A NYT author reports that Republicans and Democrats currently express what he describes as "dehumanization" towards each other at extreme rates of 30 points, which he says is twice what has been found expressed towards Muslims and about eight times what is expressed towards Mexican migrants.
This is not properly understood as dehumanization. Dehumanization is a problem: it is the problem that we see in abortion, for example, where a whole group of human beings refuses to recognize the humanity and personhood of another group. We saw the same thing at work in slavery, and in the racism used to justify the reintroduction of slavery to the West in the later Middle Ages.
This is rather a kind of distrust, but it is not a kind of prejudice. Prejudice is a pre-judgment, imposed on people due to traits that may be suggestive but not dispositive. Republicans and Democrats distrust each other for reasons. It's a considered judgment by both sides that the other side cannot be trusted with power over them.
What that means is the polity is in a dire state, but perhaps not unfairly. He argues that the current spending bill is an indicator that there aren't really serious differences; but that's only true of the party elites who negotiated it. It is definitely true of ordinary Americans, whose differences on substantial and fundamental questions of morality are incompatible.
2 comments:
My take on the spending bill is that it's about the best that could be expected from a divided government, in which even if you assume Republicans want to control spending, they lost the Senate and the White House and have only a moderate majority in the House. So I turn the page whenever I start to read complaints that the spending bill has nothing to recommend itself to Republicans; it's certainly better than it might have been if the White House, for instance, had gotten its way entirely.
In that sense it's a bipartisan effort that shows compromise is possible. It doesn't show that compromise on issues like spending is a good thing for country. As people who are complaining about the bill say, with real justice, ruining the country slightly less quickly than one's opponents would have preferred is not the same as setting the country back on the road to health.
I think that people who thoughtlessly propose that everything would improve if all of their political enemies simply died are on the road to a dangerous dehumanization. They are seeing people as obstacles to a result rather than as human beings valuable in their own right, however mistaken about important issues. That kind of thinking can lead with distressing ease and speed to a Hutu/Tutsi conflagration.
I agree, however, that's it's not quite the literal dehumanization that allowed people to think slavery was OK for Africans though "White Slavery" was an affront to humanity, or that now allows people to support abortion up to the moment of birth and for some time afterward, because a fetus literally is not human until some point no one can quite put his finger on, and all that's left is the intolerable insult of society's presuming to express an opinion about what a woman, her doctor, or her partner think about whether becoming a parent would be a good thing just now.
We see the same thing in socialism, both in the national and international varieties, in which socialist theory condemned entire classes of human beings (inferior races—the “race” in Leftist race/class/gender analysis—for national socialism and the bourgeoise—the “class” in Leftist race/class/gender analysis) to slavery and death camps. And that was in the 20th century when slavery was re-introduced to EUrope to massive popularity and academic justification.
Post a Comment