Too Much Stigma, Not Enough Persuasion
The coalition that opposes Donald Trump needs to get better at persuading fellow citizens and winning converts, rather than leaning so heavily on stigmatizing those who disagree with them. Chief among the problems with stigma as a political weapon?
.. but what caught the attention of many in this intra-left debate was the writer’s use of “white male supremacy.”
.. it typified what he sees as a “terrible fad” of defining “white supremacy” down and overusing the term. He believes overuse of that sort is both inaccurate––an incorrect usage of the term based on its denotation––and harms the ability of liberals to reach vast swaths of America.
.. “With the exception of actual neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn’t anyone in America who’s trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks or Latinos,” he argued. “Conversely, there are loads of Americans who display signs of overt racism—or unconscious bias or racial insensitivity or resentment over loss of status—in varying degrees. This isn’t just pedantic. It matters. It’s bad enough that liberals toss around charges of racism with more abandon than we should, but it’s far worse if we start calling every sign of racial animus—big or small, accidental or deliberate—white supremacy. I can hardly imagine a better way of proving to the non-liberal community that we’re all a bunch of out-of-touch nutbars who are going to label everyone and everything we don’t like as racist.”
.. what I find especially absurd about this performative shaming of Drum, ostensibly for daring to write about white supremacy without knowing what the word means, is that Drum’s definition matches the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “white supremacy” as “the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society.”
.. It is awful to stigmatize people as cringeworthy for failing to speak in the vernacular of a tiny, insular subculture. Neither journalists nor academics speaking to a general audience can insist a term’s only meaning is a contested usage so little known that it confounds a longtime employee of Mother Jones and many residents of the Upper West Side.
.. Why does this insular subculture think stigmatization of this sort will succeed beyond it?
.. if you’re a progressive who is incapable of constructively engaging with a Mother Jones staffer, what possible hope do you have of reaching the swing voters who will decide the outcome of the 2018 midterms?
.. The coalition that opposes Trump needs to get better at persuading its fellow citizens and winning converts, rather than leaning so heavily on stigmatizing those who disagree with them. Among other problems with wielding stigma, it doesn’t work.