OK I am so fucking sick of this tweet by now you don’t even know. I get that schadenfreude is fun, the frustration y’all are expressing is real, and this tweet was funny the first five or six times. But at this point? When all of us are getting screwed over by this kind of BS? This kind of soundbyte will make the situation worse.
It will make it so that people continue to vote for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party, because nobody likes to be mocked, and nobody likes to be made fun of by (people they think are) idiots. And tbh this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Republicans work that when you say it, to anyone who’s on the starboard side of the fence, you look like a flaming idiot.
Most Republicans do not think of themselves as bigots. Don’t get me wrong, they are– at bare minimum, rank-and-file Republicans are willing to support cartoonish, terrible, awful bigots, and most of them are even worse than that. But they don’t see themselves that way. They do not think they are actively voting for leopards to go eat other people’s faces. At most, that’s a fringe benefit.
The reasoning behind deciding-to-vote-Republican goes something like this:
Start from the assumption that there are always going to be, to beat this metaphor into the ground, face-eating leopards running around. People are always going to have bad luck, make bad life choices, and so on; there are always people who are going to get screwed over, because life is not fair.
They tend to assume that, if you work hard, you can avoid said leopards, or get back up and put your face back on if you get especially unlucky. They believe that working hard is therefore a moral obligation, and that if you don’t, you’re doing something wrong and you have no one but yourself to blame for your failure.
They also have the general idea that people who’ve done something wrong deserve to get what’s coming to them- whether from the aforementioned Face Eating Leopards, from The Law, or from societal scorn and disapproval.
These are all the parts you’ve probably heard and rejected. (As have I). But here’s the part you might not have consciously heard, because it’s often conveyed through dogwhistles and implication, and those dogwhistles are not intended for Millenials:
Anyone who wants to get rid of the face-eating leopards is trying to sell you some bull. After all, Life Isn’t Fair, it’s a fundamental principle of the universe. At best, people who are trying to get rid of the face-eating leopards are dangerously naiive and chasing a pipe dream. At worst, they’re trying to get you eaten by leopards so that they can get a leg up.
This is what all the ‘OMG COMMIES!!!1!’ rhetoric is about. ‘Communist’ is shorthand for ‘person who wants to get rid of the face-eating leopards’ - in other words, ‘person who wants the world to be fair’.
There are conservatives who actively support racism/sexism, but a lot of them think that that kind of bigotry falls into the Life Isn’t Fair box. So bad things happened to your ancestors, so what, suck it up and work like the rest of us. Yeah, you don’t deserve it, but we don’t deserve [$BAD_THINGS] that happened to us either.
The general idea here is that if you try to force life to be fair, the face-eating leopards will still be there, but you’ll have no way to avoid them or deal with them. If your hard work means nothing, you’re completely subject to the whims of Dame Fortune and her Face-Eating Leopards. (Incidentally, this is the name of my new folkpunk band.)
A good example: the whole thing about affirmative action some conservatives have.
To them, affirmative action means that your hard work isn’t weighted ‘properly’; it adds more randomness to the equation. To them, it seems like affirmative action means that you can work as hard as you possibly can, and then be passed over for an opportunity you could have earnt in favour of someone who didn’t work as hard, but has the right genitals or melanin.
In essence: it means more leopards.
(And yes, I know why affirmative action is a thing, I’m explaining how they see it.)
So the goal isn’t “get other people’s faces eaten by leopards” … unless they ‘deserve’ it. Which is where the bigotry comes in. But that’s not the main goal. The main goal most rank-and-file Republicans have is “make a world where no one who ‘deserves’ to have their face get eaten by leopards gets their face eaten, because they can work really hard to stave them off.”
You may have noticed by now that this ‘goal’- this whole mindset- is really convenient for the people in power. It keeps people ‘working hard’ instead of noticing that their situation could get better. And… well… there’s no nice way to say this: most people on the right have been brainwashed.
Starting in the ‘50s, and getting worse as time went on, conservative media has grown more sound-byte-y, more repetitive, and more focused on ‘telling a good story’ than on the truth. In a way, it’s become addictive. It’s kind of like how you can’t get off the Blue Hellsite, even if you know it’s a good idea- or how you can’t stop watching a TV show even if it sucks.
If you listen to conservative media on a regular basis, you have had repeated exposure to this kind of bullshit. Especially if you’re elderly and have been listening since the ‘50s.
Speaking as someone who’s Been There: this kind of repetitive nonsense gets into your head. If you listen to it over and over, it becomes your gut reaction to the situation- even if you intellectually know it’s not true.
The people in power- the people who run conservative media companies like Rupert Murdoch, the conservative politicians who tell those media companies what to say, the businessmen who pay off those conservative politicians to do what they want- they take the attitude many people already have from their (fucked-up) Protestant upbringing and just exacerbate it to eleventy.
NOTA BENE: I’m not talking about Jewish people here and I hate that I have to say that. I’m specifically calling out the Conservative Media Industry.
TL;DR:… the scenario here is less “people voting for the Face-Eating Leopard party surprised that their faces got eaten” and more “people who were sold Anti-Face-Eating Leopard Masks voted for people who would make more masks, now surprised that they got conned”.
They should have been more suspicious when their ballot was in an unmarked basement room behind a locked door in a filing cabinet marked “BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD”. They are not absolved for screwing the rest of us over.
But at the same time… most people who voted Republican did not do it to screw the rest of us over. They did it for reasons that they think are valid. If you want them to stop screwing us over, you have to understand why they’re doing it and explain to them why in a way that they can understand.
And making fun of them- even if it’s done out of fully righteous anger- is not going to help with that.
discoholicmusic
izzy806
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
