I admit, I have been spending much less time at DU lately – just stopping by a couple times a week to glance the greatest threads and maybe browse the subject lines on the first page of GD. I assume that there have been threads recently that included some kind of blanket statements about some group. Maybe it was southerners, or Christians. Maybe it was the old “pragmatic” vs. “idealistic” Democrats debate. Maybe it was even republicans. At first glance, having deep history here, but again, having spent very little time here recently, it looks like this poll is kind of a rhetorical question meant to be a statement about such blanket statements.
In any case, I think it opens up a wider conversation. Most of us are here because we’re united in our opposition to a defined group of policies and the people who advance them. Does that mean we hate all republicans? For some people, the answer is yes. And republicans – from the misguided, piss-water-beer-drinking, under-educated choad with the misspelled protest sign demonstrating against his own best interests (generalization) to the field of primary candidates trying to out-stupid each other in the lead-up to the RNC (specific) – they really make it easy for us to hate them. Even so, I think we all have a right-wing father-in-law or sister or neighbor and we argue with that person, and that person drives us nuts, but we know that person is, in fact, a human being, and maybe we even love that person.
The point is, we have values. We have very important values. Many of these are under attack, and we have to spend tremendous energy advancing and defending our values. And the people who are attacking these values, they can be identified in groups, by region, by religion, by political affiliation, by sub-political affiliation. We can identify trends within these groups. We can say that many Southern Christians support teaching “intelligent design” in public schools. We can say that those who value pragmatism above all within the Democratic Party help to shift the center to the right. We can say that those who value principle above all make it hard to get things done. We can describe all kinds of trends among many different groups and we can discern – what trends advance our values, and what trends endanger them?
I think there’s no real way to answer this poll. We should be allowed to talk about each other. We have a huge population. It’s impossible to have a cultural-political discussion without grouping and generalizing. And we should be allowed to judge.
We avoid descending into bigotry by remaining focused on the issues and the values, and resisting the temptation to dwell on the generalized groups of people whom we don’t really know.
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