So Easy, and Yet So Hard, to Be Hard Right

‘Hard right’ — not right

The US MAGA-fascist minority is making it so easy to condemn them. Now, note I said ‘condemn,’ not ‘understand.’

They are out of the closet. Ridiculously out. Way out. Scary out.

Even back in the day, when candidates like, say, the pre-Watergate rather moderate Richard Nixon were running for federal office, I didn’t understand them.

I didn’t understand how anybody could not ‘get’ that society works best when there is food for everybody — when there is reliable shipping and transportation — when there is public education — when there is accessible health care — when there is fairness.

Wait, you may say — wait, you have not made your case. Why should everybody eat? What about parasites who don’t work to get their food? What about people who bring on their own health problems? And indeed, don’t shipping and transportation open societies up to conquest and exploitation?

And what about this education thing? Why should I pay sky-high property taxes for the kids next door to go to school?

And what on earth is ‘fairness,’ anyway?

Look, I’m not a philosopher. It took one philosophy course in college to persuade me that it was too hard for me. Too niggly. Too prone to slip this way and that and become unanchored from the ‘real world.’

‘Real world’? Well, yeah. So, I became a historian.

It is so easy to be selfish. It is so easy to be self-righteous. It is so easy to be intolerant.

And what is easier than being ignorant? (Even if ignorance is sometimes fatal.)

These things are baked into our DNA.

So is empathy. So is generosity. So is regard for the tribe.

Ah, the tribe.

I was taught as a history student not to generalize. Not to essentialize. Not to believe and assume that there is a ‘human nature’ that is somehow at its core unchanging.

Thank God I was also born, apparently, with a sense of humor, so that the cofounder of homophobic Moms for Liberty getting caught in a threesome seems to me funny as hell.

Back to the ‘tribe.’ One could argue — and many have argued — that our social problems stem from our inherited survival need for loyalty to our tribe, through good and hard times: to hunt and gather, to build shelters, to defend our borders against other rampaging ‘tribes,’ and to raise children to reproduce ourselves and our ways.

One problem with that explanation for our current resistance to a diverse demographic order is that our loyalties are ahistorical and illogical.

Sometimes, our tribe is people who look like us.

Sometimes, our tribe is people who share our gender identity or sexual orientation.

Sometimes, our tribe is alumni/ae from the same school.

Sometimes, our tribe is a political party.

When two or three of these tribal loyalties clash or cross in a single individual (we now call that ‘intersectionality’), that person has to choose or become comfortable with discomfort.

This is what the modern world has brought us. Choice.

Throughout my forty years as an educator, I nimbly sidestepped most ideological arguments. I can’t say I am proud of that record.

Sometimes, it was to avoid classroom fights. Sometimes, it was to avoid being reported to my dean, as occurred not once but twice when I broke my own rule and suggested that any student feeling threatened by Trump’s Muslim ban should seek support (I was anonymously reported for being political in the classroom).

And sometimes I avoided these arguments — to my shame — because presenting evidence to evidence-avoidant people is just too hard.

Evidence.

It is the manna of historians and statisticians alike. It is gold. It is necessary and crucial. Students who receive diplomas without being able to find, use, and evaluate evidence in their chosen fields should just burn up that piece of paper. They didn’t earn it.

But the Hard Right in the United States right now is evidence-averse.

And among the alarming dimensions of that phenomenon is that this is not a matter of educational level, formal or otherwise. This is a matter of choice.

These characters and their ‘leaders’ choose to believe whatever they want, in the face of evidence to the contrary.

They choose to believe that Biden stole the 2020 election.

They choose to believe that doctors perform abortions up to the day of birth (Trump actually believes in post-birth abortion, but then he believes that ketchup is a language and that he is a Stable Genius).

They choose to believe that feminism is a massive and apparently effective plot to attack and delegitimize men.

They choose to believe that Black Americans got something of value from being enslaved and that, as a society, we have moved beyond racial discrimination.

How, then, do we account for Black Americans being arrested, expelled, questioned, shot, imprisoned, and denied health care at a rate far exceeding their statistical presence in the US population?

Easy. We change the way we teach Black history. Leave all that stuff out.

They choose to believe that — oh, I can’t go on.

It is so easy to believe stuff that has no evidentiary base. (Ask religious people. Sorry.)

It is so easy to cocoon oneself in an elective tribe, in the world or online, and never listen to anybody else.

I had been doing that here on Medium, for heaven’s sake, until I was drawn into a discussion with several individuals who believe that modern feminism is a bad and dangerous thing.

I’ve now withdrawn from that discussion. It’s not that I can be reported to my dean any longer — retirement is bliss — it’s that I found myself walking down a sunny street feeling that dark clouds and threat surrounded me.

I found myself questioning my abiding friendships with men in my life (are they really hiding their disdain and distrust of me as a woman?).

I found myself doing my daily chores while planning how to persuade these writers that they were wrong and I was right.

Oh my god. I can’t do that. I can’t do that, because they have decided to believe what they need to believe.

I don’t know why they need to believe things that are not true (like the abortion-to-the-last-day-of-pregnancy thing or that feminists hate men).

I don’t know if somebody damaged them — if they have personality issues — if their educations failed them — or if it is just plain easier to dismiss and hate rather than listen and understand.

But don’t I have an obligation to listen to and understand them? My response: that’s what women have been doing, not just in the last eight or ten years, but for centuries.

As for the other political issues, beyond that feminism thing. It’s just too exhausting.

Those people will argue and yell and insist and persist — and perseverate — until they drop, or I do. Offer them evidence? I know, I know — we have to do that. But it’s not working.

They are not kind. They are not generous. They are not listening. That part of their DNA heritage has withered.

So, I say it is easy to be Hard Right in the US today. Don’t read — don’t listen — don’t believe evidence — don’t question your own prejudices.

But it must also be hard.

It must hurt, at some level, to be so angry all the time. To be so scornful. To be so smug. To twist your mind around all those myths in the face of evidence that demonstrates their mythic status.

So, from my side, I can’t afford my own bile and anger and scorn and indignation.

I’ve gotta pull back, at least a little. I don’t want to do those arguments, which don’t follow the rules of arguments. I want my friends back (in my head and heart). I want that sunny street back. I want my hope for my children’s future back — my hope for all children’s future (despite the evidence).

Thanks for listening.