Changing Minds Takes Empathy (and Civility)
May 23, 2016
by Adam Lee
I used to follow the liberal writer Matt Bruenig’s columns on politics and economics, but I stopped reading a while ago. Although I agreed with him more often than not, he radiated an attitude of aggressive contempt for anyone who disagreed with him that I found insufferable. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to hear about this:
After multiple conversations, Matt Bruenig and Demos have agreed to disagree on the value of the attack mode on Twitter. We part ways on the effectiveness of these kinds of personalized, online fights and so we are parting ways as colleagues today. And just as we did with Matt three years ago when he first joined our blog, Demos will continue to find and amplify the voices of lesser-known progressive policy commentators to make for a more inclusive public sphere.
Bruenig was fired by his employer, the progressive think tank Demos, after getting in a Twitter spat with two other liberal writers, Joan Walsh and Neera Tanden, whom he called “dishonest”, “geriatric”, “scumbag”, and accused them of “starving poor mothers”, among other epithets. This was the culmination of a long pattern of belligerent behavior on Bruenig’s part. Disturbingly, many observers said that he was far more likely to engage in this hostile, abusive rhetoric against women and people of color.
Given that Bruenig is a Sanders supporter and Walsh and Tanden are backing Clinton, there’s a political element to this as well. As the Democratic primary winds down, some of Sanders’ most fervent supporters are becoming prone to raging outbursts and conspiratorial thinking about how the nomination was “stolen” from them. We especially saw this in the Nevada fracas, where Sanders die-hards erupted in fury and death threats against the state party chair. Most disappointing to me, Bernie Sanders himself has fed the fire with inflammatory rhetoric which implied that his supporters were justified in lashing out against a corrupt establishment.
This attitude parallels something I’m used to from evangelical proselytizers who claim that the only reason people choose not to be Christian is because they want to sin and be evil: they “love darkness rather than light” (to use William Lane Craig’s phrasing), or to excuse their “sexual promiscuity and drug-taking” (Peter Hitchens). It’s also omnipresent in Ayn Randian philosophy, obviously: she maintained that all people who don’t share her political views are leeching subhumans who worship death and want to drain the lifeblood of the true producers and innovators who exemplify greatness.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2016/05/changing-minds-takes-empathy-and-civility/
http://www.demos.org/press-release/reflections-social-media-and-our-responsibility
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