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I’m an H.I.V.-positive gay man who is distraught with where the country is headed, so I am actively participating in protests. I have a liberal friend who lives in an overwhelmingly Trump-supporting small town and is married to a Trump supporter. She messages me often about her fears of what is going on and seems equally distraught. I’ve shared with her how current politics could affect my life and how, although I’m very aware of my privilege, I’m concerned about people who aren’t as privileged and how they could be affected. But she doesn’t participate in protests and doesn’t like to actively show her views except on social media. There are protests in small towns close to her that could use her support. Once, there was a B.L.M. protest in her town, but she had ceiling fans being installed. She passed on another recent protest because she had a birthday party. She has never participated and I’m getting increasingly annoyed. I think it’s important to show up. I also know that everyone is different, so I’m trying to reconcile this. She comes off to me as someone who’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t want to shake anything up, which is the height of hypocrisy to me.
I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place, and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life. — Name Withheld
It’s not just that everyone is different; it’s that different people are differently situated. For people who live in our great urban centers, protests of the kind you evoke are about as contentious as an ice cream social. They’re cost-free. Most people you know will be pleased to see you out there. For her, in a small Trump-supporting town, it’s another story. Neighbors who see her at a protest are neighbors she’ll see at the supermarket and the school board. That could mean living with their disapproval; it could also mean ostracism. And unlike in cities, where numbers can swell to visibility, protests in small, homogeneous towns may achieve little beyond reinforcing the majority’s sense that the minority is odd or out of step.
Is it fair to call her a hypocrite? Hypocrisy means professing beliefs you don’t hold. She shares your views but confronts some very different costs when it comes to public action. And then, because she’s married to a Trump supporter, those costs run right through her daily life. She may also see that there are other, sometimes more effective ways to persuade. Research on what’s called “deep canvassing” shows that half-hour conversations — listening first, inviting people to think about their views, sharing your own experience — can shift attitudes in a way that slogans and signs seldom do. (By contrast, a large-scale study of data from 2017 to 2022 came to the discouraging conclusion that, when it comes to U.S. electoral politics, protests mainly failed to change minds or voting preferences.) Simply being a person to whom others feel safe expressing their doubts can make a difference. In that light, choosing low-key conversations over public performance could count as another strategy, and perhaps a better one.
You say apathy got us here; some researchers would say that condescension played a part. The political scientist Katherine Cramer, for example, has explored how rural resentment has been fueled by perceptions of urban disdain. As you ask whether to keep people like your low-key friend in your life, I fear that the failure of empathy here is on your side. Your small-town friend may have assessed her circumstances more carefully than you give her credit for. Maybe the question is whether she should keep someone in her life who refuses to consider that possibility.
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I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place, and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life. — Name Withheld
It’s not just that everyone is different; it’s that different people are differently situated. For people who live in our great urban centers, protests of the kind you evoke are about as contentious as an ice cream social. They’re cost-free. Most people you know will be pleased to see you out there. For her, in a small Trump-supporting town, it’s another story. Neighbors who see her at a protest are neighbors she’ll see at the supermarket and the school board. That could mean living with their disapproval; it could also mean ostracism. And unlike in cities, where numbers can swell to visibility, protests in small, homogeneous towns may achieve little beyond reinforcing the majority’s sense that the minority is odd or out of step.
Is it fair to call her a hypocrite? Hypocrisy means professing beliefs you don’t hold. She shares your views but confronts some very different costs when it comes to public action. And then, because she’s married to a Trump supporter, those costs run right through her daily life. She may also see that there are other, sometimes more effective ways to persuade. Research on what’s called “deep canvassing” shows that half-hour conversations — listening first, inviting people to think about their views, sharing your own experience — can shift attitudes in a way that slogans and signs seldom do. (By contrast, a large-scale study of data from 2017 to 2022 came to the discouraging conclusion that, when it comes to U.S. electoral politics, protests mainly failed to change minds or voting preferences.) Simply being a person to whom others feel safe expressing their doubts can make a difference. In that light, choosing low-key conversations over public performance could count as another strategy, and perhaps a better one.
You say apathy got us here; some researchers would say that condescension played a part. The political scientist Katherine Cramer, for example, has explored how rural resentment has been fueled by perceptions of urban disdain. As you ask whether to keep people like your low-key friend in your life, I fear that the failure of empathy here is on your side. Your small-town friend may have assessed her circumstances more carefully than you give her credit for. Maybe the question is whether she should keep someone in her life who refuses to consider that possibility.
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On the one hand, LW's friend could start a conversation about different forms of action, and what she's doing, rather than "I'd like to, but I'm busy that afternoon." On the other, it doesn't sound like he is taking the conversation beyond "if you can't go to that protest, there's also one on Tuesday in Anytown."
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https://vimeo.com/70976988
One kind of role in The Resistance is that of deep-cover agent.
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Pulling this bit out because the columnist
completely ignored it(edit) made so little of it that I only spotted the mention on a close reread, while to me it seems like THE most potentially problematic factor for LW’s friend’s protest participation, even above living in a conservative rural town. She already lives full time with this conflict inside the “safety” of her own home; I’m not having to flex my empathy too hard to imagine why she mightn’t be keen to throw herself out there on the public frontlines as well.no subject
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Either she doesn't care, or she's trapped by circumstances against her will.
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right?? If she's trapped by circumstance (kids, health, disability, money, safety, job, etc.), LW should be trying to help. Helping one person to escape is more important than being king of the protests.
And if she's free and able to leave but is valuing her relationship with a Trump supporter over the fuckery that's happening, that's a lot more telling than any publicly visible activism. Her spouse is choosing to support evil in a time of crisis, and if she has a choice and is choosing the spouse, that's all LW needs to know, and he has the right to tell her "look unless there's a circumstance I don't know about, I'm done with you".
But TBH he doesn't strike me as someone who knows his friend well enough to know if she has circumstances beyond her control.
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I live in a very rural state surrounded by MAGA voters and THAT"S NOT WHAT IS HAPPENING AT ALL. THAT IS NOT HOW THEY THINK OR WHAT MOTIVATES THEM.
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I'm curious if you're willing to expand on this? I mean I'm perpetually enraged that a bunch of DC and NYC resident Harvard and Yale grads with all the money and all the political power keep saying "urban elites" to describe anyone who disagrees with them (You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.) And also the reason some of us live in cities is because rural areas weren't safe or welcoming for us. (My grandmother lived in rural PA when she first came to this country! There's a reason the family went to the city!)
But that's all an aside. How do they think of blue areas or democratic voters? Is it reality based or do they think the whole thing where everyone in blue cities is an undocumented trans criminal felon committing heinous crimes upon one another, Escape from New York style? Or do they not really think about us at all?
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The problem I have with that idea is this: MAGA voters are not doing what they do to spite the urban, well educated people or as a direct reaction to them. Democratic voters could have any attitude they want about MAGA voters and the MAGA voters would feel the same because their views come from within and are a product of long simmering social forces.
The basis for all this is not rural conservatives' resentment of the coasts. It starts with racism and the Southern Strategy, being against social programs because they benefit the Wrong People and a stupid view that government is a drain on the country (blame Reagan for this), a leftover oversimplication of socialist programs with communism, and most importantly, fundamentalist religion and an anti-science outlook that started with the rejection of evolution.
All these beliefs of many rural conservatives have been whipped up and exploited by a steady diet of outrage and lies by the conservative media, starting with Fox News and the rightwing radio of the 1980s, exemplified by Rush Limbaugh. When I was working as a TV reporter in Tulsa in the mid 1980s, there were bumper stickers all around saying "I don't trust the Liberal Media."
Starting in the 1980s these people were seen as a voting bloc that could be firmly stuck to the GOP because of its racist views and it worked.
The MAGA voters I know are way more contemptuous and judgmental of liberals than most liberals I know, even if the liberals are condescending. And when a liberal says something critical about rightwingers or fundamentalists they love to pounce, like Hillary's "deplorables" comment. Look how quick so many Republicans were to identify with that group when they really didn't have to.
Hard right programs like gun rights have been gradually tacked on to the movement over the years as they sanctify the Myth of the West, the Lone Cowboy ideal, Holy Small Farmers and a bunch of other rural myths.
Meanwhile Oklahoma leads the nation in meth labs, marijuana farms and shops, teen pregnancy, divorce rates, deadbeat dads, casinos and church attendance. We are a weird weird place. All the maps shows that support for Trump is deepest and strongest in my state.
Trump whipped this movement into a cult but it was already there. Some liberals seem to need to believe that if they just said the right things they could fix all this. I guess that's a form of trying to get some control back psychologically, I dunno. These people love to argue. They don't care if the liberals are a little mean to them. They are mad (for good reasons but they are mad at the wrong things and don't understand it.) and now they can finally be mad and belligerent in public and at everyone, just like their Dear Leader.
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They seem to deeply need to live in the bubble they create for themselves and in many ways lack the empathy to see the common humanity of EVERYONE, to see that all of us are in the same boat.
My niece and her husband were so terrified by the BLM protests they witnessed in Chicago's Loop a few years ago that they left Illinois and moved to suburban Kansas City. Their second home is in coastal Florida. They spent a few years in Portland in grad school and were appalled at how liberal coastal Oregon is. Just one example.
My ex brother in law was in suburban Memphis during school desegregation and the King assassination as a child and his experiences left him deeply racist. He lives in Idaho now.
Even people who are not fundamentalist Christians have absorbed the "traditional" sexist and anti gay values of that part of the church.
Just my vantage point. But I am not a sociologist nor do I play one on TV. When I was teaching college writing in rural Oklahoma I had many students who had never met a Democrat and had a very distorted view of what they think, because they never watched anything but Fox News or Glen Beck.
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She is holding on by her fingernails, it sounds, and he is GUILTING HER?????
Perhaps he should be thinking more about (if he's a real friend) how to get her out of there?
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Makes it clear that they have personal risk and skin in the game, to me. Between the administration's hostility to HIV meds, the party's hostility to queer people, and RFK's hostility to prescription drugs and for that matter anything that can be called an achievement of Anthony Fauci, and the blows being struck against MRNA work (which includes HIV developments) LW might be personally terrified.
He doesn't say any of that, so it might not be the case. It was just what I inferred from the inclusion.