Most people don’t WANT to care

Most people would prefer not to care about American politics. They care about their family, hopefully, their dog, probably, their job, a little bit, how much money they have, a lot. They would prefer not to have to care about the intricacies of tax policy or global warming in general or mass incarceration or all of the myriad ways that active progressive citizens insist people need to care.

The new slogan of the left should be, “If you’re not outraged, then you’re not a good person.”

Even if millions of Republican voters think the election was stolen from Trump, only a few thousand of them will show up to protest. Liberals on the other hand will organize the largest protests in human history. And liberals also have a bias toward caring about protests. But if millions upon millions of people can’t be bothered to show up, even if they complain like crazy during their local dinner parties, then I don’t understand why progressives pay attention. It’s a smoke show. 

They’ve shown, most of all, that they don’t care. Liberals may not like it, but they should actually accept it. And use it to their advantage. 1) Stop asking everyone to care. Stop demanding that they take action. Stop haranguing the mfers. 2) Do what you think is right and be right about it. Explain why its right. Explain it clearly and preferably with some degree of ease. Make it sound preferable to agree with wha is right. 3) Stop shouting. Stop screaming. Stop pontificating. 4) Speak. Act. Enjoy. 

5) Take us to the place where life is better and easier. 

That’s where most people want to be.

Politics is, strictly speaking, the art of bridging divides in the public sphere so that action will happen. We don’t get to decide what the divides are or who you’re bridging those divides with. It’s hard, unsexy, an tedious. No one is happy in the end. Everyone has to deal with politics in their workplace, family, cultural life. They feel oppressed by the way their required to behave in order to bridge divides—in which they’re required to be political even when they’re not a politician. They don’t like politics because it is unlikeable. (Stop asking people to pay attention to larger politics; they already hate it!)

A second, less technical definition of politics in America is as a piece of theater that purports to be about the “soul” or identity of the nation as a whole. It’s a play and we’re interpreting its meaning as we go. And its meaning is significant for our sense of national identity. This is true. This is what we’re doing. This is also the behavior of some really insecure people.

Conservative power maybe comes from their sense of security in what the national character is while progressives want the national character to be discerned by the act of politics. Progressives are asking people to live life with a level of insecurity that they don’t want and an active engagement in politics that they don’t have time for and don’t want to feel insecure about.

So, on the one hand, it’s pathetic. On the other hand. if progressives could just realize that they have the majority in terms of people who care enough to show up, they might get a lot done.

Why is it necessary that we hear people ascent to our beliefs? Is there a politics that allows for people to gracefully not ascent to what we consider to be moral truths—not because they’re immoral but because they don’t want to participate in the political arena as a deciding of what is moral and what isn’t?

I feel like I’m almost saying what I mean but not quite yet. Liberals want everyone to put their morals into the political arena and come to an understanding that upholds the righteousness of the nation itself. Other people, conservatives and those who don’t even care enough to call themselves that, perhaps, unconsciously mostly, just don’t want the political arena to be the place where that battle is waged. They’re not that insecure and/or they don’t enjoy the process and/or they’re busy and/or it hurts their brain/soul to do it this way. It’s not a moral failing, or a failing at all. It’s that politics is just one avenue of human endeavor and it’s oppressive on the individual in a lot of ways.

Ok. I’m closer. There is a whole philosophical thought in their about how a seemingly good, inarguable thing (participate in democracy) becomes an oppressive thing (value the medium that I value and think like I think because you’re adopting the medium of thought that I prefer). I think someone has written about this. Certainly Shakespeare has. Who else?

The thing that conservatives consider tyranny may be the demand by liberals that you have to care about what we deem important. You don’t have to agree but you have to care. People don’t want to have to care.