I’ve written about how Republicans warp the discussion around them.  There was an excellent article in the Daily Kos a few days ago: Teaching the Holocaust in the South after Charlottesville.  It’s a heartfelt discussion of how student sensibilities changed after the racist Unite the Right riots.  It’s also nearly a primer on how conservatives use our sense of community to shift the discussion center.  The original article isn’t very long, and I recommend reading it yourself.

The author teaches history in South Carolina.  She struggled with the change to her Holocaust class students the year after the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville:

My class enrollment for Understanding the Holocaust through Literature and Film went from 60 to 150. A good sign, I thought. When I entered the lecture hall, however, I was confronted with something I had neither foreseen nor experienced before: a slightly more hostile audience.

At the first mention of the word Nazis, propaganda, government-sanctioned anti-Jewish riots, and bystanders, bodies shifted, throats were cleared, an unseasonal chill cracked the late-summer southern heat block. Am I turning the Holocaust into anti-Trump propaganda? — I could hear my brain self-sabotage. There comes the progressive feminist agenda! — I could hear some of them think. I shifted in my skin and stuttered a tad.

A group of white young men, clustered together in the upper middle section of the amphitheater, made sure to let me know their conservative opinions from the start: verbally, asking disingenuous questions about history, and visually through Trump-Pence stickers and hats. From the low orchestra where I stood, I unremittingly looked upward toward them, neck stretched, endeavoring to make eye contact, to gently draw them into my field of reasoning, desperate to elicit a sympathetic nod of agreement.

I spent the rest of the semester on pins and needles, overly qualifying my statements every time I used conservatism triggers like oppression, misogyny, racism, xenophobia. To this new audience, these are just the wearisome pet words of liberal propaganda….

Daily Kos, Aug. 11, 2018, Teaching the Holocaust in the South after Charlottesville

She kept trying to involve these students in the class and the material.  That’s what makes the social dynamic work.  In her desire to include them, she warped her center more to the racist side, focusing on the malcontents over the students who were more comfortable with the “genocide is bad” argument.

As all educators can attest, there is no worse defeat than “losing” the weak student, even if so many strong ones are won. I kept meaningfully interacting with dozens of wonderful people in class, but secretly all I said was meant to reach, touch, win over those few who were now avoiding looking at me altogether.

She just wanted to teach history.  She wanted to show them the relevance of past genocides on the present.  And yet, as her self-censorship got stronger and broader, her students backed away from compromise, becoming even less tolerant.

…During the last quarter of the semester, I bring up other genocides. This unit features a collage of video clips from documentary films and archival news report about Rwanda, the Bosnian rape camps, Guatemala, the Kmer Rouges’s massacres and so on, all the way back to the Armenian genocide….

The conservative Falange got fiercely defensive at this point: “None of this is my fault. Why should I feel bad?” a man with the baseball cap over his eyes said. “If people don’t like it here, why don’t they go back to where they came from?”

This isn’t a distant history, either.  As she says:

When I moved to Columbia, South Carolina, from New York City, I was surprised to discover here a vibrant Jewish community proud of its old historical heritage who made a big deal of the genteel southern benevolence they had always enjoyed: but in the historical long haul, “always” can be surprisingly relative. The Anti-Defamation League reports that in 2017 anti-Semitic incidents increased 60 percent in America.

The outside threat was real, but was this white supremacist classroom noise real or just posturing?

I had never before met so much resistance to the idea of empathy or merely pity in fifteen years of teaching the Holocaust in America. “I mind my own business” was the answer of one of these students to the question: What would you do if your neighbors were picked up to be arbitrarily sentenced to death or sent to die in a concentration camp? Granted, the student’s answer was perfectly legitimate. But I had hoped a twenty-something-year-old wouldn’t proudly go for one of the two least humane options available (the other one being taking direct part in the killing).

I don’t know how to deal with this.  I see how the GOP has been building each new schism ever since Watergate.  I’ve watched as they become more successful every year.  The wedge issues overwhelm ideas, and then the code-words overwhelm the ideas.  Remember when a reporter asked Republican pro-choice presidential candidate Mitt Romney what he’d do if his daughter became pregnant?  Romney said what he wanted, but that it would be up to her to decide.  He articulated the pro-choice position perfectly.  I suspect a lot of his supporters agreed with the idea, too.  Didn’t matter politically.  Romney repeated all the correct pro-life words, and after some obligatory back-stepping, it worked out just the same.  Cognitive dissonance be damned.  His tribe only needed the right keywords.

None of this code-worded inflexibility is an accident.  Conservatives split us apart on purpose.  It gives them power above their numbers, and it works politically.  The conservative movement learned how to build each wedge so sturdily they’d resist counterargument, logic or social custom.  They even split children from their parents!  Think about that one.  The GOP tribal lines are half imaginary, but they cleave us apart so persistently, I don’t know how to tie us together again.

Here’s the dynamic. The GOP pushes their strangely un-American idea that real Republicans don’t need “liberals” for anything.  They aren’t in your society, they say; they aren’t even like you.  And you don’t have to feel uncomfortable about that.  Don’t worry about all those other people.  You can just disown all of them.  “They don’t care about you. Hell, they hate your guts.  Didn’t you know that?  They all think you’re just an idiot yokel.  Piss on all of ‘em!”  They tap into everyone’s fear, uncertainty, and insecurity.  And it’s a poisonous idea designed to lodge deep inside you, to remove any possibility of compromise.

The other side – the more numerous non-fascist side, I hope – follows the idea that we’re all Americans.  We’re a diverse society, yes, and we disagree like crazy, but we don’t succeed without each other.  It’s why we talk about income disparity and individual rights.  It’s behind the social safety net and tolerance.  The autocratic model has a tiny set of wealthy autocratic oligarch royals standing on top of a big heap of powerless, frustrated, and desperate peons.  The American model is supposed to be cooperative, with a big middle class and only a few barons.

Again, though, there isn’t a lot of room in the liberal side for compromise, either.  Once you say that, for example, those people over there aren’t worth keeping, you’ve broken the American compact.  Once you’re intolerant, you’re toast.  I know that we haven’t always lived that, but we pretended and aspired to it.  Even when we knew things weren’t inclusive, the answer we wanted was to become what we pretended to be.  Despite a few separatists, the goal for each discriminated group was equality and equal rights.  That’s true from abolition and civil rights through feminism, the LGBTQ, and Black Lives Matter movements.  We wanted to really become what we pretended to be.

The power that dedicated conservatives had over everyone else depends on that willingness to discard people outside their self-defined group.  They just had to sit there, reject any community, and complain about how unfair it all was.  Everyone else (who still wanted them in the family) would twist themselves around, warping their own ideas to try to make the conservatives happy.  It didn’t just fail to draw them in; they increased their abuse as they felt more control over the argument.  In response, the rest of us spend endless time trying to analyze, understand and appease a group that won’t have any of satisfaction.

The cultural war would have ended if the people outside the base didn’t care.  If moderates, liberals, Progressives, Democrats, socialists and the rest simply excluded the relatively tiny lunatic fringe, we might stop twisting ourselves around with endless compromises we hate.  It’s not like they care a whit about any compromises.

Same from the conservative side.  If the Republican base did work outside their own narrowing tribe, the antagonism might crumble.  If some liberals are OK, then you might have to listen to them.  That’s why the conservative establishment is always crafting new “They hate you!” and “We don’t care!” memes to keep the division personal, active and distant.  Remember: “We support our troops!”  (Because liberals apparently don’t.  I mean, duh!  Counterculture, right?)  Ignore John Kerry.  And POW/MIA flags.  Except for Sgt. Bergdahl, because, you know, uh, stuff.

Democrat’s ‘Purple Heart’ remark at Strzok hearing spurs veterans to plan protest march
Some veterans in Tennessee say they’re planning a protest march following a congressman’s comment this week that embattled FBI official Peter Strzok deserved a Purple Heart for enduring a House panel’s grilling over allegations of bias against President Donald Trump.
— FoxNews, July 14, 2018.

I won’t pretend that this level of Astroturfing isn’t intentional.

Faced with inflexible and frequently irrational hate, the liberal position (such as it is) has been to keep trying to be inclusive.  Eventually, or so the logic goes, these MAGA screamers will notice that we’re sincere.  If we keep evaluating things rationally, offer them more compromises, they’ll see the logic of our positions, the hypocrisy of Republicanism, and come over to our side.  All we have to do is keep trying.  Obama was taking that approach for most of his presidency.

It’s a shame that being open and inviting doesn’t work.  And it’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, too.  You’d think I’d know better.  How long did I point out apparent contradictions about the law, fiscal discipline, local autonomy, deficits, freedom, etc. (And how, no, Republicans don’t support our troops a bit).  I thought that, as Americans, we were deciding these issues for ourselves.  I was wrong.

But how do we fix what the Republicans broke?  How do we restore our nation they’ve split so ruthlessly?  I don’t know the answer.  Honestly, I want to just hate them.  It would be so much easier.  But even now, when they’re tearing out the soft parts of our society and our democracy as a whole, I can’t.  They’re still part of us.

So I don’t know.  It’s still America, and we can’t discard whole segments of the population.  Do we just keep moving?

Not without anxiety and sadness, I accepted to teach this seminar again this semester. Because, as T. S. Eliot said, we fight even when we think a cause is lost because our defeat may be the preface to our successors’ victory.

Daily Kos, Aug. 11, 2018, Teaching the Holocaust in the South after Charlottesville