"Baby, You're a Rich Man"

[BainsBane]

51. You are marginalized because people object to being insulted?

Last edited Mon Apr 3, 2017, 08:04 PM - Edit history (1)

Why is it that demeaning others is necessary for you to feel that you aren't marginalized? There are people who are truly marginalized in this country, not because they suffer the horror of someone disagreeing with them, refusing to accept their insults, but because they are poor, hungry, and subject to deportation, racism, and hate crimes.

You and others here are determined to enforce a hierarchy yourselves. You do it by insisting that we as mere citizens have no right to question our betters. How dare we CITE EVIDENCE. We must accept as an article of faith that anything Bernie says is absolute truth. Imagining that as mere citizens we have a right to express our views marginalizes people that believe if they don't control the minds of others, they are being oppressed. The audacity that we behave as though we are in a democracy by daring to think critically oppresses you. How dare we fail to realize that Bernie and everyone who follows and defends his every word deserve absolute deference as a matter of birthright. You don't accept a variety of opinions. You are here telling us that our expressing our opinion marginalizes you. If we cite exit polling data, point out that Republican voters are actually wealthier and that they too have an elite, you are oppressed.

Understanding why the party lost is not achieved through blind faith. It requires serious and dispassionate review of data. The claims Bernie, and thus his supporters who are unwilling to depart from him, makes about the election are directly contradicted by polling data, not only income but the reasons voters gave for voting. Those who listed the economy as their primary concern broke for Clinton. Those who cited immigration and terrorism voted for Trump. Bernie's narrative is unencumbered by evidence. He used the Democratic defeat as an opportunity to renew his decades-long criticisms of the party. It's not that some of his points aren't valuable, but that they aren't absolute truth. Yet here you are calling yourself marginalized because some of us dared to point to data that refutes his claims. How is it that you can only be relieved from marginalization by our acquiesce and silence, if we ignore evidence and submit to the absolute infallibility of Bernie? I have never in my life treated any human being with that kind of reverence, and certainly not a politician. I have no intention of starting now because you see my independence of thought as oppressive. It is simply not in my nature, and I am proud of that. I always question. I always critique, and I will until I die. I consider that critical thinking essential to being an informed citizen.

You say you are concerned about the environment, but you refused to engage in a discussion about your solutions to how to provide energy, or how you thought a position on banning fracking were going to play with the white male Trump voters we are told we must cater to. You didn't answer if you favored coal instead of natural gas, or if you preferred dependence on foreign oil and the ongoing wars necessary to secure it. What is to be done until we can achieve independence from fossil fuels? Or is that even a goal you favor? It turns out that my daring to ask you to consider such questions "marginalizes" you. Why should you be expected to think of solutions? The point is to proclaim yourself progressive and others less. Those of us who think about comprehensive energy policy, ask questions that get to the complexity of enacting actual policy "don't agree" with you. You could very well find common ground on that and many other issues, but you refuse to engage. You don't even ask whether people agree on particular issues. You proclaim they don't so you can declare yourself separate, "progressive."

You declare a divide because it enables you to declare others as less, corrupt, corporatist, yet you don't engage on issues, the issues you proclaim "the other group" of the party in disagreement with. I expect you don't even know that Citizens United was a case about a corporate superpac that made a film smearing Hillary Clinton. Why familiarize yourself with the facts when insisting she and those who voted for her really support a decision that was about smearing her?

You made dozens of posts in my thread without directly engaging with the questions asked. You refused to acknowledge that wealth played any role in elitism. You insisted participation in the Democratic party made someone a "liberal elite" (yet inexplicably exempted Bernie) and repeatedly refused to answer a simple question: Were you saying that a social worker elected to lead her precinct was part of the elite, while a movie star with six homes and a net worth of $50 million was not? You exempted wealth, class, race, and privilege out of the conception of the elite to dismiss the poor, low- and moderate-income party activists as elites because they dare to get involved.

The irony is that the political ethos you have constructed in your post is itself elitist. You are "progressives," the rest of us lesser. You declare yourselves as "grass roots activists," while those of us who organized and protested for decades don't qualify, not because of disagreement on issues but because we refuse to accept Bernie absolute right to insult liberals and the Democratic Party. Our refusal to stay silent "marginalizes" you. Your not being marginalized requires our silence, absolute deference. By daring to question we are declared other, complicit in a corporatist corruption, not by action, wealth, or views on issues but because we dare to criticize Bernie.

Reverence for one man is not a proxy for ideology. Nor is it conducive to democracy. It promotes a hierarchical view of human worth in which citizens are deemed unfit to question great men treated not as public servants but as superior. The effort across the political spectrum to replace the rule of law with the rule of men contains the seeds of authoritarianism. I will not submit now or ever to such a political ethos, regardless of the individual in question.