Why are liberals so intolerant?
I’ve heard this question asked a multitude of times, and I can see the confusion in it from conservatives. Indeed, liberals are significantly more prone to block people on Facebook than their more conservative opponents, and they are also more likely to buck up against or reject social norms. If you’re so liberal, conservatives say, why don’t you just accept our beliefs?
I see such statements as fundamentally confused. It shouldn’t take long to straighten this out.
Conservatives, for the most part, protect and seek to insulate the status quo. There are those who will say that being conservative is to have small government, but here in the state (and would-be country) of Texas, where we liberals live in perpetual embarrassment of Ted Cruz (who, colloquially speaking, “shut down the government” to protect poor Americans from the travesty of receiving health insurance) and Greg Abbott (who sent Texas troops to oversee military training exercises due to fear of a military takeover), the message is not so much small government, but protective government.
Conservatives seem to be terrified of losing what they have. They will encourage us to spend trillions on war at the mere mention of a threat against what they have. They will insist on their right to misgender individuals, to deny people the right to marriage, to force public places to pay homage to the religion they like, and so on. The libertarian side is “live and let live” to protect the status quo, as well – few libertarians have good reason why they would support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in 1963.
Conservatives, by and large, are not about small government. They are about a large, influential, powerful government that protects the comfortable locations inherent in the status quo socioeconomic setup. And they, by and large, seem to be insulted at the mention of people who want to fundamentally adjust the system for the sake of the people who are hurt by it.
Upset at the minimum wage? Get over it, and accept the way things are. Upset at being assigned the wrong gender at birth? Get over it, and accept the way things are. Upset at racist cops? Get in line with the program, follow the rules, and you won’t have to worry about it. Upset that you’re not able to get married to someone you love because you’re gay? Get over it, and accept the way things are.
And so on. Some critical of this way of thinking, as I am, might call this heartless.
The tragedy of former-conservative-turned-liberal people like yours truly is that, somewhere along the line, our hearts began beating and bleeding for those so strongly ignored by the status quo.
And it hurts. It hurts painfully to see people’s lives fed to a system that is determined to keep them down, especially when your heart knows that they do not deserve to be kept down any more than anyone else — when you realize that it’s unfair that people pile abuse on the struggling poor mother asking for a raise and already overworked, saying she needs to work more hours, and don’t bat an eye when an attractive, wealthy white hotel heiress takes home far more for what seems to be far less work.
The poor black woman of four kids who works for minimum wage at Wal-Mart, for forty hours a week, before going to work at Target for twenty hours a week? Who can’t see her kids, and yet is continuously guilted by O’Reilly minions for not being a stay-at-home mom and being “good enough” to keep a man at home and raise them in a nice two-story white house with a white picket fence? Who, many conservatives seem to insist, deserves not a penny more than what she has — and perhaps less?
Our hearts bleed for such people — and, because many of us have actually done some research, we realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. So that when we’re at the country club, and someone who has the leisure time to play golf complains about “those people,” we’re liable to blow our top.
Yes, we are closed-minded when it comes to heartless bigotry, because we have a heart and the ones most on the outskirts of your social system can feel its pulse.
That’s the thing about being a liberal and being open-minded that many don’t seem to understand. It changes the way you love people. The further you get from the status quo, from the conservative castle-fort of the circular logic of “the way things are, are the way things should be,” the more people you meet who are harmed by the greed and paranoia the merchants of the status quo exhibit.
Being open minded makes your care about people whose concerns have, historically, been ignoring. Being liberal means you see the flaws in the system where other people are determined to put on blinders.
And it hurts. It really does make your heart hurt. And it also motivates you. And it fuels you to reach out and empathize more, feeling the injustice even more deeply. And it causes you to fight for others’ rights, for the world that should be as opposed to the world that is.
And it causes you to not tolerate people who want to keep the status quo, who are determined to protect the way things are – especially if these people are also determined to shut out the voices telling them they are in pain and that the status quo unfairly disenfranchises people. We don’t tolerate your opinion because, frankly, we don’t need it.
We may not give an audience to you because you refuse to give an audience to those we care about. If you insist on protecting the status quo and ignoring our voices – then we have no interest in yours either. We don’t need it’ it’s getting more than enough press already. We have higher priorities; we’re more interested in the opinion of a struggling single mother than in the self-righteous billionaire when we talk about the economic significance of “family values.” We’ll change things without your help.
So, that’s why we block you on Facebook. That’s why we don’t tolerate your bigotry. That’s why we aren’t willing to hear your arguments. It’s not because we aren’t liberal; it’s because we are and see a need to change things due to factors that, because of your closed-minded determination to protect the status quo, you do not have the heart and knowledge to perceive. It’s because your voices are already being heard, and they are missing vital information and empathy. It’s because your voices are joining a chorus that unfairly oppresses those our open-mindedness has led us to care about as much, at least, as we care about you, and to reach out to them, many of us have forsaken the ivory castle you dwell in to embrace those in your margins. And we can’t go back, because now these lives– not just ideas, but people and lives — are increasingly influencing our own. It’s because our view of what is fair and what is harm has been influenced by information and experiences you have forsaken and blocked from your mind.
We are so determined to give love a chance that we are less likely to put up with hate in this, the only life and the only shot of love we’ve got. And we feel a sense of urgency…
Because the thing is…
Love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nveWCRiIlo[/youtube]