Travelogue – The debates

Throughout my travelogue I mentioned the lively debates between Brother, Niece, and myself. Here’s a bit more on those debates.

Niece just turned 30. Brother is almost exactly 18 months older than me and we’re both more than twice Niece’s age. She doesn’t accept things just because someone says them. I admire that, though it can be tough to be on the receiving end of it. As I told her, I’ve done a lot of reading over the last dozen years (at least since I started this blog) and I don’t remember the names of all my sources.

In mid June Brother and his other daughter and family started a tour of Italy and Greece. This other niece wanted to expose her children to the cultural treasures of modern Italy and Greece and ancient Rome and Greek empires. Niece – the one who debated with me – joined them in Athens for a tour of those treasures and the trip back up the length of Italy. During car rides they listened to audio books about history, including of the Roman Empire.

So Niece delighted in hearing references to ancient Rome. She noticed that at least King Arthur (in fictional accounts), Charlemagne, the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, and Hitler claimed to be successors of Rome and tried (and in some cases succeeded for a while) to recreate the power of Rome.

Niece got our debates going by saying we should not dismiss conservatives as stupid and lazy. It took some discussion to refine her point to saying we should not dismiss conservative voters as stupid and lazy. She pointed out that various progressive discussion sites have lots of commenters who do exactly that. This isn’t helpful, she says. They have values and we progressives need to understand those values. We need to talk with conservatives to find where our values align.

Conservative lawmakers were a topic of other discussions. They certainly haven’t been lazy, doing a great deal to enforce supremacy.

For example, Niece said, rural conservatives believe we can and should take care of ourselves. They have been doing that for generations. Government shouldn’t take care of us.

I told Niece there are parts of her thinking I agree with. We should not belittle conservative voters. I try to refrain from doing so in this blog. I know I’m not entirely successful in that and a few of my regular readers have reminded me when I haven’t. We should indeed talk to conservative voters. We should understand, not just sneer at, their values.

Brother, at a moment when Niece was somewhere else, said talking to our conservative neighbors isn’t going to work. They’re too bound up in their beliefs and prejudices. They believe in alternate facts. They have their own sources of news.

I argued this is the only thing that can work. We just haven’t tried it. Only in the 2018 election did Democrats run a candidate in every (or nearly) Congressional seat. In many deep red states the party simply didn’t bother. In many conservative areas Democrats don’t make any headway because they don’t know how to speak to the rural way of life.

Then Brother reminded me we have a very conservative sister-in-law. We don’t even talk to her about politics. We’ve learned from experience she won’t listen. So we don’t try. But if we don’t talk to her, someone with whom we already have a relationship, how are we going to talk to anyone else?

Hey, Niece. Great ideas you have there. Go talk to your aunt and let us know how it works out.

Brother suggested we vote them out of office. I said, good idea … but he needs to factor in the voter suppression, gerrymandering, Russian interference, and the refusal of Moscow Mitch (the term Brother consistently used for Senate Majority Leader McConnell) to pass any sort of election protection laws. And, since I came home, the resignation of a member of the Federal Elections Commission, rendering that body incapable of anything.

So what do we do?

I don’t feel bad that we didn’t come up with a solution. People who study authoritarian regimes have only one idea – get your resistance in gear and get to it. Alas, even that probably won’t slow down a regime determined to be authoritarian.

Niece proved to be a sharp debater. She was good at pointing out contradictions in an argument. For example: Early in our travels I talked about supremacy and it sure would be nice to build a society without it. Late in our travels, close to three weeks later, we talked about a benevolent dictator as perhaps the most effective government. I then expressed doubt about whether a dictator, someone who got the position through enforcing supremacy, could truly be benevolent with the best interests of the citizens in mind (see our discussions of Napoleon). Niece replied that a benevolent dictator doesn’t sound any less possible than a society without any form of supremacy. Good point.

I enjoyed these debates. I appreciate that Niece challenged my positions and did so without condemning them or me. I hope she feels that my challenges of her ideas held the same respect.

Once idea of hers I challenged was whether there is a god who is sometimes wrathful. This was a realization that came to me as I spoke. In my current understanding of supremacy, a wrathful god is one who uses violence to get what he wants. Using violence is a supremacist act. Supremacist acts cannot encompass love. A god can either be wrathful or loving, but not both. Besides, a god is already supreme and doesn’t need to enforce it.

Niece maintained such wrath is used to correct us towards the attitudes god wants us to have. At the time I used Niece’s sister and her husband and the interactions they have with their children. In my visits I’ve watched them in action. They do correct their children (and the oldest one will push boundaries until he is corrected), but in my presence they were never violent. In the same way a loving god does not have to be violent to correct us.