Contempt and Contemptibility

I’m a libertarian. This means that, unless I deliberately seek one out, I run very little risk of finding myself in a libertarian echo chamber.

I live in a reliably blue state/county/metropolitan area/city. This means that, unless I deliberately seek to avoid one, I will very often find myself in a liberal echo chamber.

I briefly found myself in one of the latter yesterday. In social settings, and given that I’m a political outlier, I do try (but don’t always succeed) to avoid engaging in political discussions unless I get a sense a willingness to hear a contrary opinion (or unless someone starts up with me). Sometimes that’s the case, and respectful exchanges occur. People can disagree but still discuss. Sometimes, however, people have nothing but contempt for others and their opinions. The best way to root that contempt out is, I’ve found, to observe those who enjoy their echo chambers in conversation with each other.

I witnessed a bit of that yesterday in a small gathering where the obvious topic of the day – the Brexit – was being assessed. “Assessed” may be too polite a word – what was going on was overt mockery at the purported stupidity of the “leave” voters.

A report had come out that Google was besieged by questions from Brits regarding what the EU was and what it meant to leave the EU. My liberal echoers were rolling in mirth at this, assuming a commonality between the “leave” voters and the searchers i.e. that those who voted “leave” only started figuring out what that meant after the fact. That assumption is nonsensical, of course, but it reflects their biases. They also discussed how the vote was non-binding, that Parliament had the right to ignore it, and that the fact that there were a couple million votes on a petition to have a re-vote implied regrets over “leave” votes.

That last bit is also nonsensical. After all, sixteen million people voted to stay. Absent other evidence, BY FAR the most logical conclusion is that the petition is drawing “stay” voters who want a do-over. Liberals mocking those they presume benighted is nothing new, though, so I don’t worry too much about that. The most worrisome part of all this was the blithe suggestion that Parliament simply ignore the will of the people and either have a “do-over” vote with higher hurdles (as the on-line petition seeks) or just decide to ignore the results and stay in the EU.

Much fun has been poked at the ignorance of voters and the disappointment that is democracy. H. L. Mencken observed:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

and Charles Bukowski noted:

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

Yes, democracy and representative government mean that even the ignorant, the selfish, the deceitful, and the crooked get votes equal in weight to the smart, the altruistic, the honest, and the noble. Yes, we often get lousy outcomes and lousy representatives. But, there’s simply no other way of honoring the will of a citizenry. We write rules to protect individuals against the tyranny of the majority, and thus constrain the power we grant to those we elect, but we do vote to elect representatives, and we do vote on collective decisions. Having some decide that the outcome of a vote is unacceptable and it therefore should be ignored is… to call it a sign of contempt is to understate the horror it should evoke. It’s simply evil.

I pointed out that it would be a Bad Thing to ignore the will of the people on the Brexit vote. The response? “So what? nothing would happen.” The translation? “The voters are contemptible, they should be ignored, and they’ll just roll over and take it.”

Wow.

The light emitted from a laser has a couple special properties. It is all of a single frequency, and it is coherent. That last bit, which means that all the photon waves are “in-phase” is a function of the mirrors at either end of the tube in which the laser light is generated. In other words, all the photons bouncing around share a particular characteristic, and all that bouncing around causes them to align/match up/synchronize/become in-phase. Sounds quite a lot like echo chamber politics to me.

Unity of opinion does not, however, confer validity of opinion, and it doesn’t matter how many people of like mind get together to mock those who didn’t behave as they think they should have. Nor does it justify subordination and dismissal of differing opinions. We can have plenty of reasons why we think others are wrong, but our remedy is to argue, to deconstruct, and to put forth rational challenges, not to simply wave off as “they’re too stupid, we should ignore what they think they want.”

Over on this side of the Pond, we see the same behavior among those who are searching, scrambling, and demanding that some way be found to deny Trump the GOP nomination that he has earned from the voters. While some nevertrumpers are simply announcing that they won’t vote for him, others are suggesting the Republican National Committee rewrite the convention rules to unbind the committed delegates and thus allow them to vote for a different candidate. This is rooted in the trio of presumptions that Trump cannot win, that he is not a real Republican, and that his supporters are either too stupid or too not-Republican to be granted the right to decide the nominee.

Many have lamented the breakdown of communication across political aisles in recent years and in recent election cycles. America has become bipolar, and ne’er the twain shall meet, we’ve been told. I’ve noted that the blame for this should be assigned to the guy at the top, but it should also be noted that the guy at the top is the product of the contempt that those who elected him have for those who disagree with them. While it’s OK to have a lousy opinion of the beliefs of one’s friends and neighbors – believing something doesn’t validate it – when that contempt for others’ beliefs metastasizes into a contempt for them in general, a line has been crossed. We can’t have an honest dialogue if we loathe others merely because they think differently.

Some of my aforementioned acquaintances don’t seem to have much interest in such dialogues, but others do. I have engaged some of the latter one-on-one in the past, and we’ve had plenty of civil discourse. This is, I suspect, at least partially due to my being a creature they’re not used to dealing with i.e. a libertarian rather than a conservative, but it’s also due to their not being in the echo chamber that reinforces and coheres their baseline opinions.

In this, I’m reminded of an exchange a friend and I had way back in high school. It was the very late 1970s in Brooklyn, and if you flash back to Tony Manero walking down 86th Street under the El, you’ll know pretty much where I grew up. In the slang of the era, Tony was a “guido.” Well, actually, we didn’t use the word “guido,” but rather a word that only natives of southern Brooklyn and Staten Island from that era would recognize, so, lets stick to “guido.” My high school friend once opined that there is no such thing as a solitary guido, that they always travel in packs. When encountered one-on-one, the stereotypical behaviors were muted or simply set aside, but once in the pack, in the echo chamber, behavior was stereotypical. Thus it is with political echo chambers. If you want to have a real conversation with someone of a different view, do so without others present.

Only thus might you point out the delicious irony of the contempt that they hold for those who hold opposing views. The EU is a decaying mess of an institution. It has ceded power to mandarins who are so far removed from the accountability that elections create that they seem to care not a whit for what those they represent actually want. And, in more domestic considerations, we have those who loathe Trump supporters but who are supporting Hillary Clinton, a candidate awash in deceit, dirty money and scandal. We also have those who loathe Clinton supporters but who are supporting Trump, a man unanchored to any principle, who has spoken out of every side of his mouth, and who by every indication would rule as autocratically as his predecessors.

Disagreeing with others is how we both disseminate our opinions and improve them. Holding voters who vote other than how we prefer in contempt, on the other hand, is… say it with me… contemptible. Yes it’s a cheap and hackneyed joke, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

I close with an apology to Jane Austen, whose book title I corrupted for this essay. No connection or parallel to the novel is intended other than as a bit of a pun, and given that I haven’t read the book, finding one would be an act of invention.