Here we go! It’s almost time for the real voting to begin, and here we are once again pie fighting like no other on Dkos. We do that, don’t we?
Now, don’t get me wrong. For the most part, getting all that out and talking about it helps relieve tensions and may even clarify or help someone reach a decision they need to reach personally. And we do it because we really do care, and that is beautiful. No joke.
It’s all good, but for this hate thing…
To be frank, far too many of us are overselling strong emotion as hate. And it’s easy to do! We see some negative that, to us, makes little to no rational sense, so of course that person must just hate my candidate that I love….
Sound familiar? It should.
Now, there is a more subtle dynamic in play here, and that is what my quick diary is about:
When we don’t understand or strongly disagree with some negative argument, we will often see it as a purely emotional one, even when it’s has a rational basis. This leap to assign irrationality also leads very quickly to the strong desire to simply marginalize all of that, with the intent of moving the dialog into “more productive” territory. And it may just be that more productive territory happens to center on whatever it is we believe to be the most important too.
This is where hate is getting very seriously overused.
A quick look through the many comments related to Clinton and Sanders shows a lot of something I’m going to call “hate assignment” and the tool it embodies is the “hate hammer.”
Hate assignment happens when strong negatives are elevated to hate for the purpose of marginalization and disruption of what may otherwise be a useful dialog.
When all you have is the hate hammer, everything around you tends to look like a nail. Disregard? Oh, that’s hate. Disagreement? That’s hate too. Loathing? Definitely hate. And so on…
I’m writing this in the hopes you all think about it and reconsider doing this. Put the hate hammer down and think a little:
When you elevate disagreements to hate, you do yourself, your fellow Kossacks, the target of the elevation, your party, and your preferred candidate a disservice. More harm is done than good. Honest!
Instead, consider trying really hard to understand the why behind that negative.
While I’m here, I want to submit another thing I’ve written on from time to time here, and that is most of politics is advocacy, not debate. That’s right, advocacy.
Advocacy is a super set of debate in that the three pillars of effective advocacy are all valid: The character of everyone associated with the advocacy matters, the emotions associated with the advocacy matter, as does the rational, factual, logical aspects of the advocacy do.
People vote for people they believe will do better by them, who they like as people, and who they feel good about overall. Debate can help us sort out the issues, but it’s advocacy that gets the votes. No joke here either. It’s really worth it to internalize that and understand the harm done with bad advocacy within our own ranks.
When we frame everything as debate, we lose out on the merits of advocacy in the context of the discussion, and this brings us a quick and easy justification to pull out that hate hammer and pound away at anything that we believe does not make sense.
Going down that road is a mistake!
We build tension within our ranks, as people who want a better future, in that we don’t understand one another very well. We drain our strength away, expending a ton of energy on one another, when the real target is out there, days and votes away.
What is that target?
Making the crucial decision about who we will run for President!
Right now, I submit the matter of Sanders vs Clinton is a matter of genuine ambiguity. This means we are going to disagree, and strongly. That’s how it is supposed to be! No worries.
I’m not writing this to lay blame or guilt for said disagreement. Doing that makes no sense.
I am writing this in the hopes we all think about the longer game. What happens when the choice is made, and we’ve done ourselves so much harm with that hate hammer? The most likely outcome is it being that much harder to unify and succeed against our opposition. Who really wants that?
Not me.
I’ve seen the purity game play out way too many times. It’s always the same outcome. Purity feels really good, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near good enough to trump the world of ugly that always seems to follow. We are still suffering from that republican wave in 2010, and how it blunted the potential of the Obama Presidency for the years following. I’ve seen it happen locally too, as have many, if not all of us.
Edit: And there is a purity hammer here too. My point in bringing up purity is that aggressive over-characterization can work to the same useless ends as doing that with hate does. I’ll do better on this next time.
It’s my personal belief that either one of these two fine people can prevail against our opposition, who appears to have gone full bat shit, as of late. It’s also my belief either one of these fine people can fail hard if they don’t have the support and action needed to deliver the win too.
Disagree? Fine. That’s gonna happen, but don’t do ourselves more harm than good. Please.
Reconsider escalating disagreement to hate so easily. Does more harm than good. And it’s nearly always wrong, in the sense of the disagreement isn’t actually hate, but some other strong negative that probably does have a meaningful basis that probably would benefit from better understanding.
Put down the hate hammer and talk. Please. That’s what we are supposed to be doing, not hating, or blaming for hating.
Thanks for reading.
No matter what, this Democrat is all in for the win! There is no way I want to endure Bush 2.0, and I’m stoked over having two fine people in the running. People I can live easily with compared to the best our opposition has to offer.
It’s probably not hate. Really.