Party of One: Are Liberals Too Unlikable to Win an Election?

“If we don’t hang together, surely we will hang separately.” — Benjamin Franklin

This is a terrible time for women, for minorities, for the free press, for civilization even, and we have a lot to be angry about. But all the righteous indignation in the world has gained us neither members nor friends, and it certainly hasn’t won elections. We’re clearly on the right side of history; so how come no one likes us? Why is it that, quite a bit of the time, we don’t even like each other?

And the most painful part of this is that liberals are the kindest, most generous people I know, who genuinely want to help everyone. When we say we fight for the rights of other people, we mean it. We care deeply. But there is a public disconnect we can’t seem to get past, and I believe that it appears we set our standards for membership so high, no one can meet them, which makes most people not only feel bad about themselves, but desperately want to catch us and ridicule us when we fail to meet them ourselves. In fact, Republican voters have cited “catching liberal hypocrites” as one of their favorite activities.

It can’t be stated too strongly that one of the major reasons we lost this last election (other than angry racists, obviously) is that we turned our backs on the lifeblood of the Democratic Party — the blue collar American worker. Somewhere along the way, we stopped being the party of the humble worker and started being the party of the intellectual elite. I’m not saying adding some smart people was a bad idea, but if we’re going to be honest, we’ve spent the last decade judging the poor and uneducated and that has come home to roost, big time. Donald Trump said he loves the uneducated. We all know why — because it’s so easy to take advantage of them. But we allowed him to take advantage of those people because we turned our backs on them.

One party has standards so high, we often have an impossible time meeting them, and the other party has no standards at all — you see which side is winning. There’s a reason groups, religions, and organizations, with few or no standards have so many members. It’s easy. It’s easy to join, and effortless to be a member. Nothing is asked of adherents except the most basic of all agreements: put all your faith in one person, and nothing more will be asked of you. Which is also what makes them so dangerous, and fertile soil for the seeds of authoritarianism and tyranny. I’m not suggesting we join the Republican Party in their race to the bottom, only that we grant each other the smallest drop of mercy. It may be time for liberals to come back down to earth and appreciate a little concept called human frailty.

The latest person to learn this lesson the hard way is Viggo Mortensen, who caught liberal hell over the weekend for using the “n” word. What he said was that we don’t use the word n — anymore because it is hurtful, which is progress. Every media outlet in the country then ran headlines proclaiming “Viggo Mortensen uses the N-word!”

Should he have said it? No. Was he swerving out of his lane? Yes. But are all those headlines that make it sound as if he called someone the “n- word” an accurate representation of what happened? No. He was trying to be part of the solution. He was wrong, he was clumsy, and he didn’t understand what he was talking about, but he’s on the right side, and yet no one would grant him a drop of mercy. The same thing happened to Bette Midler, one of the biggest liberal donors in the country, when she said “women are the world’s n….” She too was wrong and clumsy, but that’s not the same thing as evil. Matt Damon got a taste of this at the beginning of the #MeToo movement when he suggested women differentiate between a drunk co-worker who flirts at a party and a rapist. This suggestion was met with such naked rage and aggression, the blow-back forced him off social media for a year afterward. We attack each other, even when we mean well, as fiercely as we attack the opposition.

I have seen all liberals do this. I have seen liberals not only attack the poor and uneducated, but try to destroy each other over misuse of a word, bad phrasing, or even not knowing what a word meant. Is not knowing what “pansexual” means a reason to get someone fired or refuse to be friends with them? For some, it seems to be.

The first person I’m putting on the hot-seat in this discussion is myself. Like many liberals, I have a “pet project” that I am passionate about. Saying I’m obsessed with women’s rights may even be an accurate term. I wrote on the subject the first time at the age of seven, and I was attacked by parent readers and the school administration alike for writing on the topics of feminism and the pro-choice movement when I was the Editorial and Opinion editor for my small-town high school newspaper. Part of my mental make-up is being in “fight mode” all the time because of where I grew up in the southern Midwest. I admit I go into a discussion on the topic with my hackles already up. This occasionally makes me, what’s the term? Aggressive and difficult to get along with.

I was self-educated on the witch trials by the age of 18, and completed a 30 -page research paper on the topic. Two of my screenplays are also on the topic. My master’s degree in history specialized in the history of French feminism, and my thesis on women writers of the French Enlightenment tore apart the commonly held belief that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a proponent of freedom for all and “universal man.” I’m now hoping to move on at some point to a Ph.D in Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, which explores misogynistic language and symbolism. I have a list of words like “patriarchy”, “intersectionality”, “essentialism”, “normative”, and “hegemonic” taped to the wall above my desk, words that medium’s grammar program is marking as misspelled at this very moment because it’s never heard those words before.

Do I know a little something about how unfairly women have been treated over time? Uh, yeah, you could say that. Does it drive me crazy that other people don’t understand the topic like I do? Yeah, you could say that too. And I’m far from alone. Like many others I know who have similar interests that border on obsession, it drives me crazy that people just aren’t as interested in my pet project as I am. That they aren’t as concerned with solving this social problem as I am. It drives me crazy that they say and post things online that are often vaguely (or completely) tone-deaf, and they don’t seem to notice or care. And I have taken some sick pleasure, I admit, in correcting them.

I have seen all my liberal friends do this with their own pet projects whether their interest is racism, gerrymandering, voting, civil discourse, or something else. I have been called out by them more than once for stating things incorrectly, and I have called out others. I’ve even lost friendships because I’m rarely not singing a Taylor Swift song and I admire Elizabeth Warren. And I myself have unfriended male liberals for saying Hilary Clinton needs to leave public discourse for the good of the party, which I considered swerving out of their lane, even if they kinda sorta have a point.

But there is a line between wanting to educate people and wanting to make fools of them, between sharing your own array of knowledge, and acting like a know-it-all, between wanting other people to take your political passion seriously, and hating people who don’t have the same level of interest in it you do, and I believe we cross that line a little too often. I have crossed it myself too often.

I have had to admit that just because someone isn’t as interested in, or knowledgeable about, women’s rights as I am does not make them evil or stupid, nor does it necessarily make them anti-woman. In fact, they may have been on my side had I been able to explain myself like a grown-up rather than snapping at everyone who “doesn’t get it” at the same level I do (which would require the entire planet to have a minimum of a master’s degree in the subject). While not sharing my obsession doesn’t mean they’re genuinely evil, my presumption that it does has occasionally made me genuinely insufferable.

I’m not suggesting that being passionate, or even obsessed, with a topic is a bad thing. Far from it. And on the topics of LGBT rights, feminism and racism, it’s even more difficult because those are elements of identity for millions, including myself. It would be incorrect and insulting to suggest that fighting to ensure you wake up with rights tomorrow is somehow wrong or obsessive. I don’t get to shed my gender, nor do others get to shed their skin color, to fit in and “forget about it” for a while. However, there is difference between having the highest standards for ourselves, and demanding that everyone else be able to meet them. If we understand a topic better than someone else, true, “it’s not our responsibility to educate”, as I’ve seen liberals write a million times, but it is in our best interests to do so. It may be best to swallow our pride a little bit (yet again) and make the effort to be understood.

There is a problem with having standards so high we’re the only one who can meet them, and with failing to openly admit we make mistakes ourselves. And I have to be honest, I’m desperately afraid that’s what’s going to happen to us — each of us in our own comfortable little self-righteous bubble that admits no members, each of us living in a fascist dictatorship because we turned off everyone else who may have wanted to help, but didn’t feel like being called an idiot — each of us desperate to come together to solve the problem, but at that point it’s too late. The Republican Party is a party of people, the Democratic party is made up of parties of one who won’t play with anyone else because they’re not good enough. This is something we need to work on for the good of everyone in this nation. It should be painfully obvious to all of us at this point that we are at war — a cultural war — which we are clearly losing. The only way we can possibly win is together. Benjamin Franklin had a point.