Guilt can be a powerful motivator in life, but is it wise to base a political strategy on it?
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Working off a post by Tim F. at Balloon Juice, Kevin Drum made an interesting point yesterday about the ways that liberals often focus on trying to guilt trip people into mobilizing for social change. As Drum see it, this is probably a problem for liberals:
…I’d take this a little more seriously, because it’s probably something that genuinely hurts lefty causes. It’s human nature to get defensive when you feel guilty, and it’s hard to recruit defensive folks to your cause. If this were only an occasional problem, that would be one thing. But let’s be honest: We really do rely on guilt a lot. You should feel guilty about using plastic bags. About liking college football. About driving an SUV. About eating factory-farmed beef. About using the wrong word to refer to a transgender person. About sending your kids to a private school. And on and on and on.
We all contribute to this, even when we don’t mean to. And maybe guilt is inevitable when you’re trying to change people’s behavior. But it adds up, and over time lefties can get to seem a little unbearable. You have to be so damn careful around us!
I don’t really have any useful advice about this. Maybe there’s nothing much to be done about it. But egos, delicate or otherwise, are just a part of the human condition. We ignore them at our peril.
Is Drum right? I really don’t know. I agree that liberals probably focus more on guilt about the injustices of the world or the moral implications of how we chose to live our lives more than conservatives do. But it’s not really clear that that strategy is worse that the conservative tendency to focus on things like self-interest or deference to authority.
But Drum is hardly alone in these sorts of critiques. Left wing supper blogger Freddie deBoer recently characterized many online liberal critiques of culture as being rooted in guilt tripping and negativity and thus both dispiriting and sanctimonious. While The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg, a liberal feminist writer if ever there was one, criticized much of the online debate in feminist circles as being “toxic” (her word) in no small part because of a heavy reliance on trying to make other people feel guilty about their political failings.
One thing I do think is clear is that the liberal focus on guilt has become more prominent since Obama’s been in the White House. Some of this probably has to do with the changing media environment and the ever expanding internet which has helped to allow voices previously excluded from our national conversation to be heard. But it is still striking how different liberals’ views on what’s wrong with politics are compared to the age of Bush. Back then it seemed like most liberals focused on attacking bad choices made by bad politicians. These days the focus increases on much broader analysis where the nuts and bolts of political concrete political change can sometimes be ignored.
As I see it this is probably has a lot do with this politics of our age. It can be hard to see in the daily news, but in many ways we are living in an era of liberal ascendency. I know, I know, the regular media narrative is that Obama has been a huge failure and we are all doomed. But at the same time the 111th Congress was the most productive in half a century; the politics of so the so called “culture wars” have largely resulted in a liberal victory; and the GOP’s modern make up presents it with a number of emerging challenges. The result is that there seems, at least to some liberals, to be more action in pointing out other liberals flaws than criticizing the other side.
Should the Republicans start winning again it’s quite likely that the guilt thread in liberals politics will recede in background. After all, that’s what happened to a lot of the liberals brawls of the 90’s after George W. Bush was elected.
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