Name and email saved. Website left blank. Mostly posting from Chrome.
2025-09-18 01:46:13
One of the things I think about a lot WRT these conversations is the difference between retributive and restorative justice approaches. For me it's not a question of whether to forgive or not to forgive, but rather a question of whether or not a path to reconciliation can still exist, and what sort of changes might be required to effect such a reconciliation.
I'm reminded of a passage in Dave Grossman's On Killing (nota bene, Grossman is not a good person and his research is deeply flawed in my estimation, but not in a way that negates what I'm about to describe). He talks about the Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners, and how Japanese recruits were required to bayonette helpless prisoners in front of their comrades as a way of destroying their old sense of identity and making them feel as if there was no way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their old communities. They were made monstrous in order to be wielded as monsters.
I'm always deeply concerned to try, as much as decency will allow, to leave some path back for reconciliation. It doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) a free-and-easy path. They should have to do the work of restoration, of reparation, to earn that reconciliation, but unless we work to keep such a path available I don't think that we will ever be able to restore the breach.
2025-09-17 18:02:18
I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
Name and email saved. Website left blank. Mostly posting from Chrome.
One of the things I think about a lot WRT these conversations is the difference between retributive and restorative justice approaches. For me it's not a question of whether to forgive or not to forgive, but rather a question of whether or not a path to reconciliation can still exist, and what sort of changes might be required to effect such a reconciliation.
I'm reminded of a passage in Dave Grossman's On Killing (nota bene, Grossman is not a good person and his research is deeply flawed in my estimation, but not in a way that negates what I'm about to describe). He talks about the Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners, and how Japanese recruits were required to bayonette helpless prisoners in front of their comrades as a way of destroying their old sense of identity and making them feel as if there was no way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their old communities. They were made monstrous in order to be wielded as monsters.
I'm always deeply concerned to try, as much as decency will allow, to leave some path back for reconciliation. It doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) a free-and-easy path. They should have to do the work of restoration, of reparation, to earn that reconciliation, but unless we work to keep such a path available I don't think that we will ever be able to restore the breach.
I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/beyond-facts-the-identity-politics
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."
The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.