Being called anti-American can still sting ask the NFL players who kneel when the national anthem is played. In the 1950s, conservatives could exile liberals from polite company by calling them Communists. Although conservatives dominate America’s elected offices, liberals wield the greater power to stigmatize. To make that possible, liberals and conservatives each need something from the other.Ĭonservatives need liberals to stop abusing their cultural power. What America needs is a conservatism whose devotees feel less stigmatized, and who earn that lack of stigma by trying harder to disentangle their support of small government and traditional morality from America’s history of bigotry. Liberals and conservatives may never agree on whether or how deeply bigotry infects American conservatism. Conservatives are fearful of discussing politics, because they dread being called a bigot. When the website examined voters’ responses to 138 different statements, it found that agreement with the claim “There is too much political correctness in this country” was one of the three most correlated with support for Trump. Meanwhile, outrage at political correctness-fueled by the conviction that charges of bigotry are used to shut down legitimate discussion-has become more central to American conservatism. In an August 2016 Suffolk University/ USA Today poll, 76 percent of Democrats said Trump is a racist. As a result of Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and his equivocal condemnations of white supremacists, outrage at perceived conservative bigotry now animates American liberalism more than it did in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Obama years. But the argument has become particularly fierce in the age of Donald Trump. The debate over conservatism and bigotry is not new. In a country whose history is marked by the subordination of blacks, women, and LGBT people, however, many liberals believe that conserving the past maintains that subordination. As a conservative, you may feel an impulse to conserve the past. But given that the Georgians affected by this decision are disproportionately poor people of color-and that they lack coverage in large measure because they are poor people of color-your opposition to expanding Medicaid perpetuates a history of state-sponsored bigotry. You may genuinely believe that Georgia can’t afford to expand Medicaid. Liberals are more likely to define it in terms of impact: You’re guilty if your actions disadvantage an already disadvantaged group, irrespective of your motives. Conservatives tend to define it in terms of intention: You’re guilty of bigotry if you’re trying to harm people because of their race, gender, or the like. These different reactions stem, in part, from different definitions of bigotry. Is American conservatism inherently bigoted? Many conservatives would be enraged by the question.
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