In Reply to: Dumb and ignorant are not the same thing. Ignorant means posted by HasBen on December 06, 2024 at 21:55:18
First, in the context I am talking about, dumb means stupid, and ignorant is more than mere lack of knowledge. It is something that marks a person as not worthy of having an opinion. I'm basing this on how the term is used in the political jargon. "Ignorant" is how the "enlightened" look down on the plebs as people who willfully reject self-education that would get them acceptance in the polite society[*] (or generally any target society that deems its membership desirable, as in the case of a knowledgeable sports fan would react to my remarks about, say, how the Lakers need a new coach; he point is to claim that I am not worthy enough to have an opinion because I don't understand basketball). There is also a hint of bigotry suggested with "ignorant" in the political jargon, which in this case, is not too far off actually, since it is their innate though often amorphous bigotry that fascists successfully exploit.
So the way I see the word being used:
That means they are not only ignorant of the facts, but that they also are not thinking to understand them, and are not interested in learning.
I have the sense that "ignorant" refers to exactly that in the political jargon.
Details aside, the only way a center left party can push back on rising fascism in this country is that they find a way to reach that particular segment of the society. These are people who are not interested in politics. They do not want to spend time thinking what qualifies as fascism and/or how the high earnings reports in Wall Street means that they are actually better off now even if they don't notice any difference.
If the Democratic Party wants to come back to power (and I am generally skeptical about whether center left parties in general are actually interested in coming to power, as opposed to relegating themselves to a more comfortable "permanent opposition" role because they find it more ... comforting, deep down in their subconscious mind perhaps because of their complicated relationship with power and authoroity in general) that will happen first by understanding what wavelength these masses out there operate in and relating to where they are, why they are there and what they care about.. Then realigning their politics to *include* those concerns (no, we don't just dump trans people and their rights because the white working class males are a bigger crowd) and speak to them in terms that resonate with them (see, Tim Walz and his brilliant line "mind your own damn business", which tracks so, so, so much better than any inclusion-oriented phrasing or slogan that progressives and liberals have come up with in my memory -- "trans rights are human rights"? Yeah, a good position summary, but you put it out there as a slogan only if you don't realize the chain of prior assumptions it takes to make it even marginally effective; assumptions, by the way, do not seem to be shared by the said masses).
At the end, I don't think we disagree much, but we seem to approach the problem maybe with a somewhat different attitude. As Happy puts it, peace!
[*] God, this part drove me nuts when I was living in Turkey because that was exactly how the small, educated and westernized segment of the population, the group that I myself belonged to, looked down on the people living in the heartland in Anatolia. There is a whole theory of how Erdogan is essentially the "Anatolia's revenge", even though he is personally from Istanbul himself, a really macho, rough and tumble part of the city, to be more exact. I should stop right here because I can go on and on about the parallels between the chronic failures of center left in Turkey and the democratic party and liberals in the States. It is uncanny, though perhaps not so surprising because both places have very similar underlying dynamics that are getting even closer each decade almost.