Member-only story
The stakes of political etiquette
Picture in your mind the most stereotypical renditions of the following two characters. First, an arrogant Trump supporter, wearing a MAGA hat and carrying his licensed firearm; second, an insolent college liberal, with dyed hair and plenty of weed in his pocket.
We might imagine that if these two were in the same room, they would be more than just political opponents. No, their animosity would be decidedly more personal. The very sight of each other’s presence might even be unbearable.
I have yet to see this in person-—I don’t care to experiment about it either—but some hostility on social media is enough to convince me that such personal animosity, which borders on dehumanization, is happening more and more. And I speculate about its cause.
Maybe it’s because, in each of their ideologies of everyday experience, the other figure is considered a huge impediment to the proper mode of society. The college liberal sees the Trump supporter as a dangerous resurgence of the ugliest parts of our past, who threatens bigotry and even wholesale oppression of entire groups of people. The Trump supporter views the college liberal as a dangerous union of politics and emotions, a myopic hypersensitivity which threatens the very foundation of discourse. In both cases, the presence of the dissenting party is more than an impediment to a political…
