Salon pundit Amanda Marcotte believes that in the Age of Trump, conservatism consists of just two tenets: the rich should get richer, and liberals are disgusting. In a Friday column, Marcotte admitted that liberals “say nasty things about conservatives,” but maintained that conservatives are far more likely than liberals to engage in “dehumanization” of political opponents.
“After Obama was elected in 2008,” she wrote, “liberals didn’t spend all their time on social media gushing about the pain he was likely to inflict on conservatives. Liberals don’t paint conservatives as a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, or suggest that we literally eliminate them from society.” Conversely, on a recent Twitter thread centered on the theme “preparing for Trump,” the pro-Trump comments “were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.”
Marcotte observed that liberals can’t meet conservatives halfway if conservatives won’t budge (bolding added):
Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that many people are arguing that we need more empathy and communication across partisan lines in this country. And clearly we do! The problem is that such efforts are almost always one-sided: Liberals are instructed to reach out to conservatives and practice empathy for them, as evidenced by the series of preachy articles published in the wake of the election, urging urban liberals to get out of their supposed bubbles and talk to conservatives in the heartland.
The irony in all this is that the reason pundits ask this of liberals and not conservatives is because they know liberals are likely to listen. Everyone understands, on some level, that asking conservatives to reach out to liberals will be met with a bunch of guffaws, a profane invitation to perform anatomically difficult feats and more stereotypes about how liberals are a bunch of useless welfare sucks.
“Conservatism has, over the decades, curdled into an ideology of hatefulness and destruction, with no real interest in building up much beyond the bank accounts of the already wealthy,” concluded Marcotte. “Conservatism as practiced by most Republicans is an ideology built on one single principle: Pissing off the liberals. And no one excels at that more than Donald Trump.”
