Beyond Contempt

How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide

Erica Etelson

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771423052
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A guide to productive dialogue across ideological divides with practical tools for building trust, defusing hostility, and approaching hot-button topics. With the election of President Biden, many liberals thought that the world of political discourse would somehow go back to normal. But the continued extremism of Republican politicians and conservative pundits has only stoked the flames of progressive disdain in ways that make it harder than ever to engage in civil debate. In Beyond Contempt, Erica Etelson shows us how to communicate effectively across the political divide without soft-pedaling our beliefs—or playing into the hands of divisive politicians. Using Powerful Non-Defensive Communication skill sets, we can express ourselves in ways that inspire open-minded consideration instead of triggering defensive reactions. With detailed instruction and helpful examples, Etelson demonstrates how we can open hearts and minds in unexpected ways.

1

Contempt and Its Discontents

If we write off half of society as deplorable,
we forfeit claims on their attention.

—Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

Psychologist John Gottman can watch a married couple talk for a few minutes and predict with 94 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be together in 15 years. The number one predictor of divorce? Contempt.¹

Out of a pool of 56 couples, it was the seven who harshly criticized each other, rolled their eyes, and made snide remarks who didn’t make it to their sixth anniversary. Had Gottman randomly guessed which couples were destined for divorce court, he would have had a 0.0000000004 percent chance of correctly identifying all seven. Gottman isn’t psychic, but he understands contempt’s power to destroy relationships. If contempt can erode the love between two adults who had planned to spend their lives together, imagine what it can do to political adversaries.

If you can’t imagine, watch a two-minute video called “Man Gets Schooled by Anti-Fascism Sign.”² The video is from a 2018 May Day rally in Seattle, where 21-year-old Luke Mahler, dressed in a Patriot Prayer t-shirt, tried unsuccessfully to rip up a discarded sign reading, “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America” while onlookers heckled him. (Patriot Prayer is an “alt-right” group. Although not considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center as of this writing, Patriot Prayer rallies alongside hate groups and provokes violent clashes with antifascist protestors.)³

The hecklers mocked Mahler’s strength and intelligence, suggesting that “educated engineers” at the nearby Amazon office could help him out. “You need a liberal to help you with that, dude. You’re too fucking stupid to figure it out on your own,” said one of them. A video of the encounter went viral, providing an online forum for a barrage of taunts. There were hundreds of hateful comments posted by people on both sides: those who saw him as a Nazi who deserved to be ridiculed and “alt-rightists” furious that he had embarrassed them.

Online hecklers reveled sadistically in Mahler’s humiliation, calling him a “dumbfuck,” “human garbage,” and “soy boy.” Several said they were trying to get him fired from his job at a local restaurant. Others mocked his “manboobs” and weak hands, speculated that he was a virgin, and wished he would be beaten to death.

As I scanned the nasty comments, I couldn’t always tell the two sides apart:

“Hey you, out of the gene pool.”

“He should use his teeth before someone knocks them out of his stupid head one day soon.”

“Nothing better than watching pathetic Nazis get humiliated.”

“You can tell how miserable and dumb he is…what a waste of a life.”

Occasionally, a commenter expressed concern that the verbal abuse had gone too far, especially since Mahler is autistic. Such heresy was quickly stamped out as fascist apologism. When one person suggested that “mocking someone for being weak is against liberal values,” another responded, “Mocking people is against liberal values. Lucky for us, conservatives and alt-right aren’t people.”

Mahler says he tried to destroy the sign not because of what it said but because it was created by Refuse Fascism, a group he claims had glitter-bombed and assaulted members of his group (an obscure offshoot of Patriot Prayer) months earlier.⁴ (He provided me with video footage of the glitter bomb.) When I asked him how he felt about the public shaming he was experiencing, he showed no emotion and said his autism makes it hard to recognize sarcasm.

I don’t know what to make of Mahler. He could be a full-fledged white nationalist. He could be, as he insisted to me, a defender of free speech who counts Muslims, gays, and Latinos among his friends and group members. He could be a college junior dabbling in the “alt-lite,” trying to find himself. He could be all or none of the above. But for the hecklers, he was a cardboard cutout of a white nationalist, devoid of humanity, worthy only of venomous contempt.

One astute commenter predicted that if Mahler weren’t already “incel,” he would be now. (Incel refers to the online community of involuntarily celibate misogynists.)⁵ The alt-right actively targets autistic, depressed, and socially anxious individuals in online discussion forums and gaming sites.⁶ Whatever loneliness, angst, or anger led this young man to Patriot Prayer could only have been magnified by the public humiliation.

The hecklers may have believed themselves to be doing the right thing in ruthlessly shaming a racist. But feeling as though we’re doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean we are.

The Contempt Reflex

Contempt is a complex sentiment produced by a blend of anger, disgust, and, frequently, superiority. It’s a feeling of scorn toward someone we hold in low esteem and wish to reject or punish. We display contempt through facial expressions and vocalizations, such as sneering, eye-rolling, snorting, sighing, and tsk-tsk tongue clicking.⁷ Next time you catch yourself rolling your eyes at someone, ask yourself what you’re feeling. (If that someone is your significant other, make an appointment with Dr. Gottman.)

Contempt is often leveled by a higher-status individual looking down upon a lower-status other, as suggested by the common term “beneath contempt.” In the act of displaying contempt, we assert our superiority and social dominance over the contemptuous other.⁸

In a split second, the brain can appraise another as morally or intellectually inferior and, therefore, unworthy of one’s attention.⁹ Often, we treat the entire person’s character as contemptuous rather than homing in on a specific offensive behavior or trait. If I hold someone in contempt, there’s little reason to engage them in dialogue—a casual sneer or snide comment will generally suffice to dismiss the contemptuous other.

Trump dispatched his 2016 rivals with crude displays of contempt—“Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Marco,” and “Low-Energy Jeb;” he is gearing up for 2020 with “Sleepy Joe” and “Crazy Bernie.” A TV or radio personality looking to fill airtime and delight their partisan audience might go beyond a snarky put-down and indulge in a lengthier reverie on the idiocy, lunacy, and moral reprehensibility of the object of their contempt.

The “emotional goal” of contempt is to exclude or punish the inferior other. By showing contempt, I inflict shame on the transgressor and then remove them from consideration.¹⁰ I might not even trouble myself with explaining the basis for my views—it’s so obvious that I’m superior and anyone who doesn’t recognize this is hopelessly clueless. In other words, I write the person off as irredeemable or, as Hillary Clinton classified half of Trump supporters, “deplorables.”

Clinton’s supporters saw the blowback against her “deplorables” gaffe as unfair. Perhaps. It’s true that, in the next and under-reported part of her speech, she spoke empathetically about the other half of Trump’s base, people who felt that the government and economy had let them down and that no one cared about them.¹¹ But in 2018, she was still dissing the Heartland and blaming its washed-up residents for her defeat:

If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coasts. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.¹²

If, as Clinton claims, her base of coastal elites is optimistic, diverse, dynamic, and moving forward, the implication is that red-state voters represent pessimism, white ethnocentrism, lethargy, and backwardness.

In politics, perception is reality. If a voting block perceives Hillary as disdainful toward them, then she is. And because she tossed out the unsubstantiated charge that “half” of Trump voters belong in the basket of deplorables, that left all Trump supporters wondering if she was referring to them. With a 50-50 chance that they were being placed in the basket of deplorables, they were incensed, just like they were when Obama made the following comment on the 2008 campaign trail: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or [have] antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or [use] anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Eight years later, Iowan Dennis Schminke cited Obama’s comment as part of his rationale for voting for Trump: “His comment, the whole thing, it’s been worn out to death, that clinging to God and guns, God and guns, and afraid of people who don’t look like them, blah, blah, blah. Just quit talking down to me.”¹³

Contempt rankles, and the alienation it engenders has a long half-life.

Contempt Toward Trump and His Base

Several times a day, Americans are subjected to Trump’s latest outburst of Islamophobia, bellicosity, misogyny, white supremacy, narcissism, mendacity, ineptitude, and/or ignorance. For the first year or so, I lapped it up. I loved to hate it. Watching Trump act despicably or butcher the English language made me feel vastly superior. Alongside my revulsion and rage, what really fueled my horrified fascination with Donald J. Trump was my contempt for him.

Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske has observed that, when someone is in a scornful frame of mind, their brain’s reward center lights up in the same way as when they are praised.¹⁴ In other words, contempt feels good; when we unleash it on an adversary, it can serve as a fleeting emotional pick-me-up, like those who delighted in the man-versus-sign heckling. When I deem Trump—or one of his supporters—to be reactionary and stupid, then I’m quite the stable genius by comparison. If they’re racists, then I’m morally superior. If they’re gullible “fake news” consumers, then I’m a savvy freethinker. If they’re ruled by fear and anger, then I’m a rational actor with a complex inner life. And if These People—these know-nothing, fearful bigots—are controlling the levers of power, then I have a strong urge to assert my dominance over them by displaying my disdain.

When, oh when, will those racist old white guys just die off?

Contempt is junk food for the soul. And for Lefties whose souls have been battered daily since 2016, it’s an irresistibly gratifying treat, and one that can feel like a necessary form of emotional self-regulation and protection. Trump’s hairstyle, physique, and incessant bluster provide an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of contemptible delicacies. From the moment he announced his candidacy, we mocked him, fat-shamed him, grammar-policed him, and pathologized him, and we laughed, oh how we laughed, right up until about 10:30 p.m. EST on Election Day, and then we cried.

We were chastened, but not for long. Hardly a day has gone by without my coming across a reference to the crazed, obese, orange Cheeto. On July 4, 2019, activists floated a giant diaper-clad Trump blimp at the National Mall. When he insisted on the border wall, Nancy Pelosi questioned his manhood. In defiance of the legitimacy of his election, I took to referring to him exclusively as BLOTUS (Biggest Liar of the United States).

We liberals and progressives indulge in cheap gratification by deriding conservatives in ways that violate our own values—we fat-shame Chris Christie, slut-shame Megyn Kelly, gay-bait the Trump–Putin “bromance,” and IQ-shame too many to mention here. We disparage the “fever dreams” of “rabid right-wing nut-jobs” and, in so doing, denigrate those who suffer mental illness as well as conservatives. We refer to rural states as “flyover” country and its inhabitants as rednecks or, as Silicon Valley CEO Melinda Byerley put it, “shithole[s] with stupid people.”¹⁵ We lament that the simple-minded “Joe Six-Pack” just doesn’t get it. None of this goes unnoticed by working- and middle-class conservatives and, just in case a snide remark slips by, there’s a squadron of right-wing commentators standing by to make sure These People feel the sting of liberal condescension.

Weeks before the 2016 election, political comedian Bill Maher expressed exasperation at the number of states that Trump looked certain to win: “What the fuck does it take in this country to have being a human being supersede being a Republican?”¹⁶ Maher’s shock and horror are understandable, but when he contemptuously suggested that Republicans are subhuman, he did Trump a favor by playing the role of the sneering liberal elite. (Maher’s classist contempt is notorious: In 1998, he mocked the death of seven workers in a Kansas grain elevator, one of whose bodies was still missing, saying that the community should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.)¹⁷

Maher’s snipe echoed actor Julia Roberts’ gibe during a 2000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser: “Republican comes in the dict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Contempt and Its Discontents
• 2. Class-Based Contempt—Red with Shame
• 3. Why Not Everyone Is a Liberal
• 4. Curiosity—The Antidote to Contempt
• 5. Speaking Your Peace
• 6. Putting It All Together
• Conclusion: To Bridge or to Break
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• About New Society Publishers