Prejudice in America
The Renaissance of Prejudice – Perfecting and Weaponizing Prejudice
“Partisan - a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”
Who came up with the politically correct phrase “identity politics”? Let’s call it what it really is – partisans perfecting and weaponizing prejudices to destroy the other party. In the past, America fought hard to battle prejudice. However, if you look at the last ten years or so we are seeing the Renaissance of prejudice. How can we let stand comments such as Democrats (meaning ALL Democrats) are for open borders or Republicans (meaning ALL republicans) are racist?
Partisan politics provides the oxygen to keep prejudices alive, mutating and more powerful. In order to target, obtain and maintain members, each political party must design programs to gain and maintain power for their party. In order to maximize effectiveness, people are classified so that some groups can be targeted as good members and others are categorized as the enemy. Labels (prejudices) are assigned to each such designated group.
For all practical purposes the country is basically evenly split between the Democratic and Republican parties. In order to maintain an advantage over the other party one must recruit people and convince them to vote for your side. Partisan politics require a divide and conquer mentality and execution. As we see time and again in elections, the margin between “victory” and “defeat” is thin.
The better one party can define and isolate groupings to either attract or blame, can mean the difference between winning and losing. To be effective, partisan politics requires the leaders to promote and then exploit people’s prejudices. The tool used for this promotion and exploitation – propaganda. The unintended (or maybe intended) consequences of these actions are to forever divide the country. We the people are collateral damage.
It’s all about the groupings being established as politically correct
“Enlightened” conversation now allows politically correct “groupings” (the core of prejudice) to have intellectual (politically correct) discussions on topics such as – race, racists, gender, sexuality, education, gun rights, how married women vote, misogynists, those that tote guns and cling to bibles, terrorists, Democrats, Republicans, and on and on. We have made establishing politically correct groupings an art form. (Anti)social media has taken the “discussion” to whole new levels.
We now find it acceptable to group and subgroup and further subgroup, etc. to be able to identify those that we want to blame or give credit to.
Think about it. How did the word “misogyny” become politically correct, mainstream and used glibly? Ten years ago, how many people actually knew that there was such a word and what it meant. Now people know the word, but do they know what it means? Do the candidates AND their supporters that this word has been ascribed to truly “hate women”?
I am particularly troubled by the new hate group “old white men”. Since this term is not defined, I will guess anyone that was an adult during the Viet Nam war and older are considered old since they would all be over 65 today. Some of these surviving old white men, men of other colors and old women served America with honor including fighting in World War II, Korea and Viet Nam. They then came home to raise families, of which you are their descendants, and continued to build our nation. Those that died in battle never got to be old men or old women (regardless of their color). How can America tolerate those that callously demean these (OR ANY OTHER) Americans?
Postjudice – the unrecognized reason prejudice is so strong
Postjudice takes a single unique event and applies it across the entire prejudice you are trying to prove and “proves” such prejudice is correct. It doesn’t really matter exactly what happened at the time. Most postjudices are spewed by the mainstream and (anti)social media long before the facts are determined. Even once the facts are determined, whatever facts don’t fit what you are trying to prove are ignored or altered.
Postjudice is the headline. Postjudice feeds the prejudice. It is the “see I told you this would happen with [this group]…” Without postjudice the prejudice would die.
Rahm Emanuel famously bragged “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Sounds to me like “exploit a tragedy before anyone recognizes what you are doing”.
Which came first prejudice or postjudice? It doesn’t matter at this point. Much like the chicken and the egg, they are now locked in a never-ending cycle that feeds on itself and metastasizes throughout all our society. Rather than eliminating prejudice and postjudice from our society we feed it using (anti)social media, talking points and “opinion media” AND made it politically correct. The “messages” are then carefully crafted into “talking points”. What are talking points? A polite, politically correct way to say propaganda.
Prejudice in America will always exist. We are a country made up of over 325 million human beings. The key is to recognize prejudice for what it is and to attack it at the source and never give it room to breathe. America will never be able minimize the deleterious effects of prejudice while the partisan process is working so hard to perfect it!
Stop trying to be politically cute – all prejudices are bad. The Renaissance of prejudice in America must be stopped. Intelligent people do not use or promote prejudices to make their points. All media should call for censorship of prejudicial statements. Such statements are intended to inflict harm and do in fact inflict harm. All those that use prejudices should be “prejudice shamed”.
Political ideology is a civil right
Political ideology is a civil right even though it is not yet recognized by the Civil Rights Act. Political ideology must be protected as a civil right by America. People display their political ideology in many ways – some wear hats, some have bumper stickers, some have signs in their yards. No one should be attacked verbally or physically because of their political ideology.