Twisting Reality - How the Powerful Pretend to be the Victim

Photos by James Brunt, via Colossal on February 8, 2018

My blog today, is copying someone else's newsletter.

Hey - they already used the right words to convey the meaning...no sense reinventing the wheel, right?

This is from today's 'Interpreter' newsletter from the New York Times.  

It's about the favorite tactic of Trump and Republicans and people like them. 

If I take my own opinion out of it, I'd say it's the favorite tactic of people in power who feel threatened.  

Today the authors (Max Fisher and Amanda Taub) started thinking about this because Germany's recent elections gave rise to the German Far Right party, which used similar tactics to make themselves seem like victims.  

Read on...the bolded portions are mine; I bolded the parts that resonated with me.

I’ve Been Punching Down So Long it Look Like Up to Me

Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party protesting against Angela Merkel’s government. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

“Don’t punch down” is one of our personal rules for interacting with other humans.

Punching down, for the unfamiliar, is a term coined by comedians as a way to tell the difference between jokes that tell truth to power and those that get laughs at the expense of vulnerable people.

The rule serves as a reminder that power matters, and context matters, when determining what is a fair or respectful way to behave. And that even people who don’t see themselves as powerful (say, just hypothetically, exhausted and disheveled newspaper journalists who are currently living out of suitcases) may actually enjoy considerable privilege and authority (again, strictly hypothetically, perhaps the journalists in question have their own column and newsletter in the Paper of Record) and should be careful to avoid carelessness or cruelty to people who don’t.

Over the past few years, we’ve noticed how a very particular sleight of hand disguises punching down as punching up. It has become a potent political tool --  one whose consequences we think are worth paying attention to. It often focuses on the supposed scourge of political correctness, which allows the powerful to present themselves as victims of the relatively powerless. What they call blows of self-defense, made against an overwhelming P.C. mob, are in fact punches that land squarely downward.

In Germany, for instance, supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, talked at great length about how oppressed they felt. Refugees, they said, now enjoy far more privileges and protections than ordinary citizens like themselves. Angela Merkel’s government, they said, cares only about foreigners. But it was “forbidden” to criticize that state of affairs, they insisted, and people like them had been silenced.

In fact, refugees in Germany tend to be poor and struggling, while the AfD supporters we spoke with were educated and affluent. And no one had been silenced, as evidenced by the fact that we were interviewing AfD voters at well-attended public rallies where speakers denounced the government.

But viewing refugees as a vast group allied with the government made them seem powerful, and let AfD supporters feel like valiant truth-tellers. And once that perspective was in place, criticism and accusations of racism from refugees and their allies could be  denounced as censorship, providing still more fuel for the grievances that supercharged the AfD’s rapid rise.

It’s not just Germany. In the United States, arguments about “political correctness” are often a way for pundits and politicians unsettled by social changes to re-frame the debate as one about freedom of expression.

That argument has resonated with the public, particularly on the right. There’s probably not a single political journalist who has not been barraged by voters who believe that political correctness has silenced real conversations about race, immigration and the threats they perceive from Muslims. Racial and religious minorities, in that narrative, have joined with liberals to impose unreasonable rules on everything from how ordinary people can talk to how politicians can govern.

In fact, of course, immigration was one of the most significant issues of the last presidential campaign. A series of incidents, including police officers shooting unarmed black civilians, have made race a subject of intense public conversation for the past several years. And undocumented immigrants and African-Americans are, objectively, poorer and less politically powerful than the average voter.

But those debates are often uncomfortable for white Americans who might resent or fear the ways that their country’s demographics, culture and political power balance are changing. Focusing on “political correctness” is a way to cast that discomfort as the result of unfair treatment, and the people punching up to demand change as a powerful group punching down at ordinary Americans.

In a recent Harpers Magazine essay criticizing the #MeToo movement, the journalist Katie Roiphe took a similar tack, presenting the movement’s supporters as an out-of-control, dangerous mob. Her sources required “deep anonymity,” she wrote, because they feared their reputations or careers would come under attack if their true thoughts were known. She compared the editor of a literary magazine to a “low-level secret policeman in a totalitarian state,” transmogrifying her from one woman with a controversial opinion into an enforcer for a dangerous and oppressive movement.

That doesn’t mean that anyone who worries about, say, college students banning speakers from campus is racist or sexist. Undergraduates have been taking things too far since undergraduates were invented; it would be weird if they stopped now. There’s nothing wrong with pointing that out.

But it’s important to distinguish between individual excesses and harbingers of creeping authoritarianism — and it can be surprisingly easy to mistake one for the other.

Bari Weiss, our colleague in the Times Opinion section, described such an error with laudable self-awareness on Tuesday, when explaining why she had deleted a tweet criticizing a freelance writer.

She regretted the way she had singled out the woman for public criticism, she wrote, but at the time, “it *felt* like punching up,” because she was defending Ms. Roiphe against what seemed like a unified angry mob on Twitter. In the thick of the criticism, she saw a frightening, overwhelming force instead of a single, relatively powerless individual, and reacted accordingly.

It’s a common human response. Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who researches the role of identity groups in politics, once told Amanda that “the best way to make someone defend their identity is to threaten it.” When critics seem like a scary, powerful mob, in other words, that will tend to make people feel more attached to their own group identities, and increase their sense that they are under threat from outsiders.

If that just leads to rancor and arguing, that’s unfortunate but ultimately not a matter of great concern. But the consequences can also be more significant. Professor Mason’s research has shown that when people’s identities harden, their fear of outsiders becomes more severe, which can fuel political polarization and tribalism.

And as we have written often in the past, polarization can be a tremendously destructive political force. It leads to gridlock, undermines governance and can even, in severe situations, erode citizens’ commitment to democracy itself. If disguising punching down as punching up contributes to such forces, it’s worth watching that carefully *** It's been tremendously frustrating for me to watch the powerful twist the truth and make themselves seem like the victims.  Poor me - the immigrants are taking my jobs. Poor me - the Black People want to announce that their Lives Matter Poor me - the women don't want to accept that I just wanna have fun. Ugh. After years - centuries - of treating immigrants like shit, holding Black People as slaves, and believing the only value of women is a means to an end. So irritating.  Eff Them. But, how do you counter their statements? I don't have a myriad of facts in my brain ready to spout at the first sign.  Also, it happens so quick it gets lost in the conversation.  I wish reporters and media broadcasters would stop them and say "The facts don't bear out what you're saying." Sigh.  I don't know the answer. Except educating people about civic debate and how to recognize tactics that aren't backed up by facts. Hey - it just now occurred to me that I'm dealing with a personal issue right now in which I've done THE SAME THING MYSELF - so I guess it's a little bit of human nature. I had an experience that I reacted to in a way that didn't have much of anything to do with the experience, but was more about protecting myself. Interesting.  I'll have to think of that some more.