This question introduced a long post on my Facebook
page: "Why do some Bernie supporters and leftists insist on insulting
Hillary?" My lightly edited response follows.
Attacks
on Hillary Clinton's record and positions are legitimate, keeping pressure on
her and her campaign to do what her critics want her to do: that is how this
very serious game is played. To speak to this as a non-rhetorical question on insults, though — here, I think, are
some of the broader reasons.
(1)
Too few Americans spend a lot of time in actual communities, i.e., places where
people are stuck with one another for the foreseeable future. This leads to the
temptation to say any damn thing one feels strongly about.
(2)
Where Americans do live in communities, many of us live in the results of
"the big sort," i.e., surrounded by
people with similar attitudes, so saying any damn thing we feel strongly about
probably will bring agreement.
(3)
Many of us spend time in virtual "communities," with
"community" emphatically in quotation marks: places where we can be
pretty anonymous and enter and leave at low cost, and places where we feel we
can say any damn thing we feel strongly about.
(4)
We're in another age of sentiment ("Get in touch with your feelings,
Luke"), where it's seen as unproblematically good to feel strongly and
share those feelings with the group.
(5)
As the custom of "busting" ("signifying on," "cut
contests," "doing the dozens") show, the adolescent male
tradition of the flyting
— insult contests — is alive and both well and ill and increasingly unisex.
Insults are sincere and sincerity is good ... and again, people can say any
damn thing, with extra points for "transgressivity," until they
breach some still- or recently-fashionable taboo.
(6)
Relatively few Americans grow up political and so haven't learned that there
are instances when one must affront the neighbors and get into arguments, and therefore one should rigorously avoid
pissing others off unnecessarily.
(7)
Relatively few Americans grow up political and in real neighborhoods, so many
fail to learn to never piss off the neighbors unnecessarily because you never
know when you might need a favor.
(8)
Many young Americans have had their self-esteem maintained strongly and work
under the idea that they can say any damn thing and insult people and still be
able to ask those people for favors.
(The
editor of The Miami Student student
newspaper sent me a Christmas card, which was a nice gesture, and used the
opportunity to drop my column. She reassured me, though, that all was well
since she'd replaced me with a colleague of mine who was a highly popular
professor who she was sure would make an excellent columnist. My friends and I
joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I
might write her one because at a young age she had the sort of total
sociopathic insensitivity typical of real-pro newspaper editors. Within a week,
she asked me for a letter of recommendation.)
(9)
The relatively hard Left and hard Right attract people who put ideas above
people and put their ideas above just about any people they are not politically
infatuated with. Such folk will say any damn thing they think demonstrates
their love of the Good, the True, and the pretty ugly, but screw it: if you
disagree, you're just wrong and evil.
