I'm not in the US and I was a bit taken aback when people on my Twitter timeline started calling for boycotts of a certain online sticker service entirely because the CEO came out on Twitter as supporting Trump a few weeks ago.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
It's easy to underestimate how deeply polarized the US really is.
Trump in particular is so far out of the bounds of normal politics that to many people, support for Trump appears no different than support for, say, Mussolini. It may only be fringe extremists playing the racial supremacy song, but half the country is marching along to the beat. At that point it doesn't matter what your private reasons for supporting a Mussolini or Franco or Trump are - you're still a collaborator. The justification for boycotts etc comes from that point of view.
It's a difficult problem - the left (such as it is) needs to find some kind of productive path forward, but I'm not convinced that pandering to the sensitivities of people who have no intention to reciprocate is at all useful.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
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