Liberal Mom’s Suggestion To Publicly Embarrass Conservative Parents Won’t Change Their Minds Or Protect Kids — But It Will Threaten Our Future
Shame is never an effective motivator.
Nicoleta Ionescu | Shutterstock The election results earlier this month shocked pretty much everyone, even those who voted for the president-elect. For those who didn't, many are reeling and trying to figure out how to navigate this new world where people we thought we knew voted differently than we expected.
This has meant a lot of advice has been flying around the internet, and a lot of this advice is … pretty bad, to be honest. One piece in particular, from a popular online mom and influencer, is, while well-intentioned, especially troubling because it misses the point entirely.
The mom suggests responding to birthday party invitations from Trump-voting moms with snide, judgmental emails.
"When your kid gets an email invite to a birthday party," the influencer wrote in her post, "you reply all and say: Excited for Jimmy's birthday. Just want to confirm your household is safe for my kid: Is your family up to date on vaccines? Will there be raw milk served? Is there a gun in the house?"
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"Why? Because then, any wacko parents on the email know this might be asked of them at some point," she went on to say, "and will want to avoid the embarrassment of being the unsafe house no one wants to bring their kid to, and will ideally feel pressured to get their act together."
She went on to admit that this approach is "manipulative" and "inefficient" but insists it's appropriate anyway because "this is how white people culture works" and hence "this is how behavior changes."
So the cure for non-direct, passive-aggressive "white people culture" is… more non-direct, passive-aggressive "white people culture"? That doesn't make one iota of sense.
But more importantly, "ideally" is doing so much heavy lifting in that sentence about people feeling pressured to change that it's going to need multiple spinal surgeries. Because this influencer has entirely missed two important points that form the entire crux of this situation we once again find ourselves, after having apparently learned nothing from the first time this all happened.
Shame and scolding do not change people's minds. They, in fact, do the opposite.
My former therapist had a saying: "Shame is almost never an effective motivator for anything besides wrongdoing." Shame and finger-wagging do not change people's minds. Rather, they just make people angry and defensive, which makes them dig their heels in even deeper.
That doesn't mean we have to tolerate bigotry and disinformation, nor is there anything wrong with verifying that a parent's household rises to the safety standards you set for your kids. But there is a huge difference between setting and communicating boundaries and snidely finger-wagging with a performative virtue-signaling email. The goal of this email, by the author's own admission, is to do the latter, not the former.
And that's not just unproductive, it's actually counterproductive. For starters, it plays directly into the stereotypes of liberals as arrogant, pedantic snobs who sneer down our noses at "real Americans," which is the line of thought the right has used to hamstring liberal politicians and causes for years.
White liberals as a bloc have done very little to disabuse the right of this notion. Suggestions like this influencer's are a case in point, as is the fact that we have spent the past 15 years screaming, "GOOGLE IT, IT'S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU!" anytime a person has asked us to explain an issue or our position to them.
This is where I remind you that Google's algorithms — and every other platform's, for that matter — simply send users what they want to hear and whatever reifies their already-held beliefs. "Google it" hasn't been a viable solution for more than a decade now.
It is these very dynamics that have allowed the right, including extremist movements, to grow their ranks by peeling off otherwise "normal" people understandably turned off by our approach — and so the steady drip, drip, drip of indoctrination begins. I have watched this happen to my own family members. We need to be willing to stop perpetuating it.
You also have no way of knowing why someone voted the way they did, and polling has conclusively shown it's not for the reasons most liberals assume.
A lot of you are not going to like what I'm about to say, and I look forward to your DMs ripping me to shreds. But I say this as a "white working-class voter" from a swing state family of precisely the type of voters who decide close elections: There is more to Trump's appeal than racism, misogyny, and other bigotries.
That doesn't mean those don't play an enormous and dangerous role, nor does it mean that dangerous conspiracy theories and, especially, an almost impenetrable propaganda machine aren't part of the problem, either. And it also doesn't mean that these people "should" be voting differently.
But just like it did in 2016, polling has pretty conclusively shown that what put Trump over the top was economic issues — or, at least, people's perception of them. Most people are not going to choose what they "should" do over their perceptions of their basic needs. That's just 101-level psychology. It's "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" type stuff.
And before you start toeing the line that the Democrats have been feeding us for two years — no, good inflation, and job and wage numbers do not count as a "good economy" when housing and grocery bills are absurdly expensive compared to four years ago. Insisting it is, is gaslighting. And so, many people voted accordingly.
That's aside from the basic truth that "the economy" hasn't actually worked normally or with any predictable stability for regular working people since before the Great Recession. Democrats have borne an unfair proportion of the blame for that (Republican obstruction and voters voting for people with no intention of fixing it are enormous parts of the problem).
But the fact that Democrats' economic proposals, Kamala Harris's included, have been almost entirely corporate-friendly — and, in fact, developed by corporate consultants, in Harris's case, her Uber executive brother-in-law — is a huge part of the problem, too. It has only helped the right destroy Democrats' credibility on the issue, which in turn hampers Dems' ability to counter their propaganda machine.
The point is this: This influencer mom, you, or anybody else has no way of knowing if reasons like vaccines, raw milk, gun rights, and bigotry are even what pushed the Trump voters in your circle to vote for him or if it was simply because they're tired of being told by Democrats that "the economy is good, actually!" while groceries and housing are still absurdly expensive. Sending a snide email like this just props all this up.
Even more important, the hard truth is this: Changing hearts and minds on social issues is not something elections can effectively do and not something you can legislate. If it were, we'd have rid our country of them by now, and Kamala Harris would have won by a Reagan-style landslide.
Social change and transforming hearts and minds is done with the kind of awkward, difficult, community-level, face-to-face OFFLINE work that white people as a bloc tend to be wholly unwilling to do — and, crucially, which we tend to assume things like snide, finger-wagging emails are an effective substitute for.
But they're not. They just drive wedges even further between you and the people in your family or community. It accomplishes nothing besides letting you blow off steam. And listen — not everyone is suited to the kind of face-to-face work that's necessary. I'm not great at it myself! But if that's you, you're better off saying nothing at all than sending an email like this.
If this new era is as bad as some experts say, you're going to need to be able to work together with people you disagree with.
Bup, bup, bup — stop right there and don't put words in my mouth: This is not a call to tolerate bigotry, violence, or any of the other ills that come with our political discourse. As I said before, there is a vast spectrum between the extremes of capitulating and shutting people down by meeting their vitriol with vitriol.
The simple fact is this: If this new era is as bad as some experts predict — essentially total governmental, economic, and societal collapse — you are going to need the people in your community, and the people in your community are going to need you.
You're going to need to coordinate for resources, safety, and help to care for the most vulnerable. And perhaps more importantly, you are going to need to be able to find common ground in order to work together to salvage your city, state, and country from whatever wreckage ensues.
Yes, right-wingers are going to have to learn to put their vitriol aside, too. I'm not saying the onus is solely on liberals. But someone has to be willing to be the bigger person and prioritize the big picture over the self-satisfaction of seizing some moral high ground none of us even agree on the definition of in the first place.
There is not a revolutionary movement in history that was composed of a group of people with 100% commonality of beliefs and goals after all of the people who were "wrong" suddenly saw the light that "liberals were right about everything, actually!"
Rather, they focused on their commonalities — our lives are immiserated, and the people in charge are at fault — and then worked together to fight back. Again, this doesn't mean tolerating bigotry or violence, nor does it mean you can't set boundaries about things like safety issues at your kid's friend's house. But that's not what performative virtue-signaling does. You can do those things kindly, calmly, and on the merits without actively driving wedges further.
And not being willing to do so — prioritizing the satisfaction of "embarrassing" your neighbors into "getting their act together" (which, again, isn't a thing) over the big-picture greater good… well, it's hard to think of a more selfish, hyper-individualistic "white people culture" act than that.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.