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in reply to @pervocracy's post:
for what it's worth, my model of this is like, most people on the right or the left of center are pretty boring when they aren't given anonymity or hyping up.
the extremists of either group aren't huge, they're just what we see in the reporting.
This isn't to say there aren't people like that, but unless they're together as a group, even the extremists often don't. They need the safety.
Very few are willing to act alone. It's still a possibility, of course, but I certainly wouldn't say 45%. it's not a 50% dice roll every time you're going out. And the more extreme of them tend to... not go in public spaces much, glued to online or only willing to be around people who won't react badly to their views.
Of course, it changes based on locale, but even then it's that way unless they've captured most of a town / most of the churches in town
it's also really easy to manufacture the illusion of a majority online, you only need like 40 accounts or less posting a lot in any given space
the other part is that even when people like, get angry or say things or whatever when it turns out they are the schoolboard parent kind of people, the vast majority of them don't escalate past words if they don't have friends around, and as mentioned below, that isn't without consequence for them even in righter parts.
Most people even in very conservative places are not horrible twisted bluenoses or would-be murderers. That's why it's extra-important to keep the people who would hype them up and hand them guns and promise them impunity out of power; absent that, all they're gonna do is make people retail-miserable at a low level until they beef it on the john.
the qanon anti vaxxer who wears t shirts with photoshopped bill gates looking evil and lives on my street in my quiet suburban neighborhood is completely harmless. he votes like shit of course, but he's kind and friendly when he walks his dog past my house flying the lgbtqa intersex flag lmao.
of course he's not all hateful people, but he's by far the worst person in my conservative, middle class neighborhood, and seeing him play nice irl makes me feel so good lmao. he wants to be tough but doesn't actually want to fight or harm, just wants to be a turd.
all that to say, i agree with nire. only the most hateful folks are worth legitimate fear. everyone else is v boring.
yeah this tracks. my friend (who is Jewish) in rural VT is neighbors with someone who is a quiet-part-out-loud antisemite, and they get along famously. not to say he's a good person, but even the most actively hateful ppl are mostly unable to maintain their hate (and thus their danger) when interacting in person with someone they ostensibly are bigoted against. its hard to shake off the cognitive dissonance of how they have built us up in their heads contrasted with their lived experience of 'having a pleasant conversation about weed while out walking your dogs', or any other innocuous interaction. the resolution to the dissonance is that every person they actually meet must be an exception. so they maintain their rancid worldview, but are no actual threat to anybody once they log off and go out into the world.
basically, i think there is significant daylight between worrying about the 45% of people who won't be on your side in the hypothetical proletariat revolution that will maybe happen one day, and worrying about people who can't even be civil in line at Dunk's if they see a trans person. and as Nire said, that tiny latter group is rare to even see out in the world
honestly i think most people on the right and the left care more about being liked by whoever happens to be around them and having strangers think they are normal than they care about any ideological position
Yeah I think this captures what I would say about my own worryingly right-wing grandmother. She would rather believe that the people she knows and loves in real life are exceptions to the rule that nearly all of them are evil. It's worryingly illogical but it does mean that she doesn't pose a threat of even rudeness IRL
Almost no one wants to be the one to start trouble. If I see someone randomly start shit with a person minding their own business in line at Dunkin', my sympathy is with the person who was minding their own business, and everyone knows that and the overwhelming majority of people behave accordingly. The power of not wanting everyone around you to go "What the hell is your problem? They weren't doing anything to you" is very strong.
I spent two and a half years living in Arizona while trans, and the worst I got was a couple people being weird about bathrooms and having to correct people repeatedly that my name was not a similar-sounding female name. Mostly everyone just seemed to move past it.
about a year ago I moved back to the place that put me in the closet for three decades, and it's been an astonishingly positive experience. mostly because it really is a lot better here than it was in the 90s, but it's still remote and rural and chock-full of right-wing brainworms. getting out of here let me accept being trans, let me finally really come out of my shell socially, and I'm no longer content to get all my human contact online, so I often go out to the bar. singular. the only one I have reasonable access to, shared by every stripe of the community.
in this year I've had one woman yell at me for going to the bathroom, and a friend of hers leave an afterparty because I was present. both were told off by everyone else present, and a while later the friend openly apologized (bathroom lady is just kinda sheepish around me now).
(the apology actually happened in that same bathroom and, to illustrate what flavor of people we're talking about, included the exchange: "is tranny okay to say?" "uh, no, it's really not." "I don't mean anything by it, I say n****r all the time too but not in a racist way." she also was very clear that she's still "against" trans people, but had decided I'm one of the good ones.)
beyond that, I've had (frankly tamer) things yelled at me from a distance on the street a handful of times (months apart), and one time when my small talk at the bar randomly drifted onto something transition-related and a guy said "I'm not a person to talk to about that."
others have said it, so I'm really just adding evidence: it's vanishingly rare for even deeply phobic people to act unless they firmly believe they're just expressing the silent majority opinion. shake that and they crumble. and few are even that motivated, because getting along with the neighbors is more valuable day-to-day.
That last bit is very much like my experience of small town Wyoming (I grew up there but have only gone back for visits). Not a lot of people are out and visible, but the ones who are don't get nearly the amount of crap one would expect.
I have similar feelings (living in england rather than US). it really is difficult trying to have reasonable caution without it spiralling into "everyone wants to kill me" which is blatantly false. hopefully we can both learn to manage the feelings without overwhelming ourselves. i've found that telling myself "real life is not twitter" can be helpful for reminding myself that most people are not like That.
is it 45% of everybody or 45% of voters? cause theres a lot less of those.
It's probably around 27-30% with a much smaller fraction of that being willing to act on it.
One thing a lot of us need to remember is that for us, being out means A) being somewhat radical and B) being willing to act on it, but for members of majority groups that's often not the case at all.
I used to work in a restaurant kitchen and while the volume and severity of homophobic language that got slung around was high, true-blue ideological homophobia of the Actually Do Shit variety was fairly rare.
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