Fuck Your Feelings
That charming sentiment cropped up frequently in the runup to last year’s election and its immediate aftermath, culminating in the Beer Belly Putsch[1] on January 6th. It was meant to signal the defiance of real Americans in the face of political correctness run amok, to show one’s allegiance to the way it’s always been done, to trigger the libs.
The conceit of this maladroit attempt at in-your-faceness is that liberals and progressives actually care about what the alt-right thinks. They don’t.
You see, most people left of center reject the legitimacy of the alt-right’s ideas. It follows that any ad hominem attacks from them aren’t worth taking seriously. To cite an admittedly puerile retort from my youth, it’s a case of mind over matter. I don’t mind, because you don’t matter.
Time to get serious. As a social scientist, I was taught to be a detached observer. I trust neither emotions nor intuition. But I’m fully aware that being human means we can never be fully separated from our sentiments, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum.
Let me offer an example. Just before the Iraq War began, several colleagues in my graduate program and I organized a public forum on its implications. While generally successful, we experienced a few hiccups. Our intention was to offer an interdisciplinary discussion, pulling in professors and grad students from several departments. We envisioned a calm, rational dialogue.
It was wishful thinking. Both ends of the political spectrum tightened the rhetorical rope around our necks to further their narrow agendas. There was the activist group who wanted to not only set up a literature table inside the auditorium but a voice on the panel as well. We grudgingly granted the first but not the second. They sulkily accepted the arrangement. Then there was the news crew from the local Fox affiliate who were there to capture the spectacle of a bunch of snotty, unpatriotic college students telling the world how much they hated America.
That was galling enough, but there were two incidents at the panel which stand out in my mind nearly twenty years later and help illustrate the point I’m trying to make.
They came when we opened the discussion to audience questions. One question was more of a statement from an undergraduate who proclaimed the pending invasion would cause millions to die. While we had already covered the considerable death toll the coalition had imposed on Iraq through its embargo since the 1991 ceasefire, apparently this wasn’t enough for our interlocutor. When one of us asked just how she knew this was inevitable she keened, “Because I feel it!” Much of the audience broke into applause.
The second was an attempt at distraction from the opposite direction. A middle-aged woman whom last summer's kids would have labelled a “Karen” stood up next to a young man clad in a collared shirt and khakis. Karen introduced the young man as her son, a soldier recently returned from our adventure in Afghanistan. How dare we question his sacrifice?
Karen
missed the point, as Karens often do.
She was trying to flip the script with a bald use of sentimentality to justify
decisions at the top regardless of their outcome. She was manipulating the attendees to shift the focus from a sober weighing of consequences to a visceral patriotism nationalism unfettered by facts.
Our panel did not question the woman’s righteous indignation. We most certainly did not say to her, “Fuck your feelings.” We implicitly understood this was a display of sentimentality mistaken for moral certitude.
And that is the heart of the issue of feelings with conservatives generally. Most are so certain of their own inherent virtue that their gut reactions—their feelings—are not recognized as such. To them, they are unerring truths.
This certainty of infallibility, albeit arrived at emotionally, creates a condition in which conservatives cannot accommodate ideas at odds with their own. Consider their reaction if you suggested that public policy should not be guided by their belief in a deity whose existence cannot be empirically proven. Consider their reaction if you pointed out that gun violence is attributable in part to the widespread and poorly regulated availability of firearms. You would be met with anger and resentment—an expression of feelings even though they would never think to label them as such.
This is because feelings to those on the right are experienced only by the weak and inferior. Their own emotions come from a place of certitude and thus are not “feelings.” Requests to be mindful of the rights and sensibilities of those historically repressed by people like them fall counter to their truth and are thus to be ignored, and if that doesn’t work, to be mocked.
The whole eff-your-feelings attitude, then, is merely an exercise in denial and projection on the part of a demographic whose social influence is on borrowed time. Having invested their identities in a received wisdom, any counternarrative poses an existential threat. Belittling those posing the counternarrative imparts a sense of security.
So here we are. I find myself forcing down my feelings in response to yours, forcing myself to be rational in the face of your irrationality, forcing myself into excessive self-restraint. Perhaps this is what you mean by “Fuck your feelings.”
Returning to the third person, it appears conservatives in general and the alt-right in particular are indulging in a paroxysm of unrestraint as a means of bounding and containing threatening social forces. Perhaps it is still another example of denying these social forces. It probably doesn’t matter. Denial postpones but will not avert the ultimate reckoning.
©
2021 The Unassuming Scholar
