A recent conversation with American friend, who is an expat in Paris has meant that I have had the song Which Side Are You on playing in my head for the last week or so. Here's the original lyrics with Pete Seeger singing,
https://youtu.be/5iAIM02kv0g?si=YSorohyDIZkRpQ5NAnd here is Billy Bragg with his updated lyrics which is how I first heard it
https://youtu.be/ALCm5Peie_8?si=jqtkMylGk-55Dz6KThe conversation with the American in Paris was triggered by the murder of Charlie Kirk and the various reactions to it. My friend is a mild mannered Democrat whose rhetoric on this was completely dehumanising of the right - the old cockroach line amongst others. He's no longer in contact with his mother and he expects that to last until she dies.
I was raising that i could not vote for parties that did not recognise the basic dignity of women, and the scientific facts about sex in humans, and his take was that the Dems hadn't really said much about that, what they said was by people who no longer had sway, they had moved on, and it wasn't that imporarant and issue on existential terms.
I disagreed with a lot of that particularly given the death threats that my wife has received for supporting single sex spaces, which seems like an existential threat to me in the most important terms.
Yet I look at Trump's actions and they seem antithetical to democracy. Not in an ideological way, he's not that bothered, he functions purely on the personal level. The issue of women's rights has pushed a lot of people into the Trump camp, notably Christine from this board, and a lot of that has come from the attempts by some on the left to silence women speaking for women's spaces, see Christine's post of what happened to her on the trans thread.
It's obvious though from the reactions from many on the right in the US, and Trump himself, that their commitment to free speech is only to speech they agree with. I suspect that Musk may be slightly more ideological 'pure' on this but as i have posted previously, I am not a defender of free speech as an absolute, and i have only encountered a very small numbers of people who actually are free speech absolutist. For example, almost no one i have had the discussion with thinks one should be able to describe graphically in detail to someone's 5 year old child how they would rape and torture them without consequences. (Note there are those that say that free speech with consequences in some circumstances is still absolute free speech but that is bollocks)
Again as I have on occasion expressed here and elsewhere, I am dubious of the feeling of end of times now as opposed to golden ages in the past. The brief discussion between Steve H and me on the thread for going off topic about our surprise at enjoying Michael Portillo's train programmes by the use of Steve's word hate applied to Portillo then, reminds me that at the time of the miner's strike amongst other divisory issues, , which Bragg's version of the song in the title covers, there felt often like an end of times division, added to by the prominence of the idea of nuclear war.
I remember the day after the Brighton bomb, sitting in a common room in the university union following with others in a shocked way, when one of our friends, a perfectly normal well behaved woman, arrived and said 'Pity we didn't get more of the bastards'. Those of in the common room were probably evenly spilt in the main between RCs and Protestants, and pretty well all the RCs were within 2 generations at most of Irish antecedents, but for most of us that was am insane comment but not that unusual.
It seems odd taking solace that this type of division is not new, but at the same time, there is an ongoing worry that we have through technology ended up with a way that this can happen quicker than ever before.
As to the question posed in the title of the thread and song, i find myself, never a great joiner or absolutist, even less likely to take a side on a whole gamut of issues as if they were the same thing. Again, though the knowledge that even what we now see was parodied by Swift with Big Endians and Little Endisns gives me some comfort that we may have been here before.
