Republican Collectivism is different from Democrat Collectivism

It is well known that the Democrats divide people into collective groups by which to judge them, categorize them, determine their amount of oppression or privilege, and so on. They divide people by race, by sex, by gender, by sexual orientation, by religion to a certain extent, and other categories as well. That is why others who are outside the Democratic Party consider them to be racist, sexist, et cetera, because they obsessively judge people into increasingly minute racial categories. In the past it was white or non-white, now it is BIPOC. In addition to racial categories, with B and I in one group, POC in a second group, and white in a third group, they do use gender based and sex based classification.

What isn’t seen as much is that Republicans also create their collective groups, but they don’t do so based on race. Their primary division is citizen and non-citizen. There are sub-divisions, such as legal aliens and illegal aliens. They have their hierarchy, based not on race but on citizenship. They also have a hierarchy based on law abiding and criminal, but for some crimes people can be redeemed because of the religious nature of many Republicans that allows them to accept repentance and give forgiveness.

Based on that, the Republican drive to close the border and remove illegal aliens makes some sense, from within their paradigm. They see those who are legally here, those who are illegally here, and want to remove the latter. The former includes citizens and legal aliens. The latter includes non-citizens and criminals.

What results is a very interesting consequence. Some people are able to say “they are judging by a different standard than I am”. Other people are not. Democrats are very bad at that, and have shown themselves to be so on very many issues. Since for them, race is a primary issue, they assume for everyone else that race is a primary issue. Therefore they assume that Republicans are using citizenship and legality as code words for race.

Meanwhile Republicans think Democrats are making a confession, thinking that criminal equals non-white.

If only it were that simple.

When Republicans accuse Democrats of saying “oh you think non-citizen and criminal describe minorities” the Democrats see that as Republicans saying “you’ve caught us and are trying to shift the blame.” Neither side is talking the language of the other.

Democrats probably don’t automatically equate non-citizen and criminal with minorities. They just think that since Republicans “obviously” think the same way they do that it must be code words to disguise the exact same classification. Meanwhile Republicans don’t care about the race of the law-abiding citizen, they care that the person is a law-abiding citizen.

I tried to explain this once to some Democrats and people farther left. I described small town Americana, a place they are convinced is full of backwards deplorable racists clinging to their bibles and guns.

In this stereotypical small town, most of the people work in the same one or two businesses. Some of them go to the Baptist church, others to the Methodist church. Their kids all go to the same High School, and most of them shop at the same stores. They don’t see each other as all that different, but they see people from outside their town as different. In particular they see people from the big cities as different.

And then the Democrats see that and misinterpret that collectivist view as racial again, trying to force-map white onto rural and black onto urban.

I don’t endorse either kind of collectivism. But I am doing better than the Democrats by at least noticing what collectivism people are using to make their own judgments instead of using different collectivisms. Republicans can see that Democrats see everything through a racial lens. Republican can see that Democrats don’t share the Republican lens of law abiding vs. criminal or citizen vs. non-citizen. Democrats cannot see that others don’t see everything through a racial lens.

The only explanation I can see is that the Republican distinction is more subtle, because it crosses racial and ethnic lines. And since it is more subtle even some libertarians fall for it, though they should know better. Most do know better, but a few fall for it. Then again, maybe the reason Democrats don’t see it is because it seems to be hard for Democrats to even see that other viewpoints can exist in the first place. They instead think that everyone agrees with their premises and choose different conclusions out of a desire to be evil.