Gee, whatever happened to Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high”? I’m hearing far too much enthusiasm for a headlong dive into the sewer to create our own venom-spewing Milo and Bannon and Flynn. Well, I’m not up for borrowing from the dark side’s playbook. There are better ways to win.
Everyone in here saying some variation of “I don’t have to listen to them, because I already know everything I need to know about every single one of those 62+ million racist, misogynistic motherfuckers” is standing in the same shallow gene pool with the flat Earth, climate denier, don’t-confuse-me-with-facts crowd. Shame on every one of you.
Losing sucks. Losing to the maniac boy-king now in the White House sucks even more. But taking back our country requires votes. Did then, does now. And winning requires getting some fraction of those 62 million supporters over to our side.
Shouting epithets and ad hominem attacks at an entire group won’t do the trick. If that’s the strategy, count me out.
There was this one question and answer that stood out to me:
Ezra Klein
Let me push you on this a little bit. People hear that answer and then what they think is, “But it feels zero-sum to me. It feels that immigrants coming over the border are taking my jobs.” And it’s not always racial. One of my colleagues, Sarah Kliff, she went up to Kentucky. She was talking to people who voted for Donald Trump but were on Obamacare. One of the things they said was, “I’m pissed off about the folks who are poorer than me, who don’t work, and who get Medicaid. They don’t have these high deductibles that I have. They don’t all this cost sharing that I have.”
One of the things that Donald Trump spoke to with great effectiveness is the feeling people have that the pie is only so big, which there are times when it is. For instance, with government programs oftentimes. That what maybe could go to them or could go to their community or could go to their family is instead going to someone else. What Trump did for a lot of white Americans is he came and said, “I’m going to make sure it goes to you. I’m going to make sure these people aren’t coming over and taking it from you.” When you say you need social inclusion, I think what a lot of people hear is, “We’re going to bring in all these folks, and those slices of the pie are going to get a lot smaller.”
Keith Ellison
See, that’s why we’ve got to be in people’s doorways and at people’s VFW halls and we got to be talking to them. Because I would say, you show me a Southern, a white person in Kentucky who voted for Trump and is now worrying about their Obamacare taken away, I’ll show you a person who Democrats haven’t even knocked on their door in years. I’ll show you some people who haven’t been talked to. They haven’t heard the other side of the story. Because I’m going to tell you right now, if they framed resource allocation as a basic issue of scarcity, we going to lose that one. There’s not enough. Obviously you’re going to pick you and your family over somebody you don’t know and have heard a lot of bad things about.
Here’s the reality of it. There is enough in America, man. There is enough. Now, there’s not enough if we give the richest people the lowest tax rates, like the hedge fund managers. There’s not enough if we let some people hoard massive amounts of wealth overseas because of the deferral provision in our tax code. There’s not enough then. If you can get a tax break for your plane and your jet and all that, there may not be enough then. If we had even a tax code like the one we had in 1975, we could make sure that the rich get to keep their money, but everybody else can make it too. Once they got you in the scarcity frame, they got you over a barrel. It’s easy then to work racial, ethnic, gender, age division.
It got me thinking, that even if the trump voters are racist, we can’t make them stop being racist. So we have to try to neutralize their racism such that they stop seeing the rest of us as outsiders and instead compatriots with shared values.
I came up with a motto that kind of embodies that idea: “Prosperity and Dignity for All” - They want to feel respected, we want to be respected and we all want to live more prosperous lives. A slogan ain’t much on its own, but I’m thinking its the right general direction to get the disaffected who voted Trump to vote for a democrat.
Nobody gets that by default. You gotta be respectable first. Respect isn’t a right. It’s earned.
I’m just saying, I don’t feel like the tRump supporters shouldn’t exist. They’re people.
But so many of them (trump too) have said that people like me shouldn’t exist. Or that we don’t exist, or that people like me should be killed/rounded up into camps/sterilized (the list goes on).
So it’s really hard for me to come out of a place of respect. I respect them enough to not go out into the public square yelling about how trump supporters should be eradicated. The favor isn’t returned.
You could not be more wrong. Everybody deserves respect by virtue of being a person.
Your sanctinmony is part of the problem, its completely unproductive and only leads to calcification of positions.
The US has 200 million registered voters, more Democratic than GOP. More could be registered besides. Winning requires turnout, a decent ground game, a message that resonates, a candidate with some charisma, a platform that seems sincere and matters to the strangely few people who care about platforms, and voter enthusiasm. Clinton had decent turnout but low enthusiasm, a broken ground game, and many totally unique flaws, and lost by a handful of votes in states that whoever runs next time will be paying more attention to and tailoring their messages to.
My part in that is sub-minuscule, other than paltry input in a late primary, a bit of volunteering/donations, and some hot air on the internet. I hope the Dems will get their shit together and hope some decent candidates will be in the running, and while I’ll do my tiny part, I will not decide this election, and I’m happy to write off anyone who willingly pulled the lever for Trump, because they’re at best ignorant and at worst genuinely horrible human beings. So if I say repeating the same mantra of listening to and courting old racist white people more as is repeated after every Dem loss isn’t for me, it won’t change 2020.
If you want to listen to Trump voters, have at it. I hear a lot from them all the time, and the article sums them up pretty well - people who support theocracy, white supremacy, and xenophobia, guided by irrational fear and hate. (Economic insecurity gets talked about a lot more by pundits than supporters, and seems selectively focused on white people, while ignoring minorities who often also suffer from economic insecurity). Most don’t see themselves as theocratic xenophobes, and love to be lied to about how their racism isn’t really racism, but in general they’re a lost cause. There are a lot more people besides them that need to get to the polls, most of whom won’t show if the candidate’s courting bigots, and those people matter more than the Trump voters who are so shockingly gullible, stupid, misinformed, and self delusional that there’s no likely way to win them even if you tried other than lying about coal jobs returning or lying about NAFTA or lying about something else.
I’m going to repeat this because this needs to be repeated over and over and over and over.
This should be inscribed in stone.
Economically poor Republican voters need to know that they are getting nothing from the Republican Party (less than nothing, since value is being taken away). [Exception: if they are fervently anti-abortion, they are certainly getting what they paid for, and paying quite a bit for it, since that’s the only thing they’re getting.]
I saw an interesting interview with a neurologist on Tavis Smiley the other day. He explained that if a person grows up with only one world view, then all information they receive is filtered then through that world view and they become more or less incapable of understanding anything contradictory to that view, at least perhaps, at face. They simply lack the neural circuitry to take in this information. What you’re left with is the connections people do have, and strengthening those. Trump is very good at strengthening connections because he repeats himself in his speeches, in his messages, and the media works as an amplifier. Anything Trump says, is television; combine that with the 24 hour news cycle, an army of commentators and you have a constant lathering of reinforcement that drives people deeper and deeper.
What’s being said does not need to be true, it doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to roughly align with a person’s world view, which may not be true, or make sense, because that’s not how the brain works, neural connections don’t have logic checks, it’s just something triggering something, triggering something and so on and so forth. A connection exists, a connection grows stronger, and other connections grow weak and die off.
Reaching a deep Trump supporter, particularly older ones, means working with what they’ve got upstairs, and knowing that you might never make a dent. The neurologist suggested asking them about things they’ve done for their community, and keep asking them about those things, to strengthen those connections. I take that to be the olive branch, to get them thinking about how they did something to make things better, to get them thinking about hope, about how they helped others and that others were deserving of that help. Of course, if they’ve never done anything for anybody, then you’re not going to get very far, but it’s important not to assume that, people do lots of things within an ‘in’ group for the benefit of their community, no matter what that community is.
However, while trying to reach out, if we have the stamina to do so, which we may not, what really shines of this message is the importance of teaching critical thinking to children, so that they can build logic checks in their brain so no matter what the message, they will question it, they will evaluate it and only if it makes sense, will they accept it. And even then, their world view must be challenged, and they must pursue the challenge, they must try to look at the world through as many eyes as possible. This is the true value of education, not job skills, not the reinforcement of cultural norms, but opening their eyes to a world of wondrous possibility, and keeping them open.
Education will decide the future of our species; freedom or slavery.
Good thing the written republican platform is to literally dismantle all public education, and explicitly states that critical thinking is counter to conservatism. Read the Texas State Republican Party’s written platform. It’s laid out clearly in black and white text.
Educating your kids and preparing them to do well in the future apparently isn’t bipartisan anymore, and hasn’t been for several years now.
Christ I hope Ellison gets the DNC chair. He definitely has a point. And I like your slogan. I really hope that these things, this kind of mobilization can make a difference. I don’t know if it will, but it sounds like a reasonable strategy.
There’s still some larger and more deep-seated thing wrong with humanity in general that goads us to cede power to malignant narcissists. We keep doing this periodically throughout the history of civilization - I do not understand why. And I feel like we’re going to go through this all over again if we don’t figure this out.
And I’m…I’m nervous. This time, the mood, the general current events, the rhetoric - psychologically speaking there are a lot of parallels to other points in history that were precursors to conflict. There’s this line from “Gangs of New York” that has been going through my head since before November. The character Bill “the Butcher” says, “…we’ll settle with a good dust up.” I get the impression that for some their feelings will not be remedied by anything less.
That’s what so mystifies me about Trump. I keep running a thought experiment where even if Trump was favoring policy I agreed with I would still be repulsed by, and reject him for: his childishness, his caustic/sneering/disrespectful manner; his constant repetition; his massive narcissism; his outright lies and subsequent resolute denials; his casual and shameless ignorance/anti-intellectualism; his pathetic and obvious pandering to religion and patriotism; his ridiculous attempted pandering to minorities; his brutalist handshake; his fear of stairwells. Birtherism, his entree into politics, would have immediately disqualified him.
I just don’t understand why more Republicans aren’t/weren’t disgusted by Trump, as a person, irrespective of his stated political views.
Yes, they have to dumb it down, bigly. And whatever Hillary said, it was going to get ignored by a certain percentage of the electorate (who voted for Trump). But still - there needs to be a coherent (albeit simplified) attack on neoliberal economic policies. Someone to acknowledge that yes, the working and middle class have been getting hurt to the benefit of the wealthy. Hillary didn’t do that.
Every day is such an opportunity under the Trump administration!
I’m listening to them, and I keep hearing the same terrifying, baffling things. I’ll ask you the same thing I asked CapnCrunch: what am I supposed to do to soften the stance of people who, at best, want to treat anyone who isn’t a white Christian male as a second-class citizen? Even assuming it’s possible to open a meaningful dialogue with them (which they’ve proven time and time again it’s not), what can we say? I agree, shouting at them doesn’t seem to help, but what’s the alternative, besides saying bigotry is acceptable? That’s literally what they want.
If there’s an actual solution rather than just shaming everyone who calls them out for their monstrous behavior, I genuinely am interested in hearing it.
I don’t understand how to take this advice to heart in any capacity. What am I supposed to do? I am being demanded to understand, yet am not being given anything TO understand. I am not saying that as some kind of assertion that they aren’t worth understanding or that I think I already understand and need no further insight - I just genuinely do not feel I have been given anything with which to reach a position of understanding.
I keep seeing articles like this, demanding my sympathy, understanding and respect. I have yet to see one that actually does anything to tell me how to do that. It feels like each one simply shows me their words and then demands my kindness, like I was supposed to have a visceral emotional reaction. Like seeing a sad eyed puppy in a humane society advertisement backed by Sarah Mclaughlin.
Far from feeling sympathy well up inside me, I’m put off. I’m not told how to deal with that, and I see in the comments here that many felt that same reaction. They put it harsher though, so all they got in response was, basically “stop that” - clearly a more flattering reaction is demanded, but there is no guidance in how to form that reaction, only blame and shame for not automatically being more charitable.
So now what? I couldn’t feel the way you want me to feel, I have no guidance for doing so besides fear mongering that we’re all going to die because I couldn’t, they are not expected to reach out to me this way, and this seems to mostly be laid at my feet, because reaching out was my job. Yet any way I know how to actually attempt to speak to them about how I actually feel is on their list of things they hate hearing and which has pushed them away. Anger is scolded as the wrong feeling, but articles like this, in attempting to inspire another emotion, mostly inspire anger.
Assume that your God believes in collective punishment: if even one person in your community commits the heinous sin, then you’re all going to Hell. Assume that there’s a moral difference between murder and righteous vindication - the one will condemn the community, the other is commanded. Now you’re getting close to the far right. “We have to punish all the people who don’t behave exactly as our God preaches, because otherwise He will punish all of us. Anyone who condones the sin is guilty of it.”
I suspect that this may be related to the childrearing style in which a parent punishes all the children for the misdeeds of one, or a teacher punishes the entire classroom. The idea of that style is to get the children to exert peer pressure on each other out of fear. They grow up to be angry and resentful, and at the same time to believe that’s the way the world works. They believe that everyone must police everyone else all the time, and that there needs to be a strong father/teacher/president who will see that it happens.
Meh, whatever. If someone farted in my face, I’m not going to tell them it smells like roses in the hopes that they’ll realize they were wrong for doing it.
If someone’s supporting Trump, I’m not going to act like that’s okay. If I do, then why the heck would they ever want to change?
I’m going to start this out by saying that I’m pretty darn far to the left. I live in the Castro in San Francisco. In the right-wing mind, I am every bad label they can think of.
That said, everyone is being far too harsh. Most of these people aren’t evil. They aren’t bigots. What they are is scared and emotionally driven.
As an atheist (really, I’m not trying to be a walking stereotype of the right here, but…), I accepted a long time ago that the average person isn’t logical. I’m not logical all the time either. We’re emotional beings and sometimes, in order to cope, we latch onto certain beliefs that are safe and conservative. This is especially true when we have little personal experiences to fall back on to.
When I see people saying they want to preserve their culture, to me that means there is a very good chance the person is rather culturally isolated and they fear the unknown.
Unfortunately that fear can (and does) rise to the point where it is hard to do anything but condemn the person for being a bigot. But… I don’t know.
It is hard for me to condemn people who are driven completely by their emotions. I mean, yes, I condemn their actions, but I’m not sure that it is the best way to change their minds. Most of these people I feel, if they weren’t under a constant barrage of fear promoted by ring-wing propaganda and with a more diverse group of friends, would change their minds.
I just don’t think it is effective to call out your neighbor for being a bigot. It feels good and maybe on the internet where people see you call them out so it effects more than just the person you’re talking to it is right, but on a one-on-one basis… I have to say, the only solution I see is basically exposure therapy. Make them not fear.
(Of course, right-wing propaganda is so powerful now it is hard to deprogram anyone without a constant presence showing you it is a lie. short of bombing radio towers though, I’m not sure how one can combat that for a good chunk of Americana. Also, there is no hope for the pro-life wing that would elect Hitler if he promised to ban abortion.)
Some of those people literally want me dead. I have had the misfortune to have been chased out of the town I grew up in by some of them (In Britain, not the US). I’m not going to be a martyr just so some liberals get to say they were the better people. If liberals aren’t willing to stand up and protect me (as many of them seem to be saying), then AFA and the Black Bloc say they will.
I only win if I am alive to apologise for doing what I needed to do to survive this round of fascism. I think that reformism will not be enough against the reactionaries, so I say try revolutionary tactics instead. I don’t think we should actively go out and attack members of the alt-right, but self-defence is fair.
