It’s not about proving oneself morally superior. It’s about winning elections.
If there is one weakness that is more commonly displayed on Kos than any other, it could well be a general hatred of all conservatives, the justification being that all conservatives are evil people who deserve to be hated. Multiple arguments are made to support this, a common one being that anybody who enables racism is racist and misogynist.
That is not always true. Perhaps not even usually true. Yes, it is true of the self-aware Klansmen and American Nazis and alt-right trolls, but not of the many good and decent church-goers who not only are not like those people, but who disapprove of them. Many voters today who are enabling Donald Trump’s misanthropic behavior are merely ignorant about the true costs of conservatism, seeing only the positives (and there are some) but blind to the negatives. They are not bad people. But they often are sincere but terribly misguided people, which is not at all the same thing.
Why does this distinction matter? Because the first principal of democratic government is that you have to get a solid majority on board willingly in order for democracy to work. Half the people (or fewer) forcing their will on the other half (or more) is essentially no different than despotism, no matter which side is doing it. That means our goal should be to win over a whole lot of people who have been voting Republican. Especially in Texas, Alabama, and the rest of the Bible Belt. And this is not impossible. (To win all, yeah, that’s impossible. To win most, that’s unlikely in the extreme. To win a lot. . .that is absolutely possible, because most of the core things that Democrats are pushing for are supported by the majority of Americans, including a substantial number of Republicans.) The reason so many Republicans vote against their own interest is not because they evil, but because of their unreasoning, illogical, emotion-based fear of Democrats. That fear can be addressed. [For some examples of how to go about it, see my other diary of today.]
Republicans thinkers and leaders are masters at manipulating popular emotion, and popular emotion will always lean toward a simplistic desire to preserve or restore the “good ol’ days.” There is nothing inherently malicious in that desire. The malice comes when people who actually know better go ahead and exploit that leaning for their own malicious purposes. The ones who fall for it are guilty more of ignorance than of malice (and you know the saying “Avoid attributing to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.” Let’s soften “stupidity” to “ignorance” and keep going.)
I have from time to time been accused here of wanting to soften progressive positions in order to win conservative voters. I want no such thing; I strongly agree with the core positions that practically all liberals and progressives agree on, and I reject the notion of compromising on any of them. What I actually propose is to speak to conservatives in their own language, addressing their legitimate concerns, in order to show them that what they fear is not actually a justified fear. That is not compromising my position, it is addressing their perception. For example, I don’t care whether a particular conservative believes that abortion is or is not sinful. Let them guide their own actions by their own beliefs. All that should matter to me or to any progressive is whether that person is willing to let other people follow their own conscience, and that is all that Democrats are fighting for: leave me alone to make my own decisions. Trying to force others to agree with your belief that abortion is not a sin is just as wrong as them trying to force you to believe that it is. Political victory in this area is achieved when others who claim to believe in freedom of conscience (a good Evangelical belief) also believe in freedom of conscience for others, and then leave it to God to judge. And abortion is a good example, because the anti-abortion leaders are misrepresenting what the Bible says. It does not at all say what “everybody knows” it says. In truth, it says almost nothing about the topic, and what it does say leans more toward the Democratic position than the Republican. We are so used to screaming about abortion that most people aren’t even aware that it can actually be talked about in a sane manner. So it is indeed possible to reach Christian conservatives, even on the most difficult position of all to address, simply by appealing to the Book that they claim to believe.
Remember: when you hate on people, it only increases their resistance. To win in the long run, you have to win them over to voluntary compliance, not forced obedience. I like to use four classic examples from history that high school students should (but usually do not) understand. The first two are Germany and Japan, 1945. They were totally defeated in war, but the United States set out to rebuild them rather than punish them. It worked; both countries are now firmly on our side, both economically and militarily. The third example is Germany in 1918—crushed, humiliated, and thirsting for the revenge that later was promised to them by Hitler. The fourth example is the Confederacy after 1865. We will never know what would have happened differently if Lincoln had finished his second term, but what actually happened was that the Confederacy was left defeated but unrepentant. The Confederate flag should have been outlawed in 1865, but it wasn’t, and how did that work out? There was no winning of their hearts and minds, and now some say that we are on the verge of fighting that war again, just like Europe fought World War 1 all over again, only worse.
We’ve got to stop hating on conservatives and start supplying convincing answers to people who listen to Limbaugh and Beck and the others. Those listeners are getting a lot of information that is both reasonable and perfectly true. But you know what they say about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The listeners are not hearing the rest of the story, and they don’t know about the perfectly good responses to the half-truths that they are hearing. So, to take just one example, Dennis Prager’s “Prager University” site can brag about how skilled they are at persuading people. Even Vanity Fair agrees with that, according to Wikipedia, which says: Vanity Fair said PragerU "packages right-wing social concepts into slick videos" and that PragerU was "one of the most effective conversion tools for young conservatives.” After watching some of Prager’s five-minutes videos, I have to agree. Those videos are very well done. But the problem with them is not so much lies (though they are sometimes there) as half-truths, cherry-picking, and the leaving out of important adverse information. It’s time for us to start telling the rest of the story, calmly, patiently, and convincingly. That’s the only way to win over the conservatives who really are good people, but who don’t see the whole picture. Start giving them the whole picture, in terms that they understand.
EJ