Strat wrote:Look, regardless of how/why Harris lost, the deomcratic party needs to figure out how to win elections and win over the working class/rural/suburban voters. The demonizing of the other side needs to stop. Clearly most of the country has greater concern over their own well being financially than what they are supposed to call transgender people. And, of course.
Without reaching these voters, they wont win elections, and if they dont win elections, then the rights for the marginalized communities we hope to protect, could be stripped away and we all lose.
Time for the deomcratic party/people like me, to do some soul searching.
The progressive left has a hard time denouncing Hamas' attack on October 7th because "israel".
Defund the police.
We do look insane. I get it.
That doesnt mean we stop fighting for such causes/ideals. But, the left better fucking figure out how to not alienate now more than half the electorate.
And, of course, there are few cures for sexism/racism/mysogny , which absolutley exist.
Its all of it.
I appreciate this post, Strat. A lot of it rings very true to me.
I rarely post in political threads, and don't really consume a ton of political content in general, partially because it helps keep my anxiety in check (I learned during the Bush era that excessive immersion in the news is bad for my mental health, even if some intentional distance comes at the expense of a level of being "informed"), and partially because so little of it seems sincere and unbiased enough to trust. (And, because of this, I always question how valuable my input really is among others who consume this stuff in greater detail.)
Mostly, though, what puts me off is the nastiness. The cruelty, the snark, the condescension, the superiority complexes, etc., coming from both sides -- all of it has just gotten so incredibly old. It is rare that I read a political article and don't find myself immediately sympathizing with whoever the article is trying to make look bad. I just have no patience for being in the mix of that much vitriol and cynicism, no matter who it's coming from or directed toward.
In a lot of ways, we are all year-round campaigners for candidates that haven't even announced their bids yet, and so often our leading (if not only) message amounts to little more than, "You're an idiot and we hate everything you stand for. Also vote for us." People are suffocated by this garbage all year long on social media, in mainstream media, from their friends and family, etc., such that when they finally get to the voting booth, regardless of who the candidates are, they're carrying around four years of baggage from being called "stupid," "hateful," "racist," "homophobic," etc., because of their feelings about Olympic women's swimming, or called "woke" and "Antifa" because they don't want their kids to be massacred during math class. The bar for being flippantly labelled some kind of "-ist" or "-phobe" (or "woke" or "radical left") is at an all-time low -- really all it takes is deviating from the going party rhetoric on a sensitive topic, at which point people start drawing all kinds of imaginary lines between a checkmark on a ballot and a malicious heart and/or a defective brain. This defies reason and is unsurprisingly not an effective conversion tool.
It would be much easier for me to accept that all voters for a specific candidate are racist, hateful, etc., if there were 100 candidates on the ballot, or 1000. But in a world where there are only two realistic choices, to me it seems like common sense that not every voter is casting their vote based on their chosen candidate's worst positions, and to some extent that has to form the baseline for compassionate dialogue. In 2016, I was pretty self-satisfied to simply write off every Trump voter as a bigot with a low IQ, but over the last 8 years (despite some
really major challenges), I've been forced to reckon with some nuance. Yes, some of the Trump voters I know are MAGA stereotypes; others very much are not, and for me to allow one vote in a multi-issue, two-candidate election to dismantle everything else I know to be true about them would be to give political emotion priority over my own lived reality, which is precisely the tradeoff that has led to some of the scariest moments of the Trump era. I've found, at least in my own experience, that there is often a chasm between what someone's character tells you about them, and what you think their political preferences tell you about them. Either we see that chasm as a space for asking compassionate questions and seeking understanding, or we see it as a space to continue vomiting our own ill-gotten assumptions into, in which case it seems foolish to assume we'll ever get anything other than the same in return.