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In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Last edited Mon Mar 6, 2017, 05:49 AM - Edit history (2)
What I do think is that the views I agree with-none of which I personally invented-have significant popularity and resonance and can win votes for Democratic candidates. I don't pretend to be personaly infallible or that nothing I support is ever unpopular.
My experience, my lived-in, day-to-day experience, is that it's possible to change minds, to win support for ideas people previously didn't support or even know of(as the LGBTQ community did in the last decade with same-sex marriage, as feminists did in the Seventies, as the black, Latino and Native American freedom movements did in the Sixties or the labor movement before that), and to expand the range of the possible.
What's the alternative, the workable alternative, to believing that? What can anyone do to achieve any change if, instead of believing that there is hope for a clearly different future, a person assumes that the big battles are all lost, most people's minds are forever cast in stone, and that nothing beyond a slightly-less-nasty version of the present can ever happen?
It sounds, from your posts here, as though that's what you believe...and that you are enraged and terrified by anyone who believes there's any more hope at all than that. You convey that impression by your habit of lashing out at almost everyone who rejects what you appear to perceive as the absolute limits of political change, and your apparent belief that the only thing that works is to demand that everyone accept your notion of such limits.
In some major ways, you have me totally wrong.
If you don't think I recognize that winning voter approval for an idea, or electing any candidate(I've worked on campaigns for forty years in three states, a good number of which were successful), requires a lot of hard work, than you just don't know me. I've lived in practical politics the whole time. It's just that I reach different conclusions than the conclusions you reach about how to approach that.
And I have no more use for the people who voted third-party or didn't vote or voted for Hair Fuhrer on "shake up the system" grounds than you do. I never did. I simply argued that we needed to use a different approach to changing their minds, because simply shouting "you have to! YOU HAVE TO!" doesn't work. Saying that is vastly different than saying third-party presidential voters are right to do what they do.
Nor have I ever defended or taken part in any of the ugliness that takes place on The SIte That Shall Not Be Named. Not my approach. Not my crowd.
And in my non-DU political life, I constantly practice compromise, I vote for candidates I'm not satisfied with on the issues, and meet people halfway in personal political discussions.
It's just that I don't accept that short-term practical considerations mean checking the goal of transformation at the door. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, in a line from a song from its Eighties musical "Steeltown", sums it up:
if we ask only little questions, and we do not ask for more,
We may seem to win a battle but still not win the war.