Something President Obama said in his speech the other night - instead of making it about us and them, you try and find some common ground. And there’s always something to agree on, even totally opposing sides. We’re still people living our lives.
"That sense of mutual respect has to be part of our message. Our politics have become so polarized these days that all of us across the political spectrum seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out-yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or they don’t bother to vote.
Now that approach may work for the politicians who just want attention and thrive on division, but it won’t work for us. To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices. And that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. "
None of that is easy, and not everyone is going to change. But the other choice is to be like them, and that helps no one.
if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns
dems have been trying to do this for years. YEARS. what do republicans do? vote against THEIR OWN bills, because they don’t want anything to get accomplished while a democrat is potus.
i love obama, but unfortunately the only thing that seems to be starting to work is calling republicans weird couchfucking fascists who need to be defeated in a landslide just to keep the country from devolving into a christofascist dictatorship
the “lets play nice” approach gave us trump 2016 , a 6-3 corrupt conservative scotus, and not even a guarantee that it won’t all happen all over again starting november
fuck trump, fuck trump voters, and fuck anyone who claims to still be “on the fence” about which choice is best for this country.
“undecided” doesn’t mean undecided for this election. “undecided” means “i’m voting R, but don’t want to say it out loud,” because that person knows that they’ll be–correctly–shat on for voting for the objectively wrong choice
And that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. "
This take the high road attitude can fuck right off when the other side’s concerns are irrational racist hatemongering bullshit.
The high road only works when your opponent as a sense of shame and the capacity to self-reflect, even a little bit.
MAGA has neither. The few republicans that still do, the few who are still the adults in the room, have already pledged for Harris. Any of them who haven’t by now are lost causes addicted to Trumps tit milk.
I totally agree with both of you that once you see the person’s true colors, there’s no point in continuing. The point was, how can you know what the person is thinking without actually interacting and finding out their real problems? And perhaps introducing some solutions or directions that, without the labels of socialism or communism, are appealing to them.
If we paint all conservatives with the same brush, we alienate the few (or maybe not as few as we think) to never consider something different. How many times is it said that much of their information comes from just a single source like Fox News? Let’s give them something else to consider before we blast them all as hopeless. As shown, there are those who have heard the message and seen the true Trump in reality who have flipped, but they only did so because someone helped them realize their echo chamber was just that and all lies. They’d still be Trump supporters if someone didn’t open their eyes.
Obama was, and remains, shockingly naive in this way.
The entire republican mindset is being trained to abuse this kind of attempt at good faith engagement. Fascism thrives on that kind of naiveté.
These are beautiful and healing words and also we’re dealing with the white Taliban whose very identity is not to play along with that.
Obama’s approach is more preventative, whereas we’re in the cancer-killing phase of things. We’re trying to get back to where we can do things that way safely, if we’re doing things right.
And even the preventative approach has to be fucking ballsy and loud about not letting rich cocksuckers hijack civil conversations to justify robbing everybody blind while calling it “business as usual”, which is what set the stage for all this in the first place.
