On how to treat the other half of the voters

[nancylebov]

It's not that we should be better than demonizing the other side, it's that we should have more sense--after all, they're a lot of the people we need to recruit.

I'm assuming that it's no harder to get people to change their point of view than to get someone interested who's been ignoring politics. If anyone here has evidence one way or the other on this, I'm quite interested.

Bush does a pretty good job of alienating people, but let's not make it harder for him by pretending that anyone who supports him doesn't have a heart and a mind.

They aren't aliens, they aren't things, and both "Republican" and "Bush supporter" are choices (in the case of party affiliation, possibly a habit), not unchangable identities.

The problem is that bigotry is *fun*. It makes you feel superior, it lets you hope that you're keeping the people on your side in place, and it's easy to get a laugh by making yet another joke about not letting your kid marry a Republican.

The other problem may be that bigotry works, but I'm hoping there are better strategies.

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I've found I have astonishingly good luck shaking things up by 1)fretting over the amount of government debt going to China and other places 2)picking at Donald Rumsfeld for being an old Navy pilot who doesn't have a clue about ground warfare, and is enchanted by cool military toys while ignoring the needs of the humans in uniform 3)pointing out that the person I'm talking to makes other decisions based on likely benefit vs. likely loss, so why are they not examining what this administration is accomplishing as carefully as they'd check out a a corporate annual report or study the results of a football/basketball coach. After all, if they don't do a good job for the team, they can be questioned and even fired, for the good of the team.
I try not to tell them they're sheep who have surrendered the right to free will because they let their patriotic reluctance to question a president take precendence over their patriotic duty to question a president. I have a little crease in my tongue from where I've bitten it in the process of resistng this urge. While I believe that many members of the Bush administration are evil, and many, many more are grossly mistaken, however good their intentions are, I don't try and imply that the people who voted for them are evil--just that they've been sold a bill of goods by people who lie so they can make money--Cheney and Halliburton make a great selling point.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

an old Navy pilot who doesn't have a clue about ground warfare

Speaking as someone who was at one point married to a surface-warfare type Naval officer (he's still my husband, he's just not in the Navy any more), Navy pilots don't have a clue, period. "Their brains don't function below 3000 feet," as the saying went.

There was an interesting op-ed in the NY Times the other day, pointing out that the Army isn't just failing to make its recruiting goals these days, it's losing junior officers to resignation at a rate not seen since the Viet Nam era.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There's been a sort of compulsive stupidity to US policy for a while that makes me feel as though I'm stuck in a Foundation novel.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

1. Glad to know that the opinion derived from my brother-in-law (a very discontented Republican stockbroker and Navy Veteran--Vietnam era) isn't jus his take on things, although his version is: the pilots aren't taught to worry about what's down below--just about whether the plane works and they can shoot stuff.

2. On the NYT piece:
People who can see the handwriting on the wall often feel compelled to read it. Once that happens, they often start thinking about it.

[madfilkentist]

You're making an assumption about your audience which doesn't apply to me.

I regard the Democrats and Republicans who hold high office, with a handful of exceptions, as equally contemptible. Voters are a different matter; I recognize that they have to choose from available alternatives. If the Democrats have relatively little power right now, their ideas are still influential. The idea that the commerce clause extends into every cranny of private life was invented to uphold Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, and it was the driving principle behind the medical marijuana decision. The idea that property isn't yours by right, but is only held in trust for society, was the driving principle behind the eminent domain decision.

Mutatis mutandis, though, your advice does apply to me. The object of my argumentation should be to persuade people, not to let them know how idiotic I think they are. Remembering this, and figuring out ways to reach people through commonalities, can be a difficult job, particularly when talking with people of left-wing persuasions (who are the ones I encounter more often) who consider name-calling a sufficient argument and thus are practically begging to be answered in kind.

[avram]

Um, what exactly are you talking about?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What I hear from people who are opposed to Bush frequently adds up to the idea that there's no hope of convincing a Republican that there's anything wrong with the administration. I believe this is both bad strategy and premature despair.

The specific recent trigger was a random conversation at Whole Foods. A woman in the checkout line picked up a copy of Architectural Digest and asked how much plastic surgery the woman on the cover had. I said it looked like a fair amount, and that the woman on the cover looked unhappy. The woman I'm talking to says that of course she's unhappy, she's married to a Republican. (I don't know whether she knew who the guy on the cover was or if it was just that they looked rich.)

I suggested that sometimes mixed marriages do work out, and that the woman on the cover might be a Republican. Neither suggestion seemed to register.

I'm sorry that I don't have more examples handy, but I'll try to keep track of more conversations.

[madfilkentist]

I'm reminded of a line in a song which has been featured on Dr. Demento, and is otherwise humorous:

People voting Republican,

Give them a boot to the head!