Thursday, December 14, 2017

Oh, For Pity Sake, This Isn't Hard - Appealing To Those Who Can Be Persuaded To Vote With Us Is A Deep 50 State Strategy

"You're a fucking idiot if you think that you're going to get redneck racists who voted for Roy Moore to vote for Democrats." 

For crying out loud.  You guys drive me to despair. 

To start with, not everyone in Alabama who could have voted, did vote.  There were certainly poor White People who aren't racists who didn't vote, for one reason or another. Some who are discouraged on the basis of what politicians have won there as Democrats on a national level gave up in such places.  Including some who could have been persuaded to vote for Doug Jones.   People you would stereotype as "redneck racists". 

There are also "redneck racists" who didn't vote but who might be persuaded to go out and vote for Roy Moore when someone shows them what you and the Rude Pundit said about them.  I'll bet there were people who voted for him in Alabama on the basis of not much more than through the appeal of regional resentment that you guys have been stoking all along.   The great Samantha Bee called out to that later group on her last show before the election when she begged them to prove they were better than "us Yankee assholes" believed.  Samantha Bee is smarter than you guys, she gets it.

I never said we needed all of them, we just need the ones we can persuade to be with us on the basis of equal rights, equal dignity and equal justice.  We have been doing badly without them for a long time, now.

And there are a lot of White Voters, even those under the apparent moral incapacity of having  college credentials and a white collar job, who do vote for Democrats and more who could be convinced that they should vote for Democrats.   Maybe even some who have voted for Republicans.   If the write in vote had gone for Roy Moore - I assume most of those votes cast by White Republicans or Republican leaning voters who couldn't stomach voting for him but could vote for someone putrid but less putrid like Luther Strange - Roy Moore would have won. 

This isn't about converting the entire set of people you like to put in the White Working Class into liberal Democrats, it's about convincing enough of those people, many of whom don't fit into your self-congratulatory, self-gratifying stereotypes, to vote for Democrats.    The most morally and politically potent way to do that is by showing them their interests are the same as Black Working Class people who are used up and thrown away in much the same way.   White Women were the largest class of people to benefit under Affirmative Action - the huge secret that racists have successfully buried - White Working Class People would be a large class of people who benefit from Democratic governance.  If the crude Lyndon Johnson who on occasion used offensive language  BUT WHO DELIVERED THE GREATEST ADVANCE IN CIVIL RIGHTS OF ANY PRESIDENT hadn't been suckered into escalating the war in Vietnam by the Harvard boys, if he hadn't been sandbagged by those promoting Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy*, he would have been reelected in 1968 and his Great Society program would have transformed the country and American politics.   A lot of what was used to undermine Johnson in the Democratic Party was based in the kind of regional snobbery that you're still undermining the Democratic Party with today.

How do such stupid people get away with selling themselves as smart?

Oh, yeah, and the extra capitalizations that annoy you.   I think Voters should be capitalized because the Voters are the most important part of the government, the roots and trunk that are what the other branches depend on.  Voters role in government is in need of boosting, especially these days as the "three branches" are all attacking Voters and Voting.   And I think The People and the various constituents of The People deserve capital letters as well, what with the cog-sci, soc-sci, psy-sci attack on us, our dignity and our very self-conception of ourselves.   I'm getting better at remembering that.  We have suffered under academic attack for too long and we need to raise our consciousness - ourselves, not allow them to be dismissed.   Letting me know you're annoyed by those capital letters is no way to get me to stop doing it.

* The treachery of Eugene McCarthy after 1968  is an interesting case to consider, as is that of Ralph Nader.

1 comment:

  1. Something like 25% of the electorate voted in that special election, up from 14% that voted in the primary that gave Roy Moore the candidacy.

    What would it take to increase the turnout, and what would the result be?

    ReplyDelete