I have always held that there are people who are fully corrupt Republican-fascists and without some dramatic conversion experience that we don't have the power to bring to them, they are not those we can or should waste our time trying to convince. Those with guns should be disarmed, those who have the weapons far more deadly to democracy of a TV or radio network, a highly promoted internet presence should be disarmed, too, my favorite weapon to do that with is enabling those they lie about to sue them into the flames of hell, my second favorite one is removing their license to broadcast or cabloid-cast.
I think there are many of them, millions, maybe tens of millions that our best hope is in giving them the honest feeling that they are better than being a member of the Trump cult of being a greedy, racist, hate-filled, resentful Republican-fascist. There are certainly a lot of those who are deluded and corrupted with the encouragement to give in to their baser desires, the kind of thing that TV and the movies and hate-talk media are so good at, enslaving people with their worst weaknesses.
If the left really, sincerely let people know that instead of rejoicing in their degradation we had confidence that they could be better, many of them might realize we want what is good for them. That isn't something you're going to get by making fun of them, of pumping yourself up by feeling better than them, of trying to make them feel small and stupid. There are those who are stupid but more who are greedy and selfish and who love to do what works for them so much better than it works for the left, feel better than other people and we won't reach them.
By the way, there is a reason that that works so much for them than for the left, it is the substance of the Republican-fascist ethos that inequality favors them whereas an egalitarian democratic ethos cannot be sustained on the love of that kind of hierarchy of worthiness.
We are not going to convince all of the tens of millions who voted for Trump that we want what is good for them, at best we can convince a winning margin of them that we want what's good for them. I think some of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but who then voted Republican after that were put off by Obama's clear love of alleged meritocratic hierarchy. And his weakening the things that would have helped the middle and underclass in the recovery, in his desire to be called "bi-partisan" by the media, of having Republicans like him and to please quislings like Joe Lieberman didn't help at all. Rahm Emanuel was an early warning signal that he was going to throw his own base of support under that bus. The extent to which Nancy Pelosi was the one who, to some extent, was able to pull us from the worst consequences of Obama's bad choices in those first two years will probably always be underestimated.
I am hoping that Joe Biden who is far less of an habitual elitist than Barack Obama can cure some of that and we will see if he does. I'm hoping that his appointments of figures from the Obama years are of those who had more of an egalitarian commitment than many of Obama's appointees did. I'm still hoping he appoints an education secretary who is a product of public education instead of another Ivy Leaguer-private school product. While there are those who went to the Ivies who can break out of it, they've had their day, just look at how many of the Trump criminals were their classmates.
We need a winning margin and that is not going to be found anywhere else except in convincing those who didn't vote to vote with us and those who were duped into voting against their own interests that Democrats will try to do what's better for them. But there is no way which we can trade off equal justice, under the law AND IN THE ECONOMY for that. They either sign onto equality or they won't ever be reliable partners in securing and defending egalitarian democracy and a decent, sustainable life. We're all in this together or we are going to all go down together.
One thing we have to do is get rid of the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate structure, those things that the fascists have constructed the unitary executive theory and those things which have empowered lies to be the most effective weapon against democracy. We have to make it clear that the goddamned Supreme Court does not get to make corporations persons, that artificial entities like corporations do not have rights and they don't get to radically alter the protection of freedom of speech by making billionaires have billions of times more "speech" than those without money. Buckley v. Valeo has the name of one of the premier fascist families of the mid-20th century attached to it for a reason. That's who benefited from it. Lots of counter-productive mid-20th century "liberalism" and even more of that "leftism" was as counterproductive as could be. We've got to junk that, too.
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