You’re still saying, “Vote for us because of them!” No wonder you can’t hold onto power. The GOP/TEA Party is so bad, so destructive, that they shouldn’t be winning* now.* They shouldn’t have come back in 2010. But they are, and they did. That is a Democratic failure. A credible party should have wiped the walls with the GOP, left them dead for a decade. That is the opposite of what happened. The Democrats are not effective.
The TEA Party are in the business of winning. I have told this board this over & over. They see social progressivism, of multiple forms, as an existential threat. They see every Lady Gaga, every teenage trans* kid on Tumblr, every time Beyoncé shakes her butt or talks about black pride on television, as the Enemy working to take away their country. So they work overtime to capture and hold onto social institutions. They are, right now, explaining to some young person that people exactly like you, k9bfriender, are dangerous pinkos who are too soft on Communism, transgenderism, and, “well, maybe sex with dogs, I don’t know for sure!”
Socially conservative posters on this board have tried to explain to you that [as they understand it, on the inside] social conservatism is a social movement, not a mere political party. It’s a worldview. And they will vote for those who allegedly “share their core values,” or failing that, against those who allegedly spit at those “core values.”
The political alternative to this *massive cultural force *has to work overtime to get people out of the knee-jerk hate-the-liberals mindset. And it’s hard as hell.
You gotta give people something positive to vote for, not just hope/assume that eventually enough of them will be sick of the GOP’s mistakes to take a chance on the other party. Especially when voters have been programmed to see that other party as the party of sexually perverted antiChristian babykillers who hate white people, or some combination of those traits.
The democrats convinced themselves that demographics was going to overcome the Republicans after Obama beat Romney. Surely republicans can be made to believe that whites will continue to vote as a block for them after trump.
I am not saying, “vote for us, because of them.” I am saying vote for us because the democrats are the party that is much more able to bring jobs and security to middle class america, more able to secure peace in the world, and more able to promote equality among the peoples of the US. I could go on about democratic policy, but I assume you already are well versed.
I am asking them to listen to us. And I am asking them to listen to them, and to compare the narratives. “Listen to us, because of them,” may be a message that I would send, but you know what? They aren’t listening to that either.
I have no interest in trying to pull the 40% of voters who are solidly republican. They can talk about me behind my back all they want. They can call me a pinko and a beastialist and whatever, and it don’t bother me none.
Now, as far as getting the moderate voters to come back, that’s actually on the republicans, in many ways.
In 2010, Some of my friends switched to the R side of things, “because the democrats aren’t getting things done.” I had this conversation with quite a number of people, and I never came up with an argument they would accept, to be quite honest. They would point out that the economy hasn’t come back to pre-recession levels, and blame the democrats for that. I would try to explain the republican obstructionism at that point, but they’d be like “well, they control all branches of govt, so why can’t they do anything?” And this was rhetorically asked, as they apparently did not care about things like filibusters or blue dog democrats. They just knew that they voted for Obama to fix everything in 2008, and he did not fix everything for them, so they decided to go with another party.
So, coming up here in 2018, with the republicans in control, it is in fact my hope that these sorts of people look at the party in power, look at what the party in power is doing, and realize at long last they they were being lied to for nearly a decade. If they were mercurial enough to abandon the dems after 2 years in power, then I hope that they will be willing to swing the other way with the same ease.
But, yeah, basically, your point is that the republicans, and the tea party in particular are fear mongers. They play on the fears and the hatreds of the people, to influence their vote.
You say that we have to give the voters something positive to vote for. Can you tell me what that was in this last election? What was the positive thing that Trump voters were voting for?
In this last election, the democrats did have a positive message. They talked about what could be done to help struggling families, both rural and urban. They talked about positive social changes. They talked about positive economic news and changes. They had a positive message.
What was Trump’s message? Lock her up! Build the Wall! Now, sure, I will grant that “Make america great again” is a positive message, but he never indicated in any way how exactly he was going to do that, or any of the other proposals.
Basically, you are asking me to ungullible other people. I am not sure how to do that. The only way for people to wake up to the fact that they are being lied to, is for the liars to tip their hand.
Now that the republicans are in power, they need to show their hand. They will enact policies, both social and economic. And if these policies are good for the people, then they will keep power. If these policies are not good for the people, then all the Tea Partiers that fought so long and hard to get these policies enacted will double down on it, but pretty much everyone else will wise up, and abandon the failed ideology.
The problem with the dems is that they are a big tent. And with a big tent comes confusion.
Some in the tent want to push social programs, but they still can’t decide which ones to push. Some want to ban guns. Some want to increase the attempts at creating equality. Some value social issues over fiscal, some the reverse.
The republicans have an advantage there, in that they can just point to the 1950’s and say that that is what their goal is. Democrats have to either imagine the goals that have not yet been achieved, or point to the other countries that have rolled out these programs, and how they are working out there. The Dem’s message is more complicated compared to the republicans much much simpler soundbites. At his point, I do’t see the problem with the message, and I am not seeing a problem with the messenger, but I am seeing a problem with the messengee, in that the are simply not listening. It really doesn’t matter what we have to say, until they decide to stop going to their feel good safe spaces in the republican party, they aren’t going to listen to the realities that are a might bit harsher than the platitudes that are fed to them.
It’s pretty well documented that white support for Republicans is correlated with the percentage of blacks in the population of a given state. Some of that has to do with conservative southern states with high black populations. But some of it is likely due to the fact that as any group has more power, they have more power to bend politics in the direction that benefits them, which then causes other groups to see themselves as disfavored and vote against them.
Import of this would be that as Democrats push the envelope more and more in favor of increasing rights and privileges for various types of minorities, this would increase support for Republicans on the part of the whites/males/straights etc.
Kate’s Law ,Secure the Southern Border , Deport Criminal Illegals & Visa Overstayers , Turn the economy around completely , successfully replace the ACA …
I pay my property taxes directly and did so even when we still had a mortgage on this house – as long as we set up a pledge account (which paid interest), we didn’t need to have our mortgage payment include taxes.
I have been self-employed for many years, so I pay my federal and state income taxes directly. I make quarterly payments. We deliberately minimize the amount deducted from husband’s paycheck – why give them our money any earlier than we have to? We get pissed off at ourselves if we are due a refund of any size – in that case, we’ve lent money interest-free to the feds or Illinois.
I am very progressive and worked for Hillary’s campaign. I’d happily pay more in taxes for a single-payer national health plan, as well as many other things.
I’m reminded of a Facebook friend who hates Obama and all socialized plans, but lives on Social Security disability and gets her health insurance through Medicare.
It’s not that support for higher taxes would drop to zero if people knew what they were paying. But it would be lower than it is now.
There’s a lot that people pay in hidden taxes for all sorts of things that they don’t see and assume are part of corporate profits for things like gas and medical devices etc. But even when people know what they’re paying, if they don’t pay directly they don’t feel it to the same extent.
Many people see SSDI and Medicare differently than other social programs, since they directly paid for those benefits while working.
Brownback, though, is a pretty good example of the perils of overreach. He is term-limited from running for re-election as governor of Kansas in 2018, but his allies did not do well this past election season, and the next Kansas Legislature does not look anywhere near as hard-right as the last one. It turns out people really didn’t like the results of his policies, and he is now the most unpopular governor in America.
But, but, but…we’ve voted into power a government that is likely to end up behaving in much the same way.
Harming a state economy is one thing; dismantling decades of institutions at the federal level is quite another and they’re poised to start doing just that in a matter of weeks.
Whether Americans finally wake up or not in 2016 or 2018 is probably not going to matter enough to reverse the damage that will be done.
So, racism, sexism & homophobia. Are “rights” limited? If we make it easier for blacks to vote, does that make it harder for whites? Are Democrats really pushing rights for the hateful minorities “more and more”? Or just trying not to lose ground–as we saw after the Voting Rights Act was gelded.
Aren’t we supposed to consider The Trump Voter as an honest son of toil, frustrated that The Factory or The Mine has closed? Not a member of the Klan?
I’m white & straight. Although female, the years have ensured that I won’t need to consider abortion. But I will never vote Republican.
This would be an absolute bureaucratic/paperwork nightmare. You’d have maybe 50% of folks who would “forget” to pay their taxes, or refuse to pay their taxes because “I refuse to have my tax dollars fund abortion/I want to protest for black lives/I want to make a principled protest against Uncle Sam over this-or-that” and eventually that would lead to its own protest - “If everyone I know isn’t sending in their tax checks, then why should I?”
You would have to increase the IRS 20-fold in size just to hire enough people whose job it would be to track down and nag/threaten/punish all of these “tax dodgers.” The government’s tax revenues would be nearly impossible to predict on a year to year basis, making budget planning near impossible.