Or maybe when I approach people, I’m not dripping with contempt and hostility and so people are more receptive to me.
You have not once demonstrated in this thread that you are listening to, care about, or empathize with anyone who voted for Mr. Trump. You are talking out of both sides of your mouth with comments like “Helping them achieve their goals is not an option here. Listening and being empathetic is something we keep trying.” If you’ve already determined that their point of view is not something you can cotton to, there’s no way you’re actually listening to what they are saying. Why would you; you’ve already made your mind up.
And I’m not sure you understand what empathy is; hint: it’s not the same as sympathy.
Well, I’m not Budget Player Cadet, but I have to notice here that by ignoring that I posted about what I’m going to experience under a Trump administration you did show me here in this thread that you are not empathizing.
But the point here is that I also did approach people with no contempt here in Arizona to convince them about not voting for Trump, and others here do report that they did so already.
When is the empathy for the other side will happen here?
Some of the goals of Trump supporters are in fact an anathema to us. Not all trump supporters, sure, but there are many who directly espouse very racist commentary. The KKK supports trump. Is helping them to achieve their goals really something that you can condone?
Now, if we are talking about people who’s goal is a good job, good life, all that fun stuff, then we are trying. Clinton had a plan for trying to achieve those goals. They voted against it. Maybe we didn’t explain it well enough, but it is hard to have a complicated discussion about economics when the others in the discussion keep interrupting with “Lock her up!!!”
So, in alot of ways, it does come down to: they either are voting for trump for social issues that I refuse to help achieve, or they are voting for trump for economic issues that we are already addressing and trying to achieve.
He never said he was a liberal - just that he goes to a liberal school. He apparently went for McCain, Romney and Trump from reading the article. So of course he thinks the alt-right community is just peachy.
Nope. I thought I had made it clear that there are some people that I know I cannot reach. I cut my losses and move on. But I cannot know they cannot be reached without engaging them.
Your last sentence is true, but your first sentence contains more nuance than I think you know.
What is a good job? What is a good life? What is “all that fun stuff”?
You’re now talking as vaguely as he did. “Make America great again.” “Have a good life.”
Why do you think the plan that Mrs. Clinton had is indisputably the best plan for all those things, when you don’t know what Mr. Trump’s supporters want or need?
Let’s say they need jobs. They want jobs. You offer a plan for them all to have jobs picking strawberries. None of them are prepared for that, physically. They have skills making brooms, not picking strawberries. Not only that, there are no strawberry farms within a thousand miles of where they live. Are they “idiots” for rejecting your plan? Or have they decided against something that doesn’t meet their needs?
So, in a lot of ways, it does come down to: you think you know better than they do what they need. That comes across in this post clearly. Dude, nobody likes to be called stupid, even people that know they aren’t ever going to be a rocket scientist. Try this: walk up to random people at the supermarket and address them “Hey, dummy. Yeah, you, idiot. Have you tried these chips?” Nobody likes to be called stupid. You can call people ugly and not get the same level of hostility as you get from calling someone an idiot.
Listen to them. Understand their position. Empathize with them. Once there is some mutual respect, find some commonality. There will be some; I guarantee it. We all eat. We all have families and friends. Pets. Music. TV shows. Establish that bond of respect, however slight, and then seek common ground.
I don’t recall your post or consciously ignoring you, but I do notice that you are trying to take a potshot at me, so there’s that.
And judging by your posts, I doubt you approached people with no contempt. You expressed contempt and derision for me right there, by implying that I was a hypocrite, for instance.
Empathy happens when you can establish mutual respect, however slight. I generally agree with you on issues, GIGO, and I have tremendous respect for your intelligence and your expertise in climate change (and statistics; you seem to be a monster with statistics), but most of the time your posts are laden with an air of superiority and certainty that many people might find off-putting.
Heck, look at some of this, all from the same thread:
IMO, all of those are condescending, adopt a superior tone and consist of broadly declarative statements designed to shut down discussion. And in some cases, to derogate whoever it was you were responding to.
So no, I don’t think that when you talked to people, you did so with a neutral tone. The evidence I have to go by suggests otherwise, IMO.
What are you talking about with this strawberry picking stuff? Do you think that resembles HRC’s jobs plan in some way? Can you demonstrate how? ‘Cause I can’t find it in there anywhere. If that’s not what you’re criticizing, what relevance does your strawberry fantasy have to this discussion? Are you assuming that k9bfriender is as ignorant of Clinton’s actual job plan and middle American job conditions as you seem to be, and just throws out ludicrous job replacement plans and then derides people for rejecting them? Do you have evidence for that? I’m pretty sure, based on what k9bfriender has posted about his own background he’s at least as well versed on his neighbors’ wants and needs and the nuances of that particular employment milieu as they are.
And where is this ‘indisputably best plan’ rubbish coming from? We’re talking about contrasting Trump’s “plan” with Clinton’s, not some arrogant claim of “we know better” made by a hypothetical smug liberal. Where do you think Clinton’s plan actually came from, and how do you think it was developed? In a DC cocktail party? No, after years of HRC’s “listening” tours where she spoke to, among others, lots of Midwesterners and rust belters hurting for good employment. Where she practiced Listening. Understanding. Empathizing.
That she got rejected for being a smug liberal DC insider after that may be, in part, to other smug liberals who’d rather lecture their fellows about empathy than learn their own candidate’s policy proposals.
My best friend is gay. And a Mexican (as in he is first generation born in the U.S. after his family migrated from Mexico. Mexican is his self-chosen term).
He voted for Trump. His thinking was that Trump said some crazy shit but the likelihood of Trump actually getting those policies enacted was less than the chances of Clinton getting her policies that he did not like enacted. Therefore, out of two bad choices, Trump was the better choice.
On your second point, you are confusing empathy with policy. It can be logically consistent to empathize with someones situation while believing the policy put forth that might help the person is a bad policy. For example, if you believe Obamacare will, in the long term, fail in its goals then being against the policy is fine. The judgement isn’t ‘Oh, your dying! Poor guy! No healthcare for you!’. The judgement is ‘This policy is going to make things worse than they already are in the long term. Therefore supporting it is wrong because it is not solving the problem’. The second option, by the way, is fairly close to my beliefs on healthcare. There are a ton of things we could do to make it more affordable and better, yet instead of tackling those challenges, we just spread the costs out across more people. I don’t believe it is a long term solution to a complex problem.
Give me a real answer 'Bo. Don’t just claim I’ve proven your point about dealing with Trump supporters by responding harshly to you. That’s weird and dumb. You’re not a Trump supporter and I’m assuming you’d like to see progressive policies enacted. I don’t feel tasked with trying to understand your political alienation because you haven’t expressed any such thing.
What was the point of your lecture to k9 about nuance regarding wants and needs? The fact that you could throw out the strawberry scenario in all seriousness as something any Democratic candidate might seriously suggest seems to indicate you’re not real committed to solutions for those Trump voters or you’d know what we’ve actually been proposing.
Which goes toward my point about your qualifications as a political consultant to the rest of us.
You need lots then, the post you quoted was replying to one where you did indeed showed lots of condescension, and indeed you also ignored what I posted in other tread that I referred to there, and here I should notice that you did not touch on any of the items I mentioned that affected me directly that Trump has promised to do, you really think I did lie about that?
Thing is that instead of emphasizing you only did claim to not ignore the post, but in the end, you did.
The point was that from Trump and followers I do not expect anything whatsoever of what you are claiming when others did report efforts to follow what you demand us to do. But of course the only thing we get is to be told that we are not being truthful.
Is that what your method really says one should proceed?
I also did not lie about approaching others with no condescension, the examples you point at are usually after the opponent has showed to be of the kind that does ignore evidence with gusto and disregards the point of view of others. So again, I did not lie about my approach as you are claiming there, but I have to point out again that what I posted was after you told us that:
As an explanation of what the Trump supporters do believe and that we should empathize with that; to that I replied with an example of someone that is also a real person and what will have to endure under a Trump administration as he put it. So again, the question that was ignored there remains: when do you think empathy will come to people like me and others from the Trump supporters?
Gigo, I posted something similar to this in another thread:
Go outside. Talk to people. Go to the store, go to the park. The nice guy behind the register? A 50% chance he voted for Trump. The asshole who cut you off in traffic? 50% chance he voted for Clinton.
Think of all those people who have been nice/kind/respectful to you. 50% of them voted for Trump.
Think of all the assholes you have encountered. 50% of those voted for Clinton.
Too many people are turning the other side into caricatures. Stop doing that and engage them as people and you might find that they are a hell of lot different than you think.
The failure, if there was one, of the liberal/progressive/Democratic approach to those Middle American Trump voters, wasn’t smugness. It was a failure to counter the false narrative that we didn’t or don’t hear or see them.
It’s apparently that false narrative that Trump exploited to garner votes in the swing states and win the EC and it’s probably that narrative that kept people who might otherwise have voted D from going to the polls.
The first half of that sentence, as I’ve said elsewhere, is less important. Most of the people who voted for Trump would’ve voted for whoever the Republican candidate was, and will keep doing that. The second half is where I’ve advocated progressives to concentrate their efforts. Snowboarder Bo is urging us meanwhile to show empathy and sensitivity to those who voted R by ignoring what they voted for in favor of understanding why they didn’t vote D or why they voted antiestablishment.
My recent anger at Bo is because he actually provides a perfect caricature of the smug liberal he accuses in the rest of us in his advocacy. He gives lip service to empathy by promoting a method that allows the empathic liberal practitioner to feel good about themselves and their process rather than actually working to improve understanding or to actually nail down those wants and needs he so smugly assumes k9 knows nothing about. Why do I suspect this? Because in a lecture in which he purports to discuss actual real world progressive interactions with actual real world Trump voters about actual Democratic proposals he gives us strawberries. (In a way that would’ve lost even Captain Queeg, who at least thought he had a command responsibility driving his own strawberry fixation.)
One more time here: progressives don’t need any more practice at empathy. We need to be factual, blunt and direct about what we believe and why. Understanding Trump voters is pretty easy. They’ll readily tell you the beliefs and hopes that supported their vote. You don’t even have to work at pulling that information. The real work comes in digging down to the source of the beliefs they get wrong so that you can help them realize their hopes through government actions that actually work for them. “Listening” cannot be passive. “Empathy” is shown through actual response. “Understanding” is shown by providing the unvarnished truth about what you believe differently and why.
And this again implies that I have not done so, BTW I made once a post in the mini rant pit thread about an ex marine that I saved from having his credit information to go to a ransomware group. The pit was directed to the ransomware guys BTW. He was one of the Trump supporters and we get along, very well as he was grateful of what I did for him at no charge. (my good deed to point out on veteran’s day )
Had to move away very diplomatically from his nonsensical conspiracy theories, and I did manage to talk with him with very little effort when I found the common ground that we had about the real reprehensible actions that the USA performed in Central America (He saw some acts that really undermined his faith in the American government). But it made him to fall for a lot of very weird conspiracies in his later years.
Got him to at least listen my point that it would not be a good idea to vote for Trump as he is a nut for conspiracies of that type and he has a willingness to use them, more likely to his own advantage and to the detriment of America.
Not a good person to offer more power to him at his disposition. Trump’s position regarding torture only speaks of the old interventionist fever when “America was Great”. I did make him think about it. I feel that not much was changed, but I do think that the conspiracies will make him have doubts about Trump more in the near future as Trump will have trouble changing the government and Trump will try to blame others or the international banks (cue the “Jews control the world” dog whistle).
However, what I’ve been trying to do this entire time is emphasize what it looks like to people who feel that their lives are at risk. While the above may very well apply to maybe even most Trump voters, they certainly don’t apply to the loudest. Besides which, I can forgive people not thinking that far when they feel their lives are at stake.
Therefore, while I think there may be misunderstandings on both sides, I still feel as though the fear and anger is quit understandable, if not justified.
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