Trumpcare debacle highlights two types of political persuasion:

Politics & Elections
21

How so? I don’t demonize people who disagree with me here. I point out the flaw in their reasoning, if I can. In this case, I’m pointing out that a large number of “liberal” posters here (in my opinion, yourself included) act as if any position taken by a conservative is an “evil” position just because it conflicts with your viewpoint of how a society should be run. This kerfluffle over health care is an example. Here’s a news flash: it is not inherently “evil” to believe that government shouldn’t be paying for the healthcare costs of its citizens.

Now, I will disclose that I think the conservative position on health-care is a bit short-sighted. Further, as I point out to my “conservative” friends, government already does pay for the healthcare costs of millions of citizens, mainly because as a society we don’t like people dying or suffering just because they can’t pay for it. But just because someone believes that healthcare costs are not something the (federal) government should be paying for doesn’t make them evil. It just doesn’t make them “liberal” socially wrt government.

So arguing that the Republicans in Congress who were determined to dismantle the ACA were somehow the embodiment of evil is simply wrong. And it does nothing to advance the discussion, any more than someone “conservative” acting as if anyone who is in favor of rights of LGBT people is “evil”, or doing the work of the “Devil”. Yet, even in this thread, we see examples of exactly that sort of name-callling, that sort of vilification. And that’s what I’m talking about. Discuss the facts, reasoning, merits of a proposal, or a person’s actions. Don’t just toss pejoratives out and dismiss them from consideration as decent human beings.

I do agree that the Republican leadership has been very intractable in Congress lately. I find that disappointing. I think Sen. McCain finds it disappointing, which was part of his message the other night. I think it’s possible to be disappointed with their behavior without accusing them of evility.

22

We don’t live in your world. In our world, the Republican leadership wanted so badly to get a political win to posture for their base that they tried to do repeal without replacement. That would remove healthcare insurance for tens of millions of Americans.

That is in no way a principled discussion of how health costs should be covered. Nor can it be described as “disappointing” behavior. Only the most hyperbolic pejoratives fit the act.

Every aspect of today’s political atmosphere is the result of conservative actions. Remember that conservatives have been calling liberals “traitors” for decades. In every case, the position the liberals took has been vindicated by history. If liberals are finally learning to talk like conservatives, only conservatives are to blame. If conservatives want to bring liberals into the discussion, they should do so. Since they’re in charge, only they can do so. They can tone down the rhetoric. They can reach across the aisle. They can stop demonizing the left.

I’m not holding my breath. Every name that conservatives get called is deserved. If you want that changed, change it from the inside. Otherwise you’re nothing more than a mini-Trump accusing Democrats of not helping to destroy their own policies. You wanted a playground president, you got him. That makes “you first” a legitimate rejoinder. Stop talking to liberals and start yelling at conservatives. Of course, I’m not holding my breath on that, either.

23

This is a bald-faced mis-representation of the facts. As everyone actually paying attention knows, the serious attempt at repeal without replacement (the “skinny” bill) was simply an attempt to move the discussion to a Conference Committee, where they could take up the House bill (which was a repeal and replace bill) and try to make it satisfy the required number of Senators. Claiming that the leadership tried to get a full repeal without replacement is just demagoguery.

I complain to conservatives just as often as to liberals. My FB is filled with posts where I debate my conservative friends and their somewhat silly notions about what should be done, and where I post endless news stories which point out the “bad” things conservative politicians are doing. But here’s a news flash: there are far more of your type on this board than there are conservatives needing to be more civil in how they deal with the opposition. So my commentary is more often directed in the direction of people like you.

I am often reminded here of the line from the movie Amadeus stated by the Emperor Joseph II: “You are passionate, Mozart, but you do not persuade.” Passion in plenty here; but very little persuasion, because to persuade you actually have to accept that the other person has value, and not simply dismiss them.

24

No, this is. The only reason to need to pass said bill was that no one could agree upon anything else. In no way would moving it to conference do anything if they couldn’t agree before that.

The point was to pass any possible repeal by reconciliation. They spent years trying to repeal, with no replacement. There was never any desire to replace, just repeal.

And you are very clearly crowing about your own integrity while making up a strawman against liberals and then knocking it down. We do not argue that all conservatives are evil.

You’re using disingenuous tactics to argue, while crowing about your own integrity. That doesn’t work.

25

If nothing else, it shows that the Republican “hive mind” is exaggerated.

26

How’s that working for you?

Nobody is trying to persuade you. We’re trying to crush you utterly. Anybody who can call the current antics of Congressional leaders “disappointing” is beyond human decency.

The passion is for the people on our side, keeping them going through the horror.

27

…And this is why American politics is poisoned these days.

28

These days? American politics has been poisoned for decades. We on the left allowed Obama’s win to delude us that progress had been made. We were wrong. You keep hearing “this is not normal.” That’s wrong too. It’s been normal on one side. Now we see it unchecked and rampant.

Persuasion? If the words and actions of Trump and his appointees and Congress aren’t persuasive enough, what can we say that would be? Far better to adopt the tactics that worked. Don’t like it? The time to have thought of that was decades ago.

We’re at war. I mean that in a more than figurative sense. We keep hearing the right say they are at war with liberals, the press, the elites, the coastal states, the cities. If you don’t think they are fighting a literal war, just listen. Demonization is their tactic, their preferred mode of discourse. Threats of violence are everywhere. Our weakness is that when we talk about crushing them, we mean figuratively and politically. They don’t. Fear is potent, as they well know, having sowed fears for those decades. Right now their rhetoric is exactly like slaveowners in early America, almost insane with fear with what slaves would do if they got their freedom. The consequences of that were horrifying beyond belief. Eventually they had to be literally crushed, although they were allowed to keep too much power. We can’t make that mistake again. We have to use our feats to ensure that their power be cut out from underneath them, and their hate seen for the evil that it is. We have only words to use. Each one must count.

29

I thought he was saying that the Trump administration is uniquely terrible at the art of persuasion. The whole ‘get the Interior Secretary to threaten the woman who controls their appropriations bills’ plan was classic Trump - no understanding of the situation, so just try to bully someone, preferably a woman, until you get your way.

Turns out, not a good idea. For one thing, there’s nothing Trump can do to her - Murkowski could win re-election without a single GOP vote. (She actually won as a write-in despite losing the GOP primary to a Tea Party challenger a while back.) Her core constituency is moderates who care more about keeping medicaid than destroying Obama’s legacy. The fact that the Administration chose as their bully a man whose entire department depends on her to get money is just icing on the idiocy cake.

None of these are secret pieces of information - a minimally competent president would either know them or have advisors who would know them (and be listened to), and wouldn’t take such an obviously stupid approach.

30

The facts as you might prefer them to be, but not the real ones, sorry.

So tell us why the required number of Senators couldn’t agree on shit within their own caucus, much less with the House? “As everyone actually paying attention knows”, McConnell’s only argument was that they had promised their base they’d repeal Obamacare and had to follow through somehow. “As everyone actually paying attention knows”, they had nothing to replace, only discussing how far to repeal, and how many tens of millions of people would be left without coverage as a result. “As everyone actually paying attention knows”, the last ditch was to repeal and figure out something to replace it with in a couple of years. “As everyone actually paying attention knows”, they don’t have shit and never did.

There is no other conclusion that can be drawn from the facts. To claim there is, or ever was or ever would be, a Republican replacement is the true demagoguery - the last seven years have proven that to “everyone actually paying attention”, including an increasing number of Trump supporters, and, perhaps eventually, you too.

Do you use as many strawmen on these hypothetical conservative boards of yours as you do here?

To persuade, the person being engaged must be willing to be persuaded. Do you make that claim, or are you content to dismiss “people like you”?

So you’re going to drop the strawmanning and misrepresentations and start actually engaging in discussion here? About damn time, friend.

31

Republicans are trying to push bills which are damn near universally despised (the last time something polled at 12%, it was congress!) that would have terrible consequences for millions of Americans, mostly the poor, sick, and elderly, because they promised their base that they would repeal a bill which they constantly and without respite slandered and lied about. The purpose of this repeal is to cut taxes on the super-rich.

In order to pass this bill, republicans have flouted basically every norm of the senate. They shoved the bill through as fast as possible and with as little debate and discussion as they could get away with in the hopes of keeping it quiet until it passed. When that failed, and the bill leaked, and the CBO pointed out that it was still a massive shitshow, they failed to pass it, so instead pushed a handful of alternatives, none of which were well-thought out. The most recent of which was a bill nobody actually wanted to pass, just for the sake of sending this hot potato back to the house, and they couldn’t even get that done.

The republican health care proposal is, essentially, a bill that would strip tens of millions of their health care coverage in order to give a kickback to the superrich. And they essentially said, “fuck doing it right, the ends justify the means”, and did everything in their power to make their health care bill match their constant lies about the Obamacare process. the entire process was so fundamentally dishonest, just like virtually everything else Mitch McConnell has done, that if Michael Moore published a political thriller about an evil republican senator who acted like this, republicans would complain about being demonized. This whole process is evil from start to finish. You could not make a more pitch-perfect caricature of dishonest, hypocritical, reverse-robin-hooding douchebags than the current republican senate and house.

And so yeah, we’re gonna call them evil. Not because they don’t want the government to deal with healthcare. But because they say that they do, and that they will do it better in order to fool people who disagree with their agenda into voting for them. Not because they rushed the bill. But because they rushed the bill after half a decade of lying about how their opponents “rushed” a bill that took over a year to debate and pass. Because their behavior in every aspect shows a fundamental disrespect for the idea that words should have meaning in politics, and that we should be able to trust our elected representatives not to immediately break every promise they made.

And sure, it’s not helpful. But what do you propose as a strategy to make Mitch McConnell be less evil? The correct solution is not “try to convince the evil man to be less evil”, it’s “try to get rid of the evil man”.

Right. That’s why. Not, say, the fact that the president is a narcissistic sociopath whose main policy goal seems to be a combination of undermining democracy and sowing anarchy. Not that the republican party has made their primary health care policy all about lying non-stop. Not because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the coalition of republicans who will put party above country every single time. No, it’s poisoned because we’ve recognized the problem and aren’t willing to undergo more false bargains with people who cannot be trusted to hold up their end and don’t want to bargain with us anyways.

Makes sense.

32

Yes. It’s unfair and inaccurate to label that as evil.

33

Then where is your line of demarcation?

34

A line? Saying a whole party that is a coalition of factions would not be it. Nor would voting to change how health care is paid for. People aren’t being denied the ability to pay for a service.

Do we have issues with how health care is allocated in the US? Yes. Is it fair to paint a group of tens of millions, if not over a hundred million, evil because they disagree with another subset of the population on how to modify the method of allocation? No.

35

Let’s call this viewpoint…incomplete.

The worry was that Paul Ryan was using a little political trickery to get the Senate bill passed, and then that there’d be a sham reconciliation that would end up approving the skinny repeal. Hence repeal without replacement. Leaving aside the question of whether that actually was Ryan’s plan or whether the Senate leadership could have been involved, do you have any doubt that McConnell and the rest of the Senate leadership would approve of it?

This was at the root of McCain’s No vote. He didn’t trust Ryan to keep his word.