allengreen,
Your post where you said,
“In 2004, I was the polite reasoner. Rabid foaming mouth Republicans shouted me down, questioned my patriotism, called me names, and politeness got the discussion nowhere. And now, having 8 yrs of history and facts on my side I refuse to be bullied by lizard brain aliens anymore,”
did strike a chord with me.
I have my own story to share from a slightly different perspective. Back in 1999 I was hired to a job I really loved at an up and coming tech company where I had stock options and thought, “this is it, this is how I will become wealthy.” Things went well for about a year, until the Presidential campaign got into full swing. I was complacent, I didn’t think there was any chance Gore, having been VP twice under a President who presided over the longest period of economic growth in American history, could possibly lose to the son of a one term, unpopular President, a man who had failed in everything he’d ever done, had dodged the draft, and had zero grasp of the English language. Then he opened his mouth and said, when things seemed to be chugging along nicely, that the economy was already in a recession….it was BS, but it was campaign rhetoric, and within a WEEK, pretty much all the investment money in the tech sector dried up. Our little company (which had a killer app which would still be considered cutting edge) was unable to get investment money and we started to slip. Then the tech bubble burst, and after about 6 sets of layoffs, come early 2003, I was let go. I was angry and bitter, and I saw a direct correlation between the President and the economic factors that got us here. Whenever I’d get together with people I used to work with, and genuinely liked, I’d be critical of the management though because I felt betrayed by them as well, and I found quickly that people don’t want to hear that….I don’t see any of those people anymore, because reasonable people…the kind you can reach with logic, get turned off by negativity…that was lesson #1.
But I had more reason to be bitter…I paid attention. Before I knew how Bush had used Choice Point to outright commit election theft, I felt it was completely wrong how he used the power of his own supporters in high places (Katherine Harris worked on his campaign and effectively certified results when they were in Bush’s favor, when she shouldn’t have been able to do so due to conflict of interest, and 2 Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold Harris’ decision also had ties to Bush’s campaign and should have recused themselves). The more I read about it, the whole chads and butterfly ballots became of less importance, though they both could have been decisive as well, and the more importance the sheer dishonesty became to me.
And then 2002, I was struck a HUGE blow. You live in Arizona where they’ll support a man for 30 years even if he doesn’t support an MLK holiday, but I live in Minnesota, where we were the ONLY state smart enough to realize that Reaganomics was reverse Robin Hood economic policy in 1984. We also elected a man named Paul Wellstone to serve as our Senator in 1990, and again in 1996. He had been planning to serve 2 terms and call it quits (which was used against him in the 2002 campaign), but after he saw what Bush was up to (and was the only one in the Senate at times with the courage to stand up to Bush), he realized he was needed.
Unlike most of the other Senators who barely seem to phone it in, Wellstone worked 80 hour weeks. He was a tireless champion for the people…a true progressive. Conservatives HATED him with a passion, and Bush himself realized what a threat he was. The Rethuglicans had gone into Minnesota (just as they are now doing with Tim Pawlenty) and groomed a young St. Paul Mayor named Norm Coleman from the mid 90s on to seek higher office some day. Coleman had been a radical left wing activist, a protester of the first order during the late 60s when he went to college. He was elected Mayor of St. Paul as a pro-choice Democrat. But he met with some of Karl Rove’s people in the mid 90s, and overnight, he became a pro-life Republican. With the help of the Republican Party elite, he ran for governor in 1998, and it seemed he’d have a good shot at it, even though he had left the City of St. Paul in Shambles (I live in St. Paul, and I saw firsthand how he lured businesses into downtown with tax breaks, then let them walk away one after another without having to pay any of those lucrative subsidies back, leaving our fair city with one of the highest vacancy rates in the country for commercial property). He might have won were it not for Jesse Ventura, who didn’t like either party, and actually had the balls to say things like, maybe we ought to consider legalizing drugs and prostitution…other countries do it. So, back to the drawing board for Norm, whom I liked to refer to as Norm Quimby, because the guy has a strong Kennedyesque way of speaking that has come to symbolize the say anything to get elected politician…clearly the guy does not represent traditional Minnesotan values.
Anyway, fast forward to 2002, Norm was running against Paul Wellstone, and was losing. So what happens? 10 days before election day, Norm and most of his family perishes in a plane crash on the way to a funeral in northern Minnesota. Some conspiracy theorists say they saw black vans in the area and had strange interference on electronic devices consistent with something that would jam a plane’s gauges. That story is given some credence by the fact that Bush specifically signaled out Wellstone as an enemy and personally asked Norm Coleman to run against him. That and Norm’s record in his first year in the Senate of supporting Bush’s policies almost 100% of the time earned him the name BushBoy.
Anyway, we picked former Vice President Walter Mondale to run in Wellstone’s place, and it might have worked, we’ll never know, because what happened was this. The campaigns agreed not to do any advertising or talk any smack about each other until after the memorial service. At the memorial service, a well intentioned, but not very smart friend of Wellstone’s came up to the podium and started to try to turn the ceremony into a political rally, chanting “we’re gonna win”...he tried to make Wellstone’s death a call to arms to win for his memory. That and the fact that Wellstone had Republican friends in the Senate and when some of them showed up, the audience booed them, made the whole deal come off pretty poorly from a PR perspective.
Well, I thought it was wildly inappropriate, but I saw it, these people were in pain, they’d lost a hero, and the one guy had lost a friend, we were grieving, some got a bit out of line. But what I didn’t know, because I didn’t listen to right wing radio, was that on talk radio they strung Democrats up like we were the most vile, hateful people….see how we used the death of one of our own for political gain? How disgraceful! In fact, what the Rethuglicans were doing was using Wellstone’s death for their OWN gain, while making it seem like that’s what WE were doing…it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, it was mean spirited and ugly, and by GOD it worked.
It worked so well that all over the country in 2002, ANGRY Republicans turned out at the polls and caused them to win both houses of Congress by huge margins, including Wellstone’s seat. So, Democrats had every right to be angry in 2002 because of what Bush was doing to the country, because of how he stole the election and because of how he was using the memory of 9/11 for political gain even then. We had substantive reasons to be angry about how Bush had replaced all the heads of the regulatory agencies with heads of the industries they were supposed to be regulating. We spent several months after 9/11 where it wasn’t even acceptable to criticize the President for ANYTHING….if you did you were blackballed, shouted down, called names, etc. We were pent up. But the Republicans, who don’t need a substantive reason to become outraged (hell, some Republicans get outraged if they think a Teletubby is gay), had all they need by the mere suggestion that Dems were using the death of one of their own to try to win an election, were positively livid. And THAT is what caused 2002, not 9/11, I would stake my life on it.
So lesson #2 was that Republicans are motivated by anger. You said it yourself when you said that the Republican mind “operates more like a lizard brain, motivated by primal aspects like fear, hate, etc.” Therein lies the problem I’ve had with many of your posts. When you attack them, you make them angry, you make them hate you, you maybe even make them fear you, that motivates them to become your enemy. When I’m fighting with an enemy, I prefer to fight with one who is complacent and doesn’t see me as a threat or an object of vitriol.
So, though I think we need to be forceful in our arguments, we need to speak to the things which motivate people, etc., I don’t think leading off with accusations is going to do anything but lesson #1 – alienate the reasonable, and #2 – motivate the unreasonable to fight back.
But we each have our own roles to play, and if you think you’ve actually changed any minds with your modus operandi, than more power to you.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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