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Edited on Tue Feb-28-06 04:26 PM by kenny blankenship
I'm not sure that "kicking their ass" is the best approach --and I'm not equating rationality, or seeing reason, with the stock liberal position on any given issue. "Chewing them out" is likely to breed resentment, indeed chewing them out may bite us in the ass a generation onwards. A more useful outcome or approach would cause them to transcend the limitations of their previous political outlook. What limitation am I talking about?
The nub of it may be this:
"Conservatives" are conditioned by Republican Party propaganda/groupthink to automatically reject any proposals to deal collectively with collective problems as a theft of their individual liberty (while OTOH midnight powergrabs of their true individual liberties by Republican governments, in response to non-problems, get a silent pass) Thanks to this effective form of mindcontrol, for the last 30-plus years Americans have avoided coming up with intelligent solutions to the energy crisis/ car crisis, and have only made matters much worse for themselves on this front. Simultaneously we've been pushing our luck on global warming and related ecological problems, again defering action indefinitely thanks to Republican faith-over-facts belief systems and the core Republican conditioning which leads people to reject out of hand collective responses to collective problems by a simple denial of the problem. And again, thanks to the engrained Republican irrational denial and their carefully cultivated asociality, America has developed the western world's most defective and most expensive health care delivery "system". America has simultaneously liquidated and shat out her once-mighty industrial base, transferring to other lands the jobs which could transform its own poor citizens (now swelling in number) into middleclass homeowners. Time and again a problem has been allowed to develop amongst us unchecked, weakening our ability to deal not only with it but also the growing ranks of other problems, because in each case the only proposal to deal with the problem was trumped either by a see-no-evil irrationalism of wishing away problems by denying their factual existence, or by the "that's not the American way" rhetoric which paints any collective solution as impossible (Americans can't succeed this way) or as racially corrupting (real Americans wouldn't do something to trash their heritage). Time and again whenever an additional problem arose threatening to stampede them towards rational collective action, the people have been buried under a blizzard of propaganda frightening them into inaction with the warning that those people who say they want to find an answer to this or that problem are REALLY just trying to enslave them to the government and motivated secretly by a desire to take away their individual freedoms and money. Or else they've been neutralized with the argument that IN REALITY individual economic action will find a better solution to any problem than longrange planning by experts and imposed collective solutions created through government actions or incentives. Or they've been neutralized by the centerpiece of Republican mindcontrol: IN REALITY there is no problem with the environment or healthcare or the economic health of the nation, (other than liberals programatically trying to enslave people.) The people have been told the solutions would harm them, deprive them of their freedom, when in truth the solutions would only constrain corporations and bring them as citizens greater economic and political liberty.
That is what the disgruntled conservatives have to be brought around to seeing and saying. We can face our problems together, by thinking and acting together, but divided we will be destroyed. If they can be brought to adopt this principle then a "liberal" program for sustained national progress becomes possible.
The great danger in our side triumphing over the discrediting of the other side, without bringing disaffected conservatives over to a more rational and social outlook, defeating them without converting them, so to speak is that they probably will harbor their resentments like oh, say resentful segregationists or CSA-sympathizers did during the 1970s, and merely bide their time until they are able once again to gain the upper hand and get payback. The horrors of the present Bush dictatorship owe much to the revenge impulses of certain men who were discredited and shamed with the downfall of the Nixon Administration. Iraq is paying for the humiliation some Americans felt in the defeat in Vietnam, just as the poor are now paying for the humiliation felt by southern white constituencies during desegregation. The cycle must be interrupted and hopefully stopped. What we do not want to do is win in such a way as to sow the seeds of an even more reactionary return; Bush is worse than Nixon by many standards, and by the same token it should be expected that any revenge restoration of the Bush throne in the future would be an evil that this country could not survive.
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