Cheryl Contee and Elon James went incognegro to the Right Online conference in Minneapolis. Ms. Contee wrote up her experiences. She was pretty fair-minded, too, but focused (in this piece) mainly on how she responded emotionally. It’s interesting how easy it was for them to convince the registration desk that they were invited by Michele Bachmann and to get in free-of-charge. It’s less surprising that they stood out like sore thumbs and felt heavily scrutinized once inside. It’s also interesting to note that they didn’t exactly feel 100% comfortable at the Netroots Nation conference, either, despite it being considerable more diverse.
In any case, I’m less committed to the two-party system. We can’t change it, but that’s exactly why the GOP concerns me so much. I assign zero good faith to them, while Cheryl still holds out hope that they can be brought around to a more decent position on racial issues.
What we saw there is a movement desperate to re-invigorate itself and willing to throw just a ton of money at the increasing problem of a shrinking base. I’ll tell you what — if I was the GOP, I’d be supporting Obamacare. Because they’ll want those seniors and boomers to live as long as possible because once they stop voting and a new generation takes its place, conservatives will either need to update its tune or risk dying. It’s going to take more than just teaching 60 year olds “blogging 101″ and “twitter 101″ to remain relevant in a rapidly changing society with new challenges that our founders just didn’t anticipate and for which we will need to generate new solutions.
I believe in a two party and even a multi-party democracy. So I’d like to see Republicans try harder and more successfully to moderate and adjust to welcome people from other backgrounds into their party.
I hope this post and my experience gives the right some insights on how to start doing just that.
I don’t think they’re listening.