I struggled to understand the relationship between James Carville and Mary Matalin until I realized it was a racket and they couldn’t lose no matter who won American elections. But I know there is a certain affinity that political organizers feel for each other, even if they are on opposite sides. I think I know exactly how Beth Cox feels. She’s a warrior, and she just lost her war. When that happened to me in 2004, I started this blog and spent every day working to stop the Bush administration and the Republican Party. Maybe Ms. Cox will now do something similar. I hope not, because she seems like the kind of person you want fighting on your side and not against you.
At the same time, I wonder if we could really communicate with each other. Could she convince me to change my mind about anything? Could I convince her that her worries are overblown and that our president isn’t going to make the country worse? What would happen if Ms. Cox was removed from her contact with the Glenn Beck show and other right-wing pundits? She seems to see through a lot of their rhetoric and correctly identifies the Tea Party and “legitimate rape Republicans” as a problem. But that didn’t prevent her from being taken in by the “unskewed polls” malarkey.
What would I tell Ms. Cox if I had the chance to speak with her? I’d tell her that most Democrats value traditional marriage but that they recognize that some people have perfectly natural same-sex attractions and that they are happiest living in a secure and committed relationship that is respected by society. And they are just as capable or incapable of being good parents as straight couples are.
I’d tell her that the people of Colorado don’t wants drugs and dependency, but they recognize that prosecuting people for smoking pot is a misallocation of resources. Our last three presidents smoked pot and then did nothing while ordinary folks went to jail for committing the same crime. That’s hypocrisy. Decriminalizing marijuana makes sense because we don’t want to define our kids as criminals for doing the same things most of us did in college. We didn’t end Prohibition because we suddenly discovered that alcoholism isn’t a problem. We ended it because everyone kept drinking and all we got out of the deal was gang violence.
I’d tell her that the reason so many new people are on food stamps is because Wall Street created a housing bubble that burst and destroyed millions of jobs and wiped out the wealth of millions of people. I’d tell her that the president has signed reforms that make it harder for the lenders to dupe people into taking out loans they can’t afford or to lend to people with bad credit or to sell risky debt as secure debt. I’d tell her that the Republican Party stood in the way of those reforms every step of the way.
I’d tell her that you can be pro-life and oppose abortion without criminalizing it or doing harm to the quality of care that women receive from their doctors.
I’d tell her that I predicted that President Bush would start a war with Iraq and that it would not go well. I’d tell her that I predicted that his tax cuts would blow an enormous hole in the country’s finances. I’d tell her that I knew that Bush’s Supreme Court nominations would destroy any campaign finance regulations and open the door to billionaire donors like Sheldon Adelson and Mike Bloomberg to buy whole candidacies, whether they be on the left or the right.
Most of all, I’d tell her that the president isn’t going to do anything that will hurt her family or her community or her way of life. She doesn’t need to worry so much. Things are going to be okay.
But, if she can’t get over worrying, I’d tell her that Hurricane Sandy isn’t going to be an isolated event. Our weather is going to continue to get more violent and unpredictable because there is more energy moving around in our atmosphere due to higher temperatures. Global warming is real and climate change is going to be costly and dangerous. If she wants to dedicate her time to something, getting her party to understand the risks of carbon emissions would be a great way to go.
Those are all good points, Booman. She won’t listen until she is out of the bubble of lies in the RW media.
Here’s someone else who has given a thoughtful response to lost repubs:
Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people
(The quote is his parting shot, the rest of the article is less harsh, but points to the hard realities that repubs have such difficulty dealing with.)
I am also a descendent of people (3 of them) who came over on the Mayflower. And I agree on every point.
She’s part of the problem right here:
1.) Republicans are the essence of “identity” politics. She thinks if they just slap a few minorities or women around on their stage — could they have done it more than they already did in 2012? They put every minority and woman they have in the party on that stage this year — that they might make inroads. it doesn’t work like that.
2.) She’s just as extreme as the Tea Party, as seen in the latter paragraph. I know that type of person, and they’re the type who doesn’t believe in abortion under any circumstance.
I’m also surprised to see her say they should run a woman on the ticket. People like this, as evidenced by her “natural order” comment, do not like women in politics, and certainly don’t want them to be president. For instance, my mom states that, “Sarah Palin had no business running for VP because it’s against “the natural order” (notice how these words are echoing throughout these communities even though they’re separated by miles).”
I’d highlight the similar passages with an additional message.
If she were to understand just one thing, it is that the United States is not a monolithic Christian nation and why it was never intended to be that way.
That would be her first step towards recovery.
If her understanding of “what went wrong” is to develop, she has to accept that most Americans do not agree with her desire to have religion and government overlap. She needs to understand why they shouldn’t overlap, and why it’s not okay to try to use laws and the government to impose one’s religious values on other citizens. She has to to be able to understand the difference between being ethical and being religious. She has to understand why it would be okay to vote for someone of a different religion and it’s okay to vote for atheists.
Nice theory, but as soon as I came to “the United States is not a monolithic Christian nation and why it was never intended to be that way” I saw the fundamental problem: This is a truth she cannot accept without uprooting every underpinning of her belief system. She is Christian; everyone she knows and values is Christian; every voice she respects in her world tells her the nation is Christian, and her kind at that; to say otherwise is to deny everything good and true in her life.
Ain’t gonna happen.
“I am not naïve. I’m not ignorant,” Cox said. She had graduated from the University of Kentucky and lived for a few years in California before moving to raise her family in Tennessee. But suddenly the map on her computer depicted a divided country she could barely recognize.”
No, she’s both ignorant and naive. She listens to freaking Glenn Beck, for crying out loud. She wants to stay ignorant.
There’s nothing you can say to people like this. Let her stay on her little island of stupid.
Matalin and Carville have a shtick: the battle of the sexes on a political level, oh deary me, how can those two partisans get along at home?, they must quarrel endelssley. Oh, it seems so cooly hot. Well no, they don’t disagree at all, they don’t even agree to disagree. Because they don’t really care what happens on one side or the other as long as their money-generating circus act keeps them in lots of cash. I’ve incidentally noticed that other teams of married couples operate in tandem in the media and politics but they seem to be usually ‘on the same side’. I’ll politely refrain from mentioning the most obvious examples in the Democratic Party.
Last night was the final segment in the History Channel’s The Men Who Built America and it should be mandatory watching for all of us. But only if it is well discussed after watching.
The Right will find the ‘heroic’ acts of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie & JP Morgan inspiring. But to watch those acts they’ll have to see the extreme abuse of the workers of America and what we looked like without a modern Middle Class. The kick is watching the interwoven commentary from Trump, Steve Case, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and the group who want to think of themselves as modern day Rockefellers.
It’s extraordinary to see the role of religion as its perceived to give them authority to smash their rivals and their workers. The Edison vs Westinghouse battle is fascinating.
And lastly, they introduce Ford. He’s portrayed as the modern entrepreneur who recognizes the value of creating a strong middle class, pays his workers a living wage and probably the leader in creating his wealth from the middle class.
Ms Cox would do well to watch, it would give her the perspective to understand why Obama’s middle class will benefit her middle class as well.
Ms Cox imagines herself a highly intelligent college graduate yet she thinks hatefo-tainment circus clowns like Glenn Beck are purveying reliable information and analysis.
Ms Cox has intentionally poisoned her brain by gorging non-stop on the worst rightwing sewage available. Looks like she needs the hard core stuff, haha. As a result, she has no judgment whatever and her corroded brain will never be able to function again. A thoroughly propagandized citizen isn’t of much use. This is a collaborative effort between the plutocrat and the propagandee, haha.
So pray hard, Ms Cox. Pray for the End Times. With the catastrophic climate change that your braindead party has ensured, they are coming, just not in the form you imagine. But Jeebus ain’t never coming back, no matter how many prayers there are…
Her daily gorging on rightwing shit has rendered her permanently sub-rational and your various questions to her might as well be in sanskrit.
Most of the things you propose to tell her are pretty macro themes – global warming, the failure of the war on drugs, gay marriage, the economy, and that the state should have a role in protecting the vulnerable from poverty, money lenders and Wall street etc.
She might parrot a few Romney/Beck talking points on those issues, but I suspect her real concerns are closer to home. How many of the women in her prayer group are non white? How much contact has she personally had with “known” gays, marijuana smokers, food stamp recipients etc. as friends rather than as the objects of her prayers and charitable work?
Her fear is that she and her family could lose the cosy bubble they live in – where they meet like minded, like skinned people at church and school and where no one is allowed to read Harry Potter because that might fire their imagination to the realization that other worlds are possible.
It doesn’t really matter how much Obama achieves on the macro issues you describe – he is a threat to her world, her cosy bubble, where there is a natural order of things, and where people like Obama belong in the out house if at all. Don’t tell her Jesus befriended gays and never condemned them. Don’t tell her most of her beliefs derive from the Old Testament and aren’t Christian in origin.
Above all, don’t tell her the world is changing – regardless of what Obama does – and that her world is becoming a smaller and smaller enclave that cannot sustain itself. Her daughters will have to grow up in a very different world, and she isn’t helping them.
“…. and a husband who took time off from his job as a pastor for annual family “playcations” to museums and amusement parks….”
What a picture of an evangelical church being involved. The minister cannot head up the Republican campaign office – his wife can! Amazing. And scary that the “preacher’s wife” can have such a prominent political position in the community.
It is the “rationalized” disregard of the separation of church and state that I think we must be vigilant about
Words and arguments will never get through to people like that.
But for some of them, an improving economy will. What’s going to happen as, over the next two and four years, the recovery continues, picks up steam, and the sky doesn’t fall?
I saw what happened to public opinion in Massachusetts when the sky didn’t fall after gay marriage was legalized. Maybe something similar will happen to some of these final days-sounding Republicans.
If a Republican had tried to explain to me in 2004, or in 2010, how it would be all right, referencing issues of importance to him but not necessarily to me, the way you do here, I would not have been particularly persuaded. And I have to say that many of the things I feared in 2004 and 2010 did come to pass. Not only are the left and right realities different, with different histories, philosophies, and facts, so that there is very little common ground on which to meet and discuss, many important values on each side are diametrically opposed. What you would like to sell as a good outcome, say acceptance of same sex marriage, is to her an unmitigated evil. Telling her that we also support traditional marriage won’t make a dent — we advocate something she can’t countenance in addition, so our support of traditional marriage just seems like a sop or a stance adopted purely for propaganda.
The way for her to overcome her fear of gay marriage is for her to get to know loving, committed gay couples, maybe a low probability event now, but perhaps more likely for her daughters. Popular media will also play a role. Not long ago people like Ms Cox could pretend that GLBT people just didn’t exist, especially not in the form of respectable out citizens. Unless she’s been willing to cut herself off from popular culture completely, she now knows better. In other words, solving the two realities problem is long term, perhaps generational, but eventually we will get there. After all, even in a country with a large racist minority we still just reelected a Black president.
Jesus will be back before it gets all that bad. As one of the godly, she’ll have been raptured by then, or dead and in heaven if Jesus is running late.
No prob.
Alvin Toffler discussed this problem over forty years ago in his book Future Shock:
Relative to how many folks remember the good old days, the future is here and they just don’t like it.
But aren’t these the same people that stitch the Serenity Prayer into needlepoint?
What happened to that?
The future is here and it’s populated with so many of them-that-aint-like-us .
Circle the wagons, tribe. Thinking this through is an invitation to the devil’s slippery ways.
Just say no to the evil-doers.
in blogsphere to this piece doesn’t in general show it at its finest. I often wonder if we have more in common with people like the person in the article than with a Democratic voter who sits on the coach and never volunteers.
She is wrong. In the end, I think some of the positions she holds are profoundly immoral.
But people seem to be taking delight in her pain. I love it when the assorted Foxnews jerks show frustration.
Her not so much.
Plus, anyone who doesn’t let their kid read Harry Potter is cool with me.
That’s what Diana Wynne Jones is for.
I would tell her not to be angry with the left. We’re not the ones who lie to her constantly. Quite the opposite, in fact: we’re the only ones telling her the truth.