Let's talk about this. The outrage... IS THE POINT. As Parker Malloy notes, this was Ryan Holiday's PR move when dealing with Tucker Max: upset the shit out of the snowflakes, get them all talking about it, and drive the jackasses in just to piss off the snowflakes. Think back to the 2016 campaign: How much of our 24-7 news coverage was some form of "coming up, you won't believe the racist and inflammatory thing Trump said be sure to tell your friends how angry you are!" The 'wingers are all about the "shy Trump voter" or "stealth Trump voter" right now because he's tanking in the polls but they have a point: my father-in-law still hasn't admitted he voted for Trump. For all I know, he will again. He's a doctorate-holding retiree in one of the most liberal corners of the United States and he doesn't want to defend his choices, he wants to align his internal experience with his external experience, which is 100% conservative talk radio. I can make him uncomfortable; just last week he decided that student loan debt was so high because kids were being irresponsible and spending way too much on worthless degrees and I had to say "look, buddy, you got doctorate for eight grand, a house for fifty grand and were making forty grand out of college. Your daughter's doctorate cost a quarter million and that was ten years ago and if someone were to buy your house today it would cost them a half million dollars. Meanwhile, your doctorate is still making forty grand out of college." But what does that accomplish? It shuts him up, sure. It makes him look uncomfortably at his feet. But fundamentally I'm reminding him that the facts out in the world don't match the pablum he chooses to consume for multiple hours a day. For sure - there are people out there facing a reckoning. But it's far easier for them to be closeted Nazis. Worse, the more vocal and outraged you are about Nazis, the more closeted they're likely to be. We've talked about this before. We've talked about it a lot. Confrontation doesn't really get you much, all it does is make them listen to you less. Yeah, you have to do something. But being mad at your family for something the Trump campaign does won't have the effect you intend.
I did not enjoy that trip down memory lane, but I was wrong. You can only fight dangerous opinions with empathy, and without empathy you can't ever understand where those opinions come from. I have learned in the intervening almost decade how to try to see the world from others' point of view. It is not always possible to do with clarity, but it is always possible to do at least a little bit. But it does take a certain willingness to challenge your own assumptions about the world. That's not something I was good at in my 20's. Mostly I had my nose stuck in a textbook 16 hours/day, which is not conducive to understanding of anything but the topic of study.
Yer a good man, Charlie Brown. For the record, the anti-vax crew in 2010 was bigger and less militant. Once California had mandatory vaccination most of them vaccinated their kids; it's one thing to say "I'm taking a stand against Big Pharma" and quite another to say "...and am willing to home-school my kids to do it." The tide had started to turn, principally because there was study after study after study indicating that vaccines are safe and because the medical establishment started to realize that answering questions was more effective than saying STFU. I, for one, much prefer having a $6k fridge full of $50k in vaccines in my wife's office to knowing she'll be out every fourth weekend to explain the delayed vaccine schedule to a bunch of scared yuppies.
Then, what can be done? I’m very concerned that he is going to win another term.
Focus on the positive, duh. Give them something to run towards, rather than something to run from. "Hey, looks like most of the country really wants to address systemic racism this election. I hope something good comes of it" beats the ever-loving shit out of "your guy uses nazi imagery in his Facebook ads you should be ashamed of yourself."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/03/donald-trumps-ever-shifting-positions-on-abortion/ https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-evolving-stance-abortion/story?id=38057176 https://qz.com/1623437/trump-shifted-from-pro-choice-to-pro-life-as-he-planned-a-presidential-run/ https://time.com/5783257/donald-trump-pro-life-evangelical-voters/ We'll pretend for this morning that you're asking an honest question, instead of snarking about how much religion sucks as per usual. We'll pretend that this is an answer you're curious about, rather than being reminded that you haven't groused about religion in three days. In the spirit of that open discussion: it wouldn't kill you to make the point that Trump's demonstrated opportunism around the abortion debate, combined with his diffident response to the value of life in general, make him a poor standard-bearer for the pro life movement. You could also argue that he has already placed two staunchly pro-life justices on the Supreme Court so his practical purpose to the movement has been served. Finally, you could point out that Trump's clumsy and opportunistic claims at being a supporter of the pro-life movement are actively driving fence-sitters away from pro-life positions and putting a generation of religious-but-not-conservative voters forever beyond the reach of the pro-life movement. Or you could sit there and snark about how hopeless it all is, how stupid they all are and how put upon you are to be related to them. Choice is yours, champ.
"Haha!" he said, "It was a trick question all along! I wasn't looking for an answer, I was looking for a fight!" We've been having these discussions for several years now, haven't we? Can I just point out to you that the way you "debate" anything is to ask a question, ignore the answer and then go "HA HA! you have fallen into my trap! I can now ignore your every sentiment, satisfied in my own smug sense of superiority." You and I actually agree about nearly everything. Yet your move, without fail, is to pick a fight about the one tiny little aspect where we don't. We're on the same side of this issue yet you have me rooting for your relatives because their disapproval hurts you more. You aren't looking to convince anyone you're looking to self-reinforce your isolation. Do you actually have any confusion whatsoever as to why they don't listen to you? If you want someone to listen to your arguments, you need to listen to theirs. And then you need to respond to what they say, not what you justify their position to be. Ask yourself these questions, and actually consider the answers: - Do they love you? - Do they think you think about things? - Do they value your opinion? - Are they willing to listen to you about other issues? - Is there a bond of kindness, family, familiarity or affinity between you and them that allows you a rhetorical avenue not available to strangers? If any of the above is true, you need to debate them differently than strangers on the Internet, no matter how much more fun it is to argue about how stupid they are. Nobody wins when everyone just leaves madder.
So by your own assessment, you are hectoring people who - Don't love you - Don't care what you think - Don't value your opinion - Are unwilling to listen to you about other issues - That you have no particular connection with ...out of a sense of zeal... ...and then expressing your frustration to the rest of us in the form of pugnaciousness, truculence and a general combativeness about the futility of debate with a population that you have no empathy for. Just wanna make sure I've got the full picture here.
I think that's a smaller component that you believe. I think the overwhelming majority of GOP supporters look at their pay stubs and tax bill and decide solely based on who is going to let them keep a larger percentage of the gross. Everything else is just rationalization. I guess like you I base this on my experience. I know a lot of solid republican voters, and none is a born againer (although a couple Catholics I'm friends with a solidly anti-abortion, though also solidly rich). The key to reaching the tax set is convincing them that percentages be damned, if they continue to vote GOP they can keep 100% of nothing after Trump ruins our economy. If the GOP got 100% of the only-cares-about-abortion vote and nothing else, they would get 0 electoral votes, 0 senate seats, and probably a few house seats.
Gallup puts it at six percent.I think that's a smaller component that you believe.
Highly religious white Protestants constitute about 15% of the adult population, and by aggregating data from 2016 through 2019, we get a reasonable estimate that about four in 10 among this group say that abortion should be totally illegal. This is higher than among Trump supporters or Republicans (or the general population) yet still leaves more than half of the evangelical group who favor legalized abortion, at least in certain circumstances.
That sounds right. Compared to Castro's 9% approval rating among Americans in his later years, I'd say that 6% is pretty fucking close to irrelevant as a voting bloc. I think what the "centrist" voter would like to hear from a candidate is some version of, "I don't support killing fetuses that could survive on their own outside the womb except in extreme medical circumstances." I'll bet that's the default stance of like 80% of the population, but you wouldn't know it from anyone's platform planks.
This conversation is aimed at influencing the opinions of people who are still committed to vote Trump come november. If the reason they state is religious, specifically Democrat support of Abortion, what can you say? My experience tells me that educating them that abortion rates drop when fact based sex education is taught and contraception is available is fruitless. It is the legality or criminality of the act that is important, nothing else.
C'mon. Castro and Congress each get like a 10% approval rating on surveys. There's always a subset of people you should just write off. I think that subset is small enough that they could be irrelevant if moneyed interests start jumping ship. After all, it was the moneyed interests who specifically brought them into politics to shore up their voting bloc, which was waning in the late 70s to early 80s. I don't so much care what people believe on their own time, but I would be as happy an anyone to see religious zealots once again be irrelevant in the political sphere.