I appreciate your honesty and the depth of your response. Our backgrounds aren’t so different. I also grew up in a rural, working-class community in North Carolina, surrounded by many of the same attitudes and traditions you describe. Perhaps the key difference is that my community was more racially diverse: Black, white, and Latino families all living through the same economic precarity. Maybe that shaped me in a different way. I did see how solidarity could form across race and difference when people shared material struggles and treated each other with decency. I also saw how easily that solidarity could be disrupted by fear, scapegoating, and political manipulation. But I don’t think that has to be permanent. That’s the difference between us, and that’s a choice I made.
Your response confirms that our disagreement isn’t just strategic, it’s philosophical. You don’t just oppose populism; you reject the idea that politics can be about building trust, changing minds, or shifting emotional terrain. You describe a population that’s ideologically frozen and morally unreachable. But people aren’t stone tablets. You changed. Why assume others can’t?
[snip: for space]
The real danger isn’t trying to build a cross-racial working-class coalition. The real danger is giving up on that project and ceding the field to the demagogues.
You say you want to win. So do I. But I want to win more than elections. I want to win power and use it to materially improve the lives of working people across this country. That doesn’t happen through management. It happens through meaning and through movement.
A little feedback that's meant to be positive and not critical..you read into my posts a lot of assumptions that are not only not there, but are incorrect. (That's not just true in this post, in nearly all of our discussions over time. It really makes it difficult to hold a discussion with you.) I'll address a few of those first...
1) I don't "reject the idea that politics can be about building trust, changing minds, or shifting emotional terrain". But I think it is very tough for politicians or political parties to connect with voters in a way that actually accomplishes this goal/action. And it's rare enough that you can't reliably build political campaigns - in one election or across elections - on the idea of doing so. If a political party is relying on that level of connection to voters, I think that political party is more far more likely to lose more elections than they win. Having that kind of connections to voters would be great, it's the kind of thing that changes society, but it's not a reliable way to win elections or impact society because of how rare it is.
2) I don't think that populism is inherently authoritarian. I do think that authoritarianism is one of the greatest dangers of populism because once a group has decided that their goals are "just" and believe the majority agrees with them, then it is very easy to justify authoritarian means to achieve those goals. Let's face it, most folks just don't operate at the philosophical level where the "rights of those who disagree with me" are valued highly if it means that I don't get what I perceive as my "rights". And that is a recipe for authoritarianism because from there it is but a short stroll to using force to achieve my "rights" against those who would keep them from me.
3) It's not that I don't assume that others can't change from their bigoted/retrograde views, it's that I think the process of doing so is difficult to create and therefore most people aren't going to do it. It happened for me because I was smart enough to be taken from BFE rural NC to Chapel Hill and exposed to a completely different world plus I was open to the ideas being espoused. I know plenty of conservative folks from rural areas of NC who went through CH and didn't change their views because they weren't open to the ideas being presented, they remained surrounded by other conservatives in CH, and/or because they left CH to go right back to conservative areas of the state/country. The kind of change I made is not atypical for rural conservatives that go to Carolina, but it is atypical for all of the conservatives that live in rural areas as most remain in their conservatism in their rural areas. There's a good analogy to this from The Simpsons in S8E15 "Homer's Phobia". In the episode, the Simpson family meets "John" (voiced by John Waters) who owns the local kitschy antiques store. John is gay and once Homer realizes this, he is against the family continuing to socialize with John. Homer is also concerned that John will turn Bart gay and take steps to prevent this, which all go hilariously wrong, and eventually lead to a situation where Homer & Bart are in significant physical danger from one of the efforts Homer takes. John ends up saving both of them (plus Barney and Moe) from injury/death, leading to Homer accepting John. John then quips back: "Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you'd be set." If only every rural conservative were to spend 4 years in Chapel Hill open to the competing views around them, maybe we could drastically change society.
4) It's not that I don't think folks in rural communities won't help their neighbors, it's that I think they tend to be really, really narrowly biased about who is their "neighbor". Most of the ones I know would give their neighbor the shirt off their back and would provide significant resources to help their neighbor...but they don't see the black/brown person, the LGBTQ person, or other marginalized folks at their "neighbor". They tend to live in very, very homogenous neighborhoods surrounded by folks like themselves and so the black/brown, LGBTQ, and other folks are viewed as outsiders and therefore not deserving of their help. It's not that most of conservative working class folks won't help their neighbor fix their car or that they disagree their kid or the kid next door should be able to go to the doctor without going bankrupt; it's that they don't care if the black man that lives 10 miles away in a different neighborhood gets his car fixed and they certainly don't care if his kid gets to go to doctor without him going bankrupt. I work in the non-profit sector in smaller NC counties and a major thing I repeatedly hear is about how "those people" take all the resources and "don't leave help for those that really need it"...and if you ask a few questions, "those people" are inevitably folks who don't look, believe, and behave like the speaker. One of the things that amazes me most about a large number of Christians, largely conservatives ones, is how they inevitably miss the point of the story of the Good Samaritan. It could not be any clearer, but nearly all the ones I know either never get it or completely ignore it. And it could not be clearer how much they miss it when you look at their voting patterns and see how they inevitably choose to be the Priest & Levite in that story rather than the Samartian.
I think a large thing that separates us is how likely we think your type of approach to be successful vs creating a situation where Pubs are actually the beneficiaries of such an effort. It's not the main reason I think we have Trumpism, but I do think that efforts by Bernie and other progressives to say that government, especially Dem-led government, isn't sufficiently effective contributed to the rise of Trumpism. I also think that the distinct advantages that Pubs hold due to geography and having a more homogenous party make it so that Dems start with an electoral disadvantage and therefore it is highly unlikely that Dems can create a sweeping electoral victory that would allow for real changing of our government. Dems got that situation in 2008 and still got a government that only created 1 lasting change...Obamacare/ACA. The idea that Dems can overcome their electoral disadvantages to create the successive electoral victories needed to establish a "change-making" government seems highly, highly unlikely to me. And so I will not support efforts in that direction that also create a greater chance that Pubs win significant elections that enable them to not only thwart Dem initiatives but also enact initiatives that harm groups Dems seek to protect. In essence, I'm not willing to swing for the fences of "institutional change" when I think the likelihood of success is very low and the likelihood of disasterous results (like Trumpism) are much higher.
So, yes, I will continue to advocate for "triangulation" and narrow wins (and hopefully narrow losses) that keeps government focused on a rather centrist, slow-changing path as opposed to a "go for broke" strategy that also increases the likelihood of significant electoral victories by opponents. And the rise of Trumpism is exactly why I will continue to do so, in that I think progressive actions over the last 25 years have done more to assist Trumpism than it has to bring about the results they're seeking. Imagine where we'd be if Hillary losing in 2016 would have led to a Mitt Romney-like Republican POTUS rather than Trump; it would have stunk to have lost, but we wouldn't be in midst of fascist authoritarian revolution in the US.
... I used to joke that if I had kicked in another million dollars I would be in Congress today ( before you respond, Zoo, it was a joke )