It's an outreach program I'm thinking of, a "Welcome Center" for tourist wingers, prominently displayed as a special button on the left side atop the ads under the dKos logo that reads "Welcome Conservatives & Republicans! Click Here."
Hang out at dKos long enough and it's clear that the Forces of Evil (a) don't have a sure-fire master plan to take over the world, (b) are making much of it up as they go along, and (c) now aim to dominate the entire universe. They must be giddy over how easy it's been so far.
They really are the bad guys. Even the imbeciles will start to get it soon. And not all Republicans are imbeciles.
Some Republicans are victims. And like black-eyed spouses who choose to return to their abusive partners, some Republican victims imagine themselves to be powerless, caught up in the matrix, afraid to disbelieve.
In the spirit of empowerment, with the most genuine intentions, maybe we ought to reach out to such "tourists" in a way they can understand and appreciate. As they're coming here by the thousands to visit, we have a heck of an opportunity to "convert" a few.
Disclaimer:I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat whose first and best presidential vote was for Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Florida primary. I delight in despising everything Republican, in moderate doses. Frankly, I'd just as soon burn them as convert them.
But I'm also an optimist who believes all but inherently evil Republicans will change once they learn how badly they have been misled and exploited. And I'm a pragmatist. It's not good to burn Republicans. Not yet, anyway.
Us against the Forces off Evil
All but fools among us now accept that "Republican" is the party of hatred and fear, and we can see in almost every Republican policy, proposal and marketing image ample support for that contention. Sometimes, we see it when it isn't even there. That's probably a strength.
For most of their lives, most Republicans have connected the word "liberal" in a similar axiom of evil. Layers of ugly connotations - moral decline, social upheaval, fiduciary malfeasance, intellectual bankruptcy - have been cemented so firmly into bedrock mainstream Republican tenets as to alter the public definition of the word.
So who is "Us?"
As we Democrats confirm our survival, inventory our resources and plot to escape our awful circumstances and save the world before it's too late, some of us have been reviewing our core principles. This community endured seemingly endless "diary storms" on abortion, gun control, gay marriage, etc., two months ago, and most of those diaries eventually addressed the core ideas that we express as political issues.
The closer we get to our core principles, the more universal they appear, the more logical, and the more uniquely American.
"We" are "Us" (and Pogo was right)
Sometimes, that means unsettling. To wit: the same raucous, pioneering zeal that destroyed Native American cultures in the 1700's and 1800's shaped the most liberal and most successful democratic system ever devised. And it's the same system equally zealous Republicans are determined to destroy.
That same raucous, pioneering zeal also sparked the organic, evolutionary "wildfire" that enflamed "Jeff Gannon" and may yet consume the Bush administration. (The puns are natural, not intentional.)
Even ardent liberals would oppose incentives to abort late-term fetuses for commercial use; would acknowledge there can be too much government; would see the folly of destroying corporatocracy without a workable replacement.
More of our political contests stem from (sometimes bipolar) degrees and definitions than from zero-sum ideological differences.
Developing "American" principles
Somewhere within those degrees and definitions lie sets of statements most of us embrace first as Americans and second as partisan Democrats or Republicans (or Libertarians, or Greens, or...). Many of those statements have already found expression in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the writings of Tom Paine, Alexander Hamilton, et.al.
Last November, wingnuts I know intimately and love deeply (four brothers and three of their wives) could not identify a single such statement. They believed, authentically, that the family liberal (me) hated the Constitution, hated the "founding fathers," and hated the government on general principle. (I have since disabused them of their notions.)
Over the past four months, my wingnut family nursed my mother through her end-of-life experience. In such intense closeness, we learned that we share many of the ideals we hold dearest. We express those ideals differently, but the root beliefs (again, many of the ones expressed in the aforementioned documents) are almost identical.
Why a "Welcome Center" might help
My adventurous brother has visited dKos frequently at my urging. He's an unregistered "lurker" who's probably here tonight. He won't register anytime soon because he believes - authentically - that dKos beats up on Republicans and Conservatives something awful. I certainly don't want to change that, it's one of the reasons I participate here.
But we might feature a "meta statement" of core principles, generally worded, that might help timid but "disaffected-ish" Republicans understand that we don't eat babies, even as some of our more passionate and esteemed diarists seem to advocate such from time to time.
A "dKos user's guide for wingnut dummies" might not persuade them that Bush is the anti-christ but it might persuade them that we aren't either. That, I think, would be a worthy achievement with thousands of wingnut "tourists."
I'd be interested in your opinions and suggestions for "statement" topics (or fully developed statements, if you feel the urge). And if there's any trend toward consensus here, I'll develop the idea into a more formal (diary) proposal for the dKos community.
Here's one such "statement," offered as a potential example:
The uniquely American ideal of open, participatory democracy "of the people, by the people, for the people," is the foremost achievement of mankind. It is the duty of every American to understand and embrace that American ideal and to demonstrate to the rest of the world that it is, indeed, civilization's finest expression.
Argue the semantics of that particular "statement," or draft similar (or better) versions, or tell me this is stupid and I've bumped a worthier diary off the queue. Anyone?