This has been brewing for a while, so please bear with me.
I've been thinking about the issue of hate speech. Why do we keep vilifying republicans? There are horrrible people in their party, I admit to being more than a little judgmental of Rush Limbaugh and ilk, but I think that perhaps we sometimes spend too much time lumping them all together.
We frequently cast the entire party by the behavior of Hannity and Coulter. Perhaps we should start talking about what it is about Hannity and Coulter that they identify with. Maybe we should start seeing what things they say that WE might identify with. Not because we will suddenly become like them, but because we have been writing this entire segment of the population off as lost causes.
I had a conversation recently with a personal trainer at my gym. (Here's another stereotype for you, gyms are for jocks and jocks are frat boys, and frat boys are republicans - He was, except for the frat boy part)
The topic of discussion turned to outdoor sports. One of the most common areas where we, as democrats, are maligned is that of our environmental policy. Hannity and Huffington say that we are hippie tree hugging liberals. The not so elite regular folk of the party probably share the trainer's view of the situation. To Paraphrase
What the democrats don't understand is that we are really environmentally friendly people. I fish in competitions, if the lakes suddenly stopped producing fish, I'd be upset, and so would all of my buddies. We have organizations that fight for protection of these areas. The same is true of hunting. But all the liberals tell us we hate the environment, when most of them haven't gone outside the city in the last year.
So, what does this come down to? I would suggest that we villify the republicans for being anti-environmentalists because Limbaugh laughs at the idea that science is lying about the situation.
I think that perhaps, the republicans might be able to move past all of the dissagrements between our parties, if we stopped being so mad at the everyday voters for the stances their elected officials take.