Some Wrong-Wingers want a new American Civil War. Well, says I, be careful what you wish for. I am going to explain the current ten-way Civil War on their side today, and some of what our side can do about it. Our side wants only the best of everything for all of them, but they, of course can’t believe that. It would make hash of their entire Theory of the Universe. And of course it would mean Those People, for multiple values of THEM, starting to get their fair share of whatever.
This is my opening salvo in a series on how to love Wrong-Wingers to partisan nullity. To heap coals of fire on their heads, according to the excessively vengeful Bible. No need to wish harm to those determined to be our enemies. We just want them, or at any rate their children, to come to their senses, to awaken from their deliberately-fostered nightmares.
Today’s Good News comes from a comment I made in an earlier GNR, and from one of my early posts on Daily Kos about the varieties of delusory experience. (🎩 William James) Back then I made the diagnoses. Today I offer treatment plans and prognoses for these wildly proliferating cancers of the mind.
"The Civil War" Soundtrack - Ashokan Farewell
This is a big deal, so I am going to pare back some of my usual features to make room. Sorry, I can’t write up everything. Do you wish I and others here could, so it would take all day to take in? No, we need to have time for life, and we need to have time for doing something about this meshugas.
I began
A Republican Bestiary
We agree that the Republican Party agenda is evil. So do they, but each faction claims that it is only the extremists (the Rightist Adventurists, in an inversion of Communist jargon) or the RINOs (the Leftist Running Dogs) that are the problem, not themselves. I have identified ten major factions among the Republicans, each focused on different issues, and each expressing the utmost contempt for all of the others as well as the rest of us, in spite of the massive overlap among them.
Feel free to chime in with evidence of more.
The Point of the Exercise
We are going to examine these factions in a very practical way. How do we break through their bubbles? How do we get them to treat people as people? How do we appeal to each of them?
Well, the basic rules are
- We don’t talk about Woke Club. We listen.
- Start with common ground.
- Speak their languages.
- Treat them as friends.
- Listen.
- Be patient.
A lot of these people think that they own the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance. So they can’t deny that those principles of Liberty and Justice for all exist. They can only claim that you misunderstood the Original Intent of the Framers.
Don’t argue. One technique is to ask
I see. So how would that work?
It takes practice and determination, and is certainly not for everybody.
Lady at dinner: But Mr. Russell, what if everybody in the world were like you?
Bertrand Russell: My dear lady, what if everybody were like a postman?
We need people who can do the organizing and GOTV and all on our side as much as we need to reach out to their side.
The 0.01%
Funding people, who think that Democracy is for sale, and will go to the highest bidder.
These are the people for whom only greed is important, and the rest of us are meant to be droids slaving for their enrichment. See Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, and Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, for details.
Think of them as Ferengi, and cite their rules at them:
- Chaos is bad for business.
- Infrastructure is good for business.
- The MIC knows full well that war is good for business. We have to remind the others that peace is good for business.
- As Henry Kaiser discovered on the Grand Coulee Dam project, healthy workers are good for business.
- As Henry Ford discovered, hiring the best and paying the best wages in the industry are also good for business, resulting in vastly improved product quality, and a work force that is also your best sales force.
Money (That's What I Want)
Not the Congresscritters. The part that wants to win elections.
Never-Trumpers are talking with them.
There is still a segment of the Republican Party for whom Trump is the ultimate disaster.
Chris Christie and Tim Scott are actually talking about Trump as a disaster for the party and the country in some detail. They have no chance of winning a primary, but they can get the attention of the MSM, and sometimes even Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair…
Old-line racists
See Accidental Courtesy, on converting Klansmen by first asking them why they are racists, and then becoming their friend.
Very similar techniques work on cultists of all kinds.
Grokking Trumpists: The Trump Death Cult
The Religious Right
We have a third of their children, those who got fed up with Fox and the Bible all day long, coupled with the bigoted hypocrisy. The kids are best placed to talk to their elders and to each other. There used to be a noisy moral panic about indoctrinated kids infiltrating homes and churches and all. It isn’t as loud now, with the focus having shifted to trans kids.
The Heritage Foundation: I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology.
It isn’t just a matter of actively teaching that America and the West are evil. Suppression of “wrongthink” is equally as important to the brainwashing process.
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
Actually, the Religious, um, Wrong formed in the Old South in defense of slavery.
Hillary Clinton going undercover to expose segregated Christianist “Academies” was her unforgivable sin, the starting point for the vast Wrong-Wing conspiracy against her since her law school days.
Don’t try to argue science with Young-Earth Creationists. They have been taught that taking one step over the line will mean infallibly going to Hell, because Jesus can only save them if they believe that Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the Fall are historical.
Neo-Confederates
A lot of Civil War, pardon me, Mr. Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression, talk comes from this faction.
Ask them what defines (supposedly Northern) tyranny, and then who the real tyrants are. The ultra-rich sold them a bill of goods labeled Starve the Beast, promising that obscene tax cuts and deregulation would bust the budget and drive up the national debt to the point where even Dimocrats would agree to cut social “spending”.
Good News Fifth Thursday: Starving the Beast is Still the Loudest Dog Whistle
On July 14, 1978, economist Alan Greenspan testified to the U.S. Finance Committee: "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."
Then they blow everything by creating monstrous financial disasters that can only be patched up with deficit spending.
So how is that working for them? Red state voters have put in the most corrupt and oppressive legislatures, courts, and administrations in the US, and those least interested in the General Welfare. White patriarchal Christianist Supremacists are the poorest, least healthy, most suicidal, most drug-addicted segment of society, and their only consolation is, in the words of Lee Atwater
Blacks get hurt worse.
We can invite them to have a life.
Tea Parties
Keep your government hands off my Medicare!!!
I can remember when Mike Pence was a Tea Party leader in Congress, one of the worst.
Forget it. The GQP is where the loonies gather now. Pence is the quintessential RINO today, for short-circuiting the 1/6 coup plot (apart from the violent insurrection, which included a plan to lynch him and hang him high.)
I can’t tell you specifically what light to shine on the cockroaches of their minds. The only point they seem to agree on is
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
🎩 Groucho Marx, in Duck Soup.
I can only counsel patience, and practicing how to listen to the deluded for the point of common ground where you can really get started with them.
Mad Tea Party - Full Music Loop
Faux Libertarians
Give them real liberty. Start with Marijuana, and Red states impinging on their rights.
Some Libertarians are in favor of free trade and immigration. You can certainly ask them about corporate tyranny and Republican moral panics.
According to their own principles, they should be in favor of voting rights, but in practice they oppose every effort to fix voting and systemic racism more broadly as government overreach.
You can certainly ask how that all works out.
Socrates would have had a field day with that lot.
College Republicans
They know about the problem, and the fact that all of the other factions ignore their proposals. Encourage them.
You can also explain at opportune moments that there are no Conservatives in the Republican Party, and direct them to the words of Edmund Burke, once the Father of Conservatism, but to these paskudnyaks just another lousy knee-jerk, bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend[invest], woke RINO Liberal.
Conservatives: Endangered species?
Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.
Neo-Cons
Many in the Project for the New American Century say they were Liberals, but they got mugged by reality. So they mugged themselves, and the world entire.
Let’s talk about unmugging.
Iraq and Afghanistan, once their pride and joy, are now the clearest cases that you can’t impose democracy, the rule of law, and human rights at the point of a gun. Also arming and funding the Taliban oppressors and other terrorists to fight Russians just gets you more terrorism. (Ukraine is the exact opposite case. We are funding and supplying those fighting for democracy there.)
Israel has the same problem. They built up Hamas as a counter to the PLO long ago, thinking that sowing even more hatred would weaken Palestinian resistance. No, the only way to defuse such well-funded hatred is to cut off the funding on all sides.
If you must have a war, declare war on poverty and oppression, not the poor and oppressed. Build schools. Fund broadband and renewable energy and infrastructure. Maybe even Free Software and Creative Commons textbooks.
Gun Nuts
No, we don’t want YOUR guns, unless you commit an actual crime, conspire with others to do so, or demonstrate that you are a threat to yourselves or others.
You can protect yourselves from the REAL gun nuts, the actual terrorists, domestic abusers, bent cops…Since you complain so much about mental health, perhaps you can explain why states with loose gun laws are also cutting their mental health services. Oh, did you know that murder and suicide rates are higher in states with the loosest gun laws? And higher in Red rural communities than in the big cities?
But don’t lead with the facts. Start with safety. If they agree that we have to rein in terrorists and prevent mass murders, that we can’t go on with guns as the leading cause of death among school-age children, then you can ask what they would propose to do about it, and, as I said at the beginning, ask how that would work.
A Bit of Regular Good News
No Fox to Give
It isn’t just the potential damages. Fox intends to make sure that Tuckums can’t do his shtick on Twitter until 2025. Elmo has a sadz, too.
NPVIC
I have plans for a Diary on this, analyzing which states are the most likely pickups for the remaining 65 Electoral Votes we need. Would you believe Arizona is in play on the map above?
Animals! Science! Weirdness!
Funny or Cry
Support your local cartoonists, and the striking writers.
Hey! Mike Luckovich is here on DK! Well, his cartoons, that is, republished by permission.
Targeting Target for pride merch, or targeting kids for gun profits?
Well, I’m going to let Guns and Roses play us out this morning.
Guns N' Roses - Civil War (Visualizer)
