I've kinda moved past the "But Europe is more liberal, so we should be too! Harumph! I'm mad because our liberal party is actually centrist!
"
I mean, yes, it would be nice.
But it's also useful to engage with reality. Ramping up the rhetoric against GOP voters will not cause the country to become more liberal. Not sure anything *can* convince them that liberals aren't the literal devil, but what I do know is this:
(bear with me)
Have you ever wondered "what is the big deal with coming out of the closet"? Why does this need to be a "movement"? Why make such a big deal in public about this stuff? Why even admit the truth at all? In a lot of cases, it'd be easier to just avoid certain people, or lie.
Coming out is important because it shows people with anti-LGBT beliefs that LGBT people are all around us even if you don't know it, they're not actively and deliberately conspiring to plan the downfall of society, and pretty much all of them just want to be treated like normal people and allowed to live their lives. They are your siblings, or your parents, or your children, or your friends.
That's always spoken to me. Not sure how applicable this idea can be to the political situation I'm talking about, but what I do know is that bubbles are bad. I didn't really "get" or agree with Sasha Baren Cohen staying with the Q guys for Borat 2, but I've somewhat come around on it. Self-selecting your social circle seems to lead to mild prejudices, which can become larger ones the longer you stay in it.
As a coder in years past, on the front-end team we would sometimes bitch about "the back end guys." It was superfluous work stuff and it never prevented us from having a beer together, but I look back at that situation and wonder sometimes. A couple missed deadlines because of a bad API implementation and things might not have been so rosy.
I wish I had some kind of hippy dippy solution to this but I really don't lol. I'm just kinda tired of liberals whining at the state of the country compared to "enlightened Yurop" and thinking the GOP's voter base problem will just go away or solve itself. It won't. And being smug about it is what got us into this position, IMO.
It's a tough problem. I was hoping the GOP would become more secular over time and that would lead to some advancements, but just blindly hoping doesn't do shit lol.
a good point, scratching at the absolute echo chamber dominance of discussion
unsarcastically, it's literally mgs2 with everyone retreating into their gated communities, disregarding any larger forum of discourse
I can't entirely blame gop-adherents since there is an absolute media wing dedicated to misleading and kicking the flock up to a froth, the gop rarely focuses on any positive goal but just convincing a wedge of the populace that the democrats are going to kill god, abort newborns, and molest your kids
I saw a bit of one of those gop-evangelists programs on tv once, sickening, literally twisting the religious beliefs of the many poors into anti-progressivism by setting up supposed biblical equivalencies of aoc and co to some biblical hell