The defining character of the heart and soul of the “Political Left” in the US is weighed down by ineffective ideals such as “fairness” and “justice” and “Go with your heart”. While they seem virtuous, they represent a burden when up against “pragmatism”, “strategic action”, and “win at all costs”.
They might as well be playing this game with one hand tied behind their backs. And, what’s more, the most fervent of the lot are playing the game from a place of coastal and urban culture that holds ideals somehow impossible to understand in a comparative framework because they have the intellectual force of ratification by cultural progress behind them.
In other words, imagine you are completely aware that you live in an area where you already have access to the latest movies on your TV while other areas are still waiting to pre-order movie theater tickets for those same movies.
Or rewind about 3-4 years, and imagine you have access to Uber on your smartphone to get a ride to the airport at 4 AM on a Monday morning, but your sister in Kansas doesn’t even know what you’re talking about.
Or what if you found out that your local school system was just awarded funding to provide each student with access to a robot personal assistant, but your sister, back in Kansas, was still jumping for joy about a new app for student’s smartphones that helped track their early learning progress.
You might mistake your seeming advantageous context as political moral superiority. That’s the right way to understand what happened in 2016.
The wrong way to understand what happened in that last election is to believe that the Dems failed to go far enough to the Left. This is a particularly dangerous error waiting as a bogeyman for Dems in 2020.
We see this error in full volume in the course of the current media and cultural framework that passes for a filter of perception thus far defining the battle ahead for many folks setting themselves up to unwittingly re-elect Donald Trump in the coming election.
In fact, it’s the same error wearing a different costume. It is the whispers of an echo-chamber of highly flawed perception bent on repeating history.
The far more important idea is NOT “how to ignite support from potential progressive voters.” Instead, the important idea is built of the fact that nearly everyone in the country already knows whether they want more of Donald Trump as president or want him out of office. The debates won’t change that. The policy ideas won’t change that. The eventual nominee candidate’s gender or race won’t change that.
We have never seen such a politically polarizing president as we have now. For 95% of voters, the decision has already been made, for or against, when it comes to the question of four more years of Trump.
The only difference is a relatively tiny slice of the electoral pie that is defined by a basically conservative tendency, but a stubborn unwillingness to accept the indecorous and destructive tendencies of the Trump administration. They will either fold and side with Trump, or not. They do not live in California or New York. They do not support Medicare-for-all with no private insurers. They see “socialism” as a very scary idea. They do not like the idea of their taxes going up to support education and healthcare for illegal immigrants.
For those who live in urban areas and are used to Uber and robotic assistants and have an affinity for concepts like “socialism”, the trap is set. If you vote with your “heart” about what you think is “right”, you will simply end up enabling another four years of Mr. Trump.
You are quite simply wrong to believe that the rest of the country will agree with you once properly educated, especially if you show them what a racist Mr. Trump is. The people that will decide this next presidential election don’t have your background or cultural milieu to draw from, and they are sick of being lectured to by people tweeting from an Uber atop a self-ratified moral high ground. Identity politics will get you absolutely nowhere with this singularly important swing vote.
If the next election is a simple referendum on Trump as a narcissistic, psychopathic temper-tantrumming three-year-old who isn’t fit to run a hot dog stand, and you avoid making it a referendum on socialism, then you will get 100% turnout on the Left and capture the swing vote and win in a landslide.
But if you rally to the notion that you need to vote with your heart, you will find you live in a different Country than the one the election is meant to serve — one that befuddles you once again with its willingness to opt for another four years of comic tragedy at the helm.
The candidate you choose doesn’t have to win a basketball game or do multiplication tables faster than the average. He or she simply needs to not be scary to the middle. That’s it.
Everyone else has absolutely already decided where they will stand. And the turnout is already guaranteed to be the highest in the history of American electoral politics. Focus only on the voters you need to win to win.
