Red Blue Bed Rue You Do Not Do Black Shoe
"...Apparently I'm so empiricist that some folks get confused when I look out the window and report that politics is not primarily a matter of arguments, but more a matter of coalitional identity and the stories that bind these identities together. My practical point, which I also believe to be empirically sound, is that if we hope to get anywhere, we'd better face up to the facts about the way people make political choices, and that simply lashing out at others' deeply-held identities with the disdainful counter-assertion of our identities is rather likely to be counterproductive.
We live in a pluralistic society. This is an ineradicable fact. Yet I take rather seriously the idea that everyone can benefit from a classical liberal social order, and that many more people than now do can come to see this. But causing people to see it isn't simply a matter of giving them a good argument. It's a matter of giving them grounds for assenting on the basis of their own commitments, in terms articulated in their own vocabulary. Now, you can try to persuade people when they like you, and they won't like you if you hate them. Yes. You know that already. So when I say that it's not such a grand thing to seethe with self-righteous contempt for the folks in America's heartland, I am NOT saying that they've got good arguments, if only we'd listen, although some of them might. I am NOT one of them, and I am NOT indulging in Red State victimology. I AM saying that here is a huge mass of Americans, most of them good, reasonable, and open to persuasion. Most Bush voters were NOT fundamentalists, although Lindsay for God knows what reason seems to think I was talking about fundamentalists. I was talking about the people who voted for Bush. I was talking about smart, educated, industrious, open, honest non-fundamentalist Americans with whom Bush successfully connected.
My point is: we'll do a hell of a lot better if are able to connect, insofar as it is possible, with whatever it was Bush connected with. Hint: it's not all God talk and homophobia. "
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