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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (12609)	2/18/2006 10:19:32 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541647

Very big questions there, E. People get there because it's easier to be an absolutist about your own positions and reinforce that with hating others, than to engage in a give and take debate and end up with a compromise position that a broad range of people can embrace. Now if the absolutist position worked, it would be a different issue. The rest of us may not like it, but it would be hard to say rescind the war on drugs if that war had succeeded. But it is an abject failure that barely makes a dent around the margins, like our immigration fiction, oops I mean policy. I would think the key to popular support is getting people to press for policies that really work. Sadly, the 2/3 of the electorate with firm partisan loyalties believe that the road to more success is their own agenda ratcheted up times ten or twenty. The only way you change that is for a major national figure like McCain to start preaching a new kind of politics and keep it up for a couple of years, so the idea of discrediting partisanship takes root in the political arena. I am not holding my breath.

To: epicure who wrote (12609)	2/18/2006 11:06:02 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541647

And what do you do about people who get there? Do we have to write them off forever? Are they immune to the logic of other positions? I think that some have to be written off forever. Sometimes that kind of binary thinking comes from closed-mindedness and emotion, which can theoretically be overcome, although I can't claim to know how. But sometimes it's just simpleness aka stupidity. Some people just can't deal with greater complexity. Those you have to write off, I suppose.