I really want Democrats to reach out to rural working-class white voters who vote against their interests for Republicans who they don’t know don’t have their backs, and just use their votes to enrich themselves and their friends in the millionaire and billionaire Republican elite.
I’ve been writing about this, and frustrated at Democrats for not prioritizing this, for years.
Which makes it funny that, today, I hear from a relative who has had a laundry list of reasons that Democrats like me are not only wrong, but evil, poured into her head by Fox News and Tucker Carlson.
This is when it hits me why some Democrats don’t think what I’ve been advocating for years is worth the time.
Where to start with this, let’s see.
The rant from the family member opened with the observation that we supposedly support open borders, which, no, not true.
Speaking for me personally, and what I believe a lot of Democrats would agree with me saying, we do recognize why there’s been an issue at the border, but we also recognize that it’s not just simple enough to say, round ‘em all up and send ‘em back home.
Donald Trump was just on TV the other day praising the dictator down in Venezuela who is claiming victory in the presidential election down there that it appears he not only lost, but lost bad, which, yeah, that’s new.
The reason Trump claims to love the guy is because the guy down there supposedly keeps things safe in his country, which, come on, that just demonstrates that Trump doesn’t get it, that it was his push in 2019 for economic sanctions on Venezuela that helped hasten a new wave of immigration into the U.S. from that country that made our border issues worse.
Next in the rant, we supposedly support “abortion at any stage,” which, no, not true, and, like “abortion at any stage” is even a real thing anyway, right?
No one that I know supports anything resembling “abortion at any stage,” but most people that I know is aware that abortion rights are important to a lot of people, and that a lot of women who need to have access to abortion for health reasons in states that have now banned them are at risk.
Then it got to, Democrats supposedly want us to get our oil from “communist countries,” which, in fact, the U.S. already gets most of its oil from, surprise, surprise, the U.S., with Canada being the next-biggest source, and Saudi Arabia, which isn’t a “communist” country, but still is a repressive state (whose leaders are fond of the Trumps, and show it with their investment money), a distant third.
The back-and-forth got to the level that somehow her “freedom of speech” was being threatened, which, hey, I’m not the government, that she should be able to support who she wants to, which, fine, support who you want to, but why do you need to demonize the other side, namely, me, as literally being evil, as part of how you go about supporting who you want to?
This isn’t a game to me, like it seems to be to a lot of people.
I’m not rooting for my favorite team, and by extension, rooting against the other side, because they’re the bad guys.
Universal healthcare is my end goal; a fully funded, and class equitable, K-12 and higher education system is my end goal; doing what we can do to make sure humans don’t make the planet inhospitable to the continuation of human life as we know it is my end goal.
I think we can treat everybody – men and women, whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, straight and LGBTQ+ – with dignity and respect.
And I think these things because I think we owe it to ourselves to ensure that we all have as good a chance as any of the rest of us to succeed in life, whatever that success may entail.
I’d like to think we can all agree on at least that point.
I don’t get how thinking this way about the world makes me evil – that me not thinking, just round ‘em all up and send ‘em all home, is the way to go, makes me evil; that thinking that denying women with health risks from being able to make reproductive choices that total strangers long past being able to have kids themselves sitting in their living rooms watching Fox News think are morally wrong is itself a moral failure makes me evil; that me thinking that a man who cynically uses religion as a weapon to get people who claim to be evangelicals on his side is the evil one makes me, instead, the evil one.
I’m not out here saying you have to vote for the same person or group of people that I do.
I’m the guy who, as a local Democratic Party chair back in the 2000s, got in trouble with some of my committee members because I talked up how much I admired guys like Emmett Hanger and Chris Saxman, a pair of local Republican elected pols that I’d gotten to know because of my work in the news media, and how I appreciated being able to talk with those guys one-on-one to try to learn how they see things.
I didn’t agree with them on everything, but then, I don’t agree with a lot of Democrats on a lot of things.
I think we all need to be open to at least listening and trying to understand, is my point here, but when the unsolicited criticism, from a family member, no less, is, you’re not just wrong, but you’re morally wrong, you’re evil, there’s nothing there in terms of trying to find common ground that we can work from going forward.
If you’ve read this far, and you’re wondering, no, this isn’t going to end well for whatever relationship might be there after this with the relative who decided today was a good day to make a spectacle of herself, but that’s actually OK.
I guess, in the end, I’d prefer to know where people are coming from, and life is too short to waste it on people who think you’re evil because you see the world differently than they do, and have damn good reasons why.
I still think Democrats need to not make it a policy to give up on the whole demographic of people like her who have let people they don’t know and wouldn’t walk across the street to take a piss on them if they were on fire tell them that their own family members are evil if they’re not members of the cult.
But, yeah, I get why a lot of Democrats say, I’ll pass, better now than I did a few hours ago.
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Chris Graham
