Unsurprisingly, five minutes into his news conference yesterday, the President had already managed to wipe out any shred of inclination I might have had to give him the benefit of the doubt going into his second term. It seems to me that I have heard this business about bridging partisan gaps, reaching across the aisle, and working to heal the division within the country somewhere before… wait… it’s coming to me… these are are the same promises he made the last time he took office, following which he then spent four years exploiting those various divisions for blatant partisan advantage.
But I digress. I sat through a conversation among coworkers at lunch today about how the northeastern states should secede from the “Red” rest of the country, with a sidebar discussion of moving to Canada, France, Sweden, etc.
Stupid liberals.
Yes, I went through several somewhat apocalyptic phases yesterday myself. However, they each passed after half an hour or so, and didn’t return over the course of the day today. Yes, George Bush won, but it’s not the end of the world. The end of the world would be if all the work that liberal, progressives, and Democrats have done over the last two years were dropped, if we gave in to the kind of thinking represented by articles such as this one.
To hear this writer put it, liberals and progressives did everything right, everything we possibly could have done, and still George Bush won, and that shows it’s not our country anymore. All the people in all those “red” states, there’s no talking to them. How can we live in a country where that many people would actually vote for George W. Bush? Blah, blah, blah.
My feeling is that so long as liberals take the approach that there’s just no talking to or understanding people who voted for Bush, we’re going to keep losing elections. We need to talk to people who don’t agree with us, and we need to understand them as more than caricatures.
The gay marriage issue is a perfect example. Yes, majorities of voters in eleven states voted for constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Is this indicative of an unbridgeable divide between Us and Them, though? Not necessarily. Technically, if I were asked whether I am in support of gay marriage, I would have to say no, because I don’t want the government endorsing any religious sacraments. However, I believe that if the government is going to grant certain legal and financial benefits to a specific group of people based on their living arrangements, it ought to grant those same benefits to ALL people in those sorts of living arrangements.
I’ve had this conversation with a number of conservative friends and acquaintances, and we have largely been able to agree. True, I would like to live in a country where everyone was tolerant, respectful, and accepting of gays and lesbians, but that’s not reality. What I can live with is a country where a majority of people are willing to live and let live. Unfortunately, Republicans have done a much better job than Democrats at framing these questions in their favor; they put ballot issues about “defending marriage” up for a vote, and it speaks to the uglier parts of people. They push the buttons that make someone who would otherwise agree that hospital visitation rights ought to be granted to people who love one another start working that The Gays Are Coming To Get Us.
I’m not saying that liberals need to start acting like conservatives, or that Democrats should go the Republican-Lite route. Rather, we need to look at what it is in all those red state people that the Republicans are doing a better job of speaking to, and instead of writing it off, figure out how we can speak to it.