The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
What you think about them, they think about you. They’re not evil, they’re not idiots. If they lived nextdoor you would probably find each other very pleasant.
It looks pretty simple from where I’m standing. You talk to them. You listen to them. You find things you agree on, beginning with the smaller things. They’re not automatons, they’re people.
Update. This avalanche of supposedly tolerant progressives who are openly against the idea of talking to their fellow citizens proves to me that America deserves everything it gets. Good luck.
You are dead wrong. I was raised in a deeply conservative lifestyle with conservative friends, family, and neighbors. I retired from a career steeped in conservatives, working shoulder to shoulder with them daily. The vast majority of the people I’ve known through the years have been conservative. I’ve been talking and listening this whole fucking time, trying to move them toward reason, naively thinking they would someday grow emotionally, become empathetic or introspective. A conservative is simply not able to experience these things. Empathy and introspection are not conservative traits.
Conservatives will not budge an inch. The more one attempts to reason with them, the more angry they become. If you aren’t careful, you will end up on their enemies list just for being a suspected non-conservative.
I appreciate your friendly approach, as it seems to come from a place of kindness and empathy, but that capacity for empathy does not exist in a conservative.
Never in history has fascism been cured by just talking and listening. Historically, the cure for fascism is only delivered by force.
No, they’re both. They know they’re spreading hate, and they find it funny.
Naw, maybe you’re not queer and not being called a pedo, or followed or having your job threatened by a former president. It’s not my job to raise an adult right and free of hate, I have one child. I don’t need to burn myself out giving Republicans 3rd and 4th chances to be decent people.
“What you think about them, they think about you”
No, this is precisely the issue. Any leftist worth their salt can’t fucking stand conservatives and YET we will still protect their basic human rights and accept them into a collective society.
Conservatives on the other hand are perpetrating violence every single day against leftists and minorities they LOUDLY do not accept into a collective society. They deny abortions for women who are on the verge of death, they advocate for draconian health care policy that massively raises the suicide rates of trans kids because they hate trans kids and they believe deep down in their racism with an unshakable fervor that makes their meager spiritual practice of christianity look sad and pathetic in comparison.
It is far past the point of having a debate with rightwing conservatives, what is left is to intimidate them into shutting up, drowning out their voices and laughing at their tiny hateful visions of the universe.
The social fabric of the US is being ripped apart by conservative white men because they can’t handle how scary using pronouns is and frankly the solution is to activate everybody else, not humor these people yet again with another discussion they are going to approach in a fundamentally disengenous way.
Hard disagree.
Your first sentence, yes I agree. The next two, not so much. In my town in 2020 we had groups of these chuds roaming around downtown, armed, hunting for “antifa,” meaning anyone wearing black or looking slightly punk. Some of them really do want to shoot us with impunity.
But yeah, it’s also my parents, who probably wouldn’t turn me into the gestapo, but the cognitive dissonance where they simultaneously believe I’m their family but I’m also “the enemy within” doesn’t seem sustainable. At some point, it’s got to be one or the other. Getting them to agree on small things hasn’t changed their overall loyalty to the party, their disdain for Dems, or our relationship.
True, but irrelevant.
Hard disagree - they have to be at least one of those things to be MAGA, usually both.
Hah! They DO live next door and I most certainly don’t find them pleasant.
Let’s assume that they are not bad people. In order to bring them to sanity, it would take an ungodly amount of pressure, and they would have to have no connections back to the cult. If there is even a single connection all the effort would be for naught.
They are not where they are, due to logic or empathy, so you can’t use logic or empathy to argue them out of it. I lost my entire extended family over this.
I know what you mean, when I put to nazis and bigots, through various civil discourses, the most agreeable and cordial justifications for their systematic capture and extermination or deportation, to my great surprise, they never acquiesce to any form of intellectual exchange, regarding the legitimate concerns I raise.
Its the most bizzare thing because, just previously, they’d been more than happy to declare thus and so the most polite and reasonable argumentations supporting the very same thing for other people. More so, they many were lamenting how unfair it was for them to be denied the opportunity to pontificate on such matters, just a short time previously.
I’m sure you can only imagine my surprise when they did this, after their claims of wanting nothing more than “civil discourse.”
Yankee here, and fully agree with what you said. Unfortunately, empathy seems to be an increasingly lost art in this country and it only seems to get worse as each side continues to dehumanized the other.