Using reason in a post-Truth era

(The systematic erosion of public confidence in reliable news sources is said to be a well-known fascist strategy.  Locate a reliable news source, and keep consuming it; just throwing up your hands and playing solitaire is a losing idea!  Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Don't get mad, get even.  I am generally opposed to violence of any kind, even verbal violence, because it does not work for progressives.  All this hysterical anti-fascist diatribes we get on social media (read: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter), have negative effects.  The chief negative effect is that they repel conservatives who have had enough.  There are many of those.  I see increasingly more evidence that reasonable people who are conservatives find that they can no longer stand to be associated with the nonsense that the undescribable losers who appear to support the GOP and/or the President keep constantly spouting.  (Why do I say appear to support?  You figure it out.  A significant majority of members of Congress are cynics.)

In November, after the new, reformed Putin makes a visit to the warmly welcoming White House, (or who knows; maybe Trump has planned a stupid trick that he hopes will destroy Putin, like stealing his underwear so he can't leave, but will probably result in all sorts of horrible things--US intervention usually backfires,) we want disillusioned conservatives voting with Democrats.  The last thing we need is more anti-conservative rhetoric, such as "We don't need no steenking conservatives to help defeat Trump!  Why don't you crawl back under the rocks from under which you crawlded out of?"  We all know the idiots who used to say this sort of thing in funny movies.  Don't be that guy.

I have been watching conservative videos on YouTube.  Why?  Well, I told Google that I no longer wanted to have my feed adjusted to what Google thinks I would enjoy seeing.  It turns out that (until I insisted that they do not use my mouse clicks to select what I see) Google made sure that even my suggested YouTube videos were selected to be only progressive-friendly ones.  So Google's advertising technique actually put me in a progressive bubble.  I can honestly say that my Google-managed bubble was a far more comfortable place in the Internet than this free-for-all digital world which I now inhabit.  Be careful what you wish for.

For more than a year I have wondered what the conservative sector could possibly say that would persuade people that progressives and liberals don't have a leg to stand on.  Well.  I saw smart-mouthed alt-right congressmen shutting down polite black congresswomen and senators.  What do they mean by shutting down?  Insulting into silence.  Countering arguments with insults seems one of the few things that alt-right congressmen have learned to do.

Tomi Lahren, a conservative talk-show host who is much admired, says that she likes hearing the popular candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak.  I couldn't bear to actually watch the video, because it would consist of Lahren's poorly-argued rebuttals of Ocasio-Cortez's goals.  Her goals are: (1) a living wage for everyone, (2) Health care for all, and (3) education for all.  Let's look at these objectives dispassionately.

(1) A living wage for all.  The conservative rebuttal of this is: Who will pay for it?  Taxes, obviously, so this is yet another instance of this Puerto-Rican woman wanting to transfer the hard-earned money of the long-suffering Koch Brothers, as well as thousands of struggling small businessmen and the middle-class into the hands of her fellow Puerto-Ricans.  On top of that, it will encourage more immigration from Mexico, more lazy minority bums from trying to find work, and will encourage these people who will get on the welfare rolls to go out and get more drugs.

(2) Health care for all.  This is a philosophical difference between the conservatives (who are either affluent executive-level people, or poor folks who stubbornly refuse health care, and most kinds of preventive medicine) who either don't need or don't want subsidized health care, and progressives, who think health care should be a given, especially for children.  Ocasio-Cortez is not going to persuade conservatives to think positively about universal health care, and the Health Care Industry will encourage keeping it private, which means more profits for them.

(3) Education for all.  Again: Who will pay for it?  The conservative rebuttal of this will have to be more subtle, and filled with dog-whistle terminology, and will add up to: we do not want the poor, and blacks and minorities and immigrants getting illusions of grandeur, so that our darling white boys will get crowded out of the good jobs, and nobody will be available to patch up the potholes.

The fact is that Ocasio-Cortez does not strike me as someone who wants a living wage, and education just for her fellow ethnic minorities; she wants it for everyone. What Bernie Sanders and the far Left wants to do is to include health, education and a living wage into the basic stuff that is available free to everyone; and then the rich can go out and get better health, better education, and more money for themselves and their children, the way it has always been done.

[Added later: I did force myself to watch a few minutes of the Tomi Lahren-related video on Fox TV, and was surprised to see that it was --at least in the segment I watched-- not a vicious attack on Ocasio-Cortez, but simply a patronizing dismissal of her as a force to be reckoned with.  She had been interviewed about her position on Israel and the Palestinian settlements, and she had conceded that she was not ready to answer questions on why she opposed the settlements.

Most Millennials will be in the same position, because the conflicts in Israel and the Palestinian settlements are so freighted with historical baggage that younger people simply cannot get their heads around the convoluted arguments the Israeli government gives for breaking agreements with the Palestinians.  The very presence of the Israelis in Israel after WW2 was based on various international agreements, mostly negotiated by the British.  But Israel has kept its borders open to Jews from anywhere in the World, which means that they must constantly acquire more farmland for new settlers.  They keep track of every Palestinian infraction of any sort, and use them to justify more Israeli settlements on the West Bank, contrary to agreements, and of course, Palestinians make attacks in retaliation, and so on.  If we wait for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to study up on the issue and make a statement, that would probably be suitable as a response to any questions on it that may come up.]

Health.  Why is universal health care so hard to achieve?  Because the Health Industry has driven up the cost of health care artificially high--which can be done in a supply-and-demand economy using scarcity techniques--so that if health care was readily available, it would cut into the profit margin of the health care vendors.  Only de-escalating health-care costs can make this happen.

Education.  This is a huge problem that is tied to the economics of labor in a free society.  Some education should be free, and of course some of it is.  Making college education free sounds like a great plan for vast majority of us, and in theory it simply means that every one can postpone actually paying attention to their teachers until they go to college, where they can start trying to learn the skills that their parents and grandparents learned in school.  Rich kids are already doing this.  (Not very well, because if they major in Business, they can essentially not learn anything.  (Okay, so I have it in for business majors, but forget that.  Just don't elect one for President.)

A living wage.  This is actually tied to other things.  If basic shelter (housing) is available for free, basic food is available for free, basic education is available for free, then 'A living wage' begins to look entirely different.  I'm not opposed to a living wage for anyone, but it seems to conflict with the determinedly anti-socialist attitude that has been common in the US for so long.  If the Socialist attitudes of those on the far Left spreads, then eventually there will be bloody revolution, and a more egalitarian society will emerge out of the ashes.*  The only way this can be prevented is if the US can force China and Mexico to be the workers, (the actual makers), which will allow the US to be the takers, as we have been for many decades!  This is, of course, what the GOP is trying to do, but it suits their purposes to designate the poor and the immigrants as Takers, while they call the 1% the Makers, because they provide factories in which the poor can make things for their bosses).  The GOP classes the poor, minorities, immigrants, and in some cases women, with Chinese and Mexicans, in other words, people who should not be enjoying Stuff.

Well, anyway, decent conservatives are becoming demoralized.  If they help 'unseat' the GOP majorities in the house and the senate, we are morally obliged to establish a rational, welcoming set of principles to which they can subscribe, on which to base some sort of coalition that can hold together for the polls, and for at least enough time after the elections to reestablish moderately progressive, reasonable policies and laws.  I don't think an F150 in every pot is going to work.

Most importantly, it will be very difficult to base any coalition of moderates and liberals on their common hate of minorities, as Trump had done.  It is a miracle that it worked at all, because it seems that those whose guiding principle is hate of minorities and immigrants, are found in clusters in the central parts of the country.  Urban and bi-coastal areas are far less down on minorities, despite the fact that it is in these places that minorities live.  Minorities themselves probably do tend to dilute the hostility, but it seems reasonable to think that those who are familiar with minorities are less hostile to them, but I could be wrong.

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