Dear @NaomiKritzer,
Thank you for your message, which I read with fascination. I have a few questions, and wonder if might impose upon your time to ask them. I'm very new to the Democratic Party, so they may seem naive, but you seem to be knowledgable.
Thank you for your message, which I read with fascination. I have a few questions, and wonder if might impose upon your time to ask them. I'm very new to the Democratic Party, so they may seem naive, but you seem to be knowledgable.
First, I'm confused about your role. Do you run the party? You say "we" with some authority--are you its official spokesperson? If so, it looks like I've got a lot to learn.
Then you say the party has never marched in lockstep, and there are members who'd fit in fine in a saner Republican Party. And I totally agree with you about 2018. Great! I'll fit in fine, it sounds like--although why the hostility to new members?
I don't know much about this Colin Peterson fellow, but I'll take your advice and learn. What I don't get is this: Why would you, given the *need* to attract former GOP voters, harangue them on Twitter--especially since we need them to win?
Or tell them their concerns about the electability of candidates among swing voters (who will make or break 2018) are "patently self-serving?" Isn't it more likely that we share your most important goal--get Trump away from the nuclear codes--and are trying to help achieve it?
I'm totally cool with voting for someone further left than I'd usually like: I have two criteria, really: Not Trump? Not a psychotic maniac? There are some candidates on the left for whom I'd vote enthusiastically--but there are some who give me that psycho vibe.
And as we all know, "psycho" isn't a left-right issue: The 20th century taught us all well that the psychos of the far-right have no monopoly on the capacity to enslave, immiserate, and shed blood. Psychos are bad news, period, whether they come from the right or the left.
So why wouldn't you *welcome* the advice of people who spent a decade overlooking how crazy the party had become? Who would know more about how that happens, how cognitive dissonance can make even intelligent people overlook things they should have seen as flashing warning signs?
Are you *sure* you're not capable of similar mistakes? I reckon humans are all hooked up pretty similarly, on both the right and the left: They develop blind spots, are wracked by cognitive dissonance, they develop tribal loyalties so passionate as to dilute their rationality.
Are you absolutely sure that couldn't happen to your party? FWIW, I was as confident as you seem to be that it couldn't happen among Democrats that it couldn't happen *in America, period.* I was wrong.
Perhaps some of the people you're telling to piss off and suck it up have something of value to contribute, in that they learned something about human nature and politics the *very* hard way?
We were forced to really confront the way "a few lunatics" on what we thought were the fringe of the party--"We've always been a big tent, etc." (in fact, we sounded a *lot* like you) can hijack a long-established political party. We've perhaps thought more about this:
After all, we're not able to kid ourselves that this is something that only happens to "them." It happened to us. So perhaps when some of us say, "Candidate X is not only unelectable (which is inherently bad, because we need to win), but giving off that psycho vibe,"
When we say, "Do you notice the cult developing around Candidate X? Do you notice that Candidate X doesn't really *know* much about the issues? Do you notice that Candidate X seems to be running on charisma and the voters' fantasies, rather than a workable plan?"
Perhaps it might be worth saying, "Hey, tell me more--we sure don't want to make your mistakes: We want to *learn* from them." (I wrote a lot more but Twitter didn't post it, which I guess tells me I was talking too much.) But if you're curious, I'll elaborate what I mean.
