Twangbanger
Grandmaster
- Oct 9, 2010
- 7,099
- 113
It ends up that way, because Black Americans in particular seem to have a sort of social "scripting" process in place, in which an older generation of the family tells the younger generation "how it is in this country:" they have "the talk" in which they explain that they cannot / will not get a fair shake in society, and that the federal government is the only entity which ever has or ever will consistently stand on their side and help them get ahead. The young person can literally grow up expecting a bad outcome. Then, when they experience a rude and unfortunate hurtful comment at the hands of some thoughtless white person (cf. Kut's famous INGO anecdotal account of the email that got sent around the police department - everybody has one), and the whole apparatus of society does not immediately come down like a lighting bolt on the offending person, the observer says, "Yep: pop was right. This country never will give a fair shake." The folklore has been validated, in their mind, and the cycle continues.
To piggy-back onto the above social scripting process, liberal groups then tell their followers that concepts such as "small government" and "personal accountability" are code-whistles to racist white people. As such, the entire GOP idea-agenda becomes tainted by association. The GOP becomes increasingly unable to defend even a scrap of it, to people like your Democrat friends you're trying to convince.
A switch did happen: Lyndon Johnson saw the opportunity to place his signature on the "right side of history." And since people associate national conditions, successes, and failures with the identity of the person who was President at the time, LBJ permanently accrued credit for that position to the Democratic Party. (Notwithstanding the fact that some of racism's most ardent supporters at the time were members of that party).
Regarding your more progressive examples of gay marriage and LGBT rights, to state it simply, the Civil Rights Movement which began for the benefit of people like Rosa Parks has had other unrelated causes grafted-onto it. Things like the issue of boys who want to win state track titles as girls, simply by filling out the paperwork differently. To make matters worse, conservative Black Americans who are privately abhorrent of such nonsense, and would never tolerate it in their own families, nevertheless stand aside and won't say a word about the movement started by Martin Luther King being used for this purpose. It isn't because they agree with it. They think it's as stupid as I or (presumably?) you do. It's that the American Civil Rights Movement has a self-normalizing characteristic to it: once a certain group has been benefited by it, they are forbidden to criticize any other group coming later seeking to benefit from it. Because they will be seen as traitors to the cause, a sort of ingrate who saw their own interests in life enhanced by something, but who will not stand for another group seeking to benefit from it. And so, this is how teenage boys wanting to sit in the girls' bathroom to pee became morally equivalent to Rosa Parks wanting to sit on a bus. If there were to develop a significant rift within the Civil Rights Movement on these points, the foolishness could be stopped. The GOP or others could claim some scrap of legitimacy for opposing it. And the Civil Rights Industry knows that - which is why they enforce the orthodoxy. Anybody who breaks ranks (eg. feminists vs. transgender females) gets the "Kanye Treatment."
The American Civil Rights movement, which began as one of the great noble endeavors of humanity, has morphed into an unopposable wrecking-ball aimed at wiping out every last remaining vestige of personal accountability for one's choices. And politicians, companies, the GOP, you name it, are terrified of it, and run like hell the other direction as soon as it changes direction and heads towards a certain issue.
Given the above, what can be concluded is that the only way the GOP can ever hope to shave off some of the Democratic friends you're describing, is to immediately repudiate and renounce every position they have on any past, present, or future "Civil Rights Issue" to be named later, cease to have an opinion on anything having to deal with preserving traditional attitudes on _any_thing, and morph into what basically amounts to the Libertarian Party. According to some accounts, this would include giving up on ideas like "small government" and "personal accountability," since we all "know" they're just talking about the sort of muscular Federal Government which stood on the side of people like Rosa Parks, and because such talk is dog-whistle cynically calculated to subliminally raise-up and pander-to aggrieved whites.
I think you can see the corner the GOP is painted-in. They are reduced to being nothing more than the Party of Oligarchy. They only positions they can safely take, without being accused of being racists, are:
1) Policies securing the benefits of Cheap Wages for American business (trade, immigration reform...)
2) Neverending War - "keeping us safe."
The fact that the above, as you mention, places the GOP on the side of doing nothing to combat concentration of power in the hands of big business, further seals their fate in the minds of the kinds of people you're trying to convince. On their worst days, they're racists; at their best, they're nothing more than reliable defenders of the Oligarchy.
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