2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillarian Outrage on full display: "Oh Noes! Bernie's courting Trump supporters" [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)About the same time that Hillary was a freshman Republican campaigning for Barry Goldwater, who was working AGAINST passage of the Civil Rights Act. Should we construe that her being involved with that was her wanting to just hang out with racists who were voting for Goldwater for that reason?
NO! I would never accuse Hillary of being an outright racist like many Republicans are. Sometimes her priorities aren't the way I'd like them to be, and she flip flops on them so that its hard to tell where her true sentiments are. But I wouldn't label her over some construed relationship as I just diagramed here.
I'd like to think that we can give the same respect to Bernie who's trying to reach across the aisle to many who support Trump NOT for his xenophobic and other bigoted tendencies, but because of his attempt to be about the sole candidate in that race trying to appeal to average people with a sense of populism that the other Republicans won't dare do at the risk of upsetting their kingmaker donors that Trump doesn't need.
Now, I do believe there are some Republicans that Trump appeals to that we don't want to try and be in the same room with. But I also believe that there are many there that want something good for average Americans, and being lower information voters, aren't seeing the bigger picture outside of Trump's message that Korporate Media is more inclined to feed them than anything about Bernie.
Another similar circumstances exist around many young Americans who find libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul appealing because of Libertarian's more publicized stances supporting rights on issues like privacy, drug use, and not being involved in other wars. And many of these young people don't see the bigger picture of what Libertarians also stand for that isn't talked about a lot that would take away a lot of their rights and wealth, and the ability of government to regulate the behavior of rich oligarchs. Those are voters we should try to appeal to as well, and let them know about those other issues that Democrats also support as well, even if many corporate Democrats don't talk as good on issues like the privacy, drug legalization, and war spending, etc. that Libertarians do now.
When we appeal to those looking at Libertarian candidates, we aren't wanting to adopt the other less talked about bad policies of Libertarians, but show where we have in common with the good policies they have and others that they might not be aware of that we also work better on too. In the case of Libertarians, the well known policies are the more appealing ones to progressives too. The opposite of course is the case with Trump, where the more well known policies are his social stances that are more bigoted. There's a reason for that reversal of which is more public too, as in both cases the less public issues are those that affect us all in terms of the elite powers over us.
We need to reverse the "Reagan Democrat" migration to Reagan in the 80's to come back to our party for the right reasons instead of becoming Republicans then for the wrong reasons.