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If you're going to be candid with other people and demand candor of them, it is a matter of honesty to admit that the voting machine stuff is a potential problem rather than a real one. That the Florida election result of 2000 was proof of an intentionally incompetent system failing and the Republicans having- and abusing- all the structural advantages (money, lies, public official actions e.g. the Supreme Court decision). And that white Americans are presently about 55% solidly Republican, 30%-35% Democratic voting. That is what the evidence says clearly- the rest is suspicions. Why not let your friends live in the empirical world, let them live outside the mania and paranoia and pain of things in which they have and make no emotional investment? The moral argument is important, but investment in the political game is voluntary in this country and politics is- unlike religion- a game in which morality is often an optional constraint.
If you feel the country has been taken over by fascists and overlords, well, that's because too much of it has. But don't be ahistorical- they were already around ten and fifteen and twenty and thirty and a hundred years ago, and they submerged the fascism when it wasn't necessary to use it to retain power. If you think the bigotry now is bad, you don't know what and how viciously the first Baby Boomer liberals had to fight the generation older than them.
Don't let Arnie get you down. Whatever he does, he can't change the basic facts of Californian life much. Under Davis there was a steady blue collar and middle class white flow eastward and northward, to places where white privilege (more money for less productivity and education) is greater. Arnie will likely try to pay off companies already destined to leave to stay on in California for a few more months or years, which will be unsustainable and ineffectual- certainly not the basis of a proper recovery. He'll probably stem things for a short time with the measures his buddies want inplemented, and then it'll collapse on them and their supporters. The top layer of Republicans will all cash in on taxpayer billions, of course, but on the other hand it's not that large a payoff if it's the end of their kind for at least a generation in the political arena and maybe the dominance of their social and economic power altogether- as I suspect it is. (The present Bush looting of the Treasury is a similar kind of involuntary payoff, in my opinion, to a decaying national colonial elite about to move offshore.) IMHO it's good riddance, even at that price (a few percent of GNP for one year or a few), if we can get them out the door and lock it.
As for good news to keep your spirits up, Davis and Schwarzenegger are probably the last of their particular kind of Democrats and Republicans to get elected in California. Other states will rumble yet, but most have already done this particular thing (purging the old style centrists, mostly Democrats) in ~1994 more thoroughly than California did and have been progressively, so to speak, purging the Republicans who replaced them as renewed Democratic talent has delivered its proofs.
By 2006 or 2008 there will be enough of a majority of social liberal leaners that the Republicans will have to change or die in national elections. There is a similar slow but quite constant increase in the proportion of control of the national wealth shifting from reactionary to moderate hands so that by 2020 the economic system will begin to break up its colonial economic doctrine (aka corporatist capitalism) with a chaotic messiness. '04 is yet to emerge for what it is.
But don't expect that what emerges when Democrats do win to match your expectations and demands. The corporations and the people who really run them are still crude and bulky entities with much power and unsociable interests, and we can make their relationship with society at large at best symbiotic- rather than parasitic. When Latino/black/mulatto/mestizo- post-white- culture starts changing towns and cities to the point of being inescapable, when everyones' kids are taken into it, it won't always be in agreeable and aesthetically pleasing and priorly convention-appropriate fashion. Liberals of the present will have a hard time with much about the society we are paving the way for, though we surely will marvel at other aspects.
So being a little sympathetic of conservatives of the present is valuable for keeping your sanity; now is not all of time, and the present condition will seem better than many you will yet encounter as well as worse than many others. Holding power is overrated as a method of doing good, and it is only means rather than reason for the doing of evil.
The way Americans have evaluated each other for thousands of years is whether you know what is truly important, and whether you can make the most of- find a bit or a lot of the sublime and the worthwhile in- the things available to you. Your friends still embody that to you, you certainly do embody some of it to them, and certainly both sides will try to embody more of it to each other as you grow. Politics is per se the impersonal, soulless, part of social life- there is only so much we can demand from it and some of it will always be painful if we engage it. Some people just do not feel called to, or capable of, the suffering involved. And maybe their advice to you is not so much discouragement as: please push these things away from you to arm's length so that it doesn't get at your inner life so much, which is the personal and what they love about you. Value them for trying to tell you as much. Maybe they don't make as much of an effort to get at truth as you would like, but humility says it's not yet clear which you is really more successful, more able to make life worthwhile in so doing. Please feel fortunate at having friends with whom you can disagree about things of this kind- many people do not. This too shall pass.
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