Reply #96: My responses...I kinda sorta agree but not totally

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

People here are angry because people hate to lose.

Far too many people have so much of their identity rooted in the underdog syndrome, that I think they love to lose more than they will admit and unless a win is a win on all fronts rather than a reasonable compromise will frame the win as a loss (see my post above on Gray Davis)

The bottom line is that people here at DU hold minority opinions on practically every issue, and, in a Democracy, that means you lose. Now don't give me this Al Gore won the election crap. You know perfectly well that 1) Al Gore is no where near as liberal as people here would like him to be, and 2) most of the 48% of the electorate that voted for Al Gore don't share your ideals either.

Many positions here are indeed reasonable but end up being framed in a manner where only the minority can completely support them. I think most people can see the problem and injustice with a CEO of a losing company making 500 times the worker's pay but when you start talking about pulling corporate charters to spite those CEO's to the detriment of those workers, people aren't going to get on board...nobody wants to be complicit in their own demise but for the people cited in my first point to you above.


If you want to stop losing, you have to change what people in this country believe. The mistake is to believe that the best place to accomplish this is in an election. Its not. People don't change their mind on an issue when they hear a politician talk. By the point election time comes around people already know where they stand and they go shopping for a candidate that shares those views.

Part of that has to do with a poor grasp of multifactorial issues i.e. trade..bilateral agreements etc....but also it is quite difficult to generate short cut language to combat the right. They say "welfare queen" or "lucky ducky" we are forced to respond with actual negative consequences of policy requiring more thought than the average attention span.


If you want to change the way this country thinks about issues you have to work long before an election begins and you have to work outside the political process. This is the thing that the far right grasps that the far left does not. The far right locks up its people through the activities of think tanks and churches that ostensibly have nothing to do with politics. The ideals of the far right are nurtured in these places long before election time. That's how elections are won, that's why we keep losing.

The right accomplished this over a period of 30 years. We live in an age of instant gratification where any ground not gained equals a complete "sell-out"