What Now? Part Three: It's Not About Reasoning with the Right-Wing
If the Trump presidential campaign’s success didn’t convince people, then nothing will. Liberal people want to cling to the belief that just rationally explaining something to a right-winger and reciting policy proposals ought to convince them. We have an undying faith in education as the presentation of information. We really want to believe that if human beings just hear the facts, they’ll come around. We think that it’s some misunderstanding or failure of logic that causes people to “vote against their self-interest.” And we’re aghast that people actually accept that we’re in a “post-fact” world. It’s easy, then, to conclude that people who vote for those who use them are just ignorant of something they should know. So, we expect that enlightening them to their lack is the solution. There’s a moveable middle that will actually listen to such argumentation, a middle, by the way, that seems to be shrinking because of decades of Republican right-wing consultants’ work to fram