This is really a pretty hard thing to do. In my social sphere the groups of people fall into three categories. 1) people who think about like me on the political issues 2) people who are calm and can rationally talk about what they may agree or disagree with me and 3) people who hate Trump or the Democrats so much that there is no chance of having a conversation with them about any political issues. The last group sucks all the oxygen out of a room there is little one can do. This last group really has a far bigger impact on everybody than is justified by their numbers. My strategy is to spend the most time with listening and talking to the group in the middle who may be on the opposite political side of where I might fall on any specific issue. They are the most useful in helping me have a complete understanding of it. Honestly the third group is just too exhausting whether it is a close family member or news outlet. I believe “The Liberal Patriot” falls in the middle group and is one of three news outlets that I will spend my time and money with
Great work here by James. Civility is an essential tool that doesn't require anyone to give up their principled points of view; it's simply about how we approach each other in our conversations, especially when we disagree, with humility and respect. This three-Ns approach is spot on.
You have laid out a very nice approach. Having served on my local school board for 6 years I learned a few lessons about working at the neighborhood level. People have very different values, experiences, and priorities. I try to remember to listen a lot and talk a little.
You might think that everyone should be able to agree on something, maybe the very basic need for personal safety?If your family is threatened or hurt by those within their neighborhood, we used to all agree that those who steal or hurt others must be dealt with for the greater good. We used to all agree that we don’t want to import criminals from other countries.
But no, we have riots in the streets by thousands objecting to removing criminals. Listening to clips of the protesters on TV leads me to believe they aren’t open to thoughtfully considering the pros and cons of their beliefs. I like KDBD’s three categories of people. The third category is alienating more and more people reducing their influence.
Hi @BetsyChapman2, thank you for the nice note. Regarding what majorities of people agree on, More Like US and AllSides have Similarity Hub (similarityhub.org) that aggregates >700 examples of common ground.
There is a big difference between respecting and having an understanding of why they feel that way, and when they have any sort of power over you and can implement their position in opposition to you. This is a source of dissension in public education.
I may appreciate that my daughter’s 7th grade math teacher thinks it is fine that my daughter doesn’t have single digit addition facts memorized. He may and did give her A’s while I believe it is crisis to be remedied immediately. That’s when my daughter applied to a private school with a higher standards. PS my daughter is now a mechanical design engineer, thanks to a sold foundation in math.
When your opinion violates my values, I will fight having it imposed on my family. Hence the popularity of school choice; we all don't have to agree. The local public school can try to provide the greatest good for the greatest numbers, and parents can choose a school suited to the needs of their child.
I am sure I am not unique in having a political discussion in meatspace that went badly. This includes some people whom I had a prior connection to, like friends and family. Social media ranges from worse to completely insane. Regular one-way media is awful too. Traditional corporate media is a leftist mono-culture and the emerging though smaller right-wing counterpart is just as bad. They exist to foster the stereotypes that the writer here deplores and create information bubbles to the point that we don't even share the same reality.
Trying to fix this is a worthy objective but I am not sure that this effort will accomplish that. As always when someone links organizations, I go and look and specifically, I look at the About Us tab. I want to see if I know anyone there and barring that from whence the the people come. The two journalism ones I looked at did not inspire confidence. First of all, the staff all declared their pronouns. The boards were drawn from the likes of J-schools, CNN and NYT. So MSM monoculture. The Institute for Citizens and Scholars was better. The board was drawn from a reasonable cross-section of the Establishment ( that is the nature of boards). A somewhat jarring visual perception is that all groups were overwhelmingly female. Given that the divisions we see are largely on the lines of sex, I don't think this is the way to fix it. In terms of the way reality is perceived, I think sex trumps identity, policy, urban/rural and even class.
I endorse the comments of KDBD about the 3 kinds of people. This is why I am more and more gravitating to the Substack world where you can find #2 sorts of people. And why I am reading this Substack in particular.
Who is this directed towards? Those who used the entire institutional infrastructure to characterize their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists for a decade? Or the couple of bloggers like Matt Walsh or Libs of Tik Tok who pushed back?
I suspect this whole effort is directed towards the latter, when it should be directed at the former.
I could not agree more. I don’t know where the author lives, but I live in Seattle and the whole premise of the post is absurd to me because it fails to recognize the illiberal basis of the Progressive project. I also find it staggeringly ridiculous that One America is singled out as part of the solution. Pramila Jayapal’s open borders globalist intifada movement does not bring people together. Their premise is anti-American. Ugh. 😩
Hi @liberalnotleftist. I'm the lead author. I live in DC. It is fine to disagree with everything Imre and I wrote. However, we referred to One America Movement (https://oneamericamovement.org/), which mainly works with leaders of religious congregations. We did not write about this different organization OneAmerica founded by Pramila Jayapal.
I looked at their website. Pretty generic and vague - "...building community and fostering dynamic learning environments where people are equipped to engage with challenging situations and materials in redemptive and restorative ways." Word Salad. Also, according to Grok "The One America Movement does not publicly disclose an exact number of members" which I think is kind of suspect.
Follow the money. This is who funds them: "The One America Movement is supported by several organizations including Stand Together Foundation, Democracy Fund, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Walter & Elise Haas Fund."
I’m going to echo several comments here about the intended audience of this piece. Having lived in Washington state for over 70 years, I’ve observed the civic and civil destruction caused by the capture of our state government and courts by liberal/progressive Democrats. Using the power of the state to prosecute a grandmother who respectfully declined to design flower arrangements for a same sex marriage seems like an egregious and obvious warning shot to anyone who dares to push back against the progressive overlords. Taking their cues from California and indulging in “ Hold my beer” activities to impose nonsense like adding licensing, training and financial requirements before one is allowed to exercise a constitutional right. Washington state used to be pretty liberal (in the classical sense). One party Democrat rule has put paid to that. I’m afraid the authors are living in a fantasy land.
I often hear of people ending long term friendships or ending contact with family, over politics. I have to wonder how good is an ideology if it includes losing a brother or sister.
A problem on the national level is that journalists and pundits tend not to know anyone who is working class, and they have to write about us as if we are a separate species. They cite statistics and studies of things that surprise them whereas in a different period they could have simply known by interacting with friends and neighbors. Often I wonder if they ever go to a party, or visit with anyone who is blue collar.
With the advent of planned communities and Homeowner Associations we are more stratified by income than ever before.
Somewhere, I think during the Clinton era, the Democrats went off the political rails adopting an almost completely negative campaign strategy delivered by a media spin machine.
The tactics have become so common-place I don’t think most of us can recognize the corrosive impact.
I use this analogy to help people see it and hopefully start to reject it.
Say that the Republicans are Pepsi and the Democrats are Coke (colors reversed for fun). Coke decides it wants more market share but instead of promoting their own brand, developing new products, basically growing their business from real productive merit… they instead launch an advertising campaign that seeks to damage Pepsi’s brand. The Coke Democrats go after the CEO claiming he sexually harassed some female 30 years ago. They claim he posted Nazi affiliation on his Facebook page. They claim Pepsi uses Moroccan slave labor, and their factories pollute the environment. None of this is remotely true, but that does not matter to the Democrats. The goal is character assassination and destruction of their opposition’s brand.
How would that type of thing make you feel? Say this tactic of negative brand advertising in the market was commonplace. It isn’t commonplace because product and service companies operate with some level of moral and ethical principles and understand that their sustainable success will only happen by producing the best products on merit.
The other problem with this negative branding strategy is that it weakens the operation of the attacker… because they tool around that and not around building a better mousetrap.
This is where we find the Democrats today. They are stuck on that strategy. Part of it has to do with the party being controlled by educated feminists where females in general tend to use covert aggression tactics… taking down and out their competition for status instead of just competing on productive merit.
You would think after the stinging losses from Trump the Democrats would learn and stop… but they just keep doubling down on their resistance, protests, riots and claiming everyone that disagrees with them is a racist, misogynist, fascist, hater.
Democrats are sick… they have adopted a mass psychosis of negativism to gain and retain power that is frankly the source of almost everything wrong with the world today.
This is an elephant in the room topic. The New York Times and NPR have near total control over the beliefs and opinions of the Progressive Left. As their narratives go, so goes political discourse. They must be exposed and shamed for their gross distortions and lies of omission. This requires the work of ethical independent journalists and commentators who can document the daily failings of the media without injecting their own bias. Also, don't be one of those Substackers who accept hot takes and dubious posts at face value. When people make extreme claims without good links and background, don't post a comment in support. Do a little research on your own. Much of what I see on Substack is just clickbait and hate farming.
I wish that were true. Progressives have run the Democratic party, the media, and much of academia for several years. Longtime NPR listeners should be acutely aware of NPR's fixation on identity and their unquestioning acceptance of the many concepts and claims that Progressives promote. Objective reality is forcing the NYT to at least obliquely recognize the facts surrounding gender ideology, but Progressive dogma is still front and center. Most Democrats don't know what they don't know because NPR and the NYT have been playing to the narrative at the expense of comprehensive and objective reporting.
This is a fine article attempting to address the hostility that exists between American voters, die hard Republicans and die hard Democrats. What about the die hard unaffiliated and independent voters? I am one of those unaffiliated voters who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times. Those die hards on the extremes can rant, rave, and cause havoc, but it is us in the middle who decide the elections. Right? I am constantly searching for the truth about what is going on in our country, reading and hearing far left articles, reading and hearing far right articles, from which I attempt to filter out what I deem to be common sense, something I can vote for. So far, I don't hear any common sense coming from the Democrats. All they do is attack and attempt to stop every effort by President Trump to do something that, to me and millions of other independent voters, seems to be a common sense effort to do right by America. We can analyze the psyches of extremists forever, but it's the middle of the road guys like me who matter most.
This is really a pretty hard thing to do. In my social sphere the groups of people fall into three categories. 1) people who think about like me on the political issues 2) people who are calm and can rationally talk about what they may agree or disagree with me and 3) people who hate Trump or the Democrats so much that there is no chance of having a conversation with them about any political issues. The last group sucks all the oxygen out of a room there is little one can do. This last group really has a far bigger impact on everybody than is justified by their numbers. My strategy is to spend the most time with listening and talking to the group in the middle who may be on the opposite political side of where I might fall on any specific issue. They are the most useful in helping me have a complete understanding of it. Honestly the third group is just too exhausting whether it is a close family member or news outlet. I believe “The Liberal Patriot” falls in the middle group and is one of three news outlets that I will spend my time and money with
I’m in total agreement about the 3rd group of people … they are small in number but big in influence.
I also like the Liberal Patriot for the reasons you gave. It gives me hope that we have more in common than those on the extreme ends.
Great work here by James. Civility is an essential tool that doesn't require anyone to give up their principled points of view; it's simply about how we approach each other in our conversations, especially when we disagree, with humility and respect. This three-Ns approach is spot on.
You have laid out a very nice approach. Having served on my local school board for 6 years I learned a few lessons about working at the neighborhood level. People have very different values, experiences, and priorities. I try to remember to listen a lot and talk a little.
You might think that everyone should be able to agree on something, maybe the very basic need for personal safety?If your family is threatened or hurt by those within their neighborhood, we used to all agree that those who steal or hurt others must be dealt with for the greater good. We used to all agree that we don’t want to import criminals from other countries.
But no, we have riots in the streets by thousands objecting to removing criminals. Listening to clips of the protesters on TV leads me to believe they aren’t open to thoughtfully considering the pros and cons of their beliefs. I like KDBD’s three categories of people. The third category is alienating more and more people reducing their influence.
Hi @BetsyChapman2, thank you for the nice note. Regarding what majorities of people agree on, More Like US and AllSides have Similarity Hub (similarityhub.org) that aggregates >700 examples of common ground.
There is a big difference between respecting and having an understanding of why they feel that way, and when they have any sort of power over you and can implement their position in opposition to you. This is a source of dissension in public education.
I may appreciate that my daughter’s 7th grade math teacher thinks it is fine that my daughter doesn’t have single digit addition facts memorized. He may and did give her A’s while I believe it is crisis to be remedied immediately. That’s when my daughter applied to a private school with a higher standards. PS my daughter is now a mechanical design engineer, thanks to a sold foundation in math.
When your opinion violates my values, I will fight having it imposed on my family. Hence the popularity of school choice; we all don't have to agree. The local public school can try to provide the greatest good for the greatest numbers, and parents can choose a school suited to the needs of their child.
Thanks. Will look. Really 700 areas of common ground? What a comforting thought.
Great. It's >700 unique survey questions showing common ground, organized into >20 topics.
Irresponsible politicians and media figures nourish and even encourage the Perception Gap that the writers so aptly describe.
I am sure I am not unique in having a political discussion in meatspace that went badly. This includes some people whom I had a prior connection to, like friends and family. Social media ranges from worse to completely insane. Regular one-way media is awful too. Traditional corporate media is a leftist mono-culture and the emerging though smaller right-wing counterpart is just as bad. They exist to foster the stereotypes that the writer here deplores and create information bubbles to the point that we don't even share the same reality.
Trying to fix this is a worthy objective but I am not sure that this effort will accomplish that. As always when someone links organizations, I go and look and specifically, I look at the About Us tab. I want to see if I know anyone there and barring that from whence the the people come. The two journalism ones I looked at did not inspire confidence. First of all, the staff all declared their pronouns. The boards were drawn from the likes of J-schools, CNN and NYT. So MSM monoculture. The Institute for Citizens and Scholars was better. The board was drawn from a reasonable cross-section of the Establishment ( that is the nature of boards). A somewhat jarring visual perception is that all groups were overwhelmingly female. Given that the divisions we see are largely on the lines of sex, I don't think this is the way to fix it. In terms of the way reality is perceived, I think sex trumps identity, policy, urban/rural and even class.
I endorse the comments of KDBD about the 3 kinds of people. This is why I am more and more gravitating to the Substack world where you can find #2 sorts of people. And why I am reading this Substack in particular.
Who is this directed towards? Those who used the entire institutional infrastructure to characterize their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists for a decade? Or the couple of bloggers like Matt Walsh or Libs of Tik Tok who pushed back?
I suspect this whole effort is directed towards the latter, when it should be directed at the former.
I could not agree more. I don’t know where the author lives, but I live in Seattle and the whole premise of the post is absurd to me because it fails to recognize the illiberal basis of the Progressive project. I also find it staggeringly ridiculous that One America is singled out as part of the solution. Pramila Jayapal’s open borders globalist intifada movement does not bring people together. Their premise is anti-American. Ugh. 😩
Hi @liberalnotleftist. I'm the lead author. I live in DC. It is fine to disagree with everything Imre and I wrote. However, we referred to One America Movement (https://oneamericamovement.org/), which mainly works with leaders of religious congregations. We did not write about this different organization OneAmerica founded by Pramila Jayapal.
OK, thanks for clarifying. I wonder why they’d use such a confusing name.
Haha, I don't know any details about how other founders made decisions to name their organizations.
I looked at their website. Pretty generic and vague - "...building community and fostering dynamic learning environments where people are equipped to engage with challenging situations and materials in redemptive and restorative ways." Word Salad. Also, according to Grok "The One America Movement does not publicly disclose an exact number of members" which I think is kind of suspect.
Follow the money. This is who funds them: "The One America Movement is supported by several organizations including Stand Together Foundation, Democracy Fund, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Walter & Elise Haas Fund."
I’m going to echo several comments here about the intended audience of this piece. Having lived in Washington state for over 70 years, I’ve observed the civic and civil destruction caused by the capture of our state government and courts by liberal/progressive Democrats. Using the power of the state to prosecute a grandmother who respectfully declined to design flower arrangements for a same sex marriage seems like an egregious and obvious warning shot to anyone who dares to push back against the progressive overlords. Taking their cues from California and indulging in “ Hold my beer” activities to impose nonsense like adding licensing, training and financial requirements before one is allowed to exercise a constitutional right. Washington state used to be pretty liberal (in the classical sense). One party Democrat rule has put paid to that. I’m afraid the authors are living in a fantasy land.
I often hear of people ending long term friendships or ending contact with family, over politics. I have to wonder how good is an ideology if it includes losing a brother or sister.
A problem on the national level is that journalists and pundits tend not to know anyone who is working class, and they have to write about us as if we are a separate species. They cite statistics and studies of things that surprise them whereas in a different period they could have simply known by interacting with friends and neighbors. Often I wonder if they ever go to a party, or visit with anyone who is blue collar.
With the advent of planned communities and Homeowner Associations we are more stratified by income than ever before.
Somewhere, I think during the Clinton era, the Democrats went off the political rails adopting an almost completely negative campaign strategy delivered by a media spin machine.
The tactics have become so common-place I don’t think most of us can recognize the corrosive impact.
I use this analogy to help people see it and hopefully start to reject it.
Say that the Republicans are Pepsi and the Democrats are Coke (colors reversed for fun). Coke decides it wants more market share but instead of promoting their own brand, developing new products, basically growing their business from real productive merit… they instead launch an advertising campaign that seeks to damage Pepsi’s brand. The Coke Democrats go after the CEO claiming he sexually harassed some female 30 years ago. They claim he posted Nazi affiliation on his Facebook page. They claim Pepsi uses Moroccan slave labor, and their factories pollute the environment. None of this is remotely true, but that does not matter to the Democrats. The goal is character assassination and destruction of their opposition’s brand.
How would that type of thing make you feel? Say this tactic of negative brand advertising in the market was commonplace. It isn’t commonplace because product and service companies operate with some level of moral and ethical principles and understand that their sustainable success will only happen by producing the best products on merit.
The other problem with this negative branding strategy is that it weakens the operation of the attacker… because they tool around that and not around building a better mousetrap.
This is where we find the Democrats today. They are stuck on that strategy. Part of it has to do with the party being controlled by educated feminists where females in general tend to use covert aggression tactics… taking down and out their competition for status instead of just competing on productive merit.
You would think after the stinging losses from Trump the Democrats would learn and stop… but they just keep doubling down on their resistance, protests, riots and claiming everyone that disagrees with them is a racist, misogynist, fascist, hater.
Democrats are sick… they have adopted a mass psychosis of negativism to gain and retain power that is frankly the source of almost everything wrong with the world today.
This is an elephant in the room topic. The New York Times and NPR have near total control over the beliefs and opinions of the Progressive Left. As their narratives go, so goes political discourse. They must be exposed and shamed for their gross distortions and lies of omission. This requires the work of ethical independent journalists and commentators who can document the daily failings of the media without injecting their own bias. Also, don't be one of those Substackers who accept hot takes and dubious posts at face value. When people make extreme claims without good links and background, don't post a comment in support. Do a little research on your own. Much of what I see on Substack is just clickbait and hate farming.
NYT and NPR are more center leftists, if you read lefty "progressive" web pages they loath both outfits as well as CNN, Wapo, and LATimes.
I wish that were true. Progressives have run the Democratic party, the media, and much of academia for several years. Longtime NPR listeners should be acutely aware of NPR's fixation on identity and their unquestioning acceptance of the many concepts and claims that Progressives promote. Objective reality is forcing the NYT to at least obliquely recognize the facts surrounding gender ideology, but Progressive dogma is still front and center. Most Democrats don't know what they don't know because NPR and the NYT have been playing to the narrative at the expense of comprehensive and objective reporting.
This is a fine article attempting to address the hostility that exists between American voters, die hard Republicans and die hard Democrats. What about the die hard unaffiliated and independent voters? I am one of those unaffiliated voters who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times. Those die hards on the extremes can rant, rave, and cause havoc, but it is us in the middle who decide the elections. Right? I am constantly searching for the truth about what is going on in our country, reading and hearing far left articles, reading and hearing far right articles, from which I attempt to filter out what I deem to be common sense, something I can vote for. So far, I don't hear any common sense coming from the Democrats. All they do is attack and attempt to stop every effort by President Trump to do something that, to me and millions of other independent voters, seems to be a common sense effort to do right by America. We can analyze the psyches of extremists forever, but it's the middle of the road guys like me who matter most.