in the fade: Some real shock and awe..
I didn’t watch the debates last night, but the further askew the far right pulls us, and the more mute—or should I say ‘dumb’—the left remains, the less I recognize the country I love.
I’m not convinced that the left remaining mute is the problem. When the left do speak up, at least from what I can see over here in the Old World, they counter the rhetoric of the far right, the Glenn Becks and the Paul Ryans, with facts and logic and common sense. But that’s doomed to fail because it’s an attempt to reason the GOP’s supporters away from a mental position they reached via irrational means.
You can’t counteract blind faith with reason, whether that faith is in a higher being or in the concepts that the Arabs are all out to get us or that Medicare is un-American or that artificially created currency crises are a good idea. I think this fundamental misunderstanding is why so many voters feel the Democrat’s public language is at best insipid and at worse irrelevant.
Notes