How did we get here? How is this possible? If there are so many critically important things going on right now, how is it we have failed to reach any kind of common ground?
Priorities. In ANY relationship, when one person starts to get really heated over a specific subject, the other person should ask themselves "is this worth it? Do we need to have this much conflict in our relationship, or should I compromise?" When there is no exploration of each other's ideas, and one side is convinced of their own inherent virtue, then that relationship dysfunctions and ceases to serve those in it.
Lets look at some things here that might not have been prioritized well.
Bathroom Equality
If someone told me, as a CIS male, I had to dress up as a woman when I go out, or I could not use the bathroom, that would be horrifying and inconvenient for me. I would feel rejected by society, I would be loud about this injustice. When the LGBT community complains about restroom use, I might not completely understand, but I can clearly see the problem.
But let me tell you that as a CIS male I am uncomfortable using the bathroom in public all the time anyways. Society constantly judges men by their penis size. Consider my options when I need to use the public restroom:
- If I stand and pee in a urinal, wow, creepy. What if kids are around? What if some guy peeing next to me is taller or shorter than me? What if I hear a sound in his direction and want to look his way? What if one of my friends shakes my shoulders and says "ha, I knew you couldn't aim!" Society is forcing me to expose myself against my consent.
- If I pee in the toilet, I am a big sissy for not standing to be judged like the real men. Or maybe someone will want to kick my ass because they think I was born female. Or maybe I am just not man enough to make the water flow in front of others. Or maybe my penis is so shockingly inadequate that I can be hardly considered a man in the first place and should hence not pee in front of others anyways.
- Ironically, if I have to take a legitimate crap, no matter how loud and how stinky, I still have to be worried about 2.
Unisex bathrooms are MUCH better for CIS males. I am relieved when in medical settings I have business to do and all that is available are single occupant restrooms. Trans-friendly bathrooms are everyone-friendly bathrooms.
But it was really clear that this was pissing off the right. They were willing to get violent over traditional bathroom use. It was clearly going to influence the election, and bathroom equality became the new sexual equality issue.
But now that the left has lost the election, ALL sexual equality progress is now in jeopardy, with multiple supreme court vacancies likely over the next few years. Marriage equality? Reproductive rights? Was bathroom equality really worth the damage done?
The damage was also done to the very planet we ALL have to live on, so no, sorry, it wasn't worth it.
Gun Control
I am really not comfortable with the idea that at any time a bullet could come flying off the street, go through the walls of my home, and kill one of my family members. Just thinking about it makes it hard for me to sleep.
However the USA is so saturated with firearms that any legislation, no matter how draconian, would take DECADES to significantly reduce the number of firearms available to the general public. But you know who does have some GREAT ideas about regulating guns? The far right.
But you wouldn't know that, because you have been so convinced of your own righteousness, that you haven't realized there was effective gun control common ground just laying around for a few decades now. The far right would like to have a concealed carry permit that is recognized across state lines. This was a real opportunity for the LEFT to say "OK, how about everyone with a gun in public require a TEXAS license-to-carry":
You might need to watch that again. Yes you heard right, Texas (as in "we always vote for reckless right wing cowboys, and if we bailed from the USA like we want to there would never be another conservative in the white house again") requires for concealed OR open carry weapons:
- Fingerprinting.
- An extensive application.
- A safety course.
- A "PROFICIENCY IN USING THE WEAPON" COURSE.
An almost Utopian level of regulation by left-wing standards, and it's just laying there, right there in Texas, like a ripe apple falling towards your hand from a tree.
But you didn't know. Were all the self-righteous thumbs up from your bleeding heart friends worth losing the election over this? Because now what Trump's pushing for has nothing to do with the Texas version, it's just "go ahead and bring guns into military recruiting centers and basically anywhere else, with basically no training at all to speak of, because nothing could possiblie go wrong."
This election loss is destroying the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink, the land we live on. So no, sorry, as Sanders noted, the Gun Control debate was not worth it.
This election loss is destroying the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink, the land we live on. So no, sorry, as Sanders noted, the Gun Control debate was not worth it.
Obamacare
One major reason why the left lost the election was because health care expenses increase too rapidly for our incomes to keep up with, and Clinton continued to support Obamacare in the face of that. You can't keep propping up Obamacare when the price in the health insurance exchanges keep going up 20% per year.
Single payer was the alternative put forward by Sanders. Did you notice all those NPR interviews with the old white guys in the midwest during the primaries who said "my first choice is Trump, but my second choice is Bearnie!" The rust belt deplorables have almost no problem at all with single payer. Their problem is that having had real industrial jobs in the past, they have been exposed to practical mathematics which quickly tells them Obamacare must be Repealed and Replaced: 20% per year, that's the problem.
Single payer is anti-establishment, and that's really what the deplorables were all about (and think about it - they must be also pissed about medical bills and lack of medical care access):
And as Trump lights the health insurance industry on fire and leaves it to die, as he has been saying he wants to do for some time now, he's probably going to do it using compromises with the left, gradually raising he income limits on getting medicaid (adding fuel to that fire.) Ironically we probably will have something like unto single payer with Trump, perhaps even more so than the "public option" Nixon-era crap Clinton had in mind.
Why didn't Hillary take Trump & Sanders "medicare for all" proposals seriously? Was Obamacare worth losing the election over? Will I be allowed to have a campfire in 2017 when Cascadia's ecosystem is as dehydrated as a tumble weed in August in Phoenix AZ?
Labor
You will find that most deplorables and libertarians completely agree with lefties more on the following sentence: "all other things being equal, if a woman does the same job as well as a man does, she should be paid the same amount." Hearing about continued pay inequality for women enrages me - and pretty much everyone else as well. Low hanging fruit, easy to find common ground on, right?
Wrong, because it is shadowed by a much more extreme and earth-shattering problem. Just as it is pointless to try to save an antique sofa with a fire extinguisher when the rest of the building is burning down around you, any type of workplace equality is becoming less and less relevant to voters everywhere. The problem is mechanization.
Here's the number you need to understand: every 100 years, 90% of jobs humans do are replaced by machines. This is great for social progress, as it reduces slavery, women feeling forced to stay at home, hazardous work environments, unsustainable lifestyles and so on. Mechanization IS progress.
The problem with mechanization is "how do we adapt to it?" The midwest deplorables have adapted to mechanization by voting for Trump.
The battle that must be fought for here, and which has been completely neglected by the left, is the need for Universal Basic Income. I know this sounds like nanny-state cradle-to-grave entitlement, but stop thinking in terms of the 1980's and instead imagine a world where every cab driver and truck driver has been replaced by a self-driving vehicle.
In THAT imminent world we are all now currently relocating to, where machines DO EVERYTHING, the only thing that matters is WHAT THE MACHINES ARE DOING. The machines will be providing goods and services. What those goods and services are and how much are provided will be the most important decisions society faces. In that world, spending money on goods and services will determine what the machines do. In that world Universal Basic Income will be as foundational to Democracy as voting rights.
Captain of industry Elon Musk has raised this issue, yet the DNC just sits there, slack jawed and ineffective:
Ironically Marco Rubio and his developing theories about EITC was the closest thing in the political sphere we've had lately to serious conversations around universal basic income. Raising the minimum and wage and tuition free education doesn't matter much in the face of jobs constantly disappearing. Was all that worth loosing the election over?
Conclusion
The left needs to prioritize, because WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE. The left (and everyone else) should be focusing on issues of real consequence:
- Global Warming
- Universal Basic Income
- Universal Health Care
- Wise Supreme Court Justices
If your pet issue isn't of that magnitude of importance to our survival, then your pet issue is killing us.
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