I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
This is such an important point, and why I believe the Dems constantly "get owned".
Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.
Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.
So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.
Before you can be a leader people have to follow you, and in democracies people have to vote for you. And the unfortunate reality is that reality doesn't matter for elections, only the perception of reality matters.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Yes, the question is what end are they devoting their sociopathic skills toward? And isn’t it the most “patronizing” thing of all to believe that people are too stupid to see that when they vote?
So far Trump 2.0 has done exactly what he promised he would, and his supporters are quite happy. If his actions don't lead to the outcomes he promised that may change, as long as someone else who understands the needs can offer an alternative.
I think we did that experiment in November, and it doesn’t support your assertion that people suddenly turn into rational performance evaluators after the election (or in this case an entire first term).
In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.
> I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
All humans do that. The question is, do you want elect someone who seems to be better at perceiving reality according to evidence than yourself, or worse?
Well, then you have to fall back on whether one of them is at least better at it than the other, and it’s hard to believe that would be a difficult decision at the moment.
Unless the election already has an obvious winner so your vote doesn’t matter, that’s just silly. Write an editorial if you’re unhappy with the choice, but don’t throw away your vote and just roll the dice as if you’re indifferent to the two alternatives. (And if you really were indifferent to the alternatives this time around, I don’t know what to say.)
I’ve been typing these comments on my phone. But, in any case, I don’t parse “democrat” as an epithet. You are looking for things to be offended about.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.