We're losing the battle for a woman's right to choose, and we're losing every other battle we try to fight.
From every corner of this great nation, I hear "why?" Why, why, why, why, why won't people listen to us? Why are people so short-sighted? Why are people so narrow-minded? Why are other people trying to push their morals on the entire country?
You have got to be freaking kidding me.
- Why won't we listen when people on our own side tell us exactly why the country won't listen to us?
- Why are we so short-sighted?
- Why are we assuming that people won't listen because they are narrow-minded?
- What the hell do we think we are trying to do when we argue for something""sell Amway???
Here's the thing""every single individual human being in this country is guided by some sense of morality. You can call it "personal belief" or "values" or whatever you want, but it's all the same. Republicans are not the "moral values" party, as many have asserted. They are just the only ones talking about politics that way.
Many years ago, conservatives were losing. Believe it or not, it's true. They were losing for the same reasons that we are losing now. They were disorganized, made up of a lot of small organizations fighting for different conservative causes, floating in the political sea without so much as a small island worth of infrastructure.
In case you missed the memo, that is exactly where we are right now.
So there they were, all of these little sailboats full of conservatives, accomplishing nothing. Do you want to know what they did? They decided to stop. They realized what they were doing wrong, and made a conscious effort to change the way they did business.
They got together. All of the little groups argued and tried to decide whose agenda was the most important. Then they compromised. They made a decision to work together, despite their own individual agendas, knowing that presenting a unified front was the only way to win.
They pooled their money, and used it to build infrastructure. They started the Heritage Foundation and bought up media time and trained interns from the best colleges and universities in the country. They hired intellectuals (believe it or not, they don't really despise them, that's just good marketing) to come up with catchy conservative language, and political strategists to design agendas, and writers and on-air talent to get their language and agendas out into the public sphere.
They did all of this over a matter of thirty or forty years.
We are at the beginning.
We are in the same place where conservatives found themselves forty years ago. The difference is, we're still cursing the darkness instead of grabbing a pack of matches off the bar, striking one up, and seeing what is right there in plain view for us to see.
We're not going to win tomorrow, or the next day. We probably won't win on Alito, and we probably won't win on impeachment, and even if we do, we'll still be in exactly the same place. No, forget that""we'll be even worse off, because we'll feel like we are making a difference, but in reality, we will not even be scratching the surface.
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