Ah. I think I get the idea you are touching on.
There can be no progress without vision; that idea that you have a goal or objective, and you are going to take every step possible to move towards that goal, and then also making a goal of letting no one dilute that goal. It's having a core idea, holding onto it, and letting it be unshakeable, and then convincing others to follow you; not just bending to cover all your bases and check as many ideological boxes as you can.
There can be no direction without vision and no movement without flexibility. Progress is directed motion, and it requires both.
weird has articulated a position at one end of a spectrum; Mitch McConnell sits on the other. If you spend all your time standing firm against ideological variance, you never get anywhere; if you rush to accommodate everyone who can possibly help you, you end up pushed in all directions. It matters what you're willing to compromise on and how far, because ideas can move in unexpected ways -- and right now both parties are rushing to accommodate people so hard that they've lost any real ideological core other than animosity. All they can agree on is that everything sucks because of those people, the ones we've decided we have more to gain by ostracizing then including. Thus we get fundamentalist pastors claiming that extreme weather is God's punishment for sodomy and radical feminists claiming the Principia Optica is a rape manual and everything in between: they've compromised and compromised until there's nowhere left to go but against Them. But, if you never compromise, you're a party of one, and people who are amenable to 99% of your agenda just start arguing that you're the sum of all evil to draw people away from you and to them. This is related to the No True Scotsman fallacy, by the way.
But these are strategic questions, and strategy grows from tactics and logistics. As I said, before you decide what you want you have to decide what you can have, and that means two things: identifying who you need and identifying what they want, every step of the way. Link those possible paths together and you have your available destination set, reachable one step at a time. People act on local, tactical scales; they can't make promises beyond the next time their schedule changes or donate money they don't know if they'll need for something more urgent, and likewise they need a goal that they can see and a perceptibly effective way to work toward it. This is one of the big problems with the more radical egalitarian subset movements: they're so concerned with the opposition that when the hated servants of the kyriarchy turn up and earnestly ask how they can help, they don't have an answer that gets them useful allies. "Give me everything you own to even out the wage gap" isn't practicable, nor is "quit your job so I can have it." And so people just don't want to do anything. "All our elected officials are psychotic tyrants" isn't actionable either. If you want to actually make progress toward your goals, "how can I help?" can either make you or break you; your immediately available answer needs to scale to all levels of commitment and resources and still feel good and do something actually useful. "Give us money or recommend us to someone who can" is worse than useless.
So, "this thing I mention" is actually a prerequisite for dealing with ideological differences -- long before you get to debate where your movement should go, you need a plan to get a movement capable of going anywhere, and that means getting ideology and pragmatism and sociology all to mesh together into something that can turn disinterested bystanders into associates with an interest in seeing your plan come to fruition. A huge part of the reason both parties are failing right now is their lack of that; each just says "get the other guys out and we'll
?? and then profit" and that's inherently unstable, because once you have the majority everyone's expecting a different good thing. A properly constructed movement founded on concrete, positive policy ideas can actually roll with people showing up with a different vision, because then you can get creative and invoke the sunk cost fallacy to minimize your losses while you put together a maximally satisfactory plan (which can just be "we make your thing an alternative to ours accessible in this way").
And really, there's a lot of good to be done that almost everyone agrees should happen because it's procedural rather than ideological, and that's a good place to start. Put together a party whose platform starts with something like smoothing the step functions in welfare brackets so nobody takes home less money by earning more, making the IRS do your taxes for you with the info they already have so 99% of people don't need TurboTax, and maybe something slightly more controversial like establishing a universal minimum wage without an exception for tips (exact amount to be determined later) and you could at least get people thinking in terms of the effects those policies will have on them rather than who you're demonizing. That gives you an opening, and you can trial more things as time goes on and you get a better sense of who's marching with you. Starting and ending with the negative just makes people contentious.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4468276 times)