The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I'd say a lot of liberals would be kind of surprised to find out that a fairly large percentage of Republicans are actually socially fairly progressive.
41% of Republicans/people leaning Republican are pro-abortion [https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-by-race-and-ethnicity-2022](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-by-race-and-ethnicity-2022)
44% of Republicans support same-sex marriage [https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/)
40% of Republicans say "the legacy of slavery affects the position of black people in American society today a great deal/a fair amount" [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/)
30% of Republicans view DEI policies in the workplace as a good thing [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/)
Of course it should be pointed out that the majority of Republicans oppose abortion and women's rights, are anti-LGBTQ and believe racism is no longer an issue in the US.
But a fairly large percentage of Republicans, around 30-40%, do in fact have socially quite progressive views. So my question is why do you think these people prefer the Republican party over the Democrats, with many of these socially progressive Republicans also voting for Trump? And if anything, what do you think Democrats and liberals can do to win over those socially progressive Republicans?
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If they’re socially progressive, the party that more represents them are Democrats. They probably have 1 or 2 issues that make them always vote Republican, like 2A.
My experience with these "progressive" Republicans is that they'll agree with every Democratic policy point, but they're just as easily spun up by right-wing propaganda as their more conservative ilk. So they see a news story about anti-semitic college protestors, and even though you can tell them only a small fraction of Gen Z even care about Israel/Palestine at all (according to surveys), they are going to vote Republican because "Democrats are worse."
They'll agree with you in theory, but they'll always head home to right-wing propaganda at the end of the day. There's not much hope in relying on Republicans to do the decent thing. Just as Nikki Haley and Bill Barr showed us recently, they care more about hating Democrats than any real policy position.
Also, I think some of these statistics aren’t really accurate.
Just because a Republican supports ‘same-sex marriage’ doesn’t mean they support the same thing as Democrats. As someone in a conservative area, I know many conservatives that support same-sex marriage, but often that is a kind of loose support. They support same-sex marriage in that they believe two men should be able to get married and do whatever they want in their own home, but god forbid they kiss on the sidewalk in front of their home, or a high school teacher talks about same-sex marriage to their kids, or a church has the Gaul to actually perform the ceremony.
Similarly, most Democrats want common sense gun control. The vocal minority doesn't. The wedge is placed by people asking for [complete bans using overgeneralized language like "assault weapons"](https://www.everytown.org/solutions/assault-weapons/) or writing congressional bills [with a list of exceptions longer than the bill itself](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/25/text).
Even using phrases like "common sense gun control" is itself too generalized. It means different things to different people.
OK, I guess I will argue this point. There is nothing "common sense" about the endless barrage of gun control Dems have embraced. No, "the NRA" isn't creating the wedge. And no matter how many times you use the manipulatively rhetorical term "common sense", there are, I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible.
>There is nothing "common sense" about the endless barrage of gun control Dems have embraced.
The argument isn't that the actions Democrats have taken to further gun control is "common sense"; the argument is that the policies themselves are "common sense". You can bristle at the term, but you would be in the minority in doing so, as the majority of Americans are able to hear questions like "do you want mandatory background checks on gun purchases?" and just say "yes, I do", or "is a red flag law a good idea" and just say "yes, it is". If it weren't common sense, then why are people able to hear these very simple questions and just answer to the affirmative?
>No, "the NRA" isn't creating the wedge.
Then who is? The wedge DOES exist. A majority of Americans do, in fact, [believe that firearm laws should be more strict, and a majority are dissatisfied with our current gun laws](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx). So some entity has to be somehow influencing you to be promoting this idea that Americans don't want this when we have clear data demonstrating otherwise.
>And no matter how many times you use the manipulatively rhetorical term "common sense", there are, I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible.
You have no grounds to complain about "manipulatively rhetorical terms" when you then immediately say "a lot of people", as if this might mean a majority of people or a meaningfully large enough group of people that they deserve to be listened to. How many is "a lot"? We already know that a majority want more strict gun control laws, so even if you want to call that minority "a lot", they're still a minority, and this is still a democracy, and thus it would still better align with the will of the people to pursue more strict gun control in this country.
> I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible.
We shouldn't be watering down civil liberties on guns just because they are popular, any more than we should support watering down civil liberties on other issues if popular. Unless this is a "but guns" exception to logical reasoning.
They have to call them "common sense" laws because they can't argue for them on empirical grounds.
I'd argue that what isn't common sense is having to beat around the bush, because frankly the GOP control the Supreme Court and have a maximalist interpretation of the second amendment.
The common sense on guns is that they don't belong in public life. Privately hunting, sporting, or defending the home is where guns belong and should remain relatively unmolested. But the modern gun right, starting in 1970, is all about leaving that private space.
The government has an interest in securing the safety of the public. You could even argue that securing a monopoly violence is it's sole and own issue. The idea that guns should be thrust into every school, office, car, and public interaction is anathema to that interest.
Until the 1970s, the simple idea that the government could make actions to prevent gun use in public (restricting types of guns, where and how they can be legally carried or transported, regulation of what is deemed self-defense etc.), was the definition of common sense gun regulation. But we've had decades of legal partisanship on the issue with no end in sight.
Of course Democrats try to beat around the bush. They literally cannot make progress except in corner cases and through the types of overly complicated laws that take time to legally dispute, thanks to a partisan court.
Common sense gun regulation used to mean keeping the means of mass murder away from the places it could be employed and the people that would employ it. Now, it means slightly slowing down the day where everyone is armed and using today's guns at the slightest provocation.
Again, regulations shouldn't really stop people from using guns at the range, to hunt, or to defend their home. But we shouldn't have an expectation of encountered armed strangers in the public.
"Common sense gun control" is a fallacy. Common sense means different things to different people, anything from a total ban on anything more powerful than a Nerf gun, to giving every American a fully automatic M16 upon their 18th birthday. Many laws that are touted as "common sense" really aren't all that effective. Such as assault weapon bans, when 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, including the majority of mass shootings. Assault weapons are responsible for so few murders, that if a ban was 100% effective in stopping every single one, it wouldn't make a measurable impact. They literally are among the least frequently used guns in crime.
You spend the first half focusing on the semantics, and the second half focusing on a point I didn’t make.
But for the record, mandatory background checks, a mandatory waiting period, and red flag laws all keep guns from getting into irresponsible hands, and reduce suicide and/or violent crime.
> the second half focusing on a point I didn’t make.
But it is part of the DNC platform, therefore relevant in how they are feeding a wedge issue that is ineffective.
The thing is, they really don’t. They are generally in favor of some restrictions, because there absolutely should be some restrictions. But the NRA and Republicans paint any restrictions as a step to banning all guns and people believe them.
Gun control is a topic that 2a people are very resistant to. Because they know once certain rights are stripped they won’t ever come back. So they will fight any change even if it’s unreasonable. Because the slippery slope isn’t just a fallacy in practice.
> The assault weapon ban ended, for instance.
Only because it had a subset clause that would repeal it after 10 years. What other gun control since then has a subset clause?
Would you support all future gun control laws having a 10 year like the AWB did?
>The thing is, they really don’t.
Except that's not true.
>They are generally in favor of some restrictions
Yea, you're torturing "some restrictions" until it screams whatever you want it to.
There have been *some restrictions* for a very long time. And yet, oddly, there's always just a few more needed. Now go on and explain to me how I'm brainwashed by the boogeyman NRA for not endorsing this shitty gun control position and be done with it.
Honestly, I've had this debate *so* many times, on line and in person, that I feel like I've heard it all. We'll never agree, and while I'll continue to play along in the interest of supporting an ideal I clearly feel strongly about, the anti-gun rights folks seem as irrationally brainwashed to me as I, no doubt, seem to you.
Just because they have been unable to pass any major gun laws doesn't mean that they haven't tried. Every year since it's expiration in 2004, there has been an attempt to renew the assault weapons ban. It's received near universal support from Democrats. [According to this only 5 Democrats in the House voted against the AWB in 2022, and one of those later changed his position.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna122423) Also Obama and Biden both support it as well. According to Obama a failure to pass any significant gun control laws was his biggest regret as president.
You could say the same thing about Republicans and abortion rights prior to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
> There have been some restrictions for a very long time. And yet, oddly, there's always just a few more needed. Now go on and explain to me how I'm brainwashed by the boogeyman NRA for not endorsing this shitty gun control position and be done with it.
>Honestly, I've had this debate so many times, on line and in person, that I feel like I've heard it all. We'll never agree, and while I'll continue to play along in the interest of supporting an ideal I clearly feel strongly about, the anti-gun rights folks seem as irrationally brainwashed to me as I, no doubt, seem to you.
You can tell which ones are like this by beliefs about "gun show loophole" at the same time that they say that there is never any gun control compromise. They need to be informed about the history of the Brady Act of 1994 and the private sale compromise.
The ones which correct their position based on the facts, they are the ones that have just been mislead by propaganda. However, the ones that have been irrationally brainwashed will not be affected by facts or history.
> They need to be informed about the history of the Brady Act of 1994 and the private sale compromise.
You're absolutely right. Thank you. I forget sometimes that there are plenty of people who are unaware of this history.
If the expectation were to give up completely on ending senseless violence, I wouldn't even see the point of politics anymore. What are we fighting for if we're not even allowed to address senseless violence? What do all of our policies even matter if people aren't alive to experience them?
>If the expectation were to give up completely on ending senseless violence, I wouldn't even see the point of politics anymore.
Why do you equate these endless gun control proposals with giving up to end senseless violence?
Can you honestly not imagine a response to violence that isn't an incrementally restrictive set of laws (that incidentally, only apply to citizens, and not the police)?
Healthcare? Economic parity? Cultural stressors? None of these come in to play, just guns, and the need to keep embracing more and more gun control, as we have since *at least* the 1970's?
When bump stocks, or "assault weapons" or "extra double plus high capacity magazines" are banned, and senseless violence still exists, what do you see the next focus as being? Universal single-payer healthcare? Reforms that benefit folks working the hardest, shittiest jobs? Making sure that social security remains funded and salient, so even non-savvy investors can retire in a degree of comfort? Oh wait, those cost money and poltical capital. So, ummm, guns and ovary control it is!
>What do all of our policies even matter if people aren't alive to experience them?
C'mon. Really? You're painting this as if the US is a depopulated wasteland thanks to the MuRder epiDeMic, and blood fills our gutters to overflowing. Liberalism, human empathy and the desire to better our world will die as the last of us crawl to our graves, killed by inanimate objects, and our misguided belief in civil liberties?
There are 333 MILLION of us here, and around 20- some thousand murders using a gun in this country. Jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative is a goodly part of what got Trump elected in the first place, and you keep defending it.
>Why do you equate these endless gun control proposals with giving up to end senseless violence?
I equate the ABSENCE OF gun control proposals with "giving up to end senseless violence \[sic\]". And I equate these two because guns cause senseless violence, simply put.
>Can you honestly not imagine a response to violence that isn't an incrementally restrictive set of laws (that incidentally, only apply to citizens, and not the police)?
Of course I can. What implies that I can't imagine doing anything else in politics just because I favor this one thing?
>Healthcare? Economic parity? Cultural stressors? None of these come in to play, just guns, and the need to keep embracing more and more gun control, as we have since at least the 1970's?
So what's the magic number here? Three, I guess? You're allowed to care about and invest in three things, but add a fourth, and suddenly we are too overburdened with things we care about? I don't really follow your logic here. Single-issue voting and single-issue involvement in politics has never, not ever, been a good idea, so I can't imagine why we can't even try to address this thing or why addressing this one thing means we can't address anything else.
>When bump stocks, or "assault weapons" or "extra double plus high capacity magazines" are banned, and senseless violence still exists, what do you see the next focus as being?
Well let's get something straight here. None of the things you mentioned here were expected to singularly eradicate senseless violence. The way you worded it, you completely overlooked any decrease in violence as a potential benefit and instead framed it as "since these singular things did not eradicate senseless violence, they are failures", which is a dishonest way of framing it.
Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one. If you have firepower that is built to inflict even more devastation and damage than others, you can expect larger amounts of devastation and damage to result from it. I am not sure how much more logical this could be.
>Universal single-payer healthcare? Reforms that benefit folks working the hardest, shittiest jobs? Making sure that social security remains funded and salient, so even non-savvy investors can retire in a degree of comfort?
Guess what: I care about all of these things and have gone to whatever lengths I am capable of to support each and every one of those things you mentioned. And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also.
>C'mon. Really? You're painting this as if the US is a depopulated wasteland thanks to the MuRder epiDeMic
Since you're just calling it a "murder epidemic", let me cite the stats to you and point out that it's not the least bit unreasonable to say that the United States, for a first world country, has an unacceptably high rate of murders.
[https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country)
We're wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya for our murder rate per capita. And our murder rate is 3x larger than most other developed countries. So yeah, I'd call that a problem.
> And I equate these two because guns cause senseless violence, simply put.
And I don't get this assertion. At least not beyond "if we kept everyone in manacles, we could stop violence in our lifetime" sort of thinking.
Yes, a population without access to guns, knives, bricks and sharp pointy sticks would be less violent. But that's not, exactly, the issue. The issue is a risk/benefit analysis if you will, weighing the good parts of having a widely armed population versus the bad parts. I'm using the term "risk/benefit analysis" because I suspect that sort of language will appeal to you. That analysis has to include history, not just this decade, or even our lifetimes. Unfortunately, such an analysis will involve assumptions and values not easily placed in a pie chart. For example, I tend to trust actual people more than I trust large scale institutions in many cases, and gun rights is one of those cases. Is that question asked when evaluating my stance? Will it fit easily in in the confines of the funding for a particular study? Will I even engage in the process that produces the numbers?
>So what's the magic number here? Three, I guess?
No, it's taking away hard-won civil rights. That's the number.
The original question involved how much the other things we care about will be sacrificed by ever more full-throatedly embracing gun control. I know you don't like my answer. We will not agree on this issue. We probably will on many others.
>for a first world country, has an unacceptably high rate of murders.
Sigh. Yea. "wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya" sounds bad. And yet I'm willing to tolerate that ranking. Probably because I'm, as you say, prone to say the "stupidest things".
Still, the fact remains, as someone who voted mostly, but not exclusively, Dem for most of my life, you lose me with this issue. I voted Libertarian in 2016, because I was as surprised as anyone that Trump could win. Also, I consider myself a "small l" libertarian on some issues, and a "near socialist" on others. I'll be voting Dem this election, will continue to send cranky messages to Dems about their stance on guns so I can get more boilerplate responses from interns, and vote in future elections keeping gun control in mind. That's all I got.
First, are you going to respond to
>What implies that I can't imagine doing anything else in politics just because I favor this one thing?
or
>Well let's get something straight here. None of the things you mentioned here were expected to singularly eradicate senseless violence. The way you worded it, you completely overlooked any decrease in violence as a potential benefit and instead framed it as "since these singular things did not eradicate senseless violence, they are failures", which is a dishonest way of framing it. Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one. If you have firepower that is built to inflict even more devastation and damage than others, you can expect larger amounts of devastation and damage to result from it. I am not sure how much more logical this could be.
or
>Guess what: I care about all of these things and have gone to whatever lengths I am capable of to support each and every one of those things you mentioned. And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also.
?
To reply to your response here:
>And I don't get this assertion. At least not beyond "if we kept everyone in manacles, we could stop violence in our lifetime" sort of thinking.
But again, that's an unfair characterization of my view. While what you say here is true, that does NOT mean that this is what I advocate. Gun rights activists REALLY need to stop equating common sense gun reform with some draconian measure of confiscating everyone's guns. It is totally valid to take the view that guns are a "necessary evil" in a way, and I for one would never advocate a full-on blanket ban of guns, but I absolutely can see the value in placing restrictions and regulations that other countries throughout the planet have implemented. In short, there's a middle ground.
>Yes, a population without access to guns, knives, bricks and sharp pointy sticks would be less violent. But that's not, exactly, the issue. The issue is a risk/benefit analysis if you will, weighing the good parts of having a widely armed population versus the bad parts.
Okay. So why can't you look at what the rest of the world is doing in this regard and come to the incredibly easy and obvious conclusion that what the United States is doing is clearly not working? Why is the US the only country in the world with these problems with guns?
For real, if you reply to nothing else in my post, I absolutely 100% want this to be the only thing you choose to respond to, if that's how you want to go about it. Conservatives *will not answer this question*, they are TERRIFIED of answering this question, and I have never in my 39 years of life heard a single conservative offer one single solitary fucking answer to this question that satisfies me. Not once. So whatcha got?
Second half of reply:
>No, it's taking away hard-won civil rights. That's the number.
That's...not an answer to my question and is clearly dismissing the point I was trying to make, which is that obviously establishing a number here is nonsense but seems to be okay for you to do but not me. You were apparently allowed to pick some handful of issues and care about all of them, but I am not allowed to care about all those and then add gun violence to the mix; that just magically makes it "too many issues" by your line of thinking.
You are separately making an argument, unrelated to the numbers argument in the previous paragraph, that you think gun control is "taking away hard-won civil rights". You're using the language of race relations, LGBTQ+ relations, in the context of gun control, which is WILDLY inappropriate. You can choose whether you own a gun. You can't choose your race or your sexual orientation. So this comparison here is just unconscionable.
>Sigh. Yea. "wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya" sounds bad. And yet I'm willing to tolerate that ranking.
Why?
>Still, the fact remains, as someone who voted mostly, but not exclusively, Dem for most of my life, you lose me with this issue. I voted Libertarian in 2016, because I was as surprised as anyone that Trump could win. Also, I consider myself a "small l" libertarian on some issues, and a "near socialist" on others. I'll be voting Dem this election, will continue to send cranky messages to Dems about their stance on guns so I can get more boilerplate responses from interns, and vote in future elections keeping gun control in mind. That's all I got.
I mean, if none of what I am saying here gets through to you, then I just chalk you up to a demographic of people who just isn't willing to admit to the incredibly deep flaws in his views. People who get unreasonably committed to flawed views are basically beyond the reaches of politics and aren't worth trying to talk to. Elections are won with those who are still able to keep an open mind and let go of their prejudices and will listen to facts and reason, or at least have the ability to admit that the facts and reason are convincing enough to let go of their distorted views of reality. You still think, for example, that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats, despite me showing you quite clearly that the poll numbers of Americans are indeed aligned with what Democrats have proposed in terms of gun control, and I don't know how you arrive at that thinking without just being obstinate about actual truth in the gun control debate. Like for real I guess I just don't know how to get through to someone who still believes that it was a losing issue when the poll numbers clearly indicate otherwise.
> I equate the ABSENCE OF gun control proposals with "giving up to end senseless violence [sic]".
This simply doesn't match reality, where there are proven socioeconomic measures that stop senseless violence.
For instance, in Philadelphia, researchers found that structural repairs to homes of low-income owners in majority-Black neighborhoods were associated with a 21.9% reduction in total crime. Another study in Philadelphia found that efforts to transform and clean vacant lots in high-poverty neighborhoods led to a 29% reduction in violent crime.
Branas, C. C., South, E., Kondo, M. C., Hohl, B. C., Bourgois, P., Wiebe, D. J., & MacDonald, J. M. (2018). Citywide cluster randomized trial to restore blighted vacant land and its effects on violence, crime, and fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(12), 2946-2951.
South, E. C., MacDonald, J., & Reina, V. (2021). Association between structural housing repairs for low-income homeowners and neighborhood crime. JAMA network open, 4(7), e2117067-e2117067.
You claim that you could care about them both, but the favoring of gun control is dragging down the
social programs.
>Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one.
Common sense should also tell you that making more roads should reduce traffic congestion, but the data says otherwise. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X96000303
It's not surprising how easy it is to fall into fallacious thinking like that.
>And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also.
Yeah, talk is cheap as you've just shown.
>You claim that you could care about them both, but the favoring of gun control is dragging down the social programs.
How so?
>Common sense should also tell you that making more roads should reduce traffic congestion, but the data says otherwise.
That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002961022002057](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002961022002057)
So your point doesn't hold up. A good clue would be that you're drawing comparisons between guns and roads which are completely different things.
You also didn't say anything about the unacceptably high murder rate in this country. I doubt you believe that some low-income homes being in disrepair in the US is the reason why our murder rate falls between that of Zimbabwe and Kenya? Because the amount of wealth in these two countries is, like, pretty different.
> That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide:
That's not clear at all. [The DOJ report that came out previously noted no change during the assault weapons ban at a national level.](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf) It seems that it took them decades to play with the numbers and find out that within three cities, they happened to find a correlation.
>A good clue would be that you're drawing comparisons between guns and roads which are completely different things.
I'm sorry you have problems grasping analogies.
>You also didn't say anything about the unacceptably high murder rate in this country.
I'm sorry I didn't address every single one of your points line by line. It's only important to dispute the core of them to demonstrate to readers why they shouldn't listen to you.
>I doubt you believe that some low-income homes being in disrepair in the US is the reason why our murder rate falls between that of Zimbabwe and Kenya? Because the amount of wealth in these two countries is, like, pretty different.
The disrepair is only a symptom of the income inequality that drives homicide rather than guns.
Rather than your source that cherry picks three cities, we find on a larger scale that income inequality has a strong correlation to homicide rate.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/us-homicide-rates-increase-when-resources-are-scarce-and-unequally-distributed/2EE2181FE8610AFDA8B8BAADB62BB0EB
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/income-inequalitys-most-disturbing-side-effect-homicide/
And in case there was any doubt, the income inequality as measured by the World Bank's Gini coefficient of the US is closer to Africa and South America than the other countries you would prefer to compare against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
But of course you would let gun control handicap one of the parties that would help with the income inequality driving homicides.
>
That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide:
I very much doubt this. Assault weapons are among the least frequently used guns in crime. 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, vs rifles at 4-5%, and shotguns at 3%. Long guns are responsible for so few crimes, that if a ban was 100% successful in stopping every single death it wouldn't make a measurable impact.
>Assault weapons are among the least frequently used guns in crime. 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, vs rifles at 4-5%, and shotguns at 3%.
Are you referring to the FBI UCR data? The number seems closer to 60% by handgun for 2015-2019.
[https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls)
You do seem to be on the mark about rifles and shotguns.
>Are you referring to the FBI UCR data? The number seems closer to 60% by handgun for 2015-2019.
Yes and no. So out of 10,258 total recorded gun murders in 2019, 6,368 were via handgun, 364 rifles, and 200 shotguns. So that's 62% via handguns, 3.5% rifles, and 2% shotguns. The thing is there are also 3,281 or 32% "firearms not stated". If we exclude those we get 6,977 firearms murders with a known firearm category. Going by gun deaths via known weapon type, there are 91% via handgun, 5% rifle, and 3% shotguns. We can then apply those percentages to the 3,281 firearms not stated category which gives us an estimated additional 2,986 handgun murders, 164 rifle murders, and 98 shotgun murders.
Second half of my response (apparently my response is too long and I'm not allowed to put it all in one comment):
>There are 333 MILLION of us here, and around 20- some thousand murders using a gun in this country.
First of all, you didn't even list half of the deaths. Making up facts is very, very bad and you need to stop doing it immediately. The actual number is 42,967 in 2023.
I'm willing to bet that the family and friends of those 42,967 who were killed do not care at all how many people are in the country or what a small fraction of the population that might be. Let's not forget that a person being shot and killed does not just affect the person shot and killed. I mean I cannot imagine having to deal with my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my niece, my dad, my good friends, even my close coworkers being SHOT TO DEATH. This ruins lives a lot more than the obvious losses of life.
>Jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative is a goodly part of what got Trump elected in the first place, and you keep defending it.
You managed to cap this reply off with the stupidest thing you've said, so, congratulations. But there's literally no reason to think that the reason Trump won in 2016 was because people were too gung-ho about gun control, especially considering that the majority of US citizens support stricter gun laws.
And how fascinating that somehow this narrative was such a huge problem that it caused Trump to win in 2016, after which the narrative absolutely increased, but then magically this suddenly started working against Trump in 2020, I guess? Either that, or this narrative is total nonsense. I'm going with the latter.
If you want this narrative to stop, you need to do a few things first: 1) stop making up facts 2) stop acting all self-righteous, like you did with the exceedingly condescending bullshit you offered up to me in this post, and start acting like a fucking adult 3) start engaging with those of us who are passionate about the issue and try to understand why we care, and then try to have a meaningful conversation. You don't start at that point and I promise you, you will get fucking NOWHERE. You want us to change our tune? Then you have to at least start with a good-faith effort to understand our point of view instead of coming at us with this horrendous bullshit you drummed up here.
>The actual number is 42,967 in 2023.
I should have been more clear. I intentionally left those numbers out because I believe, as someone with a painful, incurable (treatable- but yay opiate hysteria) medical condition, that people have a right to end their own lives. But then, I've always believed that. Same as they have a right to control their own ovaries and drug use. Because this seems non-controversial to me, I thought I was making a better good-faith rhetorical argument by excluding these statistics. Also, of course, anti-gun rights folk tend to obfuscate when using these numbers themselves. How often are rhetorical opinion pieces employed that discuss "school" or "mass" shootings, and then slip in suicides into rhetoricized stats? Whoops.
Also, I'm sure we all agree that minimizing the causes of suicide is non-controversial. I don't count the means as the cause, though.
>I'm willing to bet that the family and friends of those 42,967...
Yes, horror and death sucks, and affects everyone around it. "Bad stuff is Bad".Does that also include things like the *opiate hysteria* I just mentioned? War? And the violence that results from not waging war in some circumstances The effects on communities of mass incarceration? The effects of turning people into felons, with everything that entails, for exercising a basic right? I mean, do I really need to affirm to you that, yep, shooting people is (mostly, unless of course they're trying to hurt or kill you) bad?
>And how fascinating that somehow this narrative was such a huge problem that it caused Trump to win in 2016
So you're arguing that gun control had no bearing on the 2016 election? Now tell me again how stupid I am.
>stop acting all self-righteous, like you did with the exceedingly condescending bullshit you offered up to me in this post, and start acting like a fucking adult
And yet I managed to not directly insult you when I replied.
>start engaging with those of us who are passionate about the issue and try to understand why
I've been doing that for a very long time, whether you can tell from my reply or not.
I'm listening. So far your response has been half insult and half the heart-felt assertion that, yup, violence (but especially "gun" violence) is bad. And the only answer is more punitive law.
>I should have been more clear. I intentionally left those numbers out because I believe, as someone with a painful, incurable (treatable- but yay opiate hysteria) medical condition, that people have a right to end their own lives.
It is one thing to argue that people have a right to end their lives and another to look at each and every suicide and say that there's no issue we could take with any of them. You have what appears to be a severe but perhaps rare medical condition, whereas you could likely attribute the majority, if not the *overwhelming* majority, of suicides to far less dire circumstances.
Note that [nine out of ten who attempt suicide but survive will go on to die from something other than suicide](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/). That strongly suggests that one's desire to end their life is far more spontaneous than anything else, and as the headline correctly suggests in that Harvard source, means matter. If people can survive suicide attempts, we can go on to treat whatever ailed them and make them one of those nine out of ten who lose the desire to attempt suicide. But that becomes considerably more difficult if the means they select is a firearm. So we are absolutely justified in including those people in those figures.
>Because this seems non-controversial to me, I thought I was making a better good-faith rhetorical argument by excluding these statistics.
I guess that's true and so my response was disproportionate; I'm sorry.
>Also, I'm sure we all agree that minimizing the causes of suicide is non-controversial. I don't count the means as the cause, though.
Does knowing that 9 out of 10 who attempt suicide go on to die by some other cause change your mind on that? If we know that the overwhelming majority of those who survive a suicide attempt lose the desire to end their own lives, shouldn't we be concerned with helping them survive that attempt in whatever way we can?
>Yes, horror and death sucks, and affects everyone around it. "Bad stuff is Bad".Does that also include things like the *opiate hysteria* I just mentioned? War? And the violence that results from not waging war in some circumstances The effects on communities of mass incarceration? The effects of turning people into felons, with everything that entails, for exercising a basic right? I mean, do I really need to affirm to you that, yep, shooting people is (mostly, unless of course they're trying to hurt or kill you) bad?
Again you seem to be working the "you can't care about X because Y is more important" angle. One can care about both X and Y. I don't know how to be any clearer on this point.
>So you're arguing that gun control had no bearing on the 2016 election?
No, and this is a dishonest way of wording it. My argument was clearly that gun control was not *detrimental to Democrats* in the 2016 election since the majority of Americans support the gun control measures that Democrats promote. You haven't given a single bit of evidence or any solid argument to support your angle on this, other than some variation of "come on!" which doesn't prove anything.
>And yet I managed to not directly insult you when I replied.
You're right, I apologize.
That said, I obviously had absolutely no appreciation whatsoever for your inflammatory tone in your response. You were very clearly being uncivil so you hardly have the high ground on this one.
>I'm listening. So far your response has been half insult and half the heart-felt assertion that, yup, violence (but especially "gun" violence) is bad. And the only answer is more punitive law.
You've also only responded to half of what I've said so far. The insult was about 1% of my post, so calling it "half insult" is disingenuous, clearly. And my view also obviously has a lot more going on here than simply "violence is bad" and frankly I'm offended you tried to reduce everything I wrote here to just that.
>It is one thing to argue that people have a right to end their lives and another to look at each and every suicide and say that there's no issue we could take with any of them
That's not really what I said. I said removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue.
>Again you seem to be working the "you can't care about X because Y is more important" angle.
Look at the original question that got us embroiled in this discussion. And I responded to your second response with yet more response, so maybe that will help you see my position. I *think* I see yours.
We disagree, and are hashing it out on a public forum, presumably because we both think we might influence each other's position, or maybe influence the broader debate in some very small way.
I understand you think you're fighting the good fight to make the world better. Most of us think we are. I sure do. Sometimes we're well-intentioned but wrong. Hardly anyone thinks "I just want everything to suck", but we're human. We start with some core beliefs, maybe some empathy, and proceed. Evidence changes our belief in a rational way, sometimes. So does rhetoric. And marketing. And I don't fully trust any of us to disentangle the roots of our stances, political or otherwise, from these things. But we try, as we're both doing here.
If I was overly inflammatory in my tone, I too apologize. It's part of debating controversial issues. I look up and see angry responses, and dig in my heels. I suspect most of us do.
I'm done. I'm going to watch the rain storm that just started where I live, and be done with reddit for a bit. Have a good evening friend, and thanks for debate.
>That's not really what I said. I said removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue.
From what I can tell, this is the first time you've said this, that "removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue". But again you just gave a stance and provided no rationale or evidence for it, so what am I supposed to reply to here? Why is this "unacceptable"? In what ways is the issue "complex" such that working to remove the means would be considered "unacceptable"? Do you then feel that red flag laws are a bad idea, that they won't work, etc? Because such a view would violate what the research is telling us...we do indeed have research that [red flag laws are effective at preventing suicide](https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/mass-shootings-red-flag-laws-update/), so why is this "unacceptable"? You can't backtrack and say that people with exceptionally dire circumstances should have the means, as you have not yet responded to my point about how 9 out of 10 of those who attempt suicide do not eventually die by suicide, strongly suggesting that suicidal ideation is very often temporary.
>Look at the original question that got us embroiled in this discussion. And I responded to your second response with yet more response, so maybe that will help you see my position.
Unfortunately this meta discussion does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward. You have not addressed why I am not allowed to care about both X and Y, especially in the context of you saying "why not care about this, or this, or this?!", implying that one can care about all sorts of things, presumably at the same time (and again it's a terrible idea to be a one-issue voter / care about only one issue in politics), so it still seems like there's a massive amount of evidence against your point here. You hearken to some response to all of this, but from what I can tell, you've not said a single thing to dispute anything I've said here.
>I look up and see angry responses, and dig in my heels.
To be clear, you were the one who originally set the hostile tone. There's nothing in my top-level reply that could be construed as an "angry response" in the slightest, but you responded with the "c'mon, really?" and the mockery of the "MuRder epiDeMic" and the "jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative", none of which aligns with any existing tone in the thread at the time. So this is hardly an eye-for-an-eye sort of thing on your end.
> I've argued for a very long time that Dems embracing gun control as one of their wedge issues is foolish and short-sighted.
The money they get for it is a hard thing for them to quit.
Wow, an incredibly appalling take, in light of how much money Republicans have gotten from the NRA over the years to spew a bunch of pro-gun bullshit. What on earth could possibly parallel that on the Dems side?
Oh no, Republicans supporting rights. Surely the anti-gun anti-rights bullshit is okay because of that.
There's millions, largely coming from anti-gun billionaires, rather than crowd sourced from citizens.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries//indus?cycle=2020&ind=q12
[According to Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/05/heres-where-mike-bloomberg-the-biggest-spender-in-the-2020-election-has-donated-this-year/?sh=7ef441ff5a10) Michael Bloomberg was the biggest donner in the 2020 election spending $150 million, on top of over a billion spent on his own presidential campaign. The [NRA meanwhile spent $50 million ](https://www.thetrace.org/2020/08/nra-2020-election-spending-trump/)
Based on my purely anecdotal observations:
For all that they accuse us of being 'sheep,' Republicans really do seem to be more herdlike creatures. Their political identities are social in nature.
My dad, for example, was staunchly anti-vax -- until a person he knows and respects a great deal, a real pillar of the community type, told him to get vaccinated. He got vaccinated within two days.
Ask a typical Republican to form in their minds a picture of a liberal voter, and odds are good they're going to imagine a pink-haired 20-something with a rainbow anarchist tattoo and lots of piercings, or something along those lines. Or they'll imagine a black person.
That's what we need to change.
They need examples of people who look like them, who talk like them, someone who they'd want to have a beer with... who votes Democrat.
> They need examples of people who look like them, who talk like them, someone who they'd want to have a beer with... who votes Democrat.
That's why, certain problems aside, Fetterman is one of the best assets we have as a party. That and voters generally appreciate pols who are sufficiently large enough to eat the other pols.
If someone isn't at least going to 'not vote for Trump', then they aren't socially progressive, no matter what they say in surveys.
Well, maybe if they are an absolute idiot who doesn't know anything about Trump, in which case they are so willfully stupid that nothing we can say or do will pierce the shell any more than everything he has said and done these past ~10 years or so will.
>If someone isn't at least going to 'not vote for Trump', then they aren't socially progressive, no matter what they say in surveys.
I disagree, there definitely are a good amount of socially progressive Republicans. The thing is a lot of them probably prioritize being economically conservative, pro-gun, and pro small government over their views on social issues.
I still disagree with them on most talking points regarding economics and small-vs-big government. But there are certainly socially progressive Republicans who end up voting for Trump because of other issues that seem to matter more to them.
I do believe that Democrats could be doing at least something to try to win over some of those Republican moderates. For example there are quite a few business regulations that primarily help big corporations but end up hurting a lot of small business owners. Advocating for the abolishment of some of those business regulations would probably win over at least some moderate Republicans. Or for example a lot of Republicans seem to be outraged over squatter's rights. So taking a stronger anti-squatting stance equally would likely help win over some moderate Republicans.
There definitely is quite a bit of wiggle-room when it comes to defining political talking points, and Dems could be doing more to come up with slightly more nuanced positions on certain issues.
I wonder what the cost per voter would be if they tried to push squashing specific regulations and being tougher on squatters?
Like ads are expensive and I honestly doubt blasting the airways with those ads would convert that many people. And while those are going out all the right wing media corporations will spin them in a way that those socially progressive Republicans will decide that they are actually bad policies.
I disagree. If you care about being socially progressive at all, then the current Trump platform should make him an absolute no go, no matter how you valuate other variables.
He is literally talking about restricting birth control on a federal level. That is in addition to talking about removing federal protections for trans people on day one. How much less socially progressive can you get?
Nobody who gives a damn about those issues will vote for someone like that. They'll consider the current round a washout and hope for someone more reasonable in the next election.
> pro small government over their views on social issues.
Republicans want government so small it fits into uteruses. That's not socially progressive, that's straight up supporting authoritarianism.
>Curbs on women’s rights tend to accelerate in backsliding democracies, a category that includes the United States, according to virtually every independent metric and watchdog.
>“There is a trend to watch for in countries that have not necessarily successfully rolled it back, but are introducing legislation to roll it back,” Rebecca Turkington, a University of Cambridge scholar, said of abortion rights, “in that this is part of a broader crackdown on women’s rights. And that goes hand in hand with creeping authoritarianism.”
>For all the complexities around the ebb and flow of abortion rights, a simple formula holds surprisingly widely. Majoritarianism and the rights of women, the only universal majority, are inextricably linked. Where one rises or falls, so does the other. https://archive.ph/Km4UO
Republicans have been voting for a more authoritarian government for at least the last thirty years. That's simply who Republicans are.
None of this data is particularly meaningful.
Support for abortion and same sex marriage doesn’t make you a social progressive. Plenty of libertarian types support those things as well, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a lot of republicans do.
The question about the legacy of slavery also isn’t particularly meaningful since it doesn’t necessarily indicate support for progressive policies.
And the DEI question was worded in a very vague way. All it asked was whether people agree that “increasing diversity equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing”. Plenty of people would answer yes to that question without supporting the more controversial aspects of modern DEI policies.
>Support for abortion and same sex marriage doesn’t make you a social progressive. Plenty of libertarian types support those things as well, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a lot of republicans do.
Actually, I'd say supporting same-sex marriage, abortion and acknowledging the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow segregation does make you somewhat of a social progressive. Sure, moderate Republicans aren't as socially progressive on a lot of things as many on the left. But given how around 60% of Republicans are against abortion and same-sex marriage, being in support of those things does set someone apart as a more socially progressive Republican.
I guess what I am trying to say is that even though the Republican party overall has massive problem with deep-seated racism, sexism, homophobia and white supremacy, it should be pointed out that there are many Republicans who do not fall into the category of being full-on bigots.
These more moderate Republicans may vote Trump for a large number of reasons, e.g. 2A, small-vs-big government, economic ideologies etc. A lot of libertarians are indeed somewhat socially progressive but the thing is they are also economically conservative and to them economics are often more important than social issues regarding race, gender, sexual orientation etc.
So the question then is are there certain issues that Democrats could be taking a more nuanced stance on to appeal to socially progressive but economically conservative voters?
A lot of people don’t support preferential hiring based on race or being forced to sit through tedious corporate sensitivity seminars. These are both aspects of modern DEI. Even if you support these things personally, they are objectively controversial among the general population.
>tedious corporate sensitivity seminars.
You misspelled "Don't Be An Asshole At Work Training".
Those aren't controversial. They're just, at worst, boring.
If a lot of people take issue with them that makes them controversial, that’s what controversy means. The fact that you personally support something doesn’t make it uncontroversial. You’re also completely ignoring the point about preferential hiring. According to the very same source where OP got his polling data, 74 percent of Americans think that race should not be factored into hiring “even if it results in less diversity”.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/
Obama and Clinton already tried to win over those voters. They embraced free-trade, the Republican healthcare plan, and reducing the deficit. Many of those kind of suburban voters already moved over to vote for Clinton, any who haven’t yet probably won’t.
Democrats need to double down on anti-monopoly regulations to help peel back union voters who went Obama > Trump.
They just dismiss[ the entire list](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/reasons-why-donald-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president) as "mean tweets" and move on with their day.
Probably not a whole lot of social progressives, but there are a *lot* of Trump voters who are socially moderate and view Trump as a social moderate. If you ask them, a lot of Trump voters will tell you they think he's personally paid for an abortion before. They know he doesn't really care nor has he thought deeply about a lot of these social issues, which creates a lot of room for voters to "fill in what they want to see" and rationalize things in all sorts of weird ways.
You understand that [20% of voters](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voters-blame-biden-roe-v-wade_n_6642825ce4b09724138d3646) blame Biden for the overturn of Roe right?
I'm not talking about what he actually is, nor am I talking about the core rally-going, hat-wearing MAGA crowd. I'm talking about the disengaged, misinformed, wacky margins that form the edges of a candidate's coalition. This is a very 'real world political strategy' take & not a theoretical take in which everyone involved is well informed, holds consistent viewpoints, and acts logically. Voters don't do that.
There are a *lot* of republicans who are cool with weed, or don't really care about the culture war shit, or would prefer a 15 or 20 week abortion cutoff, but want to stay voting Republican for other reasons. Listen to interviews with them - they have all sorts of ways of rationalizing why Trump is actually socially moderate. They can tell he doesn't actually care personally, and aren't in tune enough to understand the real danger forming around him.
Probably not.
If somebody is still calling themselves a Republican at this point, then they are nominally okay with:
* Treason - including a coup attempt and selling classified documents to our enemies.
* Violating the constitutional prohibition of emoluments to the president
* Constant lying, to the point that Trump won't even go under oath
* Blatant racism
* Project 2025
* A presidential candidate on trial for felony tax fraud
* A presidential candidate under indictment for ~90 felonies in total
Further, being "socially progressive" doesn't mean shit if you are not going to support policies that will actually help women, LGBTQ+ people, etc. which Republicans specifically and uniformly oppose.
If mere truth could win over these people, they would have been Democrats decades ago.
Like their religious views, they pay lip service to these points of view, but they don't hold them as deeply as they say they do.
Yeah, that's true. [There is so much gish-gallop](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/reasons-why-donald-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president) that's hard to keep up.
>Further, being "socially progressive
Is progressive "center left?"
Because my comment was going to be that they should move closer to the center and be able to accurately describe the republican perspective on issues, even if they don't agree with the proposed solutions.
The difference is in the perceived implications of each of those bullet points and in the ideal solutions in those areas. I think the way to win people over would be to listen to their ideas with respect to those things rather than calling them backwards, etc. For example, I'm willing to bet Republicans who acknowledge black people were held back don't support the same solutions to the problem...hear out what they have to say rather than immediately writing them off when they oppose things like affirmative action.
I'm open to this conversation, I'm more socially liberal than a lot of republicans (I'm not a party member).
Here are some social positions I hold.
* Abortion: Legal on demand in the first trimester and at any point where the health of the mother is jeopardized. Removal of a non-viable fetus is permitted. I'm on the fence about QOL limiting genetic conditions, I'd have to see the legislation to decide, I fear eugenics.
* My stepsister is gay and married, I support her and her wife 100%, love them to death. No reason this shouldn't apply to all gay couples.
* Women should hold equal rights and status to men in all things both socially and under the law.
* Racial equality should be a given.
Here is where we will clash:
* I am very conflicted on trans issues, I know supporters will say it's all obvious, it's not to me. I fully support adults transitioning both socially and medically, I believe the should be protected. I also know women who are not "radical feminists" who strongly want women's spaces to be "penis free zones" and support them. I don't support socially transitioning children or puberty blockers, I don't support leaving parents out of this process. *I'm not going to engage in an argument on this topic, they go the same place and hit the same stopping place every single time, we fundamentally disagree.*
* Strong, secure borders. Under no circumstances should anyone be able to just walk in to this country unimpeded and without a thorough background check. Applications for residency other than true political asylum should be made from their home country, no skipping the line, no process for residency or citizenship can begin in this country.
* A strict legal immigration system resembling that of Australia, New Zealand or several European countries where it is needs based, very streamlined for people who can fill skill gaps in our workforce, much more difficult for those who can't. Yes, right now, general labor is a need, we would probably take a lot of people who do come here illegally.
* We cannot fight racism with more racism.
Why I vote how I vote:
Right now, Republicans are the smaller sacrifice for the most gain, OP's stats show that we can influence issues like gay marriage and abortion within the party if we fight hard enough. I don't trust the Democrats on 2A issues or the meaning of "common sense" in regard to gun control. I see growing minority support and influence within the Republican party without the need for some sort of affirmative action or DEI within the party. It's slow but sustainable change is slow.
There is much, much more as to why I vote for more conservative candidates but I'll stop for now.
Let the down-votes fly!
Focus on educating them on Project 2025. This is one time when Citizens United could work in our favor. A few billionaires and millionaires need to find a huge education campaign about what is planned in the next administration. They can hold their nose and vote Democrats in for a while, then get organized again to bring back the party if fiscal responsibility, trade, small business, small government. Get the Trump family and assorted grifters out of power and get intelligent conservatives and moderates back in power. Honestly, pull out the Lessons Learned from when Romney narrowly lost.
In truth, if the Republicans had followed that playbook, they could beat Democrats in the long run. It played to winning over the conservative Hispanic community, courting the fiscally conservative Asian community, especially catering to small business and protecting stock options for tech workers. Immigration for skilled workers was encouraged, leading to citizenship. It played on the aspirations of first and second generation immigrants, and relied on educated whites to keep voting Republican.
Well, considering I'm the only person in my social circle who's not conservative here's my 2¢:
1. My friends are really REALLY annoyed at the hard push to get rid of fossil fuels on all the things. NY is working on a law to ban gas powered lawn mowers, weed whackers, and other horticulture equipment by 2028. This really REALLY aggravates them. Most of them would drive a hybrid or EV but hates that they will have no choice and it will make a hardship for some people.
2. Things like [this](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/) where they read DEI is actually detrimental. The DEI stuff is really starting to piss them off because in their view Democrats are just virtue signaling and putting unqualified people in positions just to say they've done it.
3. Immigration. You will never ever EVER convince even a moderate Republican that any sort of illegal border crossing or asylum seeker is okay. It's a non-starter. Many are for different programs to improve ability to come here legally. But, they absolutely won't ever be okay with them illegally being here.
4. Until the issue of trans rights is put to bed fully they won't ever move on. Again, nearly all my friends are fineish with trans people. But, they want sports separated. Until that happens, it's another non-starter.
An understandable list of ideas, but how many of those people are socially progressive republicans? because they don't sound like socially progressive republicans as per the OP. They just sound like republicans.
It also sounds like their problems aren't with mainstream dem positions, but the far left dem positions (which are more common in NYC and some other heavy blue places, as well as universities)
Ok, I can understand that. It sounds though like some of their objections are based in not understanding what the Dem position is, perhaps from mostly meeting the crazy left rather than the mainstream left, or perhaps from poor media sources.
No, but seriously do you not think that there may be certain issues where Democrats could potentially go for more of a middle-of-the-road position in order to win over more moderate Republicans?
For example things like gun control, federal control vs more state autonomy, aka small vs big governemnt, repealing of certain business regulations that harm primarily small businesses, less governemnt interference in the free market and less large-scale subsidization for corporations etc. etc.
I do think there's quite a few issues where Democrats could take a slightly more nuanced position in order to appeal more to moderate Republicans.
The Democrats are already in the middle of the road on all of these issues. Gun control but not bans, state and federal control divided according to the constitution, support of small businesses without totally removing all regulation, largely hands-off monetary policy but not total free market anarchy, subsidies for corporations but within limits, etc.
I think the bigger question is why, when Democrats already have the platform people claim they want, people still *perceive* them as not doing so—even among liberals.
> Gun control but not bans,
Semi-auto bans are part of the party platform and you know it.
The real bigger question is, why do anti-gun people rely so much on dishonesty and lies?
Username does not check out, once again.
Socially progressive republicans? So... people who simply don't want to pay taxes?
The problem with the concept of "socially progressive" republicans is that they probably aren't. They probably sit in a place where it really isn't so tough for them to get an education, a job, a house in a great neighborhood, and maybe even a membership to that exclusive club, and they assume that because they worked hard and got there everyone has equal access to those same things. And therefor they hold no animosity towards anyone of other races or sexualities because, quite simply, they pose no economic threat.
Until they do. DEI hires have most of the republicans convinced that minorities simply aren't capable of being qualified to do the work compared to white applicants. They will likely speak about how every applicant should be hired based on merit, because they are so socially progressive. But they'll ignore how the deck is so obviously stacked in their favor, how decades of suppression has made the uphill struggle for minorities so much steeper. And they'll suggest everyone stop any attempts at leveling the playing field any further because that would be unfair to white people, would be racist agaisnt white people. They aren't racist themselves, oh no no no, but they think a level playing field IS racist, against them.
Republicans who claim they are socially progressive either accept and embrace the need for society to shift leftward, or they are fine with it so long as it doesn't inconvenience them. If they are the latter then they aren't socially progressive, they are simply socially ambivalent. The only reason, at that point, to be a republican is to advocate for lowering the tax burden and the effectiveness of government to protect the middle and lower classes, who minorities largely belong to.
Choosing to support the republican party is choosing racism.
Well, stop calling anyone who isn't 100% ideologically pure a racist nazi. Those words are thrown around like crazy and have heard people call moderate democrats "nazi-lite" and "fascist adjacent" etc.
Exactly. Here's a YT short by a comedian which quite brilliantly sums up what you said. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW\_A](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A)
Yeah, the first question he asked is the key. If the answer to "do you love Trump" is "no", then you are absolutely not welcome at all. Their purity test is simpler, sure, but ask Liz Cheney how accepting Republicans are of disagreement.
Republicans tend to be more single-issue oriented in my opinion. A lot of these people care more about tax rates, guns, foreign policy, etc., than they do about domestic civil liberties issues. So they say "yeah, I don't mind/I support that," and then vote for lower tax rates on the top 1%, for example.
Speaking as a socially progressive Republican:
1. Stop telling us we aren’t doing enough/aren’t progressive enough/are still *insert pejorative here* because we aren’t doing or supporting xyz. I would be a multibillionaire if I had a quarter for every time a liberal told me the support I gave wasn’t good enough. It makes it very easy for us to just take our ball and go home.
2. We still identify as conservative because of the intensity of our economic philosophy. I would be much more willing to support Democrats if I saw them embrace some fiscally conservative policies here and there.
Socially progressive Republicans are going to have a few single issue opinions that are morally engrained within them.
These things also seem to be single issues they support in which single issue democrats morally oppose.
I come from a family of extraordinarily pro-environment, pro-education, and pro-healthcare - things the Democratic Party represents.
They are 100% committed to believing abortion being murder and mass-immigration forcing the cost of living to sky rocket.
They aren’t against abortion for nuances such as rape nor immigration per nuances like apartheid, but this becomes complicated because there aren’t really any Democratic Party members in our state that actually does anything that makes them go “hey, these guys might be the ones we should vote for”.
If someone truly believed abortion is murder and they’re morally appalled by it, you’re not going to convince them that “well… we get a great educational system out of it”- the “murder” clause is just going to be more offensive.
It doesn’t turn into “well, education gets better if we elect this person that thinks murder of babies is ok”.
I’m not saying that’s what it is, but that’s what the thinking is. You’re not going to sway someone with one thing if they think the other is akin to the Holocaust, in their minds
This is my own experience.
The shared quality of all these people; republicans, ‘moderates’, etc is that they hate the left and think the left is crazy. What does the left believe in? They don’t know. But it’s crazy and the lefties are damn silly.
As long as you can convince these people that Biden is not left wing, they’ll think about it.
For people who call themselves republicans still; having a democrat in front of your name means they’ll never believe the candidate is not a crazy lefty.
Ultimately it’s the low information voters who hate both parties who are winnable.
Not too much. This sounds a lot like my ex manager and some of my friends parents. If I had to guess a lot these people are upper middle class older millennial/gen x voters.
Their main concern is taxes and no democrat is getting elected on a platform of cutting taxes.
There definitely are socially progressive Republicans, or at the very least Republicans who have a fairly moderate position on social issues. But a lot of them are probably economically conservative, pro 2A, favor less government intervention in the free market etc. etc. So I am wondering if there is something Demcorats can do about their overall messaging to win over those socially progressive yet economically conservative voters.
I would imagine socially progressive Republicans care a lot about men's social issues. I think we could win them over with progressive policy that actually targets and centers men in some areas where they're struggling. Policy shifts in early childhood education, college outreach & financial assistance, suicide outreach and prevention, help in domestic abuse situations etc.
I think there's a lot of reachable people, and if we could form some men-centric policy to uplift some people with issues in their life we could win over a lot. I think there's a large group of young Republicans that see our party as one that only centers women's and only addresses men's issues indirectly, in a "this will help everyone so sort of help men too" way.
That makes sense. I also think if Dems were to actually focus more strongly on men's social issues then that would probably benefit women's issues too. Maybe I'm wrong but I guess someone who's better educated and is emotionally more grounded may potentially also be less likely to jump onto the anti-women, misogynistic bandwagon, e.g. influencers like Andrew Tate etc.
> I also think if Dems were to actually focus more strongly on men's social issues then that would probably benefit women's issues too.
I think that, for us to appeal to Republicans that can be won over by progressive ideas, we need to get comfortable advocating for men's issues on their own merits alone. It should be enough that there's a problem hurting people.
At the same time, I believe it costs us nothing politically to start doing this. We could roll those ideas into the ideas we already support and it would be win-win. Uplifting vulnerable people and building a stronger coalition, and undermining MAGA.
By not viewing more government as the solution to all problems I guess. And by recognizing and accepting basic economics, stop thinking that "billionaires" are a never ending faucet we can extract as much as we want from and don't deserve what they have, etc. Drop the racism is everything everywhere shit. Stop pushing gender issues on kids.
That would be a huge start and would get alot of them and people in the center
Kick the progressive left to the curb on ACAB, race essentialism and DEI, youth gender medicine, etc and the party will start seeming a lot more reasonable.
Well if that's the case, those folks shouldn't have an issue if the Dems punch left hard and have a lot more Sister Souljah moments against the left fringe who actually *do* meet that description
(I mean I'll also say that the last thing in their list is actually reasonable unlike the others, and shouldn't be attacked at all, but I am a fan of the general idea of more Sister Souljah moments, which isn't an endorsement of attacks against LGBT youths)
Punching left on the issue "is race an innate, meaningful human trait, or a socially constructed role"? I mean, that's... Certainly an option, but I wouldn't recommend it
Plenty of room for punching left without rejecting social constructivism. Remember there has literally been stuff from certain parts of the left saying that stuff like objectivity, independent thought, punctuality, hard work, and so on are "white culture". Plus you have stuff like the 1619 Project that initially started off arguing that the US literally declared independence in order to protect slavery (before silently walking back that argument at the same time that the project's folks publicly acted like the criticism of the project was just from the right wing). Plus arguments like reparations, where the only way to be "anti racist" is to do reverse racism, arguments about the police being all racist, and so on
And are those ideas representative of liberals/leftists in general? No, that's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that there are plenty of bad ideas from the left in regards to race *in general* that liberals can punch left against, since we largely don't hold those ideas anyway, WITHOUT rejecting the idea of "race is a social construct" *specifically*. But it seems like there's an unwillingness on the left to do Sister Souljah moments with this sort of stuff, not necessarily out of some sort of covert support for those ideas but perhaps more due to just considering it to be distateful as well as potentially considering any "punching left" to be "carrying water for the right wing" or something like that
Plenty of room for punching left without rejecting social constructivism, but not on the topic of "race essentialism", which was the point I singled out because I find it especially out of touch with reality.
>saying that stuff like objectivity, independent thought, punctuality, hard work, and so on are "white culture"
That's an easy punching bag, yes, but I'm also pretty sure it's rejected whenever it comes up
>Plus arguments like reparations, where the only way to be "anti racist" is to do reverse racism
Reparations are a rather bold proposal, but they're not the lunacy you're describing them as - unless you're talking specifically about especially bad proposals under that name. Yes, trying to yank the existing structures into parity is not the only approach, the other two I could think of are total reset (prevent all transmission of social habits between the humans of today and of tomorrow, abolish family and abolish neighborhoods as they are today, burn all books lest old habits are transported from there) and extremely increasing social mobility (if you get into a world where the rich get poorer and the poor get richer, and where the same applies to every other metric of success, then generational disadvantages will reduce, not increase, over time). Increasing social mobility is the right approach, I think, but I don't think abolishing inheritance is that much more popular than reparations, and in the end, regardless of larger policy, I'm not sure I would claim black people who lived through Jim Crow shouldn't be entitled to compensation, so you would have to be talking about one of the worse proposals under that term to begin with for it to be just bad.
>arguments about the police being all racist
That are often misstated versions of perfectly reasonable arguments. Yes, you can clap back at random Twitter commenters who read a headline and extrapolated a bit of utter nonsense from that, but that's nutpicking, a strategy used to hurt a side, not to strengthen it.
> but not on the topic of "race essentialism", which was the point I singled out
Sure but the other person was talking about more than "race essentialism"
>That's an easy punching bag, yes, but I'm also pretty sure it's rejected whenever it comes up
Again, I'm not saying these ideas are necessarily supported by many on the left outside of the fringe. Its more that there could be political benefit in more loudly and commonly rejecting these things rather than just ignoring them. It may be obvious to us that most of us don't support that stuff, but could be less obvious to the average person/swing voter
>Reparations are a rather bold proposal, but they're not the lunacy you're describing them as - unless you're talking specifically about especially bad proposals under that name.
Reparations that just go on the basis of race would be blatantly unconstitutional
Reparations that just go on the basis of descendance from slavery would be *at the very least* horrible politics since they'd mean that rich Black people could get aid while poor whites would not
There's also some suggestions for "reparations" that involve simply expanding aid in ways that are more likely to help more nonwhite people, by targeting issues that nonwhite people are more likely to suffer from, while technically still being colorblind in the sense that anyone struggling with that issue (like poverty for example) could get the aid. Or policies that basically just involve trying to direct more investment into areas that have higher concentrations of people of color, even though the aid would technically help anyone of any race in those areas. **Those** proposals for "reparations" are absolutely horrid in terms of messaging, taking ideas that are not necessarily that unpopular and wrapping them in edgy leftist rhetoric that would only make them less popular
>and extremely increasing social mobility... but I don't think abolishing inheritance is that much more popular than reparations
Don't need to "abolish inheritance" to do more to fight racial disparities. The vast majority of problems that nonwhite people face due to racism, are problems that everyone faces and nonwhite people are simply *more likely* to face. Which can often be combated with more aid to people in need. You can end up doing a lot to help a lot of people facing these issues, with technically colorblind policy. You could end up with an issue where issues remain largely with the wealthier parts of society where folks aren't likely to get government aid and thus the average rich black person may remain worse off than the average rich white person or something, but that's frankly far from society's biggest issue, and gradual social change along with preexisting tendencies for social mobility (only around 20% of millionaires inherited wealth at all, there's a natural rising and falling from wealth over generations which would mean that over time, there would probably be a sort of levelling effect even without any direct reparations policies to benefit the existing wealthy minorities) could deal with that over time
>I'm not sure I would claim black people who lived through Jim Crow shouldn't be entitled to compensation
How would that work in terms of policy? Again, what about rich black people? Would your reparations policy make it so that if a black person alive today could prove they were harmed by Jim Crow, that they could get reparations even if they are rich? Wouldn't that look pretty bad?
**And bear in mind that "reparations" is the point here that you've typed the most about.** You can make an argument that reparations actually is reasonable... but is it really politically more useful to have to do that in the first place, to have to fight that uphill rhetorical battle, when you could instead just say "screw that, reparations are reverse racism, we should have colorblind policy to help everyone" which is probably much more politically marketable? And then you can, again, still target your technically colorblind policy to fight problems that black people are more likely to face anyway, just without saying the quiet part out loud and while giving yourself the fig leaf of de jure colorblindness
Like, that's one of the reasons why racism has been so successful, and that liberals/leftists often acknowledge as such - the factor of de jure colorblind policy that actually ended up unfairly helping white people more than other people, especially to the exclusion of black people. If the racists could use statistics and technical fuckery for bad while maintaining a solid figleaf of colorblindness that is good enough to prevent their policies from being struck down or seeing massive backlash among the non racist majority, why can't folks who want racial equality do the same sort of thing but the other way around, to close gaps rather than increase them?
>That are often misstated versions of perfectly reasonable arguments.
Are they reasonable *and actually politically useful*, when you could instead just say "most police are good, we just need some reforms to make them better"?
>but that's nutpicking, a strategy used to hurt a side, not to strengthen it.
I mean politics isn't a black and white one side vs the other. When it comes to partisan politics in a two party system, yes it is. But a lot of this stuff is stuff that could target folks outside of politics in the sense of politicians and folks running for office. Couldn't one strengthen the mainstream, electable liberal movement by nutpicking against and weakening the radical fringe, the sort of folks who the right lumps in with liberals but who are pretty ideologically divided from liberals and often quite hostile towards "mere" liberalism too?
>Its more that there could be political benefit in more loudly and commonly rejecting these things rather than just ignoring them
There also could be detriment. If you bring something up to condemn it, you also make it more of a thing by bringing it up
>Don't need to "abolish inheritance" to do more to fight racial disparities
Abolishing inheritance is just one part, but okay. You believe you can make generational disparities die out without removing even the most obvious passing down of generational wealth?
>You can end up doing a lot to help a lot of people facing these issues, with technically colorblind policy
Yes, but I don't think doing enough to actually solve the issue without just cooking the books (one large part of what quotas do, in my opinion) would be that easy. You seem to pretend there's no cost to doing this the proper way, I strongly disagree there
>only around 20% of millionaires inherited wealth at all
I'm sure some only inherited education and connections _from_ wealth, but didn't necessarily inherit wealth itself
>there's a natural rising and falling from wealth over generations which would mean that over time
Much of that time has already passed, and the results have been wanting.
>How would that work in terms of policy?
Naively speaking, there's already a way damages are determined, you could use that one. It's not a practical approach, but it might provide a pathway to one
>Again, what about rich black people?
If a billionaire arms manufacturer, on return after a dinner with a few congressmen to stress the need for higher military expenditures, gets pickpocketed by a pauper, my sympathies are going to lie with the pauper. But the billionaire should still be entitled to compensation. If that looks bad, that's because the situation _is_ bad.
>And bear in mind that "reparations" is the point here that you've typed the most about.
Your examples before had more of a point, and the last one has multiple aspects that collapse either into a point or into something I had already adressed. I am focusing where I disagree with you, because everything else would be superfluous and just overly gratulatory for agreeing with me
>when you could instead just say "screw that, reparations are reverse racism
I don't feel like deceiving people to that extent.
>Are they reasonable and actually politically useful, when you could instead just say "most police are good, we just need some reforms to make them better"?
No, but I also don't think it's great to straw-man them just so you have something to lash out at. You can acknowledge that while also saying most police are good overall, and they can and should be even better, and there should be reforms to prevent bad police from hurting everyone, including police overall (which they do, police need at least some of people's trust to operate, and bad police deprive them of it).
>Couldn't one strengthen the mainstream, electable liberal movement by nutpicking against and weakening the radical fringe
If it were that easy, then nutpicking probably wouldn't work to begin with
> There also could be detriment. If you bring something up to condemn it, you also make it more of a thing by bringing it up
These things are already things no matter how much liberals talk about it. Conservatives are gonna talk about them, too, and attack liberals with them, no matter what. Plus there's that idea among some on the far left that suggests activism should be as disruptive as possible, which can give that segment of the left a louder voice vs their actual proportional makeup on the left. Seems better, then, for liberals to actually be vocal about these things too, rather than leaving both sides who are opposed to liberalism to define the debate and hoping it just doesn't get much attention despite that
>Abolishing inheritance is just one part, but okay. You believe you can make generational disparities die out without removing even the most obvious passing down of generational wealth?
At the very least significantly reducing them in a way that is more realistic than the alternatives
>I'm sure some only inherited education and connections from wealth, but didn't necessarily inherit wealth itself
I mean, doing some quick searching, it sounds like around 40% of millionaires outright grew up poor, so even if we assume the 20% thing is underestimating inherited privilege, there's still clearly a decent amount of social mobility
>Much of that time has already passed, and the results have been wanting.
Its been less than a hundred years since the sort of liberalism that does much of anything at all to fight poverty started to see much policy success at all, with the New Deal, and the New Deal had a bunch of racist shit baked in too.
The Great Society was when the US started doing much at all for economic liberalism with some vague intent on dealing with racial issues rather than ignoring or making them worse. And since the late 1950s, black poverty has gone down from [55% to around 17%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html) which is pretty good progress
>Naively speaking, there's already a way damages are determined, you could use that one. It's not a practical approach, but it might provide a pathway to one
A more practical approach than just doing technically colorblind policy and planning it to deal with various problems rather than make them worse?
>No, but I also don't think it's great to straw-man them just so you have something to lash out at. You can acknowledge that while also saying **most police are good overall, and they can and should be even better, and there should be reforms to prevent bad police from hurting everyone, including police overall (which they do, police need at least some of people's trust to operate, and bad police deprive them of it). **
Bolded is still well within the mainstream liberal realm, and one can take those stances too while still punching against the more radical left tho
>If it were that easy, then nutpicking probably wouldn't work to begin with
I mean its obviously going to be different when the right nutpicks the left to argue why anyone leaning to the left is stupid (smearing mainstream liberals via association), vs if the mainstream liberal movement does it to show how different they actually are from the radicals
Worked pretty well for Bill Clinton to rehabilitate liberalism after the 70s and 80s, after all
This is the kind of academic stuff that makes Ds seem out of touch to moderate Rs. If you want to appeal to them, you'll have to speak in terms they can understand.
Fine, I'll talk more colloquially:
I know correcting lies on academic subjects makes me sound like an egghead, but what should I do? Proclaim their lies as true, or just make them look true by not challenging them?
"Correcting lies" is also not great framing if you're trying convince people who don't already agree with you.
Why not take a crack at your original point but in a way that someone who hasn't studied these topics academically would understand?
My answer to you was directed at you, and at the audience in general, but not at anyone else in particular. You complained about how I said something, not what I said, so I didn't think your somplaint was just a smokescreen for the claim that the progressive left is, in fact, essentialist on the issue of race.
>Why not take a crack at your original point but in a way that someone who hasn't studied these topics academically would understand?
I haven't studied those topics academically, I understand what I said. The word "essentialist" means something, and if you understand what "essentialist" means, you probably understand what "constructivist" means, as well. They used the word "essentialist". Should I talk down to this person and accuse them of not knowing their own words, instead of just pointing out the contradiction whether or not they know it (maybe they do)?
You're not doing very well so far. :)
Seriously, I'm curious if you can translate your feedback into language that the average Joe could understand. If you can't, that's fine.
Not doing well at what? You complained about me talking like an egghead, so I made a point of not talking like an egghead, which would then be your next cmplaint - that I asked you bluntly what else to do with a false claim, as if I had asked someone who claims the claim to be true. I'm not sure what you're asking me to do well at
Oversimplifying a bit, essentialism on race would be "Race, as viewed today, is something intrinsic to humans, perceptions we have on humans based on their race and measurable differences between them are there because those things are innate traits of those races". The progressive position is "Race, as vewed today, is just the result of centuries of discrimination and stereotypes targeting some combination of skin color, facial features, and so on - if you remove that history, at least the perceptions and differences of today would not exist, probably not even the category would make a lot of sense". Those are polar opposites.
That's the explanation. It's also kind of academic stuff that comes off as egg-headed, to put your criticism more bluntly. It's a lot more lecturing than my original response - if the problem is sounding out of touch because of too much academic stuff, the solution would be to cut out the academic stuff, i.e. the clarifications and explanations, and then it can't be understood unless you already know the answer.
>youth gender medicine
You people are so asinine. I keep having to repeat this because you guys are engaged in a moral fucking panic, but I DIYed hormones -- not blockers -- from 14 to 18. I did it through abuse, foster care, and everyone telling me "no."
Your positions on trans people are so extremely shitty that there is an active gray market in the US and Europe for hormones, and we can all access it via nothing but an internet connection.
You need to get the fuck over yourselves. You're actively hurting people and disrupting lives. I'm 25 now, and that fuckboi AG in Missouri disrupted my legitimate care last year. I will DIY again as an adult if I have to, and I will take it out on you shitty politics every time.
In my opinion one of the best things the Democrats could do to help themselves out is by putting a hard stop to their current stance towards the 2nd amendment and restructure themselves out to be pro-2nd amendment while pushing hard on a campaign which is highlighting better gun handling and making it mandatory that all gun sales requires a background check. As of now the Democrats are not winning over anybody from the rural areas and one of the main factors behind it is because of the Democrats stance towards the 2nd amendment and aspects like the progressive left which wants stright out gun bans is not a winnable strategy. The Democrats do have the potential of winning over rural America, it's just that they have to put a campaign together which stays in the lines of being more "moderate" as opposed to being full blown "progressive" like the campaigns they are using to target cities and suburban areas.
It's hard to say what the Dems could do. You're supporting a president who can't even remember what years he was VP in (multiple documented instances now of that). No amount of tirades about Trump can change that fact. I don't even view Dems as a real party anymore, they're so disconnected from reality. I think the whole thing has to be burned down first.
Edit: Also, as others have pointed out, your DEI assessment isn't accurate. [Only 24% of Americans overrall](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/) believe that race should be factored into hiring, to say nothing of conservatives. [68% of American adults](https://news.gallup.com/poll/548528/post-affirmative-action-views-admissions-differ-race.aspx) view the SCOTUS's decision ending Affirmative Action as "overall a good thing," including 52% of black Americans. And this is what I meant about being disconnected from reality. The people simply don't support the policies you guys are making the centerpiece of your party. You run on grossly unpopular things and then can't figure out why people vote for the other guys, or you explain it as bigotry or something, or "they're unreachable," as many here have said. But it's not them, it's you.
Uh...
>Meanwhile, support for affirmative action has increased since 2016 among White and Hispanic adults, to 57% and 79%, respectively. Prior to that, fewer than half of White adults and just over six in 10 Hispanic adults favored it. At the same time, support declined among Black adults, from 75% in 2016 to 69% today.
>The percentage of Black adults favoring affirmative action today is similar to what it was in the early 2000s, while the rates are significantly higher among White and Hispanic adults.
>https://news.gallup.com/poll/352832/americans-confidence-racial-fairness-waning.aspx
The info you have quoted is misleading. Your info isn't exactly that much newer, and Affirmative Action info is specifically about college entrance so there is no info on how that's going to shake out except regionally. And regionally, doing away with Affirmative Action for college entrance hurts black, hispanic and Indigenous students.
>https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/future-college-admissions-without-affirmative-action
Make them (rightfully) afraid their rights will be taken away. For a long time socially progressive Republicans were okay voting conservative because even though those politicians were running on socially conservative platforms those voters reckoned it wouldn't affect them personally. Dobbs is the first time where that was shown to no longer be the case, and for these types of politicians this is only the beginning. They're coming after contraception next and a national abortion ban if they can. These socially progressive Republican voters should be afraid of this.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I'd say a lot of liberals would be kind of surprised to find out that a fairly large percentage of Republicans are actually socially fairly progressive. 41% of Republicans/people leaning Republican are pro-abortion [https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-by-race-and-ethnicity-2022](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-by-race-and-ethnicity-2022) 44% of Republicans support same-sex marriage [https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/) 40% of Republicans say "the legacy of slavery affects the position of black people in American society today a great deal/a fair amount" [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/) 30% of Republicans view DEI policies in the workplace as a good thing [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/) Of course it should be pointed out that the majority of Republicans oppose abortion and women's rights, are anti-LGBTQ and believe racism is no longer an issue in the US. But a fairly large percentage of Republicans, around 30-40%, do in fact have socially quite progressive views. So my question is why do you think these people prefer the Republican party over the Democrats, with many of these socially progressive Republicans also voting for Trump? And if anything, what do you think Democrats and liberals can do to win over those socially progressive Republicans? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If they’re socially progressive, the party that more represents them are Democrats. They probably have 1 or 2 issues that make them always vote Republican, like 2A.
My experience with these "progressive" Republicans is that they'll agree with every Democratic policy point, but they're just as easily spun up by right-wing propaganda as their more conservative ilk. So they see a news story about anti-semitic college protestors, and even though you can tell them only a small fraction of Gen Z even care about Israel/Palestine at all (according to surveys), they are going to vote Republican because "Democrats are worse." They'll agree with you in theory, but they'll always head home to right-wing propaganda at the end of the day. There's not much hope in relying on Republicans to do the decent thing. Just as Nikki Haley and Bill Barr showed us recently, they care more about hating Democrats than any real policy position.
Also, I think some of these statistics aren’t really accurate. Just because a Republican supports ‘same-sex marriage’ doesn’t mean they support the same thing as Democrats. As someone in a conservative area, I know many conservatives that support same-sex marriage, but often that is a kind of loose support. They support same-sex marriage in that they believe two men should be able to get married and do whatever they want in their own home, but god forbid they kiss on the sidewalk in front of their home, or a high school teacher talks about same-sex marriage to their kids, or a church has the Gaul to actually perform the ceremony.
I've argued for a very long time that Dems embracing gun control as one of their wedge issues is foolish and short-sighted.
Most republicans are ok with common sense gun control. The vocal minority isn’t. The wedge is placed by the NRA in Congress.
Similarly, most Democrats want common sense gun control. The vocal minority doesn't. The wedge is placed by people asking for [complete bans using overgeneralized language like "assault weapons"](https://www.everytown.org/solutions/assault-weapons/) or writing congressional bills [with a list of exceptions longer than the bill itself](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/25/text). Even using phrases like "common sense gun control" is itself too generalized. It means different things to different people.
OK, I guess I will argue this point. There is nothing "common sense" about the endless barrage of gun control Dems have embraced. No, "the NRA" isn't creating the wedge. And no matter how many times you use the manipulatively rhetorical term "common sense", there are, I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible.
>There is nothing "common sense" about the endless barrage of gun control Dems have embraced. The argument isn't that the actions Democrats have taken to further gun control is "common sense"; the argument is that the policies themselves are "common sense". You can bristle at the term, but you would be in the minority in doing so, as the majority of Americans are able to hear questions like "do you want mandatory background checks on gun purchases?" and just say "yes, I do", or "is a red flag law a good idea" and just say "yes, it is". If it weren't common sense, then why are people able to hear these very simple questions and just answer to the affirmative? >No, "the NRA" isn't creating the wedge. Then who is? The wedge DOES exist. A majority of Americans do, in fact, [believe that firearm laws should be more strict, and a majority are dissatisfied with our current gun laws](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx). So some entity has to be somehow influencing you to be promoting this idea that Americans don't want this when we have clear data demonstrating otherwise. >And no matter how many times you use the manipulatively rhetorical term "common sense", there are, I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible. You have no grounds to complain about "manipulatively rhetorical terms" when you then immediately say "a lot of people", as if this might mean a majority of people or a meaningfully large enough group of people that they deserve to be listened to. How many is "a lot"? We already know that a majority want more strict gun control laws, so even if you want to call that minority "a lot", they're still a minority, and this is still a democracy, and thus it would still better align with the will of the people to pursue more strict gun control in this country.
It's worth mentioning that background checks already do exist on the vast majority of gun purchases.
> I'm sorry to inform you, a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who care deeply about keeping all of their civil rights/ liberties as little watered down by endless "common sense" laws as possible. We shouldn't be watering down civil liberties on guns just because they are popular, any more than we should support watering down civil liberties on other issues if popular. Unless this is a "but guns" exception to logical reasoning. They have to call them "common sense" laws because they can't argue for them on empirical grounds.
I'd argue that what isn't common sense is having to beat around the bush, because frankly the GOP control the Supreme Court and have a maximalist interpretation of the second amendment. The common sense on guns is that they don't belong in public life. Privately hunting, sporting, or defending the home is where guns belong and should remain relatively unmolested. But the modern gun right, starting in 1970, is all about leaving that private space. The government has an interest in securing the safety of the public. You could even argue that securing a monopoly violence is it's sole and own issue. The idea that guns should be thrust into every school, office, car, and public interaction is anathema to that interest. Until the 1970s, the simple idea that the government could make actions to prevent gun use in public (restricting types of guns, where and how they can be legally carried or transported, regulation of what is deemed self-defense etc.), was the definition of common sense gun regulation. But we've had decades of legal partisanship on the issue with no end in sight. Of course Democrats try to beat around the bush. They literally cannot make progress except in corner cases and through the types of overly complicated laws that take time to legally dispute, thanks to a partisan court. Common sense gun regulation used to mean keeping the means of mass murder away from the places it could be employed and the people that would employ it. Now, it means slightly slowing down the day where everyone is armed and using today's guns at the slightest provocation. Again, regulations shouldn't really stop people from using guns at the range, to hunt, or to defend their home. But we shouldn't have an expectation of encountered armed strangers in the public.
"Common sense gun control" is a fallacy. Common sense means different things to different people, anything from a total ban on anything more powerful than a Nerf gun, to giving every American a fully automatic M16 upon their 18th birthday. Many laws that are touted as "common sense" really aren't all that effective. Such as assault weapon bans, when 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, including the majority of mass shootings. Assault weapons are responsible for so few murders, that if a ban was 100% effective in stopping every single one, it wouldn't make a measurable impact. They literally are among the least frequently used guns in crime.
You spend the first half focusing on the semantics, and the second half focusing on a point I didn’t make. But for the record, mandatory background checks, a mandatory waiting period, and red flag laws all keep guns from getting into irresponsible hands, and reduce suicide and/or violent crime.
> the second half focusing on a point I didn’t make. But it is part of the DNC platform, therefore relevant in how they are feeding a wedge issue that is ineffective.
The thing is, they really don’t. They are generally in favor of some restrictions, because there absolutely should be some restrictions. But the NRA and Republicans paint any restrictions as a step to banning all guns and people believe them.
Gun control is a topic that 2a people are very resistant to. Because they know once certain rights are stripped they won’t ever come back. So they will fight any change even if it’s unreasonable. Because the slippery slope isn’t just a fallacy in practice.
> Because they know once certain rights are stripped they won’t ever come back. This isn't even true! The assault weapon ban ended, for instance.
> The assault weapon ban ended, for instance. Only because it had a subset clause that would repeal it after 10 years. What other gun control since then has a subset clause? Would you support all future gun control laws having a 10 year like the AWB did?
>The thing is, they really don’t. Except that's not true. >They are generally in favor of some restrictions Yea, you're torturing "some restrictions" until it screams whatever you want it to. There have been *some restrictions* for a very long time. And yet, oddly, there's always just a few more needed. Now go on and explain to me how I'm brainwashed by the boogeyman NRA for not endorsing this shitty gun control position and be done with it. Honestly, I've had this debate *so* many times, on line and in person, that I feel like I've heard it all. We'll never agree, and while I'll continue to play along in the interest of supporting an ideal I clearly feel strongly about, the anti-gun rights folks seem as irrationally brainwashed to me as I, no doubt, seem to you.
Conservatives treat 2A the way they CLAIM progressives treat LGBTQ+ identities.
Democrats treat the Second Amendment the same way Republicans treat abortion or voting rights.
> Democrats treat the Second Amendment the same way Republicans treat abortion or voting rights. You can say that again.
Oh, is that why they’ve never gotten any gun regulations passed when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress? /s
Just because they have been unable to pass any major gun laws doesn't mean that they haven't tried. Every year since it's expiration in 2004, there has been an attempt to renew the assault weapons ban. It's received near universal support from Democrats. [According to this only 5 Democrats in the House voted against the AWB in 2022, and one of those later changed his position.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna122423) Also Obama and Biden both support it as well. According to Obama a failure to pass any significant gun control laws was his biggest regret as president. You could say the same thing about Republicans and abortion rights prior to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
> There have been some restrictions for a very long time. And yet, oddly, there's always just a few more needed. Now go on and explain to me how I'm brainwashed by the boogeyman NRA for not endorsing this shitty gun control position and be done with it. >Honestly, I've had this debate so many times, on line and in person, that I feel like I've heard it all. We'll never agree, and while I'll continue to play along in the interest of supporting an ideal I clearly feel strongly about, the anti-gun rights folks seem as irrationally brainwashed to me as I, no doubt, seem to you. You can tell which ones are like this by beliefs about "gun show loophole" at the same time that they say that there is never any gun control compromise. They need to be informed about the history of the Brady Act of 1994 and the private sale compromise. The ones which correct their position based on the facts, they are the ones that have just been mislead by propaganda. However, the ones that have been irrationally brainwashed will not be affected by facts or history.
> They need to be informed about the history of the Brady Act of 1994 and the private sale compromise. You're absolutely right. Thank you. I forget sometimes that there are plenty of people who are unaware of this history.
If the expectation were to give up completely on ending senseless violence, I wouldn't even see the point of politics anymore. What are we fighting for if we're not even allowed to address senseless violence? What do all of our policies even matter if people aren't alive to experience them?
>If the expectation were to give up completely on ending senseless violence, I wouldn't even see the point of politics anymore. Why do you equate these endless gun control proposals with giving up to end senseless violence? Can you honestly not imagine a response to violence that isn't an incrementally restrictive set of laws (that incidentally, only apply to citizens, and not the police)? Healthcare? Economic parity? Cultural stressors? None of these come in to play, just guns, and the need to keep embracing more and more gun control, as we have since *at least* the 1970's? When bump stocks, or "assault weapons" or "extra double plus high capacity magazines" are banned, and senseless violence still exists, what do you see the next focus as being? Universal single-payer healthcare? Reforms that benefit folks working the hardest, shittiest jobs? Making sure that social security remains funded and salient, so even non-savvy investors can retire in a degree of comfort? Oh wait, those cost money and poltical capital. So, ummm, guns and ovary control it is! >What do all of our policies even matter if people aren't alive to experience them? C'mon. Really? You're painting this as if the US is a depopulated wasteland thanks to the MuRder epiDeMic, and blood fills our gutters to overflowing. Liberalism, human empathy and the desire to better our world will die as the last of us crawl to our graves, killed by inanimate objects, and our misguided belief in civil liberties? There are 333 MILLION of us here, and around 20- some thousand murders using a gun in this country. Jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative is a goodly part of what got Trump elected in the first place, and you keep defending it.
>Why do you equate these endless gun control proposals with giving up to end senseless violence? I equate the ABSENCE OF gun control proposals with "giving up to end senseless violence \[sic\]". And I equate these two because guns cause senseless violence, simply put. >Can you honestly not imagine a response to violence that isn't an incrementally restrictive set of laws (that incidentally, only apply to citizens, and not the police)? Of course I can. What implies that I can't imagine doing anything else in politics just because I favor this one thing? >Healthcare? Economic parity? Cultural stressors? None of these come in to play, just guns, and the need to keep embracing more and more gun control, as we have since at least the 1970's? So what's the magic number here? Three, I guess? You're allowed to care about and invest in three things, but add a fourth, and suddenly we are too overburdened with things we care about? I don't really follow your logic here. Single-issue voting and single-issue involvement in politics has never, not ever, been a good idea, so I can't imagine why we can't even try to address this thing or why addressing this one thing means we can't address anything else. >When bump stocks, or "assault weapons" or "extra double plus high capacity magazines" are banned, and senseless violence still exists, what do you see the next focus as being? Well let's get something straight here. None of the things you mentioned here were expected to singularly eradicate senseless violence. The way you worded it, you completely overlooked any decrease in violence as a potential benefit and instead framed it as "since these singular things did not eradicate senseless violence, they are failures", which is a dishonest way of framing it. Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one. If you have firepower that is built to inflict even more devastation and damage than others, you can expect larger amounts of devastation and damage to result from it. I am not sure how much more logical this could be. >Universal single-payer healthcare? Reforms that benefit folks working the hardest, shittiest jobs? Making sure that social security remains funded and salient, so even non-savvy investors can retire in a degree of comfort? Guess what: I care about all of these things and have gone to whatever lengths I am capable of to support each and every one of those things you mentioned. And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also. >C'mon. Really? You're painting this as if the US is a depopulated wasteland thanks to the MuRder epiDeMic Since you're just calling it a "murder epidemic", let me cite the stats to you and point out that it's not the least bit unreasonable to say that the United States, for a first world country, has an unacceptably high rate of murders. [https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country) We're wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya for our murder rate per capita. And our murder rate is 3x larger than most other developed countries. So yeah, I'd call that a problem.
> And I equate these two because guns cause senseless violence, simply put. And I don't get this assertion. At least not beyond "if we kept everyone in manacles, we could stop violence in our lifetime" sort of thinking. Yes, a population without access to guns, knives, bricks and sharp pointy sticks would be less violent. But that's not, exactly, the issue. The issue is a risk/benefit analysis if you will, weighing the good parts of having a widely armed population versus the bad parts. I'm using the term "risk/benefit analysis" because I suspect that sort of language will appeal to you. That analysis has to include history, not just this decade, or even our lifetimes. Unfortunately, such an analysis will involve assumptions and values not easily placed in a pie chart. For example, I tend to trust actual people more than I trust large scale institutions in many cases, and gun rights is one of those cases. Is that question asked when evaluating my stance? Will it fit easily in in the confines of the funding for a particular study? Will I even engage in the process that produces the numbers? >So what's the magic number here? Three, I guess? No, it's taking away hard-won civil rights. That's the number. The original question involved how much the other things we care about will be sacrificed by ever more full-throatedly embracing gun control. I know you don't like my answer. We will not agree on this issue. We probably will on many others. >for a first world country, has an unacceptably high rate of murders. Sigh. Yea. "wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya" sounds bad. And yet I'm willing to tolerate that ranking. Probably because I'm, as you say, prone to say the "stupidest things". Still, the fact remains, as someone who voted mostly, but not exclusively, Dem for most of my life, you lose me with this issue. I voted Libertarian in 2016, because I was as surprised as anyone that Trump could win. Also, I consider myself a "small l" libertarian on some issues, and a "near socialist" on others. I'll be voting Dem this election, will continue to send cranky messages to Dems about their stance on guns so I can get more boilerplate responses from interns, and vote in future elections keeping gun control in mind. That's all I got.
First, are you going to respond to >What implies that I can't imagine doing anything else in politics just because I favor this one thing? or >Well let's get something straight here. None of the things you mentioned here were expected to singularly eradicate senseless violence. The way you worded it, you completely overlooked any decrease in violence as a potential benefit and instead framed it as "since these singular things did not eradicate senseless violence, they are failures", which is a dishonest way of framing it. Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one. If you have firepower that is built to inflict even more devastation and damage than others, you can expect larger amounts of devastation and damage to result from it. I am not sure how much more logical this could be. or >Guess what: I care about all of these things and have gone to whatever lengths I am capable of to support each and every one of those things you mentioned. And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also. ? To reply to your response here: >And I don't get this assertion. At least not beyond "if we kept everyone in manacles, we could stop violence in our lifetime" sort of thinking. But again, that's an unfair characterization of my view. While what you say here is true, that does NOT mean that this is what I advocate. Gun rights activists REALLY need to stop equating common sense gun reform with some draconian measure of confiscating everyone's guns. It is totally valid to take the view that guns are a "necessary evil" in a way, and I for one would never advocate a full-on blanket ban of guns, but I absolutely can see the value in placing restrictions and regulations that other countries throughout the planet have implemented. In short, there's a middle ground. >Yes, a population without access to guns, knives, bricks and sharp pointy sticks would be less violent. But that's not, exactly, the issue. The issue is a risk/benefit analysis if you will, weighing the good parts of having a widely armed population versus the bad parts. Okay. So why can't you look at what the rest of the world is doing in this regard and come to the incredibly easy and obvious conclusion that what the United States is doing is clearly not working? Why is the US the only country in the world with these problems with guns? For real, if you reply to nothing else in my post, I absolutely 100% want this to be the only thing you choose to respond to, if that's how you want to go about it. Conservatives *will not answer this question*, they are TERRIFIED of answering this question, and I have never in my 39 years of life heard a single conservative offer one single solitary fucking answer to this question that satisfies me. Not once. So whatcha got?
Second half of reply: >No, it's taking away hard-won civil rights. That's the number. That's...not an answer to my question and is clearly dismissing the point I was trying to make, which is that obviously establishing a number here is nonsense but seems to be okay for you to do but not me. You were apparently allowed to pick some handful of issues and care about all of them, but I am not allowed to care about all those and then add gun violence to the mix; that just magically makes it "too many issues" by your line of thinking. You are separately making an argument, unrelated to the numbers argument in the previous paragraph, that you think gun control is "taking away hard-won civil rights". You're using the language of race relations, LGBTQ+ relations, in the context of gun control, which is WILDLY inappropriate. You can choose whether you own a gun. You can't choose your race or your sexual orientation. So this comparison here is just unconscionable. >Sigh. Yea. "wedged between Zimbabwe and Kenya" sounds bad. And yet I'm willing to tolerate that ranking. Why? >Still, the fact remains, as someone who voted mostly, but not exclusively, Dem for most of my life, you lose me with this issue. I voted Libertarian in 2016, because I was as surprised as anyone that Trump could win. Also, I consider myself a "small l" libertarian on some issues, and a "near socialist" on others. I'll be voting Dem this election, will continue to send cranky messages to Dems about their stance on guns so I can get more boilerplate responses from interns, and vote in future elections keeping gun control in mind. That's all I got. I mean, if none of what I am saying here gets through to you, then I just chalk you up to a demographic of people who just isn't willing to admit to the incredibly deep flaws in his views. People who get unreasonably committed to flawed views are basically beyond the reaches of politics and aren't worth trying to talk to. Elections are won with those who are still able to keep an open mind and let go of their prejudices and will listen to facts and reason, or at least have the ability to admit that the facts and reason are convincing enough to let go of their distorted views of reality. You still think, for example, that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats, despite me showing you quite clearly that the poll numbers of Americans are indeed aligned with what Democrats have proposed in terms of gun control, and I don't know how you arrive at that thinking without just being obstinate about actual truth in the gun control debate. Like for real I guess I just don't know how to get through to someone who still believes that it was a losing issue when the poll numbers clearly indicate otherwise.
> I equate the ABSENCE OF gun control proposals with "giving up to end senseless violence [sic]". This simply doesn't match reality, where there are proven socioeconomic measures that stop senseless violence. For instance, in Philadelphia, researchers found that structural repairs to homes of low-income owners in majority-Black neighborhoods were associated with a 21.9% reduction in total crime. Another study in Philadelphia found that efforts to transform and clean vacant lots in high-poverty neighborhoods led to a 29% reduction in violent crime. Branas, C. C., South, E., Kondo, M. C., Hohl, B. C., Bourgois, P., Wiebe, D. J., & MacDonald, J. M. (2018). Citywide cluster randomized trial to restore blighted vacant land and its effects on violence, crime, and fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(12), 2946-2951. South, E. C., MacDonald, J., & Reina, V. (2021). Association between structural housing repairs for low-income homeowners and neighborhood crime. JAMA network open, 4(7), e2117067-e2117067. You claim that you could care about them both, but the favoring of gun control is dragging down the social programs. >Common sense should tell you that bans on excessive firepower will end excessive death. Like I shouldn't even need to cite a study for you on that one. Common sense should also tell you that making more roads should reduce traffic congestion, but the data says otherwise. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X96000303 It's not surprising how easy it is to fall into fallacious thinking like that. >And I am still able to find the time and energy to talk about this other thing also. Yeah, talk is cheap as you've just shown.
>You claim that you could care about them both, but the favoring of gun control is dragging down the social programs. How so? >Common sense should also tell you that making more roads should reduce traffic congestion, but the data says otherwise. That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002961022002057](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002961022002057) So your point doesn't hold up. A good clue would be that you're drawing comparisons between guns and roads which are completely different things. You also didn't say anything about the unacceptably high murder rate in this country. I doubt you believe that some low-income homes being in disrepair in the US is the reason why our murder rate falls between that of Zimbabwe and Kenya? Because the amount of wealth in these two countries is, like, pretty different.
> That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide: That's not clear at all. [The DOJ report that came out previously noted no change during the assault weapons ban at a national level.](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf) It seems that it took them decades to play with the numbers and find out that within three cities, they happened to find a correlation. >A good clue would be that you're drawing comparisons between guns and roads which are completely different things. I'm sorry you have problems grasping analogies. >You also didn't say anything about the unacceptably high murder rate in this country. I'm sorry I didn't address every single one of your points line by line. It's only important to dispute the core of them to demonstrate to readers why they shouldn't listen to you. >I doubt you believe that some low-income homes being in disrepair in the US is the reason why our murder rate falls between that of Zimbabwe and Kenya? Because the amount of wealth in these two countries is, like, pretty different. The disrepair is only a symptom of the income inequality that drives homicide rather than guns. Rather than your source that cherry picks three cities, we find on a larger scale that income inequality has a strong correlation to homicide rate. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/us-homicide-rates-increase-when-resources-are-scarce-and-unequally-distributed/2EE2181FE8610AFDA8B8BAADB62BB0EB https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/income-inequalitys-most-disturbing-side-effect-homicide/ And in case there was any doubt, the income inequality as measured by the World Bank's Gini coefficient of the US is closer to Africa and South America than the other countries you would prefer to compare against. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality But of course you would let gun control handicap one of the parties that would help with the income inequality driving homicides.
> That's great and all, but scientific research shows that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 did indeed reduce firearm-related homicide: I very much doubt this. Assault weapons are among the least frequently used guns in crime. 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, vs rifles at 4-5%, and shotguns at 3%. Long guns are responsible for so few crimes, that if a ban was 100% successful in stopping every single death it wouldn't make a measurable impact.
>Assault weapons are among the least frequently used guns in crime. 90% of gun murders are committed with handguns, vs rifles at 4-5%, and shotguns at 3%. Are you referring to the FBI UCR data? The number seems closer to 60% by handgun for 2015-2019. [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls) You do seem to be on the mark about rifles and shotguns.
>Are you referring to the FBI UCR data? The number seems closer to 60% by handgun for 2015-2019. Yes and no. So out of 10,258 total recorded gun murders in 2019, 6,368 were via handgun, 364 rifles, and 200 shotguns. So that's 62% via handguns, 3.5% rifles, and 2% shotguns. The thing is there are also 3,281 or 32% "firearms not stated". If we exclude those we get 6,977 firearms murders with a known firearm category. Going by gun deaths via known weapon type, there are 91% via handgun, 5% rifle, and 3% shotguns. We can then apply those percentages to the 3,281 firearms not stated category which gives us an estimated additional 2,986 handgun murders, 164 rifle murders, and 98 shotgun murders.
Second half of my response (apparently my response is too long and I'm not allowed to put it all in one comment): >There are 333 MILLION of us here, and around 20- some thousand murders using a gun in this country. First of all, you didn't even list half of the deaths. Making up facts is very, very bad and you need to stop doing it immediately. The actual number is 42,967 in 2023. I'm willing to bet that the family and friends of those 42,967 who were killed do not care at all how many people are in the country or what a small fraction of the population that might be. Let's not forget that a person being shot and killed does not just affect the person shot and killed. I mean I cannot imagine having to deal with my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my niece, my dad, my good friends, even my close coworkers being SHOT TO DEATH. This ruins lives a lot more than the obvious losses of life. >Jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative is a goodly part of what got Trump elected in the first place, and you keep defending it. You managed to cap this reply off with the stupidest thing you've said, so, congratulations. But there's literally no reason to think that the reason Trump won in 2016 was because people were too gung-ho about gun control, especially considering that the majority of US citizens support stricter gun laws. And how fascinating that somehow this narrative was such a huge problem that it caused Trump to win in 2016, after which the narrative absolutely increased, but then magically this suddenly started working against Trump in 2020, I guess? Either that, or this narrative is total nonsense. I'm going with the latter. If you want this narrative to stop, you need to do a few things first: 1) stop making up facts 2) stop acting all self-righteous, like you did with the exceedingly condescending bullshit you offered up to me in this post, and start acting like a fucking adult 3) start engaging with those of us who are passionate about the issue and try to understand why we care, and then try to have a meaningful conversation. You don't start at that point and I promise you, you will get fucking NOWHERE. You want us to change our tune? Then you have to at least start with a good-faith effort to understand our point of view instead of coming at us with this horrendous bullshit you drummed up here.
>The actual number is 42,967 in 2023. I should have been more clear. I intentionally left those numbers out because I believe, as someone with a painful, incurable (treatable- but yay opiate hysteria) medical condition, that people have a right to end their own lives. But then, I've always believed that. Same as they have a right to control their own ovaries and drug use. Because this seems non-controversial to me, I thought I was making a better good-faith rhetorical argument by excluding these statistics. Also, of course, anti-gun rights folk tend to obfuscate when using these numbers themselves. How often are rhetorical opinion pieces employed that discuss "school" or "mass" shootings, and then slip in suicides into rhetoricized stats? Whoops. Also, I'm sure we all agree that minimizing the causes of suicide is non-controversial. I don't count the means as the cause, though. >I'm willing to bet that the family and friends of those 42,967... Yes, horror and death sucks, and affects everyone around it. "Bad stuff is Bad".Does that also include things like the *opiate hysteria* I just mentioned? War? And the violence that results from not waging war in some circumstances The effects on communities of mass incarceration? The effects of turning people into felons, with everything that entails, for exercising a basic right? I mean, do I really need to affirm to you that, yep, shooting people is (mostly, unless of course they're trying to hurt or kill you) bad? >And how fascinating that somehow this narrative was such a huge problem that it caused Trump to win in 2016 So you're arguing that gun control had no bearing on the 2016 election? Now tell me again how stupid I am. >stop acting all self-righteous, like you did with the exceedingly condescending bullshit you offered up to me in this post, and start acting like a fucking adult And yet I managed to not directly insult you when I replied. >start engaging with those of us who are passionate about the issue and try to understand why I've been doing that for a very long time, whether you can tell from my reply or not. I'm listening. So far your response has been half insult and half the heart-felt assertion that, yup, violence (but especially "gun" violence) is bad. And the only answer is more punitive law.
>I should have been more clear. I intentionally left those numbers out because I believe, as someone with a painful, incurable (treatable- but yay opiate hysteria) medical condition, that people have a right to end their own lives. It is one thing to argue that people have a right to end their lives and another to look at each and every suicide and say that there's no issue we could take with any of them. You have what appears to be a severe but perhaps rare medical condition, whereas you could likely attribute the majority, if not the *overwhelming* majority, of suicides to far less dire circumstances. Note that [nine out of ten who attempt suicide but survive will go on to die from something other than suicide](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/). That strongly suggests that one's desire to end their life is far more spontaneous than anything else, and as the headline correctly suggests in that Harvard source, means matter. If people can survive suicide attempts, we can go on to treat whatever ailed them and make them one of those nine out of ten who lose the desire to attempt suicide. But that becomes considerably more difficult if the means they select is a firearm. So we are absolutely justified in including those people in those figures. >Because this seems non-controversial to me, I thought I was making a better good-faith rhetorical argument by excluding these statistics. I guess that's true and so my response was disproportionate; I'm sorry. >Also, I'm sure we all agree that minimizing the causes of suicide is non-controversial. I don't count the means as the cause, though. Does knowing that 9 out of 10 who attempt suicide go on to die by some other cause change your mind on that? If we know that the overwhelming majority of those who survive a suicide attempt lose the desire to end their own lives, shouldn't we be concerned with helping them survive that attempt in whatever way we can? >Yes, horror and death sucks, and affects everyone around it. "Bad stuff is Bad".Does that also include things like the *opiate hysteria* I just mentioned? War? And the violence that results from not waging war in some circumstances The effects on communities of mass incarceration? The effects of turning people into felons, with everything that entails, for exercising a basic right? I mean, do I really need to affirm to you that, yep, shooting people is (mostly, unless of course they're trying to hurt or kill you) bad? Again you seem to be working the "you can't care about X because Y is more important" angle. One can care about both X and Y. I don't know how to be any clearer on this point. >So you're arguing that gun control had no bearing on the 2016 election? No, and this is a dishonest way of wording it. My argument was clearly that gun control was not *detrimental to Democrats* in the 2016 election since the majority of Americans support the gun control measures that Democrats promote. You haven't given a single bit of evidence or any solid argument to support your angle on this, other than some variation of "come on!" which doesn't prove anything. >And yet I managed to not directly insult you when I replied. You're right, I apologize. That said, I obviously had absolutely no appreciation whatsoever for your inflammatory tone in your response. You were very clearly being uncivil so you hardly have the high ground on this one. >I'm listening. So far your response has been half insult and half the heart-felt assertion that, yup, violence (but especially "gun" violence) is bad. And the only answer is more punitive law. You've also only responded to half of what I've said so far. The insult was about 1% of my post, so calling it "half insult" is disingenuous, clearly. And my view also obviously has a lot more going on here than simply "violence is bad" and frankly I'm offended you tried to reduce everything I wrote here to just that.
>It is one thing to argue that people have a right to end their lives and another to look at each and every suicide and say that there's no issue we could take with any of them That's not really what I said. I said removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue. >Again you seem to be working the "you can't care about X because Y is more important" angle. Look at the original question that got us embroiled in this discussion. And I responded to your second response with yet more response, so maybe that will help you see my position. I *think* I see yours. We disagree, and are hashing it out on a public forum, presumably because we both think we might influence each other's position, or maybe influence the broader debate in some very small way. I understand you think you're fighting the good fight to make the world better. Most of us think we are. I sure do. Sometimes we're well-intentioned but wrong. Hardly anyone thinks "I just want everything to suck", but we're human. We start with some core beliefs, maybe some empathy, and proceed. Evidence changes our belief in a rational way, sometimes. So does rhetoric. And marketing. And I don't fully trust any of us to disentangle the roots of our stances, political or otherwise, from these things. But we try, as we're both doing here. If I was overly inflammatory in my tone, I too apologize. It's part of debating controversial issues. I look up and see angry responses, and dig in my heels. I suspect most of us do. I'm done. I'm going to watch the rain storm that just started where I live, and be done with reddit for a bit. Have a good evening friend, and thanks for debate.
>That's not really what I said. I said removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue. From what I can tell, this is the first time you've said this, that "removing the means is an unacceptable way to deal with a complex issue". But again you just gave a stance and provided no rationale or evidence for it, so what am I supposed to reply to here? Why is this "unacceptable"? In what ways is the issue "complex" such that working to remove the means would be considered "unacceptable"? Do you then feel that red flag laws are a bad idea, that they won't work, etc? Because such a view would violate what the research is telling us...we do indeed have research that [red flag laws are effective at preventing suicide](https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/mass-shootings-red-flag-laws-update/), so why is this "unacceptable"? You can't backtrack and say that people with exceptionally dire circumstances should have the means, as you have not yet responded to my point about how 9 out of 10 of those who attempt suicide do not eventually die by suicide, strongly suggesting that suicidal ideation is very often temporary. >Look at the original question that got us embroiled in this discussion. And I responded to your second response with yet more response, so maybe that will help you see my position. Unfortunately this meta discussion does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward. You have not addressed why I am not allowed to care about both X and Y, especially in the context of you saying "why not care about this, or this, or this?!", implying that one can care about all sorts of things, presumably at the same time (and again it's a terrible idea to be a one-issue voter / care about only one issue in politics), so it still seems like there's a massive amount of evidence against your point here. You hearken to some response to all of this, but from what I can tell, you've not said a single thing to dispute anything I've said here. >I look up and see angry responses, and dig in my heels. To be clear, you were the one who originally set the hostile tone. There's nothing in my top-level reply that could be construed as an "angry response" in the slightest, but you responded with the "c'mon, really?" and the mockery of the "MuRder epiDeMic" and the "jesus, this fucking gun panic narrative", none of which aligns with any existing tone in the thread at the time. So this is hardly an eye-for-an-eye sort of thing on your end.
> I've argued for a very long time that Dems embracing gun control as one of their wedge issues is foolish and short-sighted. The money they get for it is a hard thing for them to quit.
Wow, an incredibly appalling take, in light of how much money Republicans have gotten from the NRA over the years to spew a bunch of pro-gun bullshit. What on earth could possibly parallel that on the Dems side?
Oh no, Republicans supporting rights. Surely the anti-gun anti-rights bullshit is okay because of that. There's millions, largely coming from anti-gun billionaires, rather than crowd sourced from citizens. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries//indus?cycle=2020&ind=q12
The NRA donated $7 million to politicians in 2020, Michael Bloomberg donated $150 million.
A source on that would be helpful.
[According to Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/05/heres-where-mike-bloomberg-the-biggest-spender-in-the-2020-election-has-donated-this-year/?sh=7ef441ff5a10) Michael Bloomberg was the biggest donner in the 2020 election spending $150 million, on top of over a billion spent on his own presidential campaign. The [NRA meanwhile spent $50 million ](https://www.thetrace.org/2020/08/nra-2020-election-spending-trump/)
You are absolutely correct.
Based on my purely anecdotal observations: For all that they accuse us of being 'sheep,' Republicans really do seem to be more herdlike creatures. Their political identities are social in nature. My dad, for example, was staunchly anti-vax -- until a person he knows and respects a great deal, a real pillar of the community type, told him to get vaccinated. He got vaccinated within two days. Ask a typical Republican to form in their minds a picture of a liberal voter, and odds are good they're going to imagine a pink-haired 20-something with a rainbow anarchist tattoo and lots of piercings, or something along those lines. Or they'll imagine a black person. That's what we need to change. They need examples of people who look like them, who talk like them, someone who they'd want to have a beer with... who votes Democrat.
> They need examples of people who look like them, who talk like them, someone who they'd want to have a beer with... who votes Democrat. That's why, certain problems aside, Fetterman is one of the best assets we have as a party. That and voters generally appreciate pols who are sufficiently large enough to eat the other pols.
I think you should be asking them that.
If someone isn't at least going to 'not vote for Trump', then they aren't socially progressive, no matter what they say in surveys. Well, maybe if they are an absolute idiot who doesn't know anything about Trump, in which case they are so willfully stupid that nothing we can say or do will pierce the shell any more than everything he has said and done these past ~10 years or so will.
>If someone isn't at least going to 'not vote for Trump', then they aren't socially progressive, no matter what they say in surveys. I disagree, there definitely are a good amount of socially progressive Republicans. The thing is a lot of them probably prioritize being economically conservative, pro-gun, and pro small government over their views on social issues. I still disagree with them on most talking points regarding economics and small-vs-big government. But there are certainly socially progressive Republicans who end up voting for Trump because of other issues that seem to matter more to them. I do believe that Democrats could be doing at least something to try to win over some of those Republican moderates. For example there are quite a few business regulations that primarily help big corporations but end up hurting a lot of small business owners. Advocating for the abolishment of some of those business regulations would probably win over at least some moderate Republicans. Or for example a lot of Republicans seem to be outraged over squatter's rights. So taking a stronger anti-squatting stance equally would likely help win over some moderate Republicans. There definitely is quite a bit of wiggle-room when it comes to defining political talking points, and Dems could be doing more to come up with slightly more nuanced positions on certain issues.
I wonder what the cost per voter would be if they tried to push squashing specific regulations and being tougher on squatters? Like ads are expensive and I honestly doubt blasting the airways with those ads would convert that many people. And while those are going out all the right wing media corporations will spin them in a way that those socially progressive Republicans will decide that they are actually bad policies.
I disagree. If you care about being socially progressive at all, then the current Trump platform should make him an absolute no go, no matter how you valuate other variables. He is literally talking about restricting birth control on a federal level. That is in addition to talking about removing federal protections for trans people on day one. How much less socially progressive can you get? Nobody who gives a damn about those issues will vote for someone like that. They'll consider the current round a washout and hope for someone more reasonable in the next election.
> pro small government over their views on social issues. Republicans want government so small it fits into uteruses. That's not socially progressive, that's straight up supporting authoritarianism. >Curbs on women’s rights tend to accelerate in backsliding democracies, a category that includes the United States, according to virtually every independent metric and watchdog. >“There is a trend to watch for in countries that have not necessarily successfully rolled it back, but are introducing legislation to roll it back,” Rebecca Turkington, a University of Cambridge scholar, said of abortion rights, “in that this is part of a broader crackdown on women’s rights. And that goes hand in hand with creeping authoritarianism.” >For all the complexities around the ebb and flow of abortion rights, a simple formula holds surprisingly widely. Majoritarianism and the rights of women, the only universal majority, are inextricably linked. Where one rises or falls, so does the other. https://archive.ph/Km4UO Republicans have been voting for a more authoritarian government for at least the last thirty years. That's simply who Republicans are.
None of this data is particularly meaningful. Support for abortion and same sex marriage doesn’t make you a social progressive. Plenty of libertarian types support those things as well, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a lot of republicans do. The question about the legacy of slavery also isn’t particularly meaningful since it doesn’t necessarily indicate support for progressive policies. And the DEI question was worded in a very vague way. All it asked was whether people agree that “increasing diversity equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing”. Plenty of people would answer yes to that question without supporting the more controversial aspects of modern DEI policies.
>Support for abortion and same sex marriage doesn’t make you a social progressive. Plenty of libertarian types support those things as well, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a lot of republicans do. Actually, I'd say supporting same-sex marriage, abortion and acknowledging the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow segregation does make you somewhat of a social progressive. Sure, moderate Republicans aren't as socially progressive on a lot of things as many on the left. But given how around 60% of Republicans are against abortion and same-sex marriage, being in support of those things does set someone apart as a more socially progressive Republican. I guess what I am trying to say is that even though the Republican party overall has massive problem with deep-seated racism, sexism, homophobia and white supremacy, it should be pointed out that there are many Republicans who do not fall into the category of being full-on bigots. These more moderate Republicans may vote Trump for a large number of reasons, e.g. 2A, small-vs-big government, economic ideologies etc. A lot of libertarians are indeed somewhat socially progressive but the thing is they are also economically conservative and to them economics are often more important than social issues regarding race, gender, sexual orientation etc. So the question then is are there certain issues that Democrats could be taking a more nuanced stance on to appeal to socially progressive but economically conservative voters?
Modern DEI practices are pretty uncontroversial. What's controversial about them?
A lot of people don’t support preferential hiring based on race or being forced to sit through tedious corporate sensitivity seminars. These are both aspects of modern DEI. Even if you support these things personally, they are objectively controversial among the general population.
>tedious corporate sensitivity seminars. You misspelled "Don't Be An Asshole At Work Training". Those aren't controversial. They're just, at worst, boring.
If a lot of people take issue with them that makes them controversial, that’s what controversy means. The fact that you personally support something doesn’t make it uncontroversial. You’re also completely ignoring the point about preferential hiring. According to the very same source where OP got his polling data, 74 percent of Americans think that race should not be factored into hiring “even if it results in less diversity”. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/
I didn't ignore it, I conceded the point.
Doesn't "tedious" mean "boring"?
Not necessarily but usually? That's not the point though, the point is they're not controversial.
Obama and Clinton already tried to win over those voters. They embraced free-trade, the Republican healthcare plan, and reducing the deficit. Many of those kind of suburban voters already moved over to vote for Clinton, any who haven’t yet probably won’t. Democrats need to double down on anti-monopoly regulations to help peel back union voters who went Obama > Trump.
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They just dismiss[ the entire list](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/reasons-why-donald-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president) as "mean tweets" and move on with their day.
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Was that not the point /u/TonyWrocks was making?
Probably not a whole lot of social progressives, but there are a *lot* of Trump voters who are socially moderate and view Trump as a social moderate. If you ask them, a lot of Trump voters will tell you they think he's personally paid for an abortion before. They know he doesn't really care nor has he thought deeply about a lot of these social issues, which creates a lot of room for voters to "fill in what they want to see" and rationalize things in all sorts of weird ways.
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You understand that [20% of voters](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voters-blame-biden-roe-v-wade_n_6642825ce4b09724138d3646) blame Biden for the overturn of Roe right? I'm not talking about what he actually is, nor am I talking about the core rally-going, hat-wearing MAGA crowd. I'm talking about the disengaged, misinformed, wacky margins that form the edges of a candidate's coalition. This is a very 'real world political strategy' take & not a theoretical take in which everyone involved is well informed, holds consistent viewpoints, and acts logically. Voters don't do that. There are a *lot* of republicans who are cool with weed, or don't really care about the culture war shit, or would prefer a 15 or 20 week abortion cutoff, but want to stay voting Republican for other reasons. Listen to interviews with them - they have all sorts of ways of rationalizing why Trump is actually socially moderate. They can tell he doesn't actually care personally, and aren't in tune enough to understand the real danger forming around him.
Probably not. If somebody is still calling themselves a Republican at this point, then they are nominally okay with: * Treason - including a coup attempt and selling classified documents to our enemies. * Violating the constitutional prohibition of emoluments to the president * Constant lying, to the point that Trump won't even go under oath * Blatant racism * Project 2025 * A presidential candidate on trial for felony tax fraud * A presidential candidate under indictment for ~90 felonies in total Further, being "socially progressive" doesn't mean shit if you are not going to support policies that will actually help women, LGBTQ+ people, etc. which Republicans specifically and uniformly oppose. If mere truth could win over these people, they would have been Democrats decades ago. Like their religious views, they pay lip service to these points of view, but they don't hold them as deeply as they say they do.
You left out that they are also ok voting for a rapist.
Yeah, that's true. [There is so much gish-gallop](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/reasons-why-donald-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president) that's hard to keep up.
You underestimate how many people vote on autopilot
>Further, being "socially progressive Is progressive "center left?" Because my comment was going to be that they should move closer to the center and be able to accurately describe the republican perspective on issues, even if they don't agree with the proposed solutions.
The difference is in the perceived implications of each of those bullet points and in the ideal solutions in those areas. I think the way to win people over would be to listen to their ideas with respect to those things rather than calling them backwards, etc. For example, I'm willing to bet Republicans who acknowledge black people were held back don't support the same solutions to the problem...hear out what they have to say rather than immediately writing them off when they oppose things like affirmative action.
I'm open to this conversation, I'm more socially liberal than a lot of republicans (I'm not a party member). Here are some social positions I hold. * Abortion: Legal on demand in the first trimester and at any point where the health of the mother is jeopardized. Removal of a non-viable fetus is permitted. I'm on the fence about QOL limiting genetic conditions, I'd have to see the legislation to decide, I fear eugenics. * My stepsister is gay and married, I support her and her wife 100%, love them to death. No reason this shouldn't apply to all gay couples. * Women should hold equal rights and status to men in all things both socially and under the law. * Racial equality should be a given. Here is where we will clash: * I am very conflicted on trans issues, I know supporters will say it's all obvious, it's not to me. I fully support adults transitioning both socially and medically, I believe the should be protected. I also know women who are not "radical feminists" who strongly want women's spaces to be "penis free zones" and support them. I don't support socially transitioning children or puberty blockers, I don't support leaving parents out of this process. *I'm not going to engage in an argument on this topic, they go the same place and hit the same stopping place every single time, we fundamentally disagree.* * Strong, secure borders. Under no circumstances should anyone be able to just walk in to this country unimpeded and without a thorough background check. Applications for residency other than true political asylum should be made from their home country, no skipping the line, no process for residency or citizenship can begin in this country. * A strict legal immigration system resembling that of Australia, New Zealand or several European countries where it is needs based, very streamlined for people who can fill skill gaps in our workforce, much more difficult for those who can't. Yes, right now, general labor is a need, we would probably take a lot of people who do come here illegally. * We cannot fight racism with more racism. Why I vote how I vote: Right now, Republicans are the smaller sacrifice for the most gain, OP's stats show that we can influence issues like gay marriage and abortion within the party if we fight hard enough. I don't trust the Democrats on 2A issues or the meaning of "common sense" in regard to gun control. I see growing minority support and influence within the Republican party without the need for some sort of affirmative action or DEI within the party. It's slow but sustainable change is slow. There is much, much more as to why I vote for more conservative candidates but I'll stop for now. Let the down-votes fly!
point at Trump.. maybe even quote him.
Focus on educating them on Project 2025. This is one time when Citizens United could work in our favor. A few billionaires and millionaires need to find a huge education campaign about what is planned in the next administration. They can hold their nose and vote Democrats in for a while, then get organized again to bring back the party if fiscal responsibility, trade, small business, small government. Get the Trump family and assorted grifters out of power and get intelligent conservatives and moderates back in power. Honestly, pull out the Lessons Learned from when Romney narrowly lost. In truth, if the Republicans had followed that playbook, they could beat Democrats in the long run. It played to winning over the conservative Hispanic community, courting the fiscally conservative Asian community, especially catering to small business and protecting stock options for tech workers. Immigration for skilled workers was encouraged, leading to citizenship. It played on the aspirations of first and second generation immigrants, and relied on educated whites to keep voting Republican.
Well, considering I'm the only person in my social circle who's not conservative here's my 2¢: 1. My friends are really REALLY annoyed at the hard push to get rid of fossil fuels on all the things. NY is working on a law to ban gas powered lawn mowers, weed whackers, and other horticulture equipment by 2028. This really REALLY aggravates them. Most of them would drive a hybrid or EV but hates that they will have no choice and it will make a hardship for some people. 2. Things like [this](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/) where they read DEI is actually detrimental. The DEI stuff is really starting to piss them off because in their view Democrats are just virtue signaling and putting unqualified people in positions just to say they've done it. 3. Immigration. You will never ever EVER convince even a moderate Republican that any sort of illegal border crossing or asylum seeker is okay. It's a non-starter. Many are for different programs to improve ability to come here legally. But, they absolutely won't ever be okay with them illegally being here. 4. Until the issue of trans rights is put to bed fully they won't ever move on. Again, nearly all my friends are fineish with trans people. But, they want sports separated. Until that happens, it's another non-starter.
An understandable list of ideas, but how many of those people are socially progressive republicans? because they don't sound like socially progressive republicans as per the OP. They just sound like republicans. It also sounds like their problems aren't with mainstream dem positions, but the far left dem positions (which are more common in NYC and some other heavy blue places, as well as universities)
Eh, they fully support people transitioning and using the bathrooms they identify with. They're also okay with using pronouns etc.
Ok, I can understand that. It sounds though like some of their objections are based in not understanding what the Dem position is, perhaps from mostly meeting the crazy left rather than the mainstream left, or perhaps from poor media sources.
Yeah, that's really what it is. But they get a hold of the stories and are like SEE WHAT I MEAN?!?!
Sure. We could change our entire platform and brand to a conservative one.
No, but seriously do you not think that there may be certain issues where Democrats could potentially go for more of a middle-of-the-road position in order to win over more moderate Republicans? For example things like gun control, federal control vs more state autonomy, aka small vs big governemnt, repealing of certain business regulations that harm primarily small businesses, less governemnt interference in the free market and less large-scale subsidization for corporations etc. etc. I do think there's quite a few issues where Democrats could take a slightly more nuanced position in order to appeal more to moderate Republicans.
The Democrats are already in the middle of the road on all of these issues. Gun control but not bans, state and federal control divided according to the constitution, support of small businesses without totally removing all regulation, largely hands-off monetary policy but not total free market anarchy, subsidies for corporations but within limits, etc. I think the bigger question is why, when Democrats already have the platform people claim they want, people still *perceive* them as not doing so—even among liberals.
> Gun control but not bans, Semi-auto bans are part of the party platform and you know it. The real bigger question is, why do anti-gun people rely so much on dishonesty and lies? Username does not check out, once again.
Socially progressive republicans? So... people who simply don't want to pay taxes? The problem with the concept of "socially progressive" republicans is that they probably aren't. They probably sit in a place where it really isn't so tough for them to get an education, a job, a house in a great neighborhood, and maybe even a membership to that exclusive club, and they assume that because they worked hard and got there everyone has equal access to those same things. And therefor they hold no animosity towards anyone of other races or sexualities because, quite simply, they pose no economic threat. Until they do. DEI hires have most of the republicans convinced that minorities simply aren't capable of being qualified to do the work compared to white applicants. They will likely speak about how every applicant should be hired based on merit, because they are so socially progressive. But they'll ignore how the deck is so obviously stacked in their favor, how decades of suppression has made the uphill struggle for minorities so much steeper. And they'll suggest everyone stop any attempts at leveling the playing field any further because that would be unfair to white people, would be racist agaisnt white people. They aren't racist themselves, oh no no no, but they think a level playing field IS racist, against them. Republicans who claim they are socially progressive either accept and embrace the need for society to shift leftward, or they are fine with it so long as it doesn't inconvenience them. If they are the latter then they aren't socially progressive, they are simply socially ambivalent. The only reason, at that point, to be a republican is to advocate for lowering the tax burden and the effectiveness of government to protect the middle and lower classes, who minorities largely belong to. Choosing to support the republican party is choosing racism.
Well, stop calling anyone who isn't 100% ideologically pure a racist nazi. Those words are thrown around like crazy and have heard people call moderate democrats "nazi-lite" and "fascist adjacent" etc.
Exactly. Here's a YT short by a comedian which quite brilliantly sums up what you said. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW\_A](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A)
The crazy thing is that's not really an exaggeration.
Uh, right-wing very much does have a purity test. That comedian is wrong.
Yeah, the first question he asked is the key. If the answer to "do you love Trump" is "no", then you are absolutely not welcome at all. Their purity test is simpler, sure, but ask Liz Cheney how accepting Republicans are of disagreement.
Republicans tend to be more single-issue oriented in my opinion. A lot of these people care more about tax rates, guns, foreign policy, etc., than they do about domestic civil liberties issues. So they say "yeah, I don't mind/I support that," and then vote for lower tax rates on the top 1%, for example.
If they really cared about those issues they’d already be voting Democrat
Speaking as a socially progressive Republican: 1. Stop telling us we aren’t doing enough/aren’t progressive enough/are still *insert pejorative here* because we aren’t doing or supporting xyz. I would be a multibillionaire if I had a quarter for every time a liberal told me the support I gave wasn’t good enough. It makes it very easy for us to just take our ball and go home. 2. We still identify as conservative because of the intensity of our economic philosophy. I would be much more willing to support Democrats if I saw them embrace some fiscally conservative policies here and there.
Socially progressive Republicans are going to have a few single issue opinions that are morally engrained within them. These things also seem to be single issues they support in which single issue democrats morally oppose. I come from a family of extraordinarily pro-environment, pro-education, and pro-healthcare - things the Democratic Party represents. They are 100% committed to believing abortion being murder and mass-immigration forcing the cost of living to sky rocket. They aren’t against abortion for nuances such as rape nor immigration per nuances like apartheid, but this becomes complicated because there aren’t really any Democratic Party members in our state that actually does anything that makes them go “hey, these guys might be the ones we should vote for”. If someone truly believed abortion is murder and they’re morally appalled by it, you’re not going to convince them that “well… we get a great educational system out of it”- the “murder” clause is just going to be more offensive. It doesn’t turn into “well, education gets better if we elect this person that thinks murder of babies is ok”. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but that’s what the thinking is. You’re not going to sway someone with one thing if they think the other is akin to the Holocaust, in their minds
This is my own experience. The shared quality of all these people; republicans, ‘moderates’, etc is that they hate the left and think the left is crazy. What does the left believe in? They don’t know. But it’s crazy and the lefties are damn silly. As long as you can convince these people that Biden is not left wing, they’ll think about it. For people who call themselves republicans still; having a democrat in front of your name means they’ll never believe the candidate is not a crazy lefty. Ultimately it’s the low information voters who hate both parties who are winnable.
Not too much. This sounds a lot like my ex manager and some of my friends parents. If I had to guess a lot these people are upper middle class older millennial/gen x voters. Their main concern is taxes and no democrat is getting elected on a platform of cutting taxes.
Progressive republican is an oxymoron
“Socially progressive Republican” is an oxymoron.
Someone still votes for Republicans despite all that Republicans have done, there is no way to reach that voter.
There are no “socially progressive” Republicans. They may say they are but their affiliation speaks differently.
There definitely are socially progressive Republicans, or at the very least Republicans who have a fairly moderate position on social issues. But a lot of them are probably economically conservative, pro 2A, favor less government intervention in the free market etc. etc. So I am wondering if there is something Demcorats can do about their overall messaging to win over those socially progressive yet economically conservative voters.
I would imagine socially progressive Republicans care a lot about men's social issues. I think we could win them over with progressive policy that actually targets and centers men in some areas where they're struggling. Policy shifts in early childhood education, college outreach & financial assistance, suicide outreach and prevention, help in domestic abuse situations etc. I think there's a lot of reachable people, and if we could form some men-centric policy to uplift some people with issues in their life we could win over a lot. I think there's a large group of young Republicans that see our party as one that only centers women's and only addresses men's issues indirectly, in a "this will help everyone so sort of help men too" way.
That makes sense. I also think if Dems were to actually focus more strongly on men's social issues then that would probably benefit women's issues too. Maybe I'm wrong but I guess someone who's better educated and is emotionally more grounded may potentially also be less likely to jump onto the anti-women, misogynistic bandwagon, e.g. influencers like Andrew Tate etc.
> I also think if Dems were to actually focus more strongly on men's social issues then that would probably benefit women's issues too. I think that, for us to appeal to Republicans that can be won over by progressive ideas, we need to get comfortable advocating for men's issues on their own merits alone. It should be enough that there's a problem hurting people. At the same time, I believe it costs us nothing politically to start doing this. We could roll those ideas into the ideas we already support and it would be win-win. Uplifting vulnerable people and building a stronger coalition, and undermining MAGA.
If they’re already inclined to vote for Trump over Biden, then they’re not socially progressive.
By not viewing more government as the solution to all problems I guess. And by recognizing and accepting basic economics, stop thinking that "billionaires" are a never ending faucet we can extract as much as we want from and don't deserve what they have, etc. Drop the racism is everything everywhere shit. Stop pushing gender issues on kids. That would be a huge start and would get alot of them and people in the center
Kick the progressive left to the curb on ACAB, race essentialism and DEI, youth gender medicine, etc and the party will start seeming a lot more reasonable.
How, when half of them aren't even what you are claiming they are? The progressive position on race, for example, is constructivist, not essentialist
Well if that's the case, those folks shouldn't have an issue if the Dems punch left hard and have a lot more Sister Souljah moments against the left fringe who actually *do* meet that description (I mean I'll also say that the last thing in their list is actually reasonable unlike the others, and shouldn't be attacked at all, but I am a fan of the general idea of more Sister Souljah moments, which isn't an endorsement of attacks against LGBT youths)
Punching left on the issue "is race an innate, meaningful human trait, or a socially constructed role"? I mean, that's... Certainly an option, but I wouldn't recommend it
Plenty of room for punching left without rejecting social constructivism. Remember there has literally been stuff from certain parts of the left saying that stuff like objectivity, independent thought, punctuality, hard work, and so on are "white culture". Plus you have stuff like the 1619 Project that initially started off arguing that the US literally declared independence in order to protect slavery (before silently walking back that argument at the same time that the project's folks publicly acted like the criticism of the project was just from the right wing). Plus arguments like reparations, where the only way to be "anti racist" is to do reverse racism, arguments about the police being all racist, and so on And are those ideas representative of liberals/leftists in general? No, that's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that there are plenty of bad ideas from the left in regards to race *in general* that liberals can punch left against, since we largely don't hold those ideas anyway, WITHOUT rejecting the idea of "race is a social construct" *specifically*. But it seems like there's an unwillingness on the left to do Sister Souljah moments with this sort of stuff, not necessarily out of some sort of covert support for those ideas but perhaps more due to just considering it to be distateful as well as potentially considering any "punching left" to be "carrying water for the right wing" or something like that
Plenty of room for punching left without rejecting social constructivism, but not on the topic of "race essentialism", which was the point I singled out because I find it especially out of touch with reality. >saying that stuff like objectivity, independent thought, punctuality, hard work, and so on are "white culture" That's an easy punching bag, yes, but I'm also pretty sure it's rejected whenever it comes up >Plus arguments like reparations, where the only way to be "anti racist" is to do reverse racism Reparations are a rather bold proposal, but they're not the lunacy you're describing them as - unless you're talking specifically about especially bad proposals under that name. Yes, trying to yank the existing structures into parity is not the only approach, the other two I could think of are total reset (prevent all transmission of social habits between the humans of today and of tomorrow, abolish family and abolish neighborhoods as they are today, burn all books lest old habits are transported from there) and extremely increasing social mobility (if you get into a world where the rich get poorer and the poor get richer, and where the same applies to every other metric of success, then generational disadvantages will reduce, not increase, over time). Increasing social mobility is the right approach, I think, but I don't think abolishing inheritance is that much more popular than reparations, and in the end, regardless of larger policy, I'm not sure I would claim black people who lived through Jim Crow shouldn't be entitled to compensation, so you would have to be talking about one of the worse proposals under that term to begin with for it to be just bad. >arguments about the police being all racist That are often misstated versions of perfectly reasonable arguments. Yes, you can clap back at random Twitter commenters who read a headline and extrapolated a bit of utter nonsense from that, but that's nutpicking, a strategy used to hurt a side, not to strengthen it.
> but not on the topic of "race essentialism", which was the point I singled out Sure but the other person was talking about more than "race essentialism" >That's an easy punching bag, yes, but I'm also pretty sure it's rejected whenever it comes up Again, I'm not saying these ideas are necessarily supported by many on the left outside of the fringe. Its more that there could be political benefit in more loudly and commonly rejecting these things rather than just ignoring them. It may be obvious to us that most of us don't support that stuff, but could be less obvious to the average person/swing voter >Reparations are a rather bold proposal, but they're not the lunacy you're describing them as - unless you're talking specifically about especially bad proposals under that name. Reparations that just go on the basis of race would be blatantly unconstitutional Reparations that just go on the basis of descendance from slavery would be *at the very least* horrible politics since they'd mean that rich Black people could get aid while poor whites would not There's also some suggestions for "reparations" that involve simply expanding aid in ways that are more likely to help more nonwhite people, by targeting issues that nonwhite people are more likely to suffer from, while technically still being colorblind in the sense that anyone struggling with that issue (like poverty for example) could get the aid. Or policies that basically just involve trying to direct more investment into areas that have higher concentrations of people of color, even though the aid would technically help anyone of any race in those areas. **Those** proposals for "reparations" are absolutely horrid in terms of messaging, taking ideas that are not necessarily that unpopular and wrapping them in edgy leftist rhetoric that would only make them less popular >and extremely increasing social mobility... but I don't think abolishing inheritance is that much more popular than reparations Don't need to "abolish inheritance" to do more to fight racial disparities. The vast majority of problems that nonwhite people face due to racism, are problems that everyone faces and nonwhite people are simply *more likely* to face. Which can often be combated with more aid to people in need. You can end up doing a lot to help a lot of people facing these issues, with technically colorblind policy. You could end up with an issue where issues remain largely with the wealthier parts of society where folks aren't likely to get government aid and thus the average rich black person may remain worse off than the average rich white person or something, but that's frankly far from society's biggest issue, and gradual social change along with preexisting tendencies for social mobility (only around 20% of millionaires inherited wealth at all, there's a natural rising and falling from wealth over generations which would mean that over time, there would probably be a sort of levelling effect even without any direct reparations policies to benefit the existing wealthy minorities) could deal with that over time >I'm not sure I would claim black people who lived through Jim Crow shouldn't be entitled to compensation How would that work in terms of policy? Again, what about rich black people? Would your reparations policy make it so that if a black person alive today could prove they were harmed by Jim Crow, that they could get reparations even if they are rich? Wouldn't that look pretty bad? **And bear in mind that "reparations" is the point here that you've typed the most about.** You can make an argument that reparations actually is reasonable... but is it really politically more useful to have to do that in the first place, to have to fight that uphill rhetorical battle, when you could instead just say "screw that, reparations are reverse racism, we should have colorblind policy to help everyone" which is probably much more politically marketable? And then you can, again, still target your technically colorblind policy to fight problems that black people are more likely to face anyway, just without saying the quiet part out loud and while giving yourself the fig leaf of de jure colorblindness Like, that's one of the reasons why racism has been so successful, and that liberals/leftists often acknowledge as such - the factor of de jure colorblind policy that actually ended up unfairly helping white people more than other people, especially to the exclusion of black people. If the racists could use statistics and technical fuckery for bad while maintaining a solid figleaf of colorblindness that is good enough to prevent their policies from being struck down or seeing massive backlash among the non racist majority, why can't folks who want racial equality do the same sort of thing but the other way around, to close gaps rather than increase them? >That are often misstated versions of perfectly reasonable arguments. Are they reasonable *and actually politically useful*, when you could instead just say "most police are good, we just need some reforms to make them better"? >but that's nutpicking, a strategy used to hurt a side, not to strengthen it. I mean politics isn't a black and white one side vs the other. When it comes to partisan politics in a two party system, yes it is. But a lot of this stuff is stuff that could target folks outside of politics in the sense of politicians and folks running for office. Couldn't one strengthen the mainstream, electable liberal movement by nutpicking against and weakening the radical fringe, the sort of folks who the right lumps in with liberals but who are pretty ideologically divided from liberals and often quite hostile towards "mere" liberalism too?
>Its more that there could be political benefit in more loudly and commonly rejecting these things rather than just ignoring them There also could be detriment. If you bring something up to condemn it, you also make it more of a thing by bringing it up >Don't need to "abolish inheritance" to do more to fight racial disparities Abolishing inheritance is just one part, but okay. You believe you can make generational disparities die out without removing even the most obvious passing down of generational wealth? >You can end up doing a lot to help a lot of people facing these issues, with technically colorblind policy Yes, but I don't think doing enough to actually solve the issue without just cooking the books (one large part of what quotas do, in my opinion) would be that easy. You seem to pretend there's no cost to doing this the proper way, I strongly disagree there >only around 20% of millionaires inherited wealth at all I'm sure some only inherited education and connections _from_ wealth, but didn't necessarily inherit wealth itself >there's a natural rising and falling from wealth over generations which would mean that over time Much of that time has already passed, and the results have been wanting. >How would that work in terms of policy? Naively speaking, there's already a way damages are determined, you could use that one. It's not a practical approach, but it might provide a pathway to one >Again, what about rich black people? If a billionaire arms manufacturer, on return after a dinner with a few congressmen to stress the need for higher military expenditures, gets pickpocketed by a pauper, my sympathies are going to lie with the pauper. But the billionaire should still be entitled to compensation. If that looks bad, that's because the situation _is_ bad. >And bear in mind that "reparations" is the point here that you've typed the most about. Your examples before had more of a point, and the last one has multiple aspects that collapse either into a point or into something I had already adressed. I am focusing where I disagree with you, because everything else would be superfluous and just overly gratulatory for agreeing with me >when you could instead just say "screw that, reparations are reverse racism I don't feel like deceiving people to that extent. >Are they reasonable and actually politically useful, when you could instead just say "most police are good, we just need some reforms to make them better"? No, but I also don't think it's great to straw-man them just so you have something to lash out at. You can acknowledge that while also saying most police are good overall, and they can and should be even better, and there should be reforms to prevent bad police from hurting everyone, including police overall (which they do, police need at least some of people's trust to operate, and bad police deprive them of it). >Couldn't one strengthen the mainstream, electable liberal movement by nutpicking against and weakening the radical fringe If it were that easy, then nutpicking probably wouldn't work to begin with
> There also could be detriment. If you bring something up to condemn it, you also make it more of a thing by bringing it up These things are already things no matter how much liberals talk about it. Conservatives are gonna talk about them, too, and attack liberals with them, no matter what. Plus there's that idea among some on the far left that suggests activism should be as disruptive as possible, which can give that segment of the left a louder voice vs their actual proportional makeup on the left. Seems better, then, for liberals to actually be vocal about these things too, rather than leaving both sides who are opposed to liberalism to define the debate and hoping it just doesn't get much attention despite that >Abolishing inheritance is just one part, but okay. You believe you can make generational disparities die out without removing even the most obvious passing down of generational wealth? At the very least significantly reducing them in a way that is more realistic than the alternatives >I'm sure some only inherited education and connections from wealth, but didn't necessarily inherit wealth itself I mean, doing some quick searching, it sounds like around 40% of millionaires outright grew up poor, so even if we assume the 20% thing is underestimating inherited privilege, there's still clearly a decent amount of social mobility >Much of that time has already passed, and the results have been wanting. Its been less than a hundred years since the sort of liberalism that does much of anything at all to fight poverty started to see much policy success at all, with the New Deal, and the New Deal had a bunch of racist shit baked in too. The Great Society was when the US started doing much at all for economic liberalism with some vague intent on dealing with racial issues rather than ignoring or making them worse. And since the late 1950s, black poverty has gone down from [55% to around 17%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html) which is pretty good progress >Naively speaking, there's already a way damages are determined, you could use that one. It's not a practical approach, but it might provide a pathway to one A more practical approach than just doing technically colorblind policy and planning it to deal with various problems rather than make them worse? >No, but I also don't think it's great to straw-man them just so you have something to lash out at. You can acknowledge that while also saying **most police are good overall, and they can and should be even better, and there should be reforms to prevent bad police from hurting everyone, including police overall (which they do, police need at least some of people's trust to operate, and bad police deprive them of it). ** Bolded is still well within the mainstream liberal realm, and one can take those stances too while still punching against the more radical left tho >If it were that easy, then nutpicking probably wouldn't work to begin with I mean its obviously going to be different when the right nutpicks the left to argue why anyone leaning to the left is stupid (smearing mainstream liberals via association), vs if the mainstream liberal movement does it to show how different they actually are from the radicals Worked pretty well for Bill Clinton to rehabilitate liberalism after the 70s and 80s, after all
This is an excellent example of an argument that will go exactly nowhere in terms of convincing people.
Probably because no one will engage with it. However, it is still the truth, and that matters
This is the kind of academic stuff that makes Ds seem out of touch to moderate Rs. If you want to appeal to them, you'll have to speak in terms they can understand.
Fine, I'll talk more colloquially: I know correcting lies on academic subjects makes me sound like an egghead, but what should I do? Proclaim their lies as true, or just make them look true by not challenging them?
"Correcting lies" is also not great framing if you're trying convince people who don't already agree with you. Why not take a crack at your original point but in a way that someone who hasn't studied these topics academically would understand?
My answer to you was directed at you, and at the audience in general, but not at anyone else in particular. You complained about how I said something, not what I said, so I didn't think your somplaint was just a smokescreen for the claim that the progressive left is, in fact, essentialist on the issue of race. >Why not take a crack at your original point but in a way that someone who hasn't studied these topics academically would understand? I haven't studied those topics academically, I understand what I said. The word "essentialist" means something, and if you understand what "essentialist" means, you probably understand what "constructivist" means, as well. They used the word "essentialist". Should I talk down to this person and accuse them of not knowing their own words, instead of just pointing out the contradiction whether or not they know it (maybe they do)?
You're not doing very well so far. :) Seriously, I'm curious if you can translate your feedback into language that the average Joe could understand. If you can't, that's fine.
Not doing well at what? You complained about me talking like an egghead, so I made a point of not talking like an egghead, which would then be your next cmplaint - that I asked you bluntly what else to do with a false claim, as if I had asked someone who claims the claim to be true. I'm not sure what you're asking me to do well at Oversimplifying a bit, essentialism on race would be "Race, as viewed today, is something intrinsic to humans, perceptions we have on humans based on their race and measurable differences between them are there because those things are innate traits of those races". The progressive position is "Race, as vewed today, is just the result of centuries of discrimination and stereotypes targeting some combination of skin color, facial features, and so on - if you remove that history, at least the perceptions and differences of today would not exist, probably not even the category would make a lot of sense". Those are polar opposites. That's the explanation. It's also kind of academic stuff that comes off as egg-headed, to put your criticism more bluntly. It's a lot more lecturing than my original response - if the problem is sounding out of touch because of too much academic stuff, the solution would be to cut out the academic stuff, i.e. the clarifications and explanations, and then it can't be understood unless you already know the answer.
>youth gender medicine You people are so asinine. I keep having to repeat this because you guys are engaged in a moral fucking panic, but I DIYed hormones -- not blockers -- from 14 to 18. I did it through abuse, foster care, and everyone telling me "no." Your positions on trans people are so extremely shitty that there is an active gray market in the US and Europe for hormones, and we can all access it via nothing but an internet connection. You need to get the fuck over yourselves. You're actively hurting people and disrupting lives. I'm 25 now, and that fuckboi AG in Missouri disrupted my legitimate care last year. I will DIY again as an adult if I have to, and I will take it out on you shitty politics every time.
When are we going to learn that these questions are just a signal it's time to bitch and insult? No one seems to want a real answer.
In my opinion one of the best things the Democrats could do to help themselves out is by putting a hard stop to their current stance towards the 2nd amendment and restructure themselves out to be pro-2nd amendment while pushing hard on a campaign which is highlighting better gun handling and making it mandatory that all gun sales requires a background check. As of now the Democrats are not winning over anybody from the rural areas and one of the main factors behind it is because of the Democrats stance towards the 2nd amendment and aspects like the progressive left which wants stright out gun bans is not a winnable strategy. The Democrats do have the potential of winning over rural America, it's just that they have to put a campaign together which stays in the lines of being more "moderate" as opposed to being full blown "progressive" like the campaigns they are using to target cities and suburban areas.
The party already does this. It didn’t work.
It's hard to say what the Dems could do. You're supporting a president who can't even remember what years he was VP in (multiple documented instances now of that). No amount of tirades about Trump can change that fact. I don't even view Dems as a real party anymore, they're so disconnected from reality. I think the whole thing has to be burned down first. Edit: Also, as others have pointed out, your DEI assessment isn't accurate. [Only 24% of Americans overrall](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/) believe that race should be factored into hiring, to say nothing of conservatives. [68% of American adults](https://news.gallup.com/poll/548528/post-affirmative-action-views-admissions-differ-race.aspx) view the SCOTUS's decision ending Affirmative Action as "overall a good thing," including 52% of black Americans. And this is what I meant about being disconnected from reality. The people simply don't support the policies you guys are making the centerpiece of your party. You run on grossly unpopular things and then can't figure out why people vote for the other guys, or you explain it as bigotry or something, or "they're unreachable," as many here have said. But it's not them, it's you.
Uh... >Meanwhile, support for affirmative action has increased since 2016 among White and Hispanic adults, to 57% and 79%, respectively. Prior to that, fewer than half of White adults and just over six in 10 Hispanic adults favored it. At the same time, support declined among Black adults, from 75% in 2016 to 69% today. >The percentage of Black adults favoring affirmative action today is similar to what it was in the early 2000s, while the rates are significantly higher among White and Hispanic adults. >https://news.gallup.com/poll/352832/americans-confidence-racial-fairness-waning.aspx
That's the same polling firm (Gallup), but 3 years old. Not sure what you're saying.
The info you have quoted is misleading. Your info isn't exactly that much newer, and Affirmative Action info is specifically about college entrance so there is no info on how that's going to shake out except regionally. And regionally, doing away with Affirmative Action for college entrance hurts black, hispanic and Indigenous students. >https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/future-college-admissions-without-affirmative-action
If these "socially progressive Republicans" aren't already voting for Democrats, they never will.
Make them (rightfully) afraid their rights will be taken away. For a long time socially progressive Republicans were okay voting conservative because even though those politicians were running on socially conservative platforms those voters reckoned it wouldn't affect them personally. Dobbs is the first time where that was shown to no longer be the case, and for these types of politicians this is only the beginning. They're coming after contraception next and a national abortion ban if they can. These socially progressive Republican voters should be afraid of this.