What Should We Do?

Bashing the enablers

Over the last few weeks a number of folks have expressed various degree of frustration with our political situation and an alleged lack of active opposition to the president, his politics and his enablers. Some say we should be protesting in the streets and doing more active things like building barricades to make displeasure known. Of course, escalation like that risks giving the president an excuse to escalate violence and crush democracy and slaughter political opposition, sort of like this light-hearted video suggests:

Bashing democracy and protesters

What else is there to do? One can send money to the people running for office against the president and GOP members of congress and state offices. Sometimes that helps and sometimes it doesn't.

Entering the dark pit

One thing I used to do was to go to conservative websites and engage with conservatives. When I started doing online politics, about 15 years ago, engaging with conservatives was fine. I liked it. Most were reasonably rational and fact-based. One could usually have a civil, informative discussion and disagreement. I learned things back then.

Then, over a period of just a couple of years all of the conservative sites that I engaged with morphed into what they are now. Specifically, they are now disrespectful, places where facts and reason have mostly (~90% ?) been replaced with fake reality, irrational thinking, and disrespect and insults for people who disagree with the radical ideology and blatant irrationality and biases that now dominate conservatism. There truly was a radical change from reasonable and civil to irrational and uncivil.

The stakes for the upcoming election are extremely high.  Given that, could it be helpful to once again venture back into dark conservative pits like Breitbart and Town Hall to try to infuse some facts and reason into the darkness and crackpot conspiracies? One can do that, but expect that reality and reason would still be rejected. And, the messenger will probably get rhetorically blasted. Maybe even banned from the site.

At this time, is this sentiment reasonable, or is it over the top alarmism?

Given how the human mind responds to inconvenient truths and reasoning, most minds (~99% ?) won't change, but some seeds of doubt just might be sown in a few minds. Between now and the election, that just might translate into a few votes for the opposition. Maybe.

The thought of dealing with conservative and populist cruelty and darkness is not appealing at all. But on the other hand, the stakes are extremely high. So high that some might even see it as a civic and/or moral duty. Even if one can do only a little, it is probably best to try to do it. At least, that's what Edmund says about it.

Posted by Germaine