Walz, speaking at a Harris rally in Wisconsin, told the faithful that the key to a Democratic victory was their “trying to have that hard conversation in the produce aisle, with the person you saw there at the grocery store, and ask, ‘have you voted yet?”
Observations:
1. If someone I didn’t know were to ask me that “in the produce aisle,” my first response would be, “Who the hell are you?” and my follow-up would be “Bite me!”
2. If someone I knew asked me that as anything but incidental chit-chat preceded by “How’s the family?” and “Are you too disappointed in the Red Sox?,” I’d answer, “No, because I believe everyone should vote on election day unless it’s physically impossible to do so.”
3. The political Left’s fondness for trying to bully or harass people into accepting or adopting their political views is a marker of the totalitarian turn the whole port side of the political spectrum has taken. Maxine Waters urged Democrats to confront Trump officials when they were with their families or walking down the street. Black Lives Matter activists intimidadted diners to profess support for their racist scam “or else.” Starbucks briefly tried to get its barristas to engage customers in debates over social issues. Democrats also have issued guides to haranguing one’s family at Thanksgiving dinner. Has anyone on the political Right advocated this obnoxious and offensive strategy? If so, I missed it.
4. Several wags have noted that the grocery store should be the last place Democrats try to recruit voters…
5. Wow, is Harris-Walz really using “A New Way” as a slogan? How generic and clichéd can you get? In Robert Redford’s “The Candidate,” about the packaging and disillusionment of a Kennedy-esque Senatorial candidate, he was saddled with the fatuous “There’s got to be a better way” as his empty mantra. That movie was made in 1972. Using an old slogan doesn’t exactly make “A New Way” seem very sincere or genuine.
[WordPress wants me to tag this post “Marcel Walz” and “Frightfest.” Huh?]
Ethics Alarms 
Well, I’d have to answer “No, not yet. Since I just paid $3.99 for a dozen eggs, I don’t have the gas money to go to the early polling place.
That means I’ll have to hitchhike, which probably means I’ll be killed and tossed in a ditch by the side of the road, and my story will be on Nightline in a couple years.
Maybe if I didn’t have to pay $4.99 for a box of Wheat Chex, or $3.25 for a gallon of gas, I could afford to go vote.
Does he really want to come up to me in the damn grocery store, where I am looking at the carnage the Biden/Harris administration has wreaked to ask for my support?
Sheesh.
Dana Perino quoted you almost verbatim yesterday when this discussed on “The Five”.
You may have a groupie…
Hmm. Doesn’t he look a bit like Archie Bunker in that photo?
Do you think that’s the image he wants to present?
—————-
Yeah, yeah, cheap shot, I know. Maybe he’d just heard that Trump was almost assassinated again today and he was feeling desperate.
The “hard conversations” people need to be having are the ones where they listen to each other about the problems they’re concerned about. Instead, the leadership of each party is keeping people ignorant of and afraid of each other. They don’t want to address the fears of the opposition, because that would be admitting that there’s a legitimate basis for those fears that deserves to be considered in policy decisions. Instead, they discourage their followers from thinking of the opposition as honest, principled, or worthy of respect.
OK EC
I’m game. What are the fears of hard line Democrats that they will willingly sell their souls for?
The loss of abortion capability seems to be the number one fear of women but who is instilling that fear. Women have been getting more Phd’s and other higher ed degrees than men so they should know that Dobbs did not ban abortion and more abortions have taken place since Dobbs than in the previous period. Moreover, these women have the power to get a state constitutional amendment enshrining the practice in their own state. This is how democracy works.
From my understanding, the next big fear is that the right will take away your rights. Which rights are they talking about? the right to personal self defense using tools of one’s own choosing? Or is it the right to free speech in which even hateful speech is protected? Perhaps the concern is over the right to health care. No one is even talking about taking away the right to health care. Oh that’s right we are not talking about a right we are talking about an entitlement. There is a major difference.
The fears as I understand them is the fear of having to be responsible for themselves and accountable for the outcomes of their own choices. Perhaps it is the loss of whatever handouts they have grown accustomed to and fear that those will have to be curtailed when the money runs out.
These are the fears of children and their leaders are abusing them by stoking those fears.
Conversely, the fear of conservatives is that they will not be able to protect their ability to invest, prepare for the future, assume challenges and challenge others, and have objectively ethical standards.
Identifying what Democrats fear is easy if you pay attention to them.
Generally speaking, due to what they’ve heard of conservatives from their own media and social circles and from the loudest and most annoying conservatives, Democrats fear that there is a large group of people in the country who support, in no particular order…
The fears about misinformation are just instrumental to the above. Speech is considered dangerous when it makes the above more likely, because it’s assumed that all non-ignorant people fear the above, and anything reducing that fear is spreading ignorance.
So far, conservatives haven’t done a great job of addressing these fears. Instead, they either assert that the fears are not grounded (or at least not grounded enough from conservatives’ perspectives for conservatives to worry about) or asserting they’re just something that people are expected to put up with.
Addressing a person’s fear requires either addressing uncertainty from the perspective of that person, or addressing the outcomes that they fear. This task gets much easier when we understand the core of the fear, and not just what people demand be done about it. The constructive principles and problem-solving mindsets make many things possible.
Complicating the issue (and building on your last two paragraphs) is that progressives assume that people know how to succeed at anything if given the opportunity, and if they fail then it must be conservative skullduggery at work. As someone who has identified all the problem-solving mindsets that human education systems don’t teach, I find this assumption tragically misguided. People need opportunity and support in the form of a foundational education and proper guidance, but that’s not part of the progressive plan.
Conservatives assume that if a person doesn’t succeed, it’s because they haven’t endured enough hardship or aren’t motivated enough by what happens if they fail. This assumption is also tragically misguided, and also overlooks the existence of a foundational education, which lets people skip many lessons that conservatives assume are learned by pain and tedium or not at all.
What do you think?
I think every one of the bullet points is adequately dealt with by the U.S. Constitution. What Democrats have come to fear and oppose is Constitutional government, and what they have come not to fear is overwhelming government power, which is what the Founders feared and constructed the nation accordingly. At least, Democrats don’t fear government power when they are in charge of it.
That is indeed the trap of authoritarianism. It is tempting to increase government power in order to solve nasty problems that can’t seem to be solved any other way. Many people haven’t suffered under tyranny, or they trust their own group too much to think that they could become tyrants.
Part of what makes this issue tricky is that the spectrum of libertarianism to authoritarianism is all relative, and people’s positions on it change depending on the topic. Do you not favor a ban on marijuana? If I remember correctly, you feel the same about alcohol, but feel it is unrealistic. (I sympathize with your sentiments about both of these substances.)
Of course, everything you want banned is dangerous for society. The things you don’t want banned are all either not dangerous, matters of individual liberty, or vital for society (e.g. firearms).
Everyone thinks that. How do you know you’re not just using the same level of reasoning? There are objective approaches to situations, but we get closer to them by never acting under the assumption that we’re objective. If we assume we’re objective, we’re definitely not. Objectivity is a process, not a position–just like science. When it comes to tradeoffs like costs, risks, habits, and trust, there isn’t an objective answer for what to accept and what to reject. But there are ways to unlock better options over time.
The way to dissuade people from relying on authoritarianism to solve all their problems is not to merely criticize them for not understanding all the problems authoritarianism will cause. They may be willing to accept those tradeoffs, even if we aren’t. We can’t prove to them they’re objectively wrong.
What we can do is show them how they can do better, according to their own values. We can show them how they can solve their problems without authoritarianism, using the constructive principles.
People are losing confidence in democracy because they don’t know how to do the work of democracy. That’s the first thing I’m fixing on this planet.
You have reminded me of a definition of the word “cad”: someone who doesn’t tell his wife about his vasectomy until after she gets pregnant.
Separately, readers might be interested to see the results of googling “Tim Yutz”.
Followup
I believe that your analysis is trying too hard to be objectively balanced with respect to the fear mongering. I will be the first to admit that using the worst of the lot of migrants to base our opposition to unfettered immigration is creating some unnecessary fear of most of the migrants. What I do not see are people attacking the migrants or even avoiding them in public.
Nor do I see conservatives or Republicans in general referring to the migrants in hateful terms. I am sure some rube has but I hear the word cracker far more than I hear wetback or raghead. We are condemned for using objectively descriptive terms such as illegal aliens. Even undocumented aliens is a no-no and we must use immigrants instead. This is like calling a drug mule an importer. No conservative or Republican that I know wants to ban immigrants from coming to the US we simply demand that they do it properly. I do not want to simply hear that our immigration system is broken without specific issues that need to be addressed to improve that system. Such a general complaint on its face suggests that the entire policy toward immigration be scrapped and our borders opened to all comers.
On the other hand the Left enjoys a privilege of labeling its opposition in every imaginable pejorative. The entire premise behind systemic racism makes every non-person of color inherently a bigot. Even their allies have been so brainwashed that they self-flagellate to atone for their own racism. This is unhealthy and it needs to be called out. Yesterday another assassination attempt was made on the candidate the progressives have continually called Hitler, a dictator, and numerous other terms that conjure up fears of being cast into slavery. Every assassination attempt on a president or other major figure was either a Democrat or a Leftist. You don’t see Republicans arming up to take out their opposition in a first strike attack.
I respect what you are trying to accomplish by getting the sides to listen to one another but to do so you must first eliminate the need to dominate others in the political process. Good luck with that.
Eliminating the need to dominate others gets much easier when we address the fear of what might happen to the side that loses an election. Replacing the zero-sum paradigm is a key step.
If you’re looking for ways to control the framing of the conversation, that’s something I specialize in. It’s called Visionary Vocabularies for a reason.
Walz said: “This thing’s going to be a battle for the next 52 days”
If Trump used the word “battle”, democrats would claim he was advocating using armed military force against his political opponents. That must be what Walz means, right.
It was this sort of cognitive dissonance at the Democratic convention that drove me nuts.
I did not watch much of Kamala’s speech (so I may be remembering some rally), but she would go on and on about how we need to put differences aside and find a common vision, only to conclude with the mantra, which the audience knew to chant, “When we fight, we win.”
I thought, “who are you fighting?” I thought you wanted to get along.
Granted, it was not just her. I think Michelle Obama said it; I am pretty sure the Border Patrol agent that spoke said it. It seemed to be a common theme, almost like it was rehearsed.
-Jut
I think my response to a question whether I have voted yet would be something along the lines of, “twice last week.”
-Jut
Where I vote you get a circular sticker that says, “I Voted”. If people want you to know they wear the sticker.
The question “have you voted yet?’ is as ill timed as the question “have you been saved?” Both are dependnet on a future event. Salvation comes about after death, on the day of judgment. Voting comes about after election DAY. Emphasis on Day.