by Barry King
Progressive dinosaur Dan Rather penned emotional poetry about tax policy, which as of now has been liked by 80000 facebookers and shared by 50000 of them and commented on by perhaps hundreds of thousands. To see what a post or a tweet is actually doing and how and why, the thing to do is skim the comments, and my skimming of the comments on this one, as far as I got, shows that Rather is reaching only people who already agree with him at a rate of close to 100%
Which means, he is accomplishing nothing toward bridging America's political divide. He is "preaching to the choir" in an echo chamber, which is what he has been doing (and destroying his originally brilliant journalism career in the process) for about the last 20 years of an (at least) 47-year-long career now, and probably longer, I just mention that number because I myself remember reading him since 1972, at which time I agreed with him.
In 1972 Nixon beat McGovern by 520 electoral votes to 17, winning 49 states and also enjoying a popular vote lead of 18 million votes. The most lopsided Presidential election ever, still so. But even already at that time, the blue state bubble https://www.theatlantic.com/…/saturday-night-live-s…/508337/ (though we did not yet call it that) was already so tightly sealed and culturally segregated that New York, DC, and California were full of people scratching their heads and wondering "How in the world could McGovern have possibly lost!? EVERYBODY I KNOW VOTED FOR HIM!!!!" (Although that was not my experience in Lancaster County PA where as a high-schooler still too young to vote, I was the only person in my supposedly pacifist school who supported McGovern.)
Some things under the sun stay the same (including Dan Rather, and the fact that red-staters sometimes elect candidates that they regret and which are bad for them and for the country) but other things change. 1973 liberals did not deserve Nixon, and they were able to impeach him, but 2017 liberals richly deserve Trump, and they are not going to be able to impeach him, not even with Rather's now ineffective help. For those who don't remember, Rather was a key player in the impeachment of Nixon. Maybe he thinks that he can reprise that act. Sorry, Dan.
A shout-out to liberal facebookers: please note that all your preaching to your own choirs, and zealously sharing those sermons with each other, is being completely ignored now in red-state-America. And for your part, you are not listening to them, either. That's the path, on your part, that gave us President Trump, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House, because people naturally resent being ignored and condescended to by powerful elites (which is what you have been, even if you are less so now). You would do well not to keep following that path. Maybe you can blame the Trump victory on the Electoral College, and the Republican Senate on the fact that small red states get the same number of Senators as big blue ones (2 apiece). But would you think about the House, please? The house is thoroughly democratic in a populist way: no-one can win a house seat without winning the popular vote for it, and every state has a number of representatives in proportion to its population. You want to blame money? No, Dems recently have enjoyed the money advantage and lose anyway, on merit and issues. Cheating at the fringes may be possible with the help of district-map gerrymandering, but Dems and Reps have historically both gerrymandered, so that cancels out, and the House now has an even larger Republican majority than the Senate. The composition of the House is determined "fairly", and you have lost it, fairly. Pay attention to that, please.
At least consider the possibility that all those Representatives in the House, might not be corrupt sell-outs to powerful corporations, but might in fact be doing, with honesty and integrity, what their voters elected them to do. Certainly the ones that I have voted for myself are doing so on my behalf, and I have not participated in any kind of corruption. Dems lament popular Republicans, but ignore them at their peril, and to the detriment of the whole country. Hate-mongering and name-calling against your political opponents, addressed only to each other, and the writing of emotional but irrelevant poetry (while red states ignore you and keep winning elections) is not working anymore. Please stop it.
Dinosaurs went extinct for reasons.