When the fear in question is that the evil socialist nigger is going to kill grandma, how exactly do you propose to allay that fear? It's not something rational or sane that can be talked down with reason.
A fair point. Back to basics. Forgive me if this is flowery.
The world is in a perpetual state of change. This shapes all of our lives in the most fundamental of ways, be it embracing a bold new future or huddling beneath a falling sky.
It is often said the Democratic party has no message. This is probably true, because the political dialogue in America has implicitly conceded the extremely dangerous fiction that change is something you can control, 100% of the time. The party that should be about a reactive pliability to change, a message of profound courage based on a willingness to seize opportunities as they present themselves and hope in the belief that when we wake up tomorrow the world will still be here, has allowed itself to be played into a rhetorical game it can't win.
If change can be controlled, the conservatives are probably right. Think about it: if we can control the world around us, if we can remake the people in the image of the state (and not the other way around), why
wouldn't we want to set up a Thousand-Year Reich? Who wouldn't want to know their children and children's children would enjoy the same power, stability, and prosperity they knew?
The problem is, if the conservatives were right, we'd all be speaking Latin. Rome ruled for a thousand years, but fell in a decade. It grew stagnant and unwilling to acknowledge the wild, implacable forces of change that undermined its power; it was content to blame internal liars and thieves for its degradation, satisfied in the belief that the forces upsetting its Golden Years were enemies to be faced and conquered.
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." It is a fucking mantra, precisely because it doesn't downplay fear. Fear is a natural emotion; democracy is, after all, a recent experiment, and history shows the natural human response when the walls come tumbling down is "somebody tell me what to do". But Democrats believe we can be better than that. We can build new walls, that hold up better. They won't be perfect, but they don't have to be; they just have to stay up long enough until the change subsides.
So, the message to the tea party is: it's okay. I understand. I know this is fucking scary. I'm scared, too, but we have to respond to these developments, not resist them.
I guess.
My mind is elsewhere right now; sorry.
