Reading through that transcript, I can't help but notice that Klein's fixated on determining what it is that Dems have done to lose "the center." What he thinks of as "the center" seems fairly hard to pin down. Sometimes it seem like he means "the Midwest" and "rural voters." Sometimes it's "people scared of radical change, like LGBTQ+ stuff." He never seems to linger long on any one such group, or to try to dig in and get to the deepest urges that drive each of those groups fears, and I think that's because his question is what can be done to "win them back." He reminds me a lot of the campus Christian groups I was a part of back in the day whose conversations revolved around how to "win hearts for Jesus." We were all looking for ways to appeal to the others around us, to be cool and relatable, to listen to them and find the needs and hurts that they were expressing so that we could understand how and when to convince them to join the team - being all things to all people so that by all means we could win some.
It was a transactional view of people. We cared to the degree that we thought we might be able to win them over. We were nice to everyone, but we didn't really want to spend any time in community with them unless we thought they were "on the path" to our way of things.
I see this most clearly when Klein muses over needing more Democrats in the midwest who will not alienate anti-abortion people. He's adjusting the sales pitch, trying to get a sale by avoiding conflict. It's a good way to win a sale in the short term, but it does nothing to build coalitions or to create understanding across differences. It leaves marginal communities on the margins and makes it seem tactically acceptable to abandon those communities for the sake of avoiding conflict when solidarity becomes hard.
Coates is coming from that margin and knows the peril of it. He's lived his entire life feeling like he was a target for political violence that saw him in that instrumental, transactional way, not as someone to be won, but as someone to be feared for the sake of winning that same centrist that Klein wishes to add to the D column. Coates sees that the problem for a lot of people is not political violence per se, but rather that political violence was threatening *to touch them.* "Getting out of hand," "spinning out of control" implies that what came before those dangerous moments was not a threat and was happening in a controlled and acceptable manner. Eric Brown? Not *political* violence. Not a sign of a society that had lost its way and was dangerously polarized.
I don't want to tip things over into the same conversations we have had about "white fragility" because I don't see that those conversations have been particularly productive, but I will say that I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional.
I'd like to say more, but I can again feel this threatening to turn into something that requires examples and footnotes and explanations that I don't have the resources or the time to support on the night before I start my Fall teaching, so I'll have to be satisfied with this quick stab at what nibbles at me when I read Klein.
Reading through that transcript, I can't help but notice that Klein's fixated on determining what it is that Dems have done to lose "the center." What he thinks of as "the center" seems fairly hard to pin down. Sometimes it seem like he means "the Midwest" and "rural voters." Sometimes it's "people scared of radical change, like LGBTQ+ stuff." He never seems to linger long on any one such group, or to try to dig in and get to the deepest urges that drive each of those groups fears, and I think that's because his question is what can be done to "win them back." He reminds me a lot of the campus Christian groups I was a part of back in the day whose conversations revolved around how to "win hearts for Jesus." We were all looking for ways to appeal to the others around us, to be cool and relatable, to listen to them and find the needs and hurts that they were expressing so that we could understand how and when to convince them to join the team - being all things to all people so that by all means we could win some.
It was a transactional view of people. We cared to the degree that we thought we might be able to win them over. We were nice to everyone, but we didn't really want to spend any time in community with them unless we thought they were "on the path" to our way of things.
I see this most clearly when Klein muses over needing more Democrats in the midwest who will not alienate anti-abortion people. He's adjusting the sales pitch, trying to get a sale by avoiding conflict. It's a good way to win a sale in the short term, but it does nothing to build coalitions or to create understanding across differences. It leaves marginal communities on the margins and makes it seem tactically acceptable to abandon those communities for the sake of avoiding conflict when solidarity becomes hard.
Coates is coming from that margin and knows the peril of it. He's lived his entire life feeling like he was a target for political violence that saw him in that instrumental, transactional way, not as someone to be won, but as someone to be feared for the sake of winning that same centrist that Klein wishes to add to the D column. Coates sees that the problem for a lot of people is not political violence per se, but rather that political violence was threatening *to touch them.* "Getting out of hand," "spinning out of control" implies that what came before those dangerous moments was not a threat and was happening in a controlled and acceptable manner. Eric Brown? Not *political* violence. Not a sign of a society that had lost its way and was dangerously polarized.
I don't want to tip things over into the same conversations we have had about "white fragility" because I don't see that those conversations have been particularly productive, but I will say that I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional.
I'd like to say more, but I can again feel this threatening to turn into something that requires examples and footnotes and explanations that I don't have the resources or the time to support on the night before I start my Fall teaching, so I'll have to be satisfied with this quick stab at what nibbles at me when I read Klein.