Monday, January 30, 2017

Secular progressives at a crossroad

Secular progressives and "progressive Christians" stand at a crossroads. They have two basic options:

i) One is to exercise critical sympathy for the viewpoint of at least some portion of Trump voters in order to coax them into returning to the Democrat party or joining the Democrat party. If Democrats wish to regain power, they need to rebuild and expand their fractured coalition. They lost in part because Obama overplayed his hand. 

And it isn't just the White House. Congress is in the hands of the Republicans. Moreover, Democrats will be defending 25 Senate seats in 2018. 

Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-1 in governorships. And Democrats now control only one quarter of state houses. 

All that bodes ill for redistricting after the next census. 

Of course, they might get lucky and Trump will bomb. He certainly has that potential.

ii) The other option is to fixate on in-group loyalty and solidarity. They signal each other that they are the faithful by continuing to proudly denigrate any and all Trump voters. Of course, that's what contributed to their loss in this election cycle.

Thus far, I've seen secular progressives and "progressive Christians" opt for (ii). It's more important for them to prove their virtue to each other by continuing to disparage Trump voters en masse. That seems to be key to their sense of purpose and self-identity. 

They'd rather do that than infect their ideological purity by reaching out to the leper colony that voted for Trump.

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