The Left and Right demonize each other, the Republicans demonize the Democrats, the the Democrats do a little demonizing of their own by drawing unflattering charicatures of typical Red State voters.

In politics, it seems, they all try to win over the public mind to the concept of “join our team” by trashing the members of the other team. They don’t try to win members through ideas and facts, just trash talking, like on the radio.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t respond so well to trash-talking and ignorance-flouting?

After all, we’re almost all reasonable people at heart. We respond to real facts and reasoned argument. When the politicians ain’t got enough real facts, they have to distort and demonize.

Anyway, a liberal teacher moved to Texas and learned some things about those who identify as “conservative” or “Republican”. The teacher learned that most of such people seem to really be liberals who feel they are members of the Republican team because they are Southerners. Being Republican is part of the modern Southern identity.

The teacher suggests, in the DailyKos diary exceprted below, that Democrats need to stop drawing characatures of Republicans and Southerners, and concentrate on creating Big Stories and Big Myths about liberals and Democrats, to attract people to identify with the correct team, the Democratic team.

Interesting insights. Hope you enjoy.

Daily Kos: The Bigotry of the Left

. . .

What I’ve found here in Dallas is something quite different. Yes, we have rednecks. Yes you’ll see cowboy boots. But instead I discovered that Southerners really aren’t all that different from Northerners. In listening and speaking to my students, I’ve found that they’re mostly concerned with getting jobs, what’s on television, members of the opposite sex or the same sex, clothes, and cars. The same has been true, by and large, of the working adults I’ve met as well. More importantly, I’ve discovered that while most of them would label themselves as conservatives, they generally don’t know squat about politics.
. . .

One of the stereotypes about the South is that it is far more religious than the North. Here in the South, it’s said, we have these Evangelical nutcases who are still living in the fourteenth century. Yes it’s true that Church plays a huge role in Southern communities. I’ve never seen bigger churches in my life. Some are the size of small universities. However, church doesn’t serve the function that you might think. From my students I’ve discovered that church is primarily a social institution.

. . .

I would like to suggest that Southerners vote Republican not so much because of deep ideological commitments to Republican values, rather, many Southerners vote Republican because, well, that’s what Southerners do. I know that sounds completely idiotic. I know it sounds very lame. But my experience teaches me that political parties function more as meanings or brand names in the United States, than as defined sets of policies and facts. I would wager that if we did careful polling throughout the South we would discover that most people who call themselves Republicans or conservatives are in fact liberals. I’m not the first to say this on Kos, but it’s worth repeating again and again.

. . .

I love the left because I think the left is the side of knowledge, reason, truth, and justice. However, if we focus on facts and policy alone we’ll never reach all of these masses who have only the most rudimentary political knowledge. This entails that we must engage in a concerted war of meaning and “myth” making, creating a grid through which voting decisions might be made.

. . .

The left hasn’t done a very good job of creating founding myths, and we’ve suffered for this reason. On the right they have the whole “America was founded as a Christian nation narrative”. Why not revive the Enlightenment, the age of reason, and the revolutionary ideals of liberty advocated by the founding fathers to ground our policies and positions? If we can appeal to the historical imagination perhaps we can begin swaying some minds to the south.