01-13-2021, 02:40 PM
(01-13-2021, 12:52 PM)David Horn Wrote: I see your point, but wonder how to do what you suggest. Much of white evangelical identity (what you're discussing here) makes no room for the reduction in status that this group must accept for a diverse country to succeed. No one gets to be King of the Hill in a truly fair society -- certainly not by virtue of birth. This is the third pass at fixing a vexing race problem created at the dawning of this nation. Both prior attempts failed on this very issue.
I think it starts by stopping assuming what they want and are concerned about and engaging with them enough to know exactly what that is. You mentioned you grew up in the 50's and 60's, which means that the evangelicals you probably grew up with and formed an impression of are very different from the ones who actually exist now. For the record, I'm not evangelical but I have enough relatives who are and spent enough time among that community to have a pretty good idea of what they care about and it isn't being King of the Hill or excluding black people. They don't see themselves as in the majority (which they aren't) and they don't consider themselves 'white' first but 'Christian' first and mostly want assurances that the dominant tribe recognizes a clear boundary to how much the state can force them to violate their conscious in order to participate in the public sphere. This is true for all conservative Judeo-Christian religious groups, not just evangelicals, BTW.
It starts by, as I think Jonathan Haidt put it, speaking to the elephant. Stop acting as if conservatives don't share any values with liberals and recognize that they have the same values, plus *more* of them. Acknowledge those values as important and things that most be considered when making policy and speak to those values to find common ground. Clinton, for all his faults as a human being, was excellent at doing this. Obama was as well, which is why he remained personally popular despite a number of people didn't like his policies. It won't work for all the groups that find themselves in the conservative camp right now, some are just too far away, but you could probably pull over the social conservatives (probably the easiest set of groups) and the laissez faire capitalists.
Just remember, the consensus that comes out of the 4T becomes the next cycle's conservatives. At some point, Democrats will figure out how to talk to them and bring them into the fold, unless they plan to lose power to the Republicans if they keep driving their more conservative members out of the party. Since my primary concern is with how far we go in persecuting those outside the emerging dominant tribe, I just think the sooner they manage to do this the better.