Avi Rosenzweig
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

It’s always a tough situation when we hold those whose views are in accord with our own to a higher standard of behavior than we hold those with whom we are not as well synched. You say that you “don’t believe in censoring [your]self because my thoughts may be twisted by others” and that seems forthright and an upstanding attitude to adhere to, but unfortunately it isn’t always the politic tactic. Conservatives realize that — they were burned badly by supporting Ross Perot, and ending up with Bill Clinton, and they learned their lesson about acting according to conscience rather than censoring themselves. The result is that old saying about Dems fall in love but Reps fall in line. — They eventually got behind Trump, even though he was disliked by their own internal majority, because they chose politics over their ideals. For the leftists who stuck with their ideals, the result was worse than if they had stooped to considering the real-world consequences of voting their consciences.

So you and other leftists who want to feel good about not sullying yourselves by voting against Trump in a way that would have actually stopped him now have to rationalize away your idealistic behavior by rejecting criticism about splitting the coalition, etc. I’m not unmarked by this myself — the policies and goals that Sanders most recently put forward and that Nader put forward earlier were closer to what I advocate for than what HRC or WJC had in their platforms, but both of them (HRC and WJC) were a lot better than what the Reps had on offer.

Note also that I couched my ‘Deplorables’ quip as a quip — I do not “write off” any American citizen and I believe in representative democratic government. Unlike Reps who think that the millions of people whose votes for HRC don’t matter because they all live in CA or NY, who seem to think that some votes count more than others, I think that one-person one-vote is a part of American aspirational ideals that we can get closer to. America includes both Seattle and Fort Worth, both San Francisco and Jacksonville. No one of those is the ‘real’ America. All of them together are.

Is being against gerrymandering a leftist or SJW position, or is it an American position?

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    Avi Rosenzweig

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