snit snat wrote:
>
> At 09:39 AM 6/9/2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I don't see people predisposed to Shrub changing their minds. For them,
> four more years of Shrub is way better than four more years of Kerry.
In the whole history of humanity, what proportion of the species (or of any geographical sub-unit of the species) has changed its mind within a time span of 10 years?
My answer would be maximum 2% to 3%. (I pick the numbers out of the air. Can anyone else make a more persuasive guess?)
So saying that those predisposed to Bush are not going to change their minds is something like observing that in the near future Denver will not be closer to sea level than Amsterdam.
It's simply irrelevant.
Political change _always_ comes from a very small number of people (relative to the population) shifting their views _very_ slightly (from passive to active).
But if you do want to obsess about how to change the minds of rightist voters, I suggest the first step is to start talking about Bush voters rather than Shrub voters. It doesn't hurt to be respectful towards those whose minds you want to change.
Note, I am not in the least interested in changing their minds _at the present time_. If a mass political movement of the left should emerge, many Bush partisans would change their minds not because of some argument or persuasive technique but because they would respond to the changed political weather by emphasizing different elements in their views of the world. Maria S has strong views A, B, C, D, E, F . . .P. But the social relations in which she finds herself embedded "bring out" only B, D, P. Then that weather changes. All of a sudden (and it often is all of a sudden) and suddenly her thought and action is dominated by A, D, G, & L. D remains the same, but means something different. So without having changed any of her ideas suddenly she has what amounts to a totally new world view.
The task of leftists is and always has been not directly to sway the huge anti-left forces in the society but to cooperate with the spontaneous left forces that are always emerging but usually don't go anyplace. Gramsci's little aphorism means that we treat each outburst as though it were going to change the world (even though we know it won't) because someday we along the rest of the world will be amazed. Consider those leftists who opposed the Korean War. I didn't even know they existed at the time. But it was those leftists who were essential to the anti-war movement of the '60s. In fact, the SDS of the '60s was born when at a convention it removed the section in its by-laws denying member ship to communists (i.e., to the '50s anti-war people).
Carrol
Carrol