Democrats try to raise their spirits by observing, "See, some people hate Trump, or Musk." Musk is the ingredient in perfume that smells like sweat, an undertone perfume seems to need; in order for people to smell like gardenias the flower essence has to mingle with a hint of sweat but, when they smell it directly, most people do dislike musk. You have to give Elon M. some sympathy points just for going through life with that for a name. But, more seriously...for Ds reading this...please, please, please don't try to base another election on hate. Learn from past mistakes.
Ds don't like to admit it but their voter base consists of people dependent on government funding, whether honorably, as mail carriers and public school teachers, or not, as women who prostitute themselves in order to get subsidized for being single mothers of more and more young children, or men who set out to drink their way to disability. Rs say, and quite rightly I might add, that putting the entire latter group on day labor sites all day, forcing them to sit up and be quiet and sober until they're led off to work and then work until they're brought back to the sites if they want their handouts, would do them the world of good. Rs have less to say when faced with people who have carried mail, or taught six-year-olds the alphabet, or pulled injured passengers out of burning cars for thirty years. But people can agree to blame any young person who's never worked for the government himself, who's told to start firing people and begins by firing people the public could actually miss. As a total outsider, not even an American, Musk is unimpeded by any sympathy for the likable time wasters who love to go to the office, look busy, hang out with each other, and barely manage, on their best days, for three of them to do what one real worker could get done before lunch, working from home. Huzza. But he's also clueless about who the time wasters are. Instead of saying, "Right--at this office it's Carol, Susan, Dave, Steve, and Olufemi," he's likely to be programming a computer to go down a list of names and fire the person named on every third line.
And he's also well accustomed to being disliked. Bright, funny-looking kids usually are disliked. They experience school as torture: being locked in a sensory deprivation chamber with twenty strangers who all hate them, for no reason. And what do they do about it? They learn to hate back. Pull up those memories if, and only if, you want to watch someone with no emotional attachment to you turn before your eyes into someone who sincerely hates you.
We'd be stupid not to rely on Musk's genius for all things car, computer, and rocket-related so it would probably be a good idea to turn off the hate machine. Do we want him to build spacecraft that can rescue stranded astronauts, or spacecraft programmed to cut off astronauts' oxygen supply? To search government computers with our real names, home addresses, and medical records in them, detachedly, using an algorithm, or hostilely, going after people who try to sabotage his work? Musk has made some trans-humanist noises in public and, yes, if driven back into Cornered Rat Mode he probably would know how to manipulate enough computers to use DNA "therapies" to turn an enemy into a toad.
There might be things Ds can do to reconnect with their voter base, besides training stupid people to be haters, which never works well. Consider, for example, something Robert Reich e-mailed this morning:
"When oligarchs talk about free markets, they mean markets they're free to control."
So, instead of those Marx-inspired ritual wails about "ooh, ooh, hate those oligarchs," meaning rich people who are not big donors to their party...what about defining what public-spirited people mean when we talk about free markets? "We mean markets that are open to the public. We mean replacing handouts with licenses to operate small businesses, starting with a license and a box of pencils, or some other small item Wal-Mart agrees to let them sell in Wal-Mart parking lots, and continuing unimpeded for the first five years." Even Rs have to like that kind of idea so the Ds can reclaim the feeling of solidarity with Rs, which they so desperately need after these long ugly years of hate-based campaigning. Even the handout-dependent have to have, buried somewhere deep inside them, an inner child who always wanted to grow up, who will be thrilled to hear: "No food stamps for you this month. You're not an infant, nor even an addict, so you are now Wal-Mart's socks department. Go and earn a respectable living selling socks."
All that Rs will be able to say against this idea is "We can do it better." Can one party do it better than the other? I have no idea, but I think finding out would be a total win-win.
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