I keep reading demfenders (because they're the first things that's gonna get damaged when the right wing drives its SUV into the democratic party) mention this word; "inclusive", as in "the democrats need to be more inclusive of..." followed by one of the hollow right wing propaganda issues that exist as nothing more than a counter point to one of those "single issue"s that need to abandoned, happily ignored or fallafelled to death, like womens rights, GLBT rights, anti-discrimination laws, the rebuilding of New Orleans, anti-war efforts or whatever the caucasian hetero-normative libgressive patriarchs have decided is irrelevent this week.
Now the trouble with this is that the word "inclusive" is being used like the phrase "multicultural", it's supposed to set off the same signals in the brain at least. If I declared that you weren't inclusive, you'd assume that I was calling you a bigot of some kind, like one of those wacko anti-immigrant types, it is in short a quick and extremely dirty method by which the authority rimmers on the left, center and obstructionist right use to try to shut down discussion about the greater issue of the right wing shift the democratic party.
The trouble with this cheap little retorical tactic is that, while discussing immigration, the issues that racist minutemen types bring up to bolster their irrational fear of the Other do not hold water in regards to immigrants, but actually do when you focus them at the democratic party's inclusiveness to right wingers.
For instance:
Point the 1: That they are immoral, murderous, filthy and want to rape our women
The Reality regarding immigrants: most immigrants to america (mainly mexicans or muslims, depending on who the racist is precisely) are members of a highly moral religion that abors the loss of life, and they will on average be less likely to kill white folk in their beds than a californian neo-nazi who's high on PCP and looking for trouble.
The Reality regarding Right Wing Politicians: It is, to put no too fine a point on it, 100% absolutely true, if they want to ban abortion, they are immoral because no only do they want to increase abortions with their stop-gap measures to make sex officially "icky", they want to force women with not other choice but abortion to risk serious medical harm in process, because they want to force her to undergo the life threatening and life wrecking medical procedure called "birth" while getting rid of any support that mother might have had from the nation to raise the child, because government subsidy programs are "immoral". If they support corporations over employees then they are immoral because they wish to empoverish the workers of american and drive down wages and employee benefits, leading to poor living conditions and a rise in crime. If they support bans on SSM they are helping to fuel the fire of homophobia across the nation that leads to gay bashings and rob GLBTs of equal rights, also aiding the consolidation of power for the extremist right. In short, if they support Right Wing Politics at all they are immoral and bad for this country. They are also highly amoral when offered cash or homosexual prostitutes, and thus prone to corruption, bribes and scandal that would make the entire democratic party look bad and less electable. They also support enough aspects of the patriarchy that they are happily ignorant of their complicitness in the rape culture inside and outside prisons.
Point the 2: That they will steal jobs from hard working members of us
Reality regarding immigrants: Well if by "jobs" you mean lowest of the low jobs that white people don't particularly want to do and, if they're really hard working, can do better than, then they might steal your job, or they might also provide an increased labor pool for employers to exploit while at the same time increasing the net number of consumers in the society, thus increasing demand for labor along with the supply of labor.
Reality regarding Right Wing politicians: Every right winger who gets a seat on the senate or congress with a D in front of his name has stolen a seat from a progressive minded politician, there is no way under the current system that an increase in right wing democrats will be able to create an increase market for left wing dems, and it is entirely conceivble that, with a party to back the candidate up that has the serious genitalia orbs to push and win with left leaning policies and issues, a left leaning dem could grab hold of even the reddest state by its short and curlies, which would inherently negate the need for a right wing dem and the right wing votes he might be able to bring with him in the first place.
Point the 3: That they are all secretly plotting to oppress us when the numbers are in their favor
This is, to my mind the most crucial thing, the thing that seperates the crazy racists from the chaff, and the stupid dems from the sensible political operators respectively, now outside of areas that have actively and highly visible militant organisations fighting for...whatever, the various groups that make up immigrants lack the sort of wide spread organisation and will to pull off such a consiracy, it's utterly ludicrous and reliant on fantastic conspiracies involving tobacconists being vanguards for the grand brown hoard's diabolical plot.
The thing is though, that while such a theory is ridiculous when discussing immigrants, the same cannot be said for right wing politicians, they have in fact shown themselves to be a highly focused, highly organised and highly unified group, right wing politicians are in effect a small enough and goal oriented enough group that they could, if allowed into the democrat party in large enough numbers, could do to the democratic party what they will do to the supreme courts i.e. send it hurtling rightwards and cease being a road block for far right idealogical politics.
Now I'm not really confortable using this particular paradigm to explain why "inclusiveness" is probably gonna be the thing that either kills or turns the dems back into the horriffic little down presser it was back in the day, but that's exactly why "inclusive" is the buzz word used to silence opposition to the rightward shift of the democrats' that requires this of all comparisons to dissect, it's supposed to spark off the very valid fear of being *.phobic that good liberals have and make them not actually analyse what is being sold to us under its banner.
What is being sold to us is this though: An immoral, eventually unelectable democratic party that, rather than the current status quo of them being non-obstacles in the right wing's warpath, will actively begin aiding in the acceptance and legal adoption of right wing policies with all three houses for the forseeable future, regardless of who gets elected, turning a nominally two party state into an actual one party state, but with the external image of a two party one.
I'm gonna end now with The quote from pastor martin niemoller:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Remember centre-left liberals, they will come for your "single issues" eventually, they always do because what ever even marginally left wing thing you hold to as an unalienable part of the democratic party's core values, they're still too right wing for the right wingers
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