The Power of a Coherent Vision
The Republicans have long understood the power of offering a coherent vision to the public. That’s why they adopted Newt Gingrich’s ten-point “Contract with America” in 1994 as their central unifying message—a decision that enabled them to take back control of the Congress. Lacking a similar unifying vision, the Democrats are once again on the path toward self-marginalization, while progressives stew in their own sense of powerlessness.
Putting forward a larger worldview is both ethically appropriate and likely to be politically effective. The core values of love, kindness, generosity, and caring (caring for each other and the earth) must become the central focus of all who hope to heal and transform our world. A progressive political movement that does not prioritize love will never succeed in effectively challenging unbridled corporate capitalism and the toxic ethos dominating the global economy.
Most people have two voices in their heads. One voice says this is a world in which other people are out to advance their own interests at all costs, and they will exploit us unless we succeed in dominating them first. The other voice says our own security and success in the world is more likely to be achieved when others experience us as loving, caring, and generous toward them. Those who hold the domination worldview tend to vote conservative, whereas those who hold the generosity worldview tend to vote liberal or progressive.Actually, Mike, you have it all wrong. Those who hold the conservative worldview tend to want people to be independent and, as much as possible, resist the snares and lures of government entitlement programs, which breed dependency. Those who hold the "love" worldview (or "the vision of the anointed," as Thomas Sowell calls it) use it to empower themselves, bureaucracies, and big government at the expense of the individual, all the while telling themselves that they know better than "the little guy" how he should lead his life.
We know where your recipe for Utopia leads, i.e. to perdition--and it isn't a place that anyone who values freedom/liberty would want to live.
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