Brawndo Addict
Banned
I agree. I think the LGBT movement had an advantage in that non-heterosexuality can emerge in any group - even rural America has gay children. So there's more chance that your friend, your cousin, your role model reveals themselves as gay when they were already in a position of trust. You can't come out as black. It's going to be much, much harder to do the same for minorities. At least in the short-run, though, we might not need to do that. In the short-run, we can win back those who are apathetic about racism back into our coalition by offering them economic stuff they want, even if we can't persuade them to care about racism. It's a stop-gap, but what other choice is there?
I think there's two underlying issues here that are sort of getting overlapped.
Issue 1: How do we win the next election?
Issue 2: How do we get people to change their minds about something?
These are very different objectives which require very different methodologies.
I think there's a strong argument to be made that Issue 1 could be resolved entirely on the campaign side. The margins in key states were so incredibly low such that even things like marginally increased staffing, GOTV efforts, tailored advertising/messaging, or even just more campaign stops could have made a material difference.
I also think that resolving Issue 2 is not necessary to solve Issue 1, and in fact, trying to resolve Issue 2 is a fool's errand. Changing deeply embedded psychological belief structures on a faster timescale of years as opposed to decades is the opposite of easy or efficient and it is fundamentally dependent on being able to leverage deeply personal individual connections. Liberals and minorities simply don't live in the places where this work and relationships would have to happen and I'm not convinced that nationwide canvassing efforts are going to be a realistic, effective, or scale-able solution or alternative.
I also think the social/cultural impacts of the internet are a complete wild-card that makes it very difficult to make predictions based on our assumptions about how society used to work. I am deeply cynical about our culture's trajectory in this Wild West technological future and fear that corporations will ultimately become the gatekeepers or 'designers' who determine how society will develop (either deliberately or as an accidental by-product).
Facebook's/Twitter's algorithms and policies will play a bigger role in determining how fast people change their minds about something (if at all) than civic engagement will. This is the grim Black Mirror future we are living in.