Rich Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on their own turf, at community activities important to these people. Progressives don't even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the 'red' communities, and as a result "the left understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people...letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit".
We the educated progressive reformers can talk about, or for the uneducated working class, but can we converse with them, in a mutual pedagogy of the oppressed? Hard to do unless we speak of business, family, shared faith, patriotism, and economic aspiration. Many of my educated progressive friends are in the Dumpster, just without the Flag Decal. Many lack health care. A few are hungry. One is currently homeless. Speaking of Solutions from the Grassroots up, our working class cultural adversaries may be our natural economic allies and fellow sufferers. We all have our illusions to console us, and over those self-pleasing delusions we love to fight, defining an "us" and a "them." But effective broader based leadership has to emerge from conversations in which our stereotypes and our false hopes gradually dissolve, as we get to know others as they know themselves, in their own life world, in their own language. Hence civic dialogue, which is a polite term for shooting the shit with the rubes, I mean, with my Fellow Americans.
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