I think the left is not inclusive enough. Though perhaps a better way to describe it is that the left is increasingly unwelcoming, remarkably to the people whos

I think the left is not inclusive enough. Though perhaps a better way to describe it is that the left is increasingly unwelcoming, remarkably to the people whose votes we need. As an extremely liberal person who also happens to be from the south, I am horrified by my Facebook feed where everyday posts by liberal friends proudly mock conservatives as being stupid or bigoted. Being from the south, I know many conservative people with great hearts. These are the people we are trying to convince to join our side, and we are shitting all over them. In these articles, one can sense a true disdain for many conservative points of view on topics like abortion, the role of religion in our society, and gun control. It is rare to find articles that I would feel comfortable sharing with conservative friends or family, as their tone is so contemptuous of conservatives. If it were not for the acerbic tone, many of these articles might become powerful tools of persuasion. But I guess it is just too much fun to taunt the "basket of deplorables." To quote an article that nicely summarizes a Lincoln speech: > When Abraham Lincoln was 33 years old, he gave a speech inside a Presbyterian church to a temperance society. His message: The assembled ought to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol, rather than shunning them, or denouncing them as moral pestilences. Indeed, they ought to use “kindly persuasion,” even if a man’s drunkenness had caused misery to his wife, or left his children hungry and naked with want. > For people are never less likely to change, to convert to new ways of thinking or acting, than when it means joining the ranks of their denouncers. > To expect otherwise, “to have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation ... and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature,” Lincoln explained. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/why-cant-the-left-win/522102/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/why-can...