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What Do We Do With the 73 Million Trump Voters?
How do we instill common sense and good judgment into people who ignore facts?
I have written about the massive demographic changes occurring in the United States these days, what has been called “the ‘browning of America’.” White people, as a group, have been taught, for centuries, to view our history from a Eurocentric perspective. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant values were at the root of our success in the world. Tall White men, with guns blazing, rightfully dominated the little brown people living in Godforsaken places (you know, the ones with minerals and oil, and agricultural products that we could extract for vast profit), or so the histories read and the movies showed.
At times I have asked “What do we do with people who ignore facts and reject reason? Can we educate them to the point where we can have intelligent conversations and reasonable arguments with them?”
When I pose the question that way — blunt, no-holds-barred — people accuse me of being a Nazi or an authoritarian. They say that I “look down” on people; that the “socialists and communist Democrats running around” want to put people into reeducation camps and institute the American version of China’s Cultural Revolution, or create an American gulag. They throw me into the “socialist and…
