It’s important to understand the difference between progressives and conservatives, because if you don’t — if you don’t figure out how they think — you’ll never be able to defeat them. Let me give you an example. When the family came out on stage last night, and the lady talked about her daughter with congenital heart disease, the progressive Democrat thinks, “Oh, my God, that’s not fair, we have to do something to help her.” The conservative Republican thinks, “Too bad, boo-hoo, shit happens, that’s not my problem.” He’s thinking about how much it will cost to provide heart surgery for every one of those 1 in 500 children who have congenital heart defects, and how much larger the “government” will become with such a program, and how much more everybody will have to pay in taxes. He just doesn’t think it’s doable or reasonable. Not everybody can be saved. Do you see it? So you have to come at him from a different angle. You can’t just say, “Well, he has no conscience, no concern for others, so you’ll never change him. We’ll probably have to kill him, or wait for him to die.”
This is what you say, in two parts:
(1) We both want a strong society, one that can grow and succeed and compete with the rest of the world. We can’t have that when so many people are suffering, living in fear that they or their children will drop dead because they can’t afford medical care. It’s just like the military; you have to have your buddy’s back; it can’t be every man for himself or else the unit doesn’t work. It’s the same thing in a society. The more people who are left completely on their own, the lower the morale and the less effective they are. Yes, individual communities should take care of their own, just as they did in the old days. But charity can only go so far, and we no longer live in the kind of society where it’s possible or even desirable for villages to function like families. Technology and communications have spread us too far apart. We have to take broader responsibility for our friends and neighbors, or else it will all fall apart. We’d need more police protection to keep all the angry people at bay, more walls and more rules and more “death panels.” This is not a matter of simply caring about others; it’s a matter of self-preservation as a society. You ARE your brother’s keeper, as your Bible says.
(2) But won’t it cost so much to provide this kind of care that others will have to go without? Won’t it cause scarcity and long lines? Perhaps at first it might. But remember that in the early days of the automobile, only rich people could have them. Now almost every person has a car, or at least access to public transportation. The same with indoor plumbing, refrigerators, television sets, computers. Even the poorest people today have telephones in their pockets with thousands of times the computing power of the first computing machines. Once we figure out a way to mass produce things, to make them more available to people, the price comes down, and the people who make them see an increase in their incomes. That’s how an economy works. You never say, “Oh, that would cost too much.” You get the resources somehow, even if you have to borrow them, and you move on. That’s what it means to build a business, and a country. So it’s not about giving poor people their own yachts or supplies of cavier. Some things may always be scarce, but medical supplies are not like cavier. Everybody will need them sooner or later. So we’ll find a way to afford them, and eventually to profit from them.
Do you see how that works? Don’t assume everybody thinks like you. And, by the way, we as progressives can learn something from that whole line of reasoning. We can learn that everything isn’t just about love. It’s also about being smart and practical.
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