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Paying Attention

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The other night, I saw several Democrats (three primary candidates for statewide office in Texas, and one regional Democratic leader) discussing the State of Democracy on Facebook Live. Looking at the information for the event, 115 people said they were Interested and 36 said they were Going.

They talked about many things. Education, representation, voter suppression, etc. Several good points were made. However, there were some problematic points as well, some of which I’d like to address. Near the beginning of the session, the question was raised of how the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol could have happened. Their conclusion was that no one was paying attention.

There were other points, too. The first is that, if we only talked more about the attack, and what led up to it, we’d be able to move forward. There was also the conclusion that, at this point in time, anyone who self-identifies as a Republican is aligning with the attackers. The one I find most troubling, though, is the caricature of Republican voters as ignorant, or uneducated.

I am going to talk about all of these.

Talking does not solve problems; action does. Maybe it’s tough to acknowledge that, as candidates, they cannot do more than promise to try to bring change. In regard to voter suppression, it was stated that the Texas Department of Public Safety closed many urban offices, making it more difficult for (mostly Democratic) urban voters to acquire the ID they would need to cast a ballot at the polls. While this is true, there was no discussion on how to address those closures; on which officials were in charge of closing those offices;  and on who those officials report to.

There was also mention of the elected Texas Democrats who were in the Capitol Building at the time of the attack. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate that they were on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. From my side of the screen, it looked more like name-dropping.

This segues nicely into their commentary that anyone who currently self-identified as a Republican was aligning themselves with the former administration and the rioters. This is a great talking point, except that it’s simply not true. Do any of these people actually know anyone personally who self-identifies as a Republican? I do. And while I recognize that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” the people I know personally who refer to themselves as “Republican” believe Biden won fair and square. They also believe that Big Government is bad for everyone, that Big Tech is fleeing California because of Democrats taking over and ruining it, and a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with the 45th President. While some of their beliefs align, there is not a 1:1 correspondence – rather like how Catholics and Mormons both consider themselves Christians.

Which gets us to that notion that those who voted against Biden and/or other Democratic candidates are ignorant, uneducated, or willfully stupid. This, too, does not match my lived experience. While the talking heads on Fox News tend to be dropouts, that sample size is a bit small to extrapolate to the population of Republican voters at large. Some of them are in the personal networks of local and state Republican officeholders. Some are business owners. Many of them have been vaccinated. Although a large percentage of those who remain unvaccinated are Trump supporters (we know this because they tell us), there isn’t a lot of data on self-identified Republicans who are vaccinated.

I heard a lot of talk at the Facebook event, with more inference than information. They said that the attack happened because we weren’t paying attention. That’s incorrect. It happened because it wasn’t considered possible – until too late.

Are these people paying attention now?


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