HKO_A

Perhaps you have experienced the conversation when you are constantly interrupted and talked over.  When this happens our first response is to raise our voice over the interrupter, but try the opposite.  Stop mid-sentence, even mid word and see if they ever return to you to inquire, “what were you saying?”

They usually don’t because such people have no interest in what you are saying.  You are just a format for them to get to hear themselves talk.  After a while you break off relationships with such people. Life is just too short. As Stephen Covey observed, “Most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand.”

When we feel contempt from businesses we stop going. We can forgive mistakes, even when repeated, but we rarely give contempt a second chance.   When we read about them going out of business we just nod and go to their nearest competitor.

Moments of contempt are memorable. Elizabeth Warren saying “You didn’t build that,” angered American business owners profoundly. We owe our success (but not our failures) to the government.

Jonathan Gruber, an architect of Obamacare said,” Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Hillary lectured, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. “

“And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama said.

When one is decried as racist, anti-science, anti-intellectual or any number of other libels whenever they question any liberal orthodoxy most will not engage further because once they are treated with contempt they just withdraw. The accuser may feel they won, but their victory is pyric because this contempt is not forgotten.  It is remembered, it accumulates and it eventually reaches that Network ‘mad as hell’ moment. That moment was November 9.

The accumulation of contempt felt by a large segment of the voters drove many to Trump’s camp.  Yes, it drove some undesirables as well, but so do all movements.  OWS had them, BLM had them. It seems obscured that the BLM movement was well under way long before Trump was a threat.

This contempt was a major factor in his success. Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate, and the Democrats have deteriorated in all but a handful of states.  But this contempt factor damaged the Democrats much more than the Republican were damaged by their limited appeal to ethnic minorities.

Some Democrats got the message and are pleading to their constituencies to be more open minded to the opposition and stop yelling and demonizing. Others have not gotten the message.

The Republicans must realize the limit of their approval.  A better candidate would have beat them.  The Republicans were written off in 2008.  Do not make the same mistake of overestimating your victory or underestimating your opponent.

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