"A Tisket, a Tasket ...
Who's inside your Basket ...
If you got no Deplorables in it ...
Then ALSO RAN is your name, Sir."
I have a theory of thirds, as I call it. Take any group and:
One Third is made up of Kind and Decent Folk.
A Second Third is made of people you ought keep at a distance.
And a Final Third is OK to have lunch with ever now and then.
To think that Elections are won by the Party with the most Righteous folk ... To imagine that your Church's pews are graced solely by the butts of Good and Upstanding members of your Faith ... To think that your Profession attracts only the Decent and the Kind ... To imagine your Army is comprised only by Selflessly Heroic defenders of the Nation .... To reason that all members of a Given Race are to be preferred to members of Another Race ... this may be the essence of deplorable jingoism.
To argue that all Supporters of Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or John Kasich or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump are Good Americans is both Dangerous and Stupid. It is Stupid in that it fails to recognize Reality and Dangerous in the way any such bifurcation of humanity into Good and Bad or Us and Them precludes Richness, Dialogue and Peace. Wars are fought by Strongmen under the screen of such distinctions ... Romans Catholics and Protestants ... Blue and Grey ... Sunni and Shiah ... Hutu and Tutsi.
The Swedish writer, Per Lagerkvist, wrote a one-page story (The Venerated Bones) about two cities that had fought a terrible and bloody war. Afterwards, a rumor spread that during the night, the Fallen Soldiers in the Graveyard arose and, as we might now say, partied together. The Elders of the Two Cities decided to send a Joint Commission to check it out. Hiding behind trees, they were appalled to indeed see the Dead rise from their graves and consort with each other.
"How could you consort with your enemies," the Commissioners asked.
"No such thing," the Dead replied, "we are doing no more than exchanging bones; it is such a muddle down here under ground. Rest assured, we hate each other as much as ever."
Do I approve of Sen. Clinton's comment that as much as a half of Trump supporters are "deplorables?" No, I don't. Still, the questions of what percentage are deplorable on each side and what kind of deplorable they are say something about what the Candidate is selling and what risks that politician is willing to accept in calling out those whose values are contrary to those held-tight by supporters of the Bill of Rights and other American Values.
Indeed ... Even in the USA where we don't formally govern by Coalition, neither Party can put together a winning margin without cobbling together different factions. There are just two many more or less binary issues that separate Americans ... too many Special Interests. What's the expression: Politics Makes for Strange Bedfellows.
Here, too, the Media Outlets have -- to my way of thinking -- been too shy to ask important questions in their surveys of likely voters. Oh, they'll report on each Party's Platform ... but Platforms don't quite tell the story. They do give a list -- and not always with a wink and a nod -- of Least Common Factors that are held by the Most Populous possible Coalition and offend the fewest. I remember, for instance, Marjorie Bell Chambers telling me that I was politically stupid to complain about the 1992 Republican Platform on Abortion. We were drinking in an airport bar (August 1993) after a seminar in Minneapolis. I argued that to make abortion illegal except in cases of rape and incest was inconsistent. Either abortion was the premeditated murder of a human being and should be applied to any and all circumstances of conception ... or it was not. It was at that point that the 80'ish woman told the still-not-50 man that he was "politically speaking, a moron." I suppose she was right.
If I cannot figure it old, maybe these guys can.
So, here is a Survey Monkey type set of questions that might clarify the distribution of Deplorables in the 2016 POTUS election with an absolute minimum of pussy-footing about salient questions.
Whom do you intend to vote for in November?
What % of your Gross Adjusted Income do you
give to the Less Fortunate and to Charities?
Do you think White People are
-- by and large -- evil Capitalists?
Do you think Black People are inferior to White People?
Do you think Whites and Blacks should live together?
Do you think Men and Women can live as equals?
Should people receive equal pay for equal work?
Do you believe that Humankind should take
on the responsible of being Good Stewards to our Planet?
Do you think it acceptable to bar people from
coming to the United States based on their religion?
Whether or not you believe in God, do you accept the
principal of showing kindness to "the stranger living among
you" that is put forth repeatedly in the variety of Sacred Writings?
Do you believe that it is equally sad when a Syrian
is blown up as when an American is?
Should Gays have equal protection under the law?
If Isis is comprised of Radical Islamic Terrorists,
then was Tim McVeigh a Radical American Terrorist or a Radical Christian Terrorist? (pick one or neither)
If cars can be equipped with Speed Governors,
should there be any limits on the prices charged
by Doctors or Pharmaceutical Companies?
Are members of the underclass poor because they're lazy?
Are members of the well-off doing well mostly because of hard work?
Do you think it's acceptable to offend others to attain a political goal?
If you are religious, do you think that your religion
is more right than your neighbor's?
If the answer to the above is "yes," do you think
your neighbor feels his religion superior for the same reason,
namely that it is theirs?
Give me the answer to these questions ... i.e., the % of Clinton, Johnson, Stein and Trump voters who vote one way or another with each query and I could give you my own impression of the % of Deplorables in a given candidate's baskets.
You might have another distribution of percentages -- my basket? your basket? -- but we'd each get a platform on which to guesstimate.
Let me close by saying that John McCain set the bar just-so when he called a woman out at one of his rallies for trying to demonize his opponent by pigeon-holing him as a foreigner. I respect McCain for doing that but, more to the point, I think anyone who doesn't is unfit to serve as President of the United States.
Vaia con Dios
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