The purpose of reaching out to extremists is to keep them talking so that everyone can see (1) how extreme they are and (2) how reasonable you are. Then you can achieve your goal, because the people will adopt your goal as their own.
For example, the excellent movie Milk shows Harvey Milk doing everything he possibly can to keep the extremists talking, and it works! No, the extremists didn’t change at all, but their position, as expressed in their bill, lost.
This is what we must do in South Carolina.
We must be as reasonable as possible as we reach out to the extremists in our state legislature and keep them talking. If they won’t change, then we can vote them out. We can get a reasonable legislature elected and get our reasonable bills passed. We can end payday lending, raise the cigarette tax, expand early voting, and take down the Confederate flag.
This is what we must do in the USA and around the world.
There is much ado from the right about President Barack Obama’s interest in talking with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran. They say that President Obama is being extremely naive and egotistical if he thinks that talking to President Ahmadinejad will get Iran to change. But they’re missing the entire point.
Sure, it would be wonderful if, after a conversation with President Obama, President Ahmadinejad made major changes in Iran. And yes, President Obama is an excellent speaker and conversationalist: if anyone could convice President Ahmadinejad to get Iran to change, it would be President Obama.
But no one, not even President Obama, thinks that talking to President Ahmadinejad will get Iran to change. President Obama knows that President Ahmadinejad is an extremist who’s not going to change. So, what is President Obama doing? Here’s how The New York Times described President Obama’s Iran strategy:
“The logic of his Iran strategy is to give Tehran a chance to come in from the cold with offers of engagement and economic and security incentives. If Tehran does not take him up on the offer — early signs are not hopeful — he must build support for tougher international sanctions to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.” [Editorial, April 24, 2009]
When President Obama reaches out to President Ahmadinejad, the world sees clearly that President Ahmadinejad is extreme and President Obama is reasonable. Iran doesn’t change. The world changes. The people of Iran change. And then President Obama continues to be reasonable as he gets the world and the Iranian people to require Iran to change.
What’s important to see is that giving Tehran a chance is, in fact, the crucial and critical first step in building support for tougher international sanctions. Skipping this step is a huge mistake.
This was President George W. Bush’s mistake with Iraq. The world agreed with us that President Saddam Hussein was an extremist. The world implemented a solution that was working — weapons inspections. But then, President Bush decided to tell and to show the world that he was unreasonable. He chose to invade Iraq before the world was ready.
People in the USA and around the world kept asking, “Why Saddam Hussein (and not other extremist dictators)? Why now, when the weapons inspection process is working so well?” The answers that people came up with were, “Well, I guess the fear of 9/11 has made President Bush into an unreasonable person.”
We cannot afford to keep making this mistake, not in the world, not in the USA, and not in South Carolina. We cannot skip the reaching out step. In fact, we must always and constantly reach out to demonstrate our reasonableness.
