Edit: It’s funny how many people are interpreting this as about unity or working together. I interpreted it as about dreaming big and working long term to make the dream dream happen.
I mean, look at abortion. I was born only a few years before Roe v Wade. For most of my lifetime, people were saying Roe v Wade was settled law. I remember people saying it was impossible to make abortion illegal, that there was no reason to worry about it, that the politicians fighting to make abortion illegal and the protesters in front of clinics were just the dying embers of a dead branch of conservatism, and so on and so forth. The conventional wisdom for decades was that the Supreme Court precedent set by Roe v Wade was unassailable and conservatives should just give up and fight the culture war on other battlegrounds.
But you know what conservatives did? They didn’t discourage each other. They didn’t tell each other it was a useless fight. They didn’t tell each other it was a waste of time. They fought for literal generations. They knew the only way to make abortion illegal again was to make the Supreme Court overturn their own precedent. So they fought for fifty fucking years to take over the Supreme Court.
Only a handful of the first anti-abortion crusaders lived to see their victory. Generations of people fought against abortion, lived and died, with victory seeming as far away as ever. But in the end they didn’t give up. They sacrificed. They voted. They donated. They protested. They beat their heads against a brick wall until the brick wall broke. And they fucking won.
Compare that commitment to the people hanging out on this instance who think not eating beef on Fridays for the sake of the environment is too much work.
A policy banning something is infinitely easier to implement than a policy creating something.
Banning abortion without exception is one line. Ensuring everyone has access to affordable healthcare requires changing how entire industries function. Banning puberty blockers without exception is one line. Switching energy generation to be entirely sustainable requires changing how entire industries function.
Banning burning fossil fuels is one line.
And just like all the other horrible, one-line laws, it has catastrophic consequences. If you care about the people who will suffer those consequences, you have a hard time doing those things.
If you could just declare “no more fossil fuels starting now,” and the whole world just listened (problem 1? They would not), you would immediately eliminate every nations military, the internet would shut down, there would be massive, world-wide famine (no way to transport food or store it reliability) , no hospitals, fire fighters, police or ambulances. I’m sure there’s a million other knock-on effects as well.
That’s the real difference…some people refuse to think about how policy (even well-intentioned policy) can cause harm. If the right is thinking about those kinds of harms, which I tend to think they are not, then they are clearly more comfortable with making the world worse for large swathes of the population. They either never considered or didn’t care about the consequences of making women carry non-viable fetuses to term. They never considered or didn’t care about the people impacted by their bathroom bills (both trans and cis individuals).