You know, for all the love we lavish on it, we can't forget that our democracy is a tool. It's a tool designed to function on good-faith debate. To debate in good faith, you must open yourself to the possibility of being convinced against your beliefs.
When you have prematurely written off others who wish to debate with you as "looters," whose reasoning can be dismissed out of hand, you are no longer using the tool as it was intended. You are unlikely to get the result for which the designers intended, and you're likely to damage the tool in the process. The question then becomes whether you're doing something as unwise as driving in nails with a socket wrench, or as ludicrous as trying to screw in screws with a socket wrench, all the while chiding naysayers that the socket wrench has done wondrous things when tasked with tightening bolts, and that they should have faith in the greatest tool ever invented.
