I was browsing Reddit and saw the picture shown below.
Regardless of how you feel about the issue I am curious how it is that all these people parrot the same talking point at the same time. Sometimes verbatim, sometimes with only the barest changes but always tooting the same horn. I have seen this happen fairly frequently and, while I seem to see it more with republicans, democrats have done it too.
Is there a talking point staff that sits in a room in the wee hours of the night and then emails everyone in their party the prescribed Tweets for the day? Hive mind? Something else?
It seems someone is deciding the marching orders for the day that all members must subscribe to and parrot across any and all media they can. Who are those people?
Calling it now: if the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, and I post hereabouts saying that I’m weeping tears of joy, and I get indignant pushback from this board’s lefties, I already figure I’m going to reply that “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
And — were it not for this post, here, now — I’d figure on then being accused of getting that talking point from somewhere else. But, as far as I know, plenty of folks who’ve seen that quote time and again would react the same way: not upon coordinating with each other, but just because it’s a remarkably appropriate response, is all.
The outrage of the day works this way on the right. Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, CRT, teachers being groomers and pedophiles. These things pop into existence and then immediately every right leaning person is sharing the same memes about it. Sometimes it lasts a couple of days and then nobody ever brings it up again. The genesis is the same every time though. I do not see similar things happen on the left. Not that coordinated, and this has been happening at least since Summer of 2016 during the Trump/Clinton campaign. I noticed it then, every new thing that started on the right flew through the right social media ecosystem like wildfire. I started predicting it once I saw one righty share a meme about something I just knew all of the rest of them would share something similar within 24 hours. Almost never failed. It still happens, but I utilize the snooze function on FB much more, well, liberally these days.
I have certainly read articles about party leadership handing out “talking points” documents to people.
That said, you’ve got about 200 Republicans in the House and an additional 50ish in the Senate and, obviously, they all have a similar outlook on the world - ergo choosing to be a member of that party. It’s not too surprising that you would get 3 of them having a similar reaction to the same news.
ETA: I believe that actual talking point memos are usually either handed out during campaign season - to create a shared strategy - or if there’s been a big scandal and they need to hammer/deflect it in a targeted way. This wouldn’t fall under either of those headings and it would be difficult to arrange on such a quick schedule so, as said, I think it’s just 3 out of 250 people having a similar reaction.
Both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee have extensive communications operations the routinely generate and disseminate talking points, draft social media posts, and other materials to elected officials, party operatives, friendly media outlets, etc. The Republican and Democratic House and Senate campaign committees do likewise, as well as any number of advocacy groups.
Oh, it’s been going on a lot longer than that. Newt Gingrich started it (well, the modern iteration) and right-wing hate radio and the exponential growth of Fox News post-9/11 helped fuel it beyond congress.
Remember when John Boehner called Republicans the party of “job creators” during the Great Recession and Fox News ran with it, taking it straight to the rank-and-file Republican base? There’s a modern example A.
Social media just brought it to the masses in a way that Rush and Fox could only dream of.
CNN currently has a story detailing how, following the 2020 election but before Jan 6, Sean Hannity and Mark Meadows were privately discussing the “stolen election” message and the language needed to deliver that message. They quite literally wrote a script they would both follow in their defense of Trump’s bullshit lies. Sometimes they use the exact same language (“stop the steal,” “fake news,”) but often it’s they aren’t literally parroting each other but rather parroting the same message. As you note the right-wing boggeyman of the day (RWBOTD?) is emblematic of this. Today it’s CRT, yesterday it was trans people using the “wrong” bathroom, the day before that it was Sharia law. Last week it was commies in the state department. It’s always the same message, delivered by a unified party.
So yes, they all get on board at the same time to deliver a cohesive, unified message. It’s done deliberately and often as part of a larger strategy: hate fuels fear, fear fuels action, action leads voter turnout.
I guess I mean that I noticed something change in social media the summer of 2016. But yes, this has been the essential playbook for as long as I can remember. “Flip flopper”, “cut and run”, “for us or against us”, “welfare queens”, “devil music”. We can go on and on. The only real legitimate policy debates these days take place within the Democratic party. It’s as if the two parties are the extreme right wing authoritarian fascists one one side, and literally everyone else on the other side. It’s not surprising that the Dems/Left can’t ever be that coordinated with messaging. It is fundamentally a different thing than what the Right has become.
This is the way I see it: after the Cold War ended the Republicans needed someone to vilify, someone to become the “other.” They no longer had these Godless commies to blame everything bad that happened in the world on. This happened on the heels of Nixon’s Southern Strategy followed by the Moral Majority movement. Thus the Republicans had become pretty good at the “join us, we’re your friends / the good guys / the guys who share your interests / beliefs / values” messaging. Now they added the “liberals aren’t just fellow Americans we disagree with, they’re literally bad people who you should never vote for, ever.” It worked, and Newt and the R’s (now there’s a band name for you…) rolled to victory in 1994. They took this even further, taking advantage of the Lewinsky affair to drive home the “we’re the good guys” message.
Then came Bush. He lost the popular vote, just barely winning the electoral vote (it came down to one state, as you may remember). Republicans didn’t exactly ignore that but they din’t push his popularity (or lack thereof) either. Then came 9/11 and the inevitable uber-patriotism and being a Republican was no longer about policy, it was about identity. They took the message from the post-Cold War years – “Liberals are the embodiment of immoral evil” – and ran with it again. Remember Bush’s “If you aren’t with us, you’re against us” comment? Fox and their ilk turned that into a political slogan: being a Republican meant being an American, and vice versa. Being a Democrat / Liberal (they made no distinction) was being anti-American.
When Obama came along they had been drinking the KoolAid for so long that this young charismatic black man was not a political rival with differing policy ideas, he was literally an enemy of all things American, a foreign-born Muslim evildoer straight out of a Thomas Harris novel. To support anything that Obama supported was to embody the very idea of being un-American. Mitch McConnel admitted as much.
Fast forward to Trump. Early in Trump’s attempt to win the nomination a lot of Republicans thought he was a joke and indeed treated him like a joke. As it became clear Trump had built up some real momentum they became “Never Trumpers.”
Then he secured the nomination, becoming the de facto head of the Republican party.
And because the R’s had been spending decades portraying anyone who wasn’t on Team Red as a card-carrying threat to all that is American, the Never Trumpers had no choice but to jump on the Trump bandwagon. To do anything else would’ve been viewed as egregious sin, a treason against America itself. When Trump barked, they jumped; when he spewed something vile like a dog barfing up a bellyfull of old garbage they all eagerly crowded around him, fighting over who would be the first to lap it up.
Team Red was Team Trump. Those who questioned it, even a bit, were ostracized, banished from the party. Witness the attacks against Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney when they dared to speak against Glorious Leader. Witness Ted Cruz’s sniveling, groveling apology on Fox News after he dared to deviate from the official Republican narrative regarding January 6.
These people dared to step outside the tight little bubble that 30 years of hate had managed to form. To be a Republican was / is to be a hateful, angry fascist – or at least, to kowtow to them because that what Trump is and he controls the message.
And being a Republican is to agree with that message. Whatever it is. Whatever the message is, to be a Republican is to agree with it, to propagate it, to spread it.
Now, the Democrats have spent that entire time trying to govern. Vainly, ineffectually, and often by courting disparate ideologies and factions that still have enough common ground to call themselves Democrats – look at the differences between Bernie and Joe Manchin. Admittedly Bernie openly disavows much of what mainstream Democrats advocate for, but he’s with them on enough foundational issues that he’s functionally – and practically – a Democrat. (To be fair Republicans have done this for decades as well). Being a Democrat usually means being willing to discus policy, government functions, and similar traditional political roles. It generally doesn’t mean being a hateful xenophobe.
So yes, the Republican party is one small group of extreme right-wing adherents to authoritarianism and borderline fascism. This leads somewhat naturally to a unified message.
Being a Democrat means… everything else. Far left, center-right (coughcoughBidencoughcough), independents: they all tend to lean toward the Democratic party when they actually step into the voting booth – for those that actually choose to vote. But since the Democrats aren’t a unified cult like the Republicans are, there is no unified message.
Haven’t noticed much unified messaging from the Left (but, then again, I’m only 635 months old), but I can explain how it works on the right. You see, sometimes, when a Republican really, really loves a nugget of abject bullshit generated by a troll farm in Belarus…
Here are the Talking Points for Abortion, distributed in the last 24 hours.
This isn’t a dig at you: but I’m constantly astonished that people don’t know that this is happening. The Republicans have an astonishingly effective propaganda machine that has been doing this for decades. I’ve talked about this constantly on the boards. There are think-tanks dedicated to this.
The Democrats do this too: but not to the degree the Republicans do and not as effectively. Because the Republicans don’t even need to understand the issues at play here. They can just shift from talking-point to talking-point.
There is a lot of blindness to this issue; when I point out how Sinclair Media Group, whose executive chairman (and until 2017 president and CEO) David D. Smith is a noted Trump booster has made an aggressive push to buy into local television media—it’s attempt to purchase Tribune Media would have given it direct access to over 70% of local markets—and the fact that their ‘news programming’ consists of pushing ideologically driven messages as indicated by the clip I linked above, many people are just dismissive that this is scaremongering and nothing that hasn’t been seen before even though it is literally unprecedented to have so much of the market controlled by a single entity since the very early days of limited broadcast networks. I’ve been doing a lot of reading as of late about Weimar and post-Weimar era Germany; originally to better understand the historical context of Babylon Berlin but now because the parallels to the rise of demagoguery and proto-fascism are starkly clear, and yet most people seem to be in complete denial that ‘it’ (fascism) can happen here because somehow America is to star-spangled special to go down that path.
Abortion has been a stalking horse for conservatives for decades because it is a highly polarizing issue over which they can draw a bright line, and one that even people who are not directly impacted by it seem to have surprisingly strong emotions about, but the opposition to it is fundamentally a moralistic issue absent of any consideration for the implications of unwanted pregnancies, those arising from incest and rape, and for some, even those necessary for the life and well-being of the woman. Many women quite rightly see it as an attempt for state control of their bodies when there is no comparable mandate toward men, and even for advocates who support it on the presumed legality of a fetus being a person under law there is an undercurrent of blame, shame, and obligation toward women with an unwanted pregnancy regardless of the circumstances even as many conservatives otherwise decry government authority over other aspects of their lives not related to reproduction.
It is, in fewer words, the perfect issue to define an ideological battle over and force people to declare an allegiance with “us or them” because there is no acceptable middle ground for ‘true’ conservatives. And this is very deliberate strategy by people like Newt Gingrich who could actually give fuck all about abortions despite his hypocritical mouthing of ‘family values’. It is just a way of pitting people against one another and make conservatives feel like they are oppressed martyrs even as they are actually oppressing the rights of others.
The reason you might see it elsewhere is that it is a preexisting phrase, used when talking about privilege in general. And it very much is a talking point, even if you came up with it (in regards to AA) yourself. It is a pithy statement that ignores the actual nuance of the situation, which requires acknowledging that there are many different things that are perceived by some as affirmative action, and that each one has different argument for whether or not it is actually unequal.
So part of the issue is just the trend towards using talking points instead of debate. That naturally leads to reaching for existing phrases that you can use ironically against those who originally said them.
This creates plausible deniability for the talking points that are clearly prescribed.
And hatred rarely lends itself towards creativity, so it should be unsurprising in trying to come up with “pithy” ways to pwn the libs that they would come to the same lowest common denominator while digging through the muck.
Seems that’s hardly limited to “pwn the libs” types; libs appear just as quick to pithily recycle a phrase — Party Of Personal Responsibility, Thoughts And Prayers, Fuck Your Feelings, and so on, and so on — that they’ve seen folks on the right use.
