The historical lessons are from Venezuela and efforts to defeat Hugo Chavez. A lot of the tactics currently being used against Trump were tried against Chavez, and they didn’t work.
The most important of the fours steps that should be adopted immediately is #2 - Show no contempt.
[QUOTE=Andrés Miguel Rondón]
Your organizing principle is simple: don’t feed polarization, disarm it.
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Polarization is the problem, not Trump, not Trump supporters. Every time someone makes fun of the orange face, the hair, the tiny hands, the pout and the voice, it is feeding into polarization. Yes, these things drive Trump crazy, and that is emotionally satisfying, but what they also do is further stiffen the resolve of his supporters and their resistance to seeing any other point of view. Trump is their man. If you want to encourage desertions from his own side, don’t engage in cartooning, or in demonizing the other side. Because by and large they aren’t demons. They are (gasp) individual people with their own ideas and values, just like we are. The challenge is to get both them and us to realize that.
The tactic that will work, I think, is step #4 - go out among Trump supporters, make friends of them, let them see that although you disagree with Trump you are a human being with a life and problems very similar to theirs.
Yes, and good luck in getting anyone to go along with that. Most of what I’ve been hearing is that Trump/Republican/conservative opponents intend to double down on their insults and intransigence.
Meh, as I pointed before the election was very close in the battleground states, the democrats only need to convince about 2% more that they were misled and they should demand their congress critters to be the check and the balance of Trump.
And the most recent polls show that that will not be too hard.
The comparison to Chavez isn’t really very apt, though, because Trump is first and foremost not a populist. He talks a populist game when it suits him, but his real base is upper- middle class conservatives and business interests, now joined by most of the rest of the Republican establishment.
Most Trump voters do not actually constitute a despised and disadvantaged underclass, as was the case with a large chunk of Chavez supporters in Venezuela. The “populist” narrative is what we’re being fed by Republican elites to distract attention from the fact that Trump’s Presidency is essentially a corporate takeover of the executive branch.
“Populism” is essentially a distraction in this case. The people who are actually controlling the Trump administration are mostly the same elites who have always controlled Republican administrations in the last half-century or so (and significant chunks of Democratic ones as well).
Even if not a perfect parallel with Chavez, those are still good ideas. Increasing polarization, though immensely satisfying, is probably not a good, long-term strategy.
I’ve noticed on this board that when someone makes a comparison or analogy and the correspondence to the central issue is not PERFECT IN EVERY RESPECT, the point being made is often completely discounted and any merit that the comparison may have is trashed.
What those on the left who are so determined to continue their my-way-or-the-highway-and-if-the-highway-you’re-an-asshole approach to political matters seem to keep forgetting is the huge groundswell of Republican dominance in almost all of the country’s forms of governance. People are fed the fuck up with what liberalism has wrought in this country. As a result and in addition to the presidency, Republicans now control both houses of Congress, most state governorships, most state legislatures, and are in position to load the Supreme Court with several conservative judgeships. I don’t know that the Democratic party has ever been so thoroughly defeated and marginalized at any point in the history of this country.
The groundswell of opposition to liberalism is occurring elsewhere in the world where liberalism has had its way also, as evinced by the Tory and Brexit victories in England and increasing political support for right wing politicians and their positions all over western Europe.
So I would think that if I were a liberal or a Democrat I’d be taking a long hard look at how I’d been going about doing things and trying to figure out what has caused it all to go awry. But no, the liberal impulse to insult and denigrate anyone not hewing to the party line, along with the absolute conviction that their point of view is the only legitimate and non-evil one is too strong. Thus the idea now is to double down on the insults and condemnation because ‘resistance’ and not allowing today’s government to become ‘normalized’ (:rolleyes:) is thought to be the solution to the quagmire that liberalism now finds itself in.
Another way to look at it is that liberalism is the response to traditional and stayed conservative values that for years oppressed minorities, denied them basic human rights including the right to vote and the right to equal treatment and opportunity under the law.
Still another way to look at it is that this is just a last angry and fearful conservative knee jerk reaction in the face of an evolving geo-political, socio-political, technology based economy that challenges entrenched nativism and out of date religious and societal norms.
History appears to be on the side of progress and progressives. So I would not get too comfortable with the the idea that a knee-jerk conservative resurgence - be it ISIS or Donald Trump jingoism - is going to have any lasting impact.
But what you’re forgetting is that most Americans live in cities, with ever more of them in larger cities, and major cities (as well as the largest counties) trend strongly Democratic.
Remember, polls show that majorities of Americans agree with liberal positions on most issues. What we’re seeing electorally in terms of Republican officeholders is not so much some alleged “groundswell of opposition to liberalism” as the consequences of the demographic “big sort”. That is, liberals are getting more concentrated in urban areas while conservatives are getting more dominant in rural areas.
That imbalance is what gave the presidential election to Trump, even though Clinton decisively won the popular vote. It’s also what’s making more rural states more red, even as the cities within them get bluer. What’s going on is not a decline in liberalism, but rather a demographic repositioning that gives conservatives disproportionate electoral influence. (And of course, there are also issues of gerrymandering and vote suppression that tend to strengthen the dominance of conservative minorities.)
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
So I would think that if I were a liberal or a Democrat I’d be taking a long hard look at how I’d been going about doing things and trying to figure out what has caused it all to go awry.
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Thanks for your “concern”, but a lot of the phenomenon you describe is actually pretty well understood. And it’s mostly not due to the cause you’re trying to ascribe it to.
Be honest. The vocal minority of both Republicans and Democrats – including your president and his senior advisors – believe in my way or the highway.
The Republican dominance in American politics is not due to Democrats being assholes. It’s because a) Republicans have been successfully gerrymandering districts for decades and b) Republicans have been very successful is deterring would-be democratic voters from casting ballots.
Indeed, one key point of the Trump success was the targeted Facebook ads (aka Project Alamo) to deter people from showing up.
That said, a lot of crap spewed on social media is coming from planted agents.
Some are trolls, and some are paid to be trolls, and many don’t have the needed skills to recognize that they’re being influenced by trolls.
It used to be difficult to implant a subversive agent among a group you wanted to disrupt.
In amplification of points made above, it is worth pointing out that the Republicans have not actually won the popular vote for the Presidency since 1988 except for one time (2004). They apparently have also not generally been winning the cumulative popular vote for Congress…It is just that through a combination of demographic distribution of voters plus Republican gerrymandering, they have been able to turn a minority of the popular vote into a majority control of Congress.
So, the actual facts are that we have a very closely divided country on the national level…and Republicans who have benefited strongly from the way that population is distributed.
You seem to be suggesting that I’m saying that the demographic “big sort” happens only within state borders. Nope nope nope nope nope. Liberals are becoming more concentrated in major cities, and also within blue states that contain most of the major cities.
Also, local politics and national politics are quite different. For example, I might vote for a Republican governor if I thought the Democratic Party machine in my state was getting too comfortable or there was a corruption scandal. And a Republican governor in my blue state might do well focusing on things like fiscal prudence while leaving alone the issues that liberals care about at the national level. We have seen that quite often. Where the Republicans have succeeded is in using those victories (which do not represent an endorsement of the national party platform) to entrench Republican majorities at the national level through redistricting.
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OK, I know I don’t have any right to direct the course of this thread, but most of the responses are straying from the subject, which is, specifically, what are the best strategies to adopt to undermine the support of a leader who uses populist techniques to get elected and to stay in power?
Kimstu, there is an important distinction between Trump’s powerful supporters and the majority of people who voted for him. That majority may not be “despised” but they are often disadvantaged, and they feel ignored and undervalued, and they voted for Trump largely because he seemed to be paying attention to their issues and was promising to do something about them. I believe, as you seem to, that it was all a line and a tactic to get him elected, but that doesn’t change those voters’ motivations. And having invested their faith in him they are going to be hard to break away, human nature being what it is. I think we need to give them space to fall away on their own, by stressing the outcome of his actual policies rather than by making fun of him, criticizing his character or flailing around trying to prove he’s a narcissist idiot.
2014 clearly did go to the Republicans, but if gerrymandering and was not an issue and the popular vote is worth something at all then the Republicans would had got just a very thin majority in the House in the last election.
The popular vote is not worth anything, at least not at the national level. That’s true for the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. It’s a meaningless number, except to the degree that it (imperfectly sometimes) reflects the number of the 435 individual House districts that were won or lost.
You seem to be suggesting that I’m saying that the demographic “big sort” happens only within state borders. Nope nope nope nope nope. Liberals are becoming more concentrated in major cities, and also within blue states that contain most of the major cities.