Yes, that’s exactly what you are doing by harping on this boogeyman.
I mean McAuliffe was a carpetbagger, not a particularly popular Governor, running for a non-consecutive second term (which is frequently a loser in this state), he ran a poor campaign, in a midterm when the President is of his same party and that President is unpopular. He lost by what looks like it’ll be 2-3%.
I think it’s possible you’re buying into a narrative that isn’t complete or fully fleshed out.
Now all that being said, I absolutely agree the CRT line of attack hurt the Democrats in Virginia, and it probably did hurt them enough that McAuliffe likely could have eked out a win had he handled it better–and it is equally likely had he handled it better down ballot Dems would have done better as well. I don’t really know why Democrats wouldn’t just say “CRT should not be taught in schools, it is not taught in schools, and we won’t allow it to be taught in schools.” And then call any further comments on it by Youngkin attempts by far-right lunatics to indoctrinate children into the conservative fringe. That’s how one should conduct partisan politics. (By the way I don’t think that rebuttal is entirely fair, but neither is the CRT attack, but politics isn’t built around fair behaviors.) The Democrats response to CRT was to “wish it wasn’t an issue because it’s dumb culture war shit”, and like always, they do really bad at that stuff when in reality they could significantly mitigate quite a bit of it. The answer was certainly not to say parents have no say in how schools are ran, or to just repeatedly try to make people think Youngkin=Trump. Running against a former President who isn’t on the ballot is almost always dumb.
Biden for example wasn’t afraid to simply say “I oppose defunding the police, and actually want to give more funding to the police.” But some Democrats, afraid of offending some part of their coalition, were being mealy mouthed about it for months, it put Biden in a bad position that he even had to address it–the party should have come out against that nonsense the moment it was uttered by some stupid activist, but they didn’t, and it got bigger.
Pretty much everything ZS has written here about CRT (and several other subjects) has been a lie, including lying about Democrats lying (which is kind of meta).
But then he and his chosen political ideology are big fans of the tenet of repeating lies over and over until people believe them. Wonder where they got that idea?
The main answer is that they would be playing constant catch-up to the Republicans’ smear campaigns. For every Gish Gallop they refute, the Republicans can release twenty more and in the mean time the Democrats would also be repeating the smears. Like the story about LBJ and his opponent, in fighting a smear one ends up repeating it.
The other reason is that only the second part of “CRT should not be taught in schools, it is not taught in schools, and we won’t allow it to be taught in schools” is actually relevant. Saying that “CRT should not be taught in schools and we won’t allow it to be taught in schools” would be conceding that the “far-right lunatics” of the “conservative fringe” were right to say that CRT is somehow a bad thing and a threat to children. Why would they do that?
The truth - that CRT is not actually taught in schools - already renders the rest of it irrelevant, and trying to convince people who have already accepted the GOP version of reality that it’s not a threat would simply entrench those people further. What you’re proposing here is not a stronger opposition, it’s capitulation. You’re saying “If only the Democrats had conceded the field to the Republicans, the Democrats might have won”, as if that makes any sense.
The Democrats may be terrible at effective messaging, but blaming them for failing to overcome the considerable might of the right-wing smear machines is comic-book villain logic: “It’s your fault for failing to stop us from doing bad things!”. Why is it that our board conservatives so rarely take the view that maybe the Republicans should - instead of relying on voter suppression and smear campaigns to win elections - actually promote policies that a majority of Americans want? Is it because voter suppression and smear campaigns work - and that a wide majority of conservatives are fine with that?
Guys, in the end, we saw the GOP literally create a racist issue out of whole air and enough Biden 2020 voters… who apparently saw Joe as a more benign racist than Trump, but still a racist… bought it to swing this election.
A completely fake, non-existent issue, and because of its racist framing and success, is now going to be nationalized in 2022.
How fake? How non-existent? Let’s check out Google trends…
2004-Current:
2016-Current:
2020-current:
I’m really interested in what happened the week of September 6th, 2020… was it a Russ Douthat column in the NYT? Ben Shapiro on Facebook? Somebody started this fake shit, it’s purposeful, and it’s having the intended result.
And everybody buying into the anti-CRT rhetoric is literally falling for a purposeful, guided, misinformation campaign, and that includes many in this thread. And it includes, to the threads title, the vast majority of those who call themselves ‘conservative’ nowadays.
Yeah. The more Republicans lie, the more these folks throw shit fits about Democrats not having adequately overcome the effects of Republican lying. Way to deflect attention from the real problem here, folks.
Because Republicans will just continue lying about what CRT is. Anything that they don’t like that they consider even vaguely race-related they will brand as “CRT”.
The fact is that Democrats are more willing to address, in education and public policy, issues related to race, gender, LGBTQ, etc., than Republicans are. And a lot of Republicans still feel very threatened by that, and are very willing to listen to Republican rhetoric exaggerating and misrepresenting Democratic positions.
There’s not really anything Democrats can do to change that, except give up on supporting equality and tolerance for minorities so they can appeal to the same conservative anxieties that Republicans exploit. And I, for one, don’t want Democrats to do that.
Much like everything else they don’t like is “Communist” or “Marxist” or “Socialist” or “Fascist” or “unconstitutional” or “woke” or sometimes all of those mixed up together.
The problem with living in a bubble is that one’s gaslighting and propaganda starts being confused with fact. What is with the denial of reality those on the loony progressive left engage in with such fervor?
CRT, antifa, destructive mostly peaceful protests, cancel culture, defund the police are not fictitious concepts created by the right regardless of how many times you folks parrot the talking points. Most people don’t like their children being indoctrinated with the racist ideology of the far left. Most people don’t like to see the father of a girl who has been raped in a bathroom be the one arrested while the school covers stuff up in the name of political correctness. Most people don’t like the fact that no one knows what male and female even means any more.
The SDMB and other ideologically aligned safe spaces are not the real world and quite a bit of stuff that’s accepted as gospel or denied as reality are perceived very differently in the real world. Do you folks honestly believe that outside of progressive strongholds concepts such as defund the police has a positive connotation?
The violence that was in the news every day?
Then they must be relieved, seeing as how this isn’t a thing.
I do not respond to you. I feel that I should owe you the courtesy to, at least once, let you know this, lest you waste any of your quickly shortening time on Earth responding to me. You’re not on ‘ignore’, you’re just on the internal ‘have my eyes skip over his post’ list.
Like I said, a courtesy. Have a good day, Octo.
Today’s Republicans are a far more salient example of this phenomenon than today’s Democrats, though.
“Stop the Steal”, accusations of widespread election fraud, anti-vax paranoia, ivermectin promotion, CRT boogeymen, allegations of “Marxism”, “destroyed cities”, the Jan. 6 insurrection being a “false flag operation”, etc.: these and countless more, all the way out to the most extreme QAnon conspiracy theories, are just gaslighting and propaganda that Fox viewers huddled in their bubble have mistaken for facts. Because they have no connection anymore to what facts are.
Literally yesterday, hordes of right wingers showed up at Dealey Plaza in Dallas because they sincerely believed that JFK Jr., who was secretly alive and in hiding, would emerge, give a speech, and be acclaimed as Donald Trump’s vice-president.
This is just another example of the effects of the right-wing propaganda bubble. None of the things you’re claiming here that most people “don’t like” are actually facts (except for the fact that a man behaving aggressively at a school board meeting was arrested for disorderly conduct). Right-wingers are upset about them because right-wing media are lying about them, and they have been indoctrinated not to trust anything but right-wing media.
You guys that are just saying Democrats should put their head in the sand and ignore the issue just aren’t being realistic. The Democrats should not spend a lot of time arguing about what is, or isn’t, being taught in schools–factual debates where you have to explain yourself are losers. But coming out repeatedly against CRT (which is what Biden did with Defund the Police) is 100% the right move. Then you shift to attacking the Republicans where they are always soft on education–say the GOP is going to gut local school funding, is going to pauper public schools to fund private schools etc etc.
Honestly the response by a lot of you is why I don’t really have much hope for your party–and because I’m in permanent protest of my former party and am locked into voting Democrat for likely the rest of my life, that’s unfortunate because I do want to see the GOP lose (much more than I want to see Democrats win.) Guys politics isn’t about fighting on the ground you want or fighting fair. I don’t care that there might be some high level defense of CRT, it’s not popular, and it isn’t important–shit on it, counter attack, and move on.
I won’t deny that the right has many problems as well. The anti-vax paranoia is one of them. However, we all know that the progressives are engaged in a very destructive and bigoted game of identity politics. The progressive tactic of Humpty Dumptyism is also destructive. We can’t prove anything here but in time as folks become more and more repulsed by the lunacy of the far left at least we’ll see where public opinion is.
You do realize that the left is not homogenous and that there are factions waging an ideological battle for control of the party apparatus? All, let me repeat that ALL, institutions face the same issue when the institution in question achieves a certain size and measure of power.
I mean, let’s unpack some of this propaganda hysteria here.
Take your allegation “Most people don’t like the fact that no one knows what male and female even means any more”, for example. This is a paranoid distortion of the fact that liberals are supporting freedom and equality for transgender/nonbinary people based on the best current scientific understanding of the physiology and psychology of sex and gender.
Right-wingers may not “like” the biological fact that human sex and gender exist on a spectrum, and that there are many factors that influence gender identity besides chromosomal sex. Right-wingers may understandably “like” the traditional simplistic belief that sex = gender, and that both sex and gender are strictly and immutably binary and any apparent deviation from that rule is merely pathological, better than they “like” the more complicated reality.
But that more complicated reality is what the current state of the science supports. What do you expect us reality-based, science-promoting liberals to do about that? Just ignore it until traditionalist right-wingers spontaneously come around to being able to accept science that contradicts their traditional oversimplifications?
You guys are getting upset at reality and blaming it on us. Actually, that should be the basic Democratic motto for all of the Republican “culture wars” hysteria (and Republican climate denial hysteria, and Republican anti-vax hysteria, and all the other delusional partisan shitfits Republicans are throwing).
That is as old as politics. What seems to me to be a relic of the Clinton era is that politicians on the left are afraid to run bold, issues based campaigns because they’re afraid of offending portions of their own party. Republicans have and have had that exact same problem, but their candidates typically try to commit to some shit and just go with it, hoping most partisans will stay loyal and vote.
If you actually go back in history and read how Democrats like FDR and JFK ran campaigns, those guys would have very little issue countering the sort of tactics the modern GOP uses. Nothing the GOP does today is remotely novel in politics. What’s novel is thinking you can counter it by taking the high road and “tut-tutting” which appears to be Dem strategy in the last 10+ years.
Systemic issues are often overwhelming in importance in elections. A lot of times parties / candidates can do very little to change that. But going hard in the paint is how a party can affect things on the margins, trimming losses, slightly extending gains, winning close fights that could go either way. Like nothing, absolutely nothing, the GOP did could have saved it in the 2008 or 2018 elections, as an example. But the Democrats if they actually were more effective at politics, could have limited the damage they suffered in 2010, 2014 and 2016. In fact 2016 was a winnable year for them and was lost due to bad politics. In 2020 their topline candidate, Biden, ran almost the perfect campaign to defang Trump–unfortunately a lot of down ballot and State efforts for the Dems was lackluster and poorly done, which is why despite Biden beating Trump by a very large margin in the popular vote and a healthy margin in the electoral college, Dems ended up with a razor thin house majority and lost several Senate seats they very easily could have won.
To some degree I think Republicans know Dems have greater natural advantages in many ways, and maybe that’s why the GOP is just better at politics. If the GOP was as bad at politics as the Democrats they’d be the equivalent of the Labour Party in the UK right now–all but on life support, the Democrats have enough demographic strongholds and high support among certain ethnic / identity groups that even when doing terrible they likely can always maintain some level of power, but Republicans kind of know they could easily suffer a New Deal type wipeout if they really fucked things up, so maybe that’s why they have just over the years developed a party that is far more realistic and brutal about the skullduggery of politics, I don’t know. I’m an outsider to the Dems, and am continually shocked in how very few of the ones I interact with online understand politics isn’t a debate club.
Why not come out against widespread GOP pedophilia and cannibalism? These are much more explosive topics also that don’t exist.
It’s such a great move to deny, refute and legitimize stuff someone else made up.
It’s when you say this that without realizing it you exit reality.