I sure hope “there’s so many kids getting raped in the schools I’m responsible for that I got the vapors and was confused about which one you meant, also rape doesn’t count if it’s by someone you know, also you’re a bigot for caring about your daughter getting raped anyway so you’re under arrest” does not continue to be the Democrats’ campaign message in 2022. They will need to cut lose most of the posters in this thread if they want to make the pivot.
Thank you for reminding me to ask this question:
What is the name of that law that says the amount of effort needed to eliminate bullshit is a magnitude higher than the amount of effort needed to create it?
now you’re not even trying! That was pathetic. Bye!
This ain’t a fair fight (and fuck anybody who wants to chide me for wanting fairness); I haven’t seen hardly a suggestion that Republicans will ever be held accountable for any of their lies. We have reached the point where supposedly shrewd political observers are blaming the lack of a public health care system on Democrats.
Give us a fair fucking chance. Everything Dems do is apparently a mistake. Nothing Republicans do will cost them politically.
On a positive note, I would like to note that the leader of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, read my CRT article and (re)tweeted it out this morning.
Tweet:
Article:
Amazing how white people are so fragile we create racist laws aimed at us as to protect a us from being negatively intellectually and emotionally impacted from a narrative of history which does not place us at the apex.
And then there’s the fucking vote fraud issue, which apparently only one side is allowed to use with impunity. I guess when red state legislatures throw out unfavorable popular vote results in ‘24 and successfully engineer a Trump presidency, we’ll have people in here making it the Dems’ fault for not stopping it.
Just curious. Do we have any conservatives here that have backed the stolen election claims? I mean posters who have been around for more than one issue, not some troll that makes an account for the express purpose.
I haven’t been reading as much in P&E as I used to, but from what I have read, we’re above that.
~Max
Only ONE order of magnitude? McGuffin’s Law of Insanely Optimistic Assertions, I think.
Nope, and in fact I would argue you have poor reading comprehension if you think that. I made pains to make it clear there is no magic bullet nor am I selling magic bullets. A lot of the “efforts” of political strategy and messaging move things at the margins, as I noted many times there are large systemic issues going on during any given election cycle that account for the lion’s share of the election results. However, the margins can matter. They can mean if you’re going to lose seats in Congress for exaple, maybe you staunch the bleeding with a good strategy as a party vs a bad one. If you’re going to gain seats, maybe it means you gain more and build a stronger majority.
Structurally the U.S. will always have two major parties and maybe occasionally smaller ones, the two parties won’t be exactly equal but both will likely always be competitive in some respect, and there’s no magic words that makes that go away.
I already answered it quite clearly–this is, by the way, why I often avoid these “liberal” pile on threads, you guys almost invariably ask the same question 15 different ways and by lack of reading comprehension have trouble recognizing it’s already been answered. I’ll state exactly once more to be clear I have actually already answered the question: Republicans are talking about teachers teaching white children that they should be ashamed to be white, and that the United States is an irredeemably racist country that we should be ashamed to live in. I have also made it very clear that actual truthiness of this narrative is not that politically relevant. If they were saying “the sky is fuschia” okay, maybe it is because you can paint them as insane for saying things that are patently not true. But there’s always going to be some cases of teachers doing weird things, there’s 3.2m teachers. You can easily take those events, maybe a teacher modifies some work sheet from a college and gives it to students during a lesson on diversity / inclusion, and by the time Fox News and Breitbart get their hands on the event, they can program 100+ hours on it and make that classroom incident whatever they need it to be.
When the liberals largely don’t respond at all in mainstream media, it lets conservative propaganda set the tone. So that when scattered liberal efforts emerge to counter these claims “hey that’s not really happening”, by then, the far right has hundreds of hours of Fox News posts, Breitbart media personality tweets (with screenshots of the worksheet) etc to go on, so now they can say you are ignoring objective reality. Republican propaganda, much as you want it to be, is not delivered in a way that can easily be dismissed and ignored.
That doesn’t mean it cannot be responded to at all, which is the strategy Democrats have been running with.
FWIW the Republican propaganda isn’t magic either, it doesn’t always work, but sometimes it will. Case in point–the migrant “caravan” that Fox News spent like 35 straight days running stories on in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, to make people afraid to vote Democrat. People were so angry at Trump no one gave a fuck about that caravan, and it didn’t save Republicans in 2018. Note that the caravan suddenly dropped off the airwaves almost exactly when the election ended–because it was a silly story not grounded in anything real (yes, there were migrant caravans and are migrant caravans, tracking one as it makes its way up from Southern Mexico is a ridiculous endeavor, and it was framed like a barbarian army surging forward to attack the gates.)
I think this question belies much of the trouble with the Democrats. Republican politicians don’t operate this way. They ask what position is most likely to be most successful in the next election. Republicans actually very regularly “pick a side” in their own caucus, and go with it because they’ve determined it is the best electoral path. The GOP picks what it believes is the most optimal answer, understanding you cannot make 100% of the caucus happy, and focusing on that is not ideal for forming strategies.
I agree with you on Stand Your Ground laws, but not every issue is the same in its impact and visibility. Most Stand Your Ground laws were passed to curry favor with the base, and that’s what they did. After that I think the importance of those laws decreased for people on the right. They became important to people on the left, but not people in the middle. The Republicans really didn’t have to engage on it that much, it just wasn’t an issue that was affecting them.
I disagree that Biden would have gained net votes on defund the police–for one, inner city racial minorities were against defund the police, as shown with the recent Minneapolis vote where they were given the chance to essentially disestablish the police department and said “no.” It should be remembered that some progressive ideals that are couched as “racial justice” are not supported as much by racial minorities as they are supported by white educated upper middle-class liberals. The “Latinx” issue falls into this exact same category, in which a vast majority of the native Spanish speakers in our country do not like the term Latinx (many of them also never agreed with being all lumped together as “Latinos” for that matter, most identify as more specific national origin groups.) But that doesn’t matter to white upper middle-class progressive, Latinx is “correct” and not agreeing with it is incorrect. Latinx luckily isn’t a political issue, at least not a big one, yet, but when it is I predict the Democrats will handle it poorly.
Defund the Police would also be very unpopular in the suburbs. So if Biden had embraced it, he likely alienates some of his inner-city minority base, and some of the suburbs that he flipped. All because it “might” get more progressives to come out to vote? I don’t think the progressive wing is that significant that it is more important than those two groups, nor do I think there were enough “fence sitter” progressives in 2020 who would’ve gone and voted Biden over it to make up for where it would have hurt him.
I don’t really think either of us is factually correct here, it’s more a matter of opinion–but I do appreciate you actually addressing it from the perspective of political strategy.
I think there are a few things going on here. First is that you’re right, if people can find a single example (and it’s a big country) they’ll beat that example to death on places like Fox and it is eventually going to get into other sources. Whether it’s a conservative columnist in the WaPo or NYT or an “explainer” or “fact check”, it’s getting spread. The second is that adults may also be exposed to the DiAngelo style “diversity training” through work or see columns like the latest one from Charles Blow entitled “White Racial Anxiety Strikes Again”. Some of those people might disagree completely with Kendi or DiAngelo or Blow, but might agree with say McWhorter. The third is that the response, at least online, has been to completely exclude the middle. All parents who disagreed with McAuliffe’s statement about parental involvement, all parents who don’t want their children being taught DiAngelo style “white fragility”, and so on can’t possibly be well-educated parents with a difference of opinion. Now they’re all white supremacists who don’t want history taught at all and are probably a bunch of rubes.
I think the fight is going to really hurt the Democrats, especially since they’ve made it black vs white. Even the “acceptable” new term BIPOC seems to shunt anyone who isn’t black (yes, I know the second letter is for indigenous, but how often does that actually come up in these debates?) to an afterthought of status. And large parts of the country simply aren’t this simple black vs white dichotomy when it comes to race. California is 40% Hispanic, 40% white non-Hispanic, 17% Asian, 6% black. Texas is 40% Hispanic, some of which is encapsulated in 67% white, 14% black, 6% Asian. Depending on your terms, Florida is 54% white non-Hispanic, 26% Hispanic, 17% black, 3% Asian. My own state of New Mexico is 37% white non-Hispanic, 49% Hispanic, 10% native, 2% black, 2% Asian, 9% as other (whatever the means for those who responded). I remember reading a critique by McWhorter of DiAngelo who had apparently written something along the lines of “If you say that an area is a bad neighborhood, what you really mean is a black neighborhood”. To which I can only say bullshit. If I say that the South Valley or the Warzone are bad neighborhoods, they may have more violence due to poverty, they may be more Hispanic than other neighborhoods. But I sure as hell don’t actually mean that they’re “black neighborhoods” because there’s no such thing as a black neighborhood in Albuquerque.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the “demographics is destiny” argument the Democrats have been making for years now about how they’ll flip Texas any time now, that Virginia is about to become a lock, that they’ll lock in Nevada and Arizona and maybe North Carolina fails miserably as enough of the minorities they’re counting on to vote Democratic because “Why would they vote Republican?” decide they don’t like the Democrats approach to race.
Are republicans ready for parents to demand truth in education and get salty about it? They can demand an end to this BS. Do they have the right?
IOIARDI?
Honestly, I think @Martin_Hyde is right. You can’t reason people out if a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Instead, as he pointed out in another thread, we should have been bombarding the airwaves with ACTUAL EXAMPLES OF THE LUNACY REPUBLICANS WANT TAUGHT IN SCHOOL. Show the textbooks that describe slaves as “migrant workers” and that claim that slaves were mostly happy to work on plantations. Compare Republicans to the Confederate traitors they worship, and go into detail about how many actual loyal Americans they butchered.
This culture war the Reich - sorry, I mean Right - is so keen to have is indeed real, and it is a struggle for the very soul of our nation. We cannot sit idly by while the descendants of traitors ruin our country.
I 100% agree with you and Martin_Hyde. Here’s where it all goes wrong for us progressives on matters of calling out Republican lunacy. Recently some parents and schoolboard members demanded that “Beloved” by Toni Morrison be removed from schools (along with some other titles). If Democratic social media activists were as organized and persistent as those on the right, the story, “Republicans Want to Ban Books!” should have been top of the charts across all media. But was it? Fuck No. You know what was a huge story? When a publisher decided they were not going to continue to publish some Dr. Seuss titles. And that turned into a “Liberals Want to Ban Beloved Children’s Books!” story.
Democrats and progressives simply lack the organized social media outrage apparatus of the right. We’d rather try to explain nuanced concepts (CRT, for example) to the public in hopes they’ll make the effort to listen. But the public is not interested in investing that kind of mental energy and they don’t have the attention span.
Straw thesis. There are certainly some Virginia voters who vote Republican because they get all their white supremacy marching orders from Fox News, but that’s not the only reason Republicans ever get elected in Virginia. And AFAICT nobody in this thread has claimed it is.
Right, and by the way–the left could build some sort of better “social media outrage” apparatus, they just don’t have the wherewithal. The reality is most of the left is just as prone to buying into “outrage culture” as the right, there just isn’t nearly the big organized platform for it on the left.
This message board tends to embrace outrage culture less than mainstream culture. This isn’t because we are some sort of “elite”, it’s because of two-fold reason–one, a core ethos in this site is skeptical inquiry, which I think undermines the sort of “passive” consumption of information that is required to fully immerse yourself in outrage culture. The other is, the political Dopers are people who tend to be very informed and well read on politics, which works the same way. The vast majority of people, and this doesn’t make them stupid or dumb, simply have other interests in life and other focuses, and prefer not to spend tons of time second guessing everything they hear or deeply thinking about politics.
Outrage culture plays to them because it’s thin but bombastic, so it gets their attention (which is likely to be short, because they have other things going on), but it creates an Impression/memory that sticks with them. So like you said, they incorporate in their mind that “someone” probably a big evil liberal, is banning Dr. Seuss. Once that’s processed in, it’s non-trivial to fix.
Well for 4 years all you heard from the turnp right was that it is pathetic to harp on an election once it’s passed.
If Ds say “Republicans can’t move on and they are hypocrites” it’s just spitting in the wind. Liberals require honesty, consistency, and morality in their positions, and conservatives have just lost their minds. It’s assymetric warfare.
Oh, please. The radical left and their enablers, even on sites like this, have a very well organized propaganda apparatus. Additionally, they have a well organized street violence wing.