And I’m not saying we should campaign with her. I’m saying we need to start reminding people that think they’re voting for “conservatives” that they’re in fact doing no such thing.
Democrats are becoming / have become the party of conservatives in the sense that conservative is opposite of aggressive. The saying that comes to mind to describe Democrats is from Karate Kid, where Mr. Miaygi says that karate is for defense only. For Democrats, it’s become “politics is for keeping things the same only”. Other than the Bernie / AOC wing of the party, that’s what the Democrats have become.* Which is fine if you’re a college educated upper middle class professional, but maybe not so much for people from other groups. IMHO this explains why educated upper middle class professionals are becoming the base of the Democratic Party, as well as why Democrats are starting to lose various minority groups. Especially young men from racial minority groups that don’t have a college education.
ETA: It might not have seemed like it at the time, but looking back it seems like the guiding philosophy of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, etc. was “don’t rock the boat, and if we do rock the boat, rock it as little as possible”.
ETA 2: Take the Ukraine war as an example. Had Trump, or even Bush Jr., been POTUS over the last four years (and been on Ukraine’s side), they would have likley been a lot more aggressive in sending aid to Ukraine and in sanctioning Russia.
To be frank, I don’t think that many self-described ‘conservatives’ actually care about the traditional definition, nor hold their leaders accountable when they fail to enact fiscally conservative policies or demonstrate a lack of decorum and ‘family values’ in their own conduct even as they promote ‘conservative’ views like banning abortion or bringing prayer back into public schools. Using public funds to support for-profit ‘charter schools’ is actually the opposite of conservatism in any sense, and yet it is now a solid plank of the GOP general platform.
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It’s not that the platform itself is conservative. It’s about how aggressive elected Democrats are in pushing that platform. IMHO the most recent aggressively progressive Democrat to be POTUS was LBJ. Since LBJ left office, the philosophy of the Democratic Party has become “don’t rock the boat”.
A lotta good Democratic politicians put their futures on the line to rock the boat enough to get the ACA over the finish line in 2009, and many of them paid for it with their careers in 2010. Ditto Clinton and the 1993 tax hike, or the more recent Inflation Reduction Act.
The only legistlative boat-rocking that Republicans have done lately has centered around tax cuts for their donor class. (Oh, and Medicare Part D by GWB. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every so often.)
Passing Newt Gingrich’s health care plan was the opposite of “rocking the boat”.
The ACA, Clinton’s tax hike, and the Inflation Reduction Act are exactly the kind of thing I meant by “not rocking the boat”. Those things are all small potatoes compared to the kind of things LBJ got done, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Clean Air Act of 1963, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, and Medicaid. Yes, LBJ and the Democrats paid for those things, but at least they were great plans, not the tiny steps forward that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer favored. In the sense that the latter favored small steps forward instead of great progressive leaps, they are the very definition of conservative.
ETA: As far as Republicans rocking the boat, I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. They have massively rocked the boat, just in the wrong the direction. If they weren’t rocking the boat, we’d be getting ready to inaugurate President Kasich or President Christie or someone else similar rather than Trump.
It’s more about making sure people understand what the Republicans “aren’t” more than anything else. They still use that “conservative” label, and many low-information voters buy it. They need that label ripped away from them. Once people know they’re not voting for actual conservatives, then it opens up the possibilities for getting them to see that the GOP is slap-ass crazy.
I agree that some “conservatives” are like that. But there’s a portion of the voting public that doesn’t pay enough attention to realize what they’re voting for in reality, and that could be persuaded to move away from the GOP. It’s about propaganda, and how much they hear from the right-wing bullshit machine, and how little they hear from our side.
You would think that a character like Donald Trump would have caused traditional Reaganite or even neocon Republicans to turn away from the GOP because he is such an awful, hypocritical, sleazy, gross person with idiotic and self destructive policy notions and who is basically hostile to nearly all traditional Republican ideals and most actual Republicans themselves. But…that hasn’t happened, and Republicans (and others) have voted for him en masse while the GOP establishment has hugged up to them like a coon hound wanting praise from its master.
The problem with fighting the “propaganda war” is that competing in it requires being able to lie constantly, for years on end, in hyperbolic and absurdist fashion, about things that are so obviously not true with a straight face in order to sufficiently stoke fear, uncertainty, and doubt to the point that people will vote for your party because they are literally afraid of what will happen if they don’t. Democrats are like the one smart character in a horror movie who keeps saying, “If we all just stick together and don’t wander off into darkened barns or down in the cellar to have clandestine sex, we can all survive and beat this monster,” and whom the rest of the characters totally ignore until he is torn limb for limb by the crazed undead psychopath. They are Samual L. Jackson from Deep Blue Sea while Republicans are arguing against sealing off the open bay that is the only way that the shark can actually attack them.
Stranger
First, let me compliment you on the Deep Blue Sea reference. I’ll never forgot that scene.
I think MAGA & Republican talking points are getting into the ears and eyes of more people than anything the Democrats are doing. We are walled off from a very large % of the public. Democrats rely on an informed public, and have an advantage with high-information voters. As a high-information voter, you’re going to know what each side stands for and what policies each side is pursuing. You might even know the vote count on specific bills by party.
But among low-information voters (not stupid, but just ignorant on policy & on politics in general), Republicans have a yuuuuuuge advantage. These people, to the extent they hear anything, only hear the right-wing’s bullshit. It’s either they hear nothing, or they hear MAGA. They’re not reading Paul Krugman’s substack, I can guarantee you that.
We have to fix this asymmetry, or Dems will be permanently on the outside, and we’ll never be able to get the country to move on beyond MAGA. And it means we have to enter the propaganda war. Without an ability to yell just as loud and as often as Republicans, we’re toast.
BTW, the propaganda war doesn’t require telling lies constantly. In our case, we can scream the truth in simple, easily-digestible sentences.
I agree w your overall assessment.
The problem is that the R propaganda machine is funded by some billionaires, a few hostile foreign countries, and the advertising, merch, and donations machine that the media stream uses to whip up their customers to support with their spending (and donating) dollars.
NewsMax is a profit-making venture. So is Faux.
Until / unless you / we have a plan to make our D/leftish propaganda profitable we’ll be limited to spending pennies to their dollars. Political donations are passe; it’s now politics as a media-based business.
The term “conservative” depends on what thing you’re trying to conserve. Most fundamentally, the right wing wants to conserve sources of hereditary power (white supremacy, male supremacy, class supremacy, inherited wealth, etc). That’s the actual liberal/conservative dichotomy.
Of course few people want to admit they favor classism, racism, sexism, so they whitewash it as being skeptical toward change, preserving traditions, etc, which gets further euphemized as “government should be smaller” (because government threatens hereditary power, which is the thing right-wingers most want to preserve). This is how they peel off milquetoast centrists who have no real principles other than they’d like to be left alone.
You can only say that Dems are more conservative if you take Republicans at their word about what conservatism is really about. But all they ever do is lie, so it’s dumb to buy into that deceptive framing. Conservatism is about preserving white power, male power, and other sources of inherited power. Conservatism is a trash ideology, nobody should be trying to out-conservative the right wing.
It’s definitely what nailed Sam Jackson’s casting as Nick Fury.
I think you probably have a much more positive view of the Democratic party than I do, but if Democrats were actually “scream[ing] the truth” about many of the challenges and existential threats we are dealing with, most of the public would completely block them out. They’ve lost credibility because they abandoned the middle class (and even longer for labor) to seek corporate funding to the point that most Democratic Congresspeople might as well advertise themselves as “Brought to you by Eli Lilly” or “Sponsored by Bank of America”. That’s fine for Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats, but it scrubbed the Democratic party of its traditional base which is why their demographic on a map now shows as mostly blue dots in a big sea of red.
What the modern GOP has figured out is that they can manufacture identifiable bogeymen like immigrants, imported goods, government-imposed vaccine and pandemic abatement measures, et cetera, and then propose easily digested (if mostly unworkable) ‘solutions’ to them. It really is a long con and they have been getting away with it for going on four decades with evident success and considerable popular support. Trying to convince the victim of a scam that they are being scammed means forcing them to admit to their gullibility, and most people just don’t want to admit to that kind of weakness. The reality of developing actual solutions to real problems is far more complex, requires sacrifice and nuance, and doesn’t offer any easy way to wealth and fame.
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Yes, and it won’t be easy to get our own propaganda right-sized. But the right-wing bullshit machine wasn’t built in one day. It happened over a long period. I think the Dems have finally woken up to the fact that there IS a problem. That’s the first step.
There are other ways to define conservatism. And there are other ways that the GOP talks the game on conservatism, which leads me to my point below…
Yes. All they ever do is lie. I think it’s upon us Dems to expose their lies, and show the low-information voters that the “conservatism” they thought they were voting for is no such thing.
OK. But just relying on the NY Times and NPR to help us talk to America hasn’t been working either. There has to be a change in how Democrats reach average Americans. Most of them…in fact a vast majority of them…don’t even know what our arguments are. They’re more likely to know what Faux News says about our arguments than to know our actual arguments.
OK. But one way to guarantee that they don’t admit to their gullibility is to not even try to talk to them to begin with.
What I’m saying is that this won’t work because they don’t care.
Nobody’s ever going to go “huh, I fell in love with the word ‘conservatism’, but now that you mention it, Democrats are technically more conservative!”
Low-information voters who call themselves “conservative” were never bought into the principle, nor in the pseudo-intellectual movement called “conservatism”. They used that term, but they always knew deep down that it was about elevating some people over others. That’s what they want, no matter what you call it.
Low-information voters who don’t call themselves “conservatives” might be swayed by the semantic argument, but it’s a bad idea to cede the idea that “conservatism” is a good thing that ought to be pursued.
High-information voters who call themselves “conservative” are in on the con. They are its architects and maintainers, they’re not going to yield to someone else’s redefinition of conservative.
The only useful marrow to suck out of that bone is loss-aversion psychology - i.e. we had some good stuff, and we’re at risk of losing it. But for that to take hold, the fear has to be concrete and visceral. “Democracy” is abstract and intellectual. Public health is something that won’t be fully missed until it’s gone. People don’t understand safety nets until they need them, until then it’s just taxes. These things don’t get missed until they’re gone, at which point it’s too late to conserve them, they have to be innovated again.
We cannot and should not try to out-conserve conservatives. It’s a con that only works for right-wingers.
To be honest, I think most people don‘t want to hear the truth, even a Disneyfied version of the truth that mostly-honest politicians tell; they want to hear about clear problems and easy fixes even if they are obvious nonsense. They certainly don‘t want to hear about ugly facts and complex solutions, especially ones that have big price tags and require sacrifices.
But don’t let me dampen your enthusiasm. For sure, the Democratic party needs to find a way to appeal to the people who are glomming onto populism like a child’s safety blankie. I just don’t know how they get there while maintaining any principles or effecting any solutions.
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Yes, I know it ain’t easy. There are a lot of news deserts in the US. Dems might try an approach where we invest in local news reporting, and build from there. I’m not sure of what steps need to be taken. But honestly, until this year, I didn’t realize the extent of the problem.
“Conservative” doesn’t mean conserving, or prudent, or traditional any more. It has become a description of a fascist nationalist movement. So no, Democrats aren’t conservative in that sense and that’s the only sense people hear. Once a word becomes as toxic as that one has, I think it makes sense to just leave it to the people who shat on it.
There is no Republican platform any more, so whatever Democrats stand for is all there is that anyone is standing for. For example, “democratic” is wide open.
It is kind of shocking that as much criticism as there was about Harris not having a clear ‘platform’ or coherent policy statements, Trump didn’t even bother trying to actually campaign or explain how he would accomplish any of the simplistic ‘goals’—like deporting millions of immigrants—that he promised. It is as if his voters didn’t even care, and not just ‘low information voters’. And the same is true for most of the hardline MAGA and associated Republicans in Congressional, state, and often even local elections. The ‘Culture War’ issues like abortion, religion, (fear of) immigrants, et cetera have so dominated the political landscape that there is no oxygen for actual policy discussions, and these are issues on which the Democrats are never going to win because the Republican positions are stated in fear-based (mostly made up) problems and the simple solution that you vote in a God-fearing MAGA candidate and they’ll just take care of it, somehow.
There is literally no Republican policy platform of any kind; not energy, trade strategy, or domestic policy, or education (other than abolishing as much of it as they can), or anything else other than fear and anger. And you can tell because Trump supporters seem to have become even more angry and strident since they completely won control of all branches of government and increasing stranglehold over many states, plus having nearly all of their wealthy critics or doubters kissing Trump’s ring. In fact, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that we’ve gone from a proto-fascist stage into rapidly emerging fascism with so many parallels to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich that I’m not sure if domestic politics even matters much anymore. I sure hope I’m wrong and there is some kind of vigorous ‘blue wave’ of opposition that retakes the reigns of Congress and reimposes some democratic norms but I have a real sinking feeling that this is just the road we are going to go down as a nation for the foreseeable future.
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