You have one party that has unapologetically launched a full-blown alternative right-wing media establishment that is encompassed on social media, podcasts, cable “news”, and various websites. As Steve Bannon says, they flood the zone with “shit”.
The Democrats don’t have anything that even remotely approximates this. First, they don’t have a “flood the zone” view, as they’re more likely to be bound by some amount of truth. The supposed “liberal media” fact-checks the Hell out of everything the Dems do and say. And they don’t get in front of RedAmerica, except as a punch line of a joke.
The Dems are not on enough of a war footing to combat the Republicans in today’s propaganda environment.
I have no idea how they’re supposed to go on a “war footing to combat” this. What is the opposite of “Flooding the zone with shit”? Do we counter-flood with our own shit? That just doubles the amount of shit. Cleaning up a shit-flood is inherently more difficult than just letting the shit flow. No one pays plumbers $50 an hour to start leaks, after all.
“Flooding the zone with shit” is essentially just weaponizing Urban Legends. “I know a guy who’s brother’s girlfriend’s cousin said that the immigrants are eating cats!” (that’s pretty much exactly how this rumor started, and it ended up in a nationally-televised presidential debate!) And we all know how easy those spread, and how hard it is to counter them.
Identifying the problem is easy. We’ve known about it for years. Finding the solution is what still evades us.
And even if we didn’t care about the amount of shit and only wanted to win, it still wouldn’t work for us as a strategy. The two parties are not symmetric. Although they aren’t entirely immune to confirmation bias, the left wing doesn’t seem to like being lied to as much as the right wing does. So if we flood the zone with shit of our own we lose our base.
No, just no. It’s not the Democratic Party’s problem. Don’t implicitly blame Democrats for what the Republicans are doing. Republican lies are not something Democrats can solve.
No doubt. As I have said elsewhere, what allowed Trump to entirely upset the political landscape and take over the Republican party and the government despite being utterly unqualified as a candidate was that he rejected the conventional wisdom that Americans would punish a candidate whose statements were obvious lies.
In 1968 Nixon realigned the parties with the Southern Strategy. In 2016 Trump realigned it again with the misinformation strategy. The sole advantage the the Democrats have is that sooner or later reality punishes those who don’t believe in it, hard and with a vengeance. So eventually it will become clear that the world doesn’t work the way Trump says it does. The problem is that with Trump leading the country when reality hits us over the head with a 2 by 4, its going to hit all of us regardless of party.
Despite right wingers saying stuff like “facts don’t care about your feelings,” it is, in fact, the right that has won the battle of feelings. While the left deals in facts and lectures everyone about how wrong they are, at least on the things that matter to the majority of voters, the right has taken over the Clintonesque ‘feel your pain" and target-marketed the painpoints and make scapegoats, etc that appeal to the irrational voter (the rational voter is a myth). It doesn’t matter if all the metrics say the economy is doing well, when millions of "anti-government’ people on all kinds of welfare programs (The Don is a lifelong welfare recipient and benefactor of government seizure of private property, I must note) drive their huge suburban farm vehicles up to Walmart and park sticking 12 feet out of the handicapped parking spaces, to find that eggs aren’t 88 cents like they were the last time trump was president.
You have that backwards. The alternative media hijacked the party.
The alternative media, from Faux to Infowars to … are a collection of independent profit-making ventures that are not financed by the Republican party. Rather the opposite, the loose cabal funds the party by keeping the audience boiling with rage and treating politics (or at least bitching about Lefties) as their main hobby. Whereby they become easy prey for fundraising appeals or being sold overpriced merch.
This is unprecedented in the history of the US, and AFAIK other countries as well. The Hearst papers from long ago were a very very pale forerunner of this idea.
Now you’re totally right that this unholy alliance of for-profit propaganda and a RW populist / fascist party represents a severe problem for Dems trying to win elections or to govern if they do.
Ultimately, the reason the Dems can’t fight fire with fire is the same reason there’s no history of left wing AM radio shows in the USA: Rightism is highly emotional and visceral with a dollop of hostility always included. Leftism is inherently intellectual and what emotion it has is empathetic, not angry.
There is some truth in this, but historically, the left has had and used anger effectively. The difference is, the anger was combined with real analysis, history, and democratic organizations, unlike the right which is happy to sow and reap anger for its own motives, which it disguises from those it manipulates.
Exhibit A, Jim Seymour, IWW poet and a stanza from his poem The Dishwasher
You leeches that live on the fat of the land,
You overfed parasites, look at my hands.
You laugh at them now they are blistered and coarse;
But such are the hands quite familiar with force;
And such are the hands that have furnished you drink
The hands of the slaves who are learning to think,
And hands that have fed you can crush you as well
And cast your damned carcasses clear into hell!
But the Democratic Party is led by milllionaires and depends on the professional middle/managerial class for support, and both those groups hate and fear working class anger and try to tamp it down. But that anger does not go away, and explodes into support for the right, which uses anger to mimic conviction and offers temporary catharsis. Until the Democrats can offer workers real solutions that acknowledge that anger, they may continue use to alienate a huge section of the population.
Note that history’s most candid and open proponents of fact-free hate-filled propaganda, the Nazis, were never overcome by any political opposition. They were overcome only by force of arms.
I’m not advocating for that. I’m just saying that Democrats should keep trying to think of ways to counter the right-wing propaganda advantage—but shouldn’t break their hearts over how hard it is to do.
Orwell knew. He never wrote a story in which a rational left managed to win back a population enthralled by right-wing hate-mongering.
(It’s a pessimistic viewpoint–but maybe it’s better than endless wrangling over ‘what the Democrats did wrong.’)
IMO, the best way the Dems can use propaganda effectively will be to start our own troll farm focused on MAGA’s natural paranoia. Start spreading rumors about MTG’s secret plan to out Boebert’s disloyal remarks, whether it’s true or not. Convince Mike Johnson that Trump secretly plans to replace him as Speaker. Post “friendly” Xits on Donald’s account about how everyone is saying that Vance doesn’t want to wait 4 years for his turn on the throne.
The Liberal media can stop trying to be “balanced” to the Right wing. When doing a piece about how senile trump is- they always had to include jokes about old Biden also.
Just stop that shit.
So, no the Liberal media does not have to spew out hate and lies, but look at the New York Times and it’s endless articles bad mouthing Biden and even Harris as they would give the NYT an exclusive interview. That crap has to stop.
The way to combat it is to become the Party people want to believe. I don’t like saying it, but right now the Dems have an insufferability problem and it’s a real turn-off to low-information swing voters.
…the opposite of flooding the zone with shit is sincerity. It was Walz going early in the campaign “These guys are just weird." It was the only time during the campaign that Trump & Co were on the defensive. But then the campaign pivoted and put a muzzle on this line of attack.
It’s ignoring the “focus groups” and the “talking points” and “staying on message” to the point you start sounding like a bot. It’s about having principles and standing by them. It’s about giving people something to believe in. Something to vote for.
You don’t fight propaganda by buying into it. When you accept the Republican framing on things like immigration and the borders, and you try and match the rhetoric, you just become the lesser version of that. The people who want you to get tough on the border won’t vote for you, and the people who want to protect the rights of the undocumented go, “what the hell are you doing?”
It might not have been enough to win the election. (although I personally think that it would) But at least you go down fighting.
One reason Bernie Sanders is wildly popular is because the guy has a reputation for not-BSing and when he speaks, he is speaking his mind. (Now, I would still quibble and say that I do think some of Bernie-ism is bullshitting and lying, but he has a perception and reputation for being hard-hitting honest, and perception is reality.)
Democrats have long lacked a nominated candidate who has a reputation as being a hard-hitting truth-teller. The reason Trump has such cult-like support is because his supporters think he “tells it like it is.” The Ds would, or could, rout the Rs if they could find and nominate such a candidate of their own.
There are several threads that have some basic similarity, so – rather than construct something new – I think this fits in this thread, too:
Here’s the GOP Fear and Faith platform in a nutshell. These are the lies the right spreads about the left. None of this has any relationship to Democratic policy proposals or planks in the party platform:
*They’re turning this country socialist – like Venezuela
*They’re giving this country over to illegals and brown people
*They’re going to ban your guns and your religion
*They’re teaching your children to be ashamed of their race, their heterosexuality, and their ethnicity
*They’re turning your cities into war-torn cesspools
*Your children are utterly not safe in Librul 'Murica
*You won’t be able to buy a 17 ounce fountain drink
*We’ll all be forced to eat nothing but kale. An In-n-Out Double Double burger will be a Felony
*They’re using Agenda 21 to force us all to live in cramped barracks and drive Smart cars or (GASP!) EVs
*Anthony Fauci is going to sedate you, Bill Gates is going to inject a chip into you, and then Big Brother will own you
*You’ll pay 105% of your income in taxes
*Biden Crime Family!!
*You’ll have to marry interracial, have LGBTQ kids, and get an abortion. You’ll just have to
*We’ll all be buying Cadillac Escalades for non-English speaking Welfare recipients
*They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets … of the people that live there
*FOR THE LOVE OF GRID … BENGHAZI !!!
And I really could go on and on.
They’re evil, but they’re generally not stupid.
If Democrats need to reach people who are vulnerable to this kind of marketing effort, I really don’t know how they could. Whatever other qualities that cohort has, it will be hard to bypass these lizard-brain, existential issues to talk intelligently to them about the reality of “their economic interests.”
…I think Bernie comes with too much baggage. I think every frontline Democrat equally comes with baggage. Its why Walz was a breath of fresh air. And what the Democrat establishment did to him sucked the life out of the campaign.
What’s worse is that the establishment are convinced they didn’t do anything wrong. Nobody is calling for their heads. And none of them are even considering falling on their swords.
The campaigning, and dare I say it ,the resistance, needs to start today. Because unlike the last time, it really is the resistance now. The pillars of democracy are on their last legs. Somebody has to step up to fight the deportations, to fight the right to have an abortion, to fight for trans people, to fight for the rights of the unhoused, to fight the takeover of the schools and the universities. It needs to happen in the courts and the streets and it has to start now.
But my god there is nobody around to step up. There is almost nobody on the national stage who can see what the Republicans did, nor how to effectively combat it. Which is why I’m convinced that the Democrats will split. Enough is enough. Somebody has to start a coordinated strategy at all levels to prepare us for what is to come. Because this isn’t just about America. It’s happening where I live as well.
Where do you live? I’m aware that other democratic countries are fighting off their own right-wing style of bullshit, and a lot of them are losing that fight.