The Northern Strategy

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

This thread is largely inspired by a couple of posts in the How Big A Scandal to Not Vote for the Dem thread of a few weeks ago.

This:

To lose the 2020 election, the Democratic candidate will have to make herself/himself less popular than Trump. A way that could happen is if the Democratic candidate listens to only a portion of the American public. If the candidate and party decides that Trump can’t win and 2020 is the time to energise the left and go bold with lots of big, liberal policies, then they could end up turning off lots of voters. The Democrats need a candidate that appeals to all of America and not just the far left. Being stupid enough to just pay attention to the left and ignore the rest of the country would cause the Democratic candidate to lose. And losing to Trump twice would indeed be scandalous.

This:

How about open hostility towards rednecks? If a candidate makes it through the primaries, and then is caught multiple times making derisive statements about pickup trucks, trailer parks, and “God, Guns and Guts” bumper stickers, it would anger quite a few people. It would also bring into question his/her competence as a politician. I think some of the current Democratic candidates could be labelled as urban liberal elites, or even champagne socialists. If a candidate with that profile makes a few anti-redneck gaffes, she/he is going to be unpopular. And popularity wins elections.

This:

So what is something scandalous and within the bounds of likelihood that a Democratic presidential candidate could do that would make them more unpopular than Trump? I think being hostile to a segment of American society fits that bill. And white American urban poor, aka rednecks, who apparently are frequently Trump supporters is my guess as the most likely target segment for Democratic hostility.

And this:

A liberal elite who punches down and scorns a section of society would certainly create a backlash. Dealing with the backlash would take time, and would be a distraction from the candidate’s main message. If the backlash was strong enough, it could move centrist voters from the Anybody But Trump camp, to A Pox on Both Their Houses.

For an example from the UK, Gordon Brown had a gaffe where he called an elderly woman a bigot. It certainly hurt his campaign and arguably cost him his prime ministership.

Let me give some context of my perspective on next year’s elections. I think most Trump supporters are not reachable. I feel like the winning Dem strategy is to court their own base while also motivating some of the tens of millions of apathetic non-voters to vote. The conservative base is best jettisoned altogether, hence “The Northern Strategy”: seek victory without even trying to convince the conservative demographic. So, when it comes to reaching out to and actively courting Trump supporters, I disagree with Wrenching Spanners (though I want to talk about it, obviously).

There’s an important distinction to be made with the original Southern Strategy, however. The idea is not that we intend to discriminate against this demographic. We aren’t going to make second-class citizens of them, we aren’t going to segregate them or provide this and that benefit to everyone but them. Not at all. The Northern Strategy derives from the practical insight that compromising with or negotiating on policy grounds with today’s conservative right is effectively engaging in a conversation with nonsense.

Is there a middle ground between “Mexicans are racists” and an evidence-based narrative of the border? I don’t think so.

Is there a middle ground between “Climate change is a hoax” and an evidence-based response to climate change? Not if you care about future generations, there isn’t.

Is there a middle ground between “Democrats hate America and want to turn us into Venezuela” and looking at the evidence on the distribution of health care, education, the revenue-to-spending balance? We can come to a decision to tax at a spectrum of rates, or act or not act to provide health care to a variety of degrees, and so on for every policy, but we can’t really even have a conversation at all with people who only bring fantastical accusations, and won’t look at, let alone respond to, solid evidence.

In a lot of ways, the best way to help conservatives is to ignore them. Let them scream bloody murder about how socialist higher taxes on the wealthy are, how Soviet to provide health insurance. The obvious fact is that they don’t understand the issues, their heads have been filled with false fears because that serves the interests of the wealthy. Their lives and the prospects for the country’s, and the world’s, future will be better under sensible public policy, uncompromised by a bunch of hysterical nonsense.

That’s the first aspect of the discussion: is this Northern Strategy approach really a good idea? Should we really pretend to curb imaginary socialist inclinations, humor the idea that there is an invasion and an emergency at the border, and so on? Feel free to change the way all of this is framed if you think I am being unfair or clueless or what have you.

The second aspect of this discussion: Democratic candidates personally attacking this demographic aka “punching down”. My very first reaction was to reject that. I thought that maybe calling out the deplorables for all their bad ideas and bad behavior would be a great way to motivate the apathetics. Have a muscular campaign and take the fight right to the opponent. Bright lines, clear arguments, a clear choice between better and worse.

Well, on second thought that seems pretty divisive. Conservatives may have a lot of what I consider dumb ideas, but when it comes down to it I would much rather help them than attack them. They’re citizens, they have jobs, they take care of their families and generally contribute to the country. The idea isn’t to isolate them and wreck their lives. The idea is to make theirs, and everyone else’s, lives better. The only issue with them is that their dumb ideas are counterproductive to most people who aren’t wealthy.

So ok, maybe back off the personal attacks somewhat. Stick more to the substance and address it to reachable Dems and apathetics. Ok. But then I read Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes trial. I had never studied this one very closely, I went googling around for a transcript of the actual trial and wound up reading that instead.

At first it might seem like the writing of a guy with normal 1925 prejudices. By the end (and I know it is a lot to ask to read 13 old newspaper articles) I was convinced that it was such a hateful screed that it couldn’t even be considered journalism. It is one long, and fairly eloquent, hit piece and smear job. It is so full of snobbish, sneering mockery and insults that it overwhelms the question of which side was right or wrong in the court case the articles are ostensibly about. Nope, by the end I felt quite sympathetic for the evangelicals of Tennessee, and even for (apparently sick and dying) William Jennings Bryan. Quite a feat.

To really get the full effect you would have to read the whole thing, but here are a few samples:

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders – that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous – by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

During the whole time of its delivery the old mountebank, Bryan, sat tight-lipped and unmoved. There is, of course, no reason why it should have shaken him. He has those hill billies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theological bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.

The Baptist preachers ranted unchallenged.

Their buffooneries were mistaken for humor. Now the clowns turn out to be armed, and have begun to shoot.

In his argument yesterday judge Neal had to admit pathetically that it was hopeless to fight for a repeal of the anti-evolution law. The Legislature of Tennessee, like the Legislature of every other American state, is made up of cheap job-seekers and ignoramuses.

The Governor of the State is a politician ten times cheaper and trashier. It is vain to look for relief from such men. If the State is to be saved at all, it must be saved by the courts. For one, I have little hope of relief in that direction, despite Hays’ logic and Darrow’s eloquence. Constitutions, in America, no longer mean what they say. To mention the Bill of Rights is to be damned as a Red.

The rabble is in the saddle, and down here it makes its first campaign under a general beside whom Wat Tylor seems like a wart beside the Matterhorn.

The old gladiator faced his real enemy at last. Here was a sworn agent and attorney of the science he hates and fears – a well-fed, well-mannered spokesman of the knowledge he abominates. Somehow he reminded me pathetically of the old Holy Roller I heard last week – the mountain pastor who damned education as a mocking and a corruption. Bryan, too, is afraid of it, for wherever it spreads his trade begins to fall off, and wherever it flourishes he is only a poor clown.

But not to these fundamentalists of the hills. Not to yokels he now turns to for consolation in his old age, with the scars of defeat and disaster all over him. To these simple folk, as I have said, he is a prophet of the imperial line – a lineal successor to Moses and Abraham. The barbaric cosmogony that he believes in seems as reasonable to them as it does to him. They share his peasant-like suspicion of all book learning that a plow hand cannot grasp. They believe with him that men who know too much should be seized by the secular arm and put down by force. They dream as he does of a world unanimously sure of Heaven and unanimously idiotic on this earth.

He goes on, and on, and on, and on. Nearly every line is a twisting of the knife. I’m sorry to even link to such a thing, but it is important to make my point: this kind of insulting, vitriolic attacking really ought to be avoided. I went in agreeing with Mencken’s basic opinion of the Scopes case and came away thinking him to be pretty much a monster with which I would not want to be associated. Read it- I doubt I am the only one who feels this way.

Point is, the Dems could have the better information, the smarter policies, the right answers for what ails America and still lose by pushing people away, even people who basically agree with them. Wrenching Spanners was right on this point- “punching down” or generally being derisive of the opposition can make you very, very ugly. It can make you lose.

[Chisquirrel]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Point is, the Dems could have the better information, the smarter policies, the right answers for what ails America and still lose by pushing people away, even people who basically agree with them. Wrenching Spanners was right on this point- “punching down” or generally being derisive of the opposition can make you very, very ugly. It can make you lose.

Got it. So “fuck your feelings” is ok, but “some of these people hold truly abhorrent beliefs” is bad.

[Covfefe]

A lot of Democrats running in last year’s mid-terms strategically made a point of avoidance of insulting average citizens and sinking to lower depths of discourse. This worked well for Tammy Baldwin, granted her opponent did not have great appeal and there were other factors of momentum in play. As for citizens and online provocateurs, there is venom and there will be more. A Democrat’s challenge is to stoke interest without doing things that a reasonable person would conflate with adding to the bad blood. If we’re talking about a presidential candidate, I just don’t know, maybe you can throw some of that out the window, because the media will run with sound bytes in ways that reasonable explanations can’t always fix.

[Sherrerd]

…“punching down” or generally being derisive of the opposition can make you very, very ugly. It can make you lose.

Yes. The better path is to talk about the policies that will make life better for all Americans (even the Trump fans).

There is always a tug toward “us versus them,” though. Democratic candidates will feel the urging to clearly separate themselves and their followers from those who feel it’s fine to cage children on the southern border.

Rallies are particularly likely to bring this urging to the fore. “Us versus them” is wildly popular when large groups of humans gather. It’s the way our brains work.

Kudos and honor to those candidates who are able to resist the urging. It won’t be easy, even though Democrats by nature are less tribal than are their opponents. (Or so the brain science tells us).

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Chisquirrel

Got it. So “fuck your feelings” is ok, but “some of these people hold truly abhorrent beliefs” is bad.

No, not at all. “Fuck your feelings” is bad- just look at how that stuck in everyone’s craws! But in the context of the Northern Strategy, it is the Dems who want to avoid stepping in that poo.

And “some of these people hold truly abhorrent beliefs”- I am suggesting rejecting their beliefs on the political level, but not rejecting the people themselves. No need to put too fine a point on beliefs being “abhorrent”, especially if it is about things that don’t matter.

@Sherrerd

There is always a tug toward “us versus them,” though. Democratic candidates will feel the urging to clearly separate themselves and their followers from those who feel it’s fine to cage children on the southern border.

Rallies are particularly likely to bring this urging to the fore. “Us versus them” is wildly popular when large groups of humans gather. It’s the way our brains work.

But really it is these ideas vs those ideas. The “Us” should remain the whole country. I’d like to move away from the Warring States model of politics. Yeah, there are political parties and people are working hard to win, but there is a more fundamental category that includes the whole system. Let’s not poison that in the quest to “win”.

[Velocity]

I have no data to cite (since this is inherently hard to find data on) but it seems that conservatives generally rally tighter when they feel attacked than liberals do.

The flip side of that, though, is that it’s also easier to butter them up with the right soothing words and make them miss the big picture. A Democratic candidate could say the right things to butter up Trump voters while in hard actuality pursuing policies that are liberal.

[RTFirefly]

@Velocity

I have no data to cite (since this is inherently hard to find data on) but it seems that conservatives generally rally tighter when they feel attacked than liberals do.

IOW, all the time. That they are perpetually being victimized by those godless (or Muslim) libruls is an essential part of the right-wing creed.

The flip side of that, though, is that it’s also easier to butter them up with the right soothing words and make them miss the big picture. A Democratic candidate could say the right things to butter up Trump voters while in hard actuality pursuing policies that are liberal.

I doubt this. In a society whose divisions have become as deeply entrenched as ours, Trump voters aren’t going to even listen to a Dem in numbers worth chasing.

[DSeid]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

<snip>
… I feel like the winning Dem strategy is to court their own base while also motivating some of the tens of millions of apathetic non-voters to vote. The conservative base is best jettisoned altogether…

@Sherrerd

Yes. The better path is to talk about the policies that will make life better for all Americans (even the Trump fans).

There is always a tug toward “us versus them,” though. …

Possibly it matters who you mean by “the conservative base”. The die-hard Trumpsters are maybe 30 to 35%. That is a pretty hard floor. You don’t reach them but denigrating them pushes away some who are not in that group.

I see two possible most effective tactics to take.

The economic populist approach. Us v them is the easiest sale, and this approach just substitutes a different them. In this approach the them is the very wealthy who have gathered up disproportionate wealth and power, in reality not the 1%ers but the 0.1%ers. That leaves 99% plus as “us” to that small (but powerful) “them”. This one works best if there is an explicit expression of empathy for the problem that the various members of “us” have. There is no question that several candidates will play that approach, even if few have the skill to pull off that last part of it.

The other one takes more oratory skill. It’s the one Obama played and Kennedy as well for that matter. Appeal to a unifying positive vision that has no them (at least no domestic them, threat of Russia, etc. is potentially allowed). Appeal to how we want to think of ourselves, in service of a greater good.

Making the “them” be a group that most rural Americans and a sizable number of working class ones feel they are part of is not IMHO a best possible option. Don’t forget that there were a good number of Obama-Trump voters. Those are the Trump voters worth chasing. And you want the Obama-stayed home ones back too, while keeping the Romney-Clinton ones.

[septimus]

@DSeid

Possibly it matters who you mean by “the conservative base”. The die-hard Trumpsters are maybe 30 to 35%. That is a pretty hard floor. You don’t reach them but denigrating them pushes away some who are not in that group.

I see two possible most effective tactics to take.

The economic populist approach. Us v them is the easiest sale, and this approach just substitutes a different them. In this approach the them is the very wealthy who have gathered up disproportionate wealth and power, in reality not the 1%ers but the 0.1%ers. That leaves 99% plus as “us” to that small (but powerful) “them”. This one works best if there is an explicit expression of empathy for the problem that the various members of “us” have. There is no question that several candidates will play that approach, even if few have the skill to pull off that last part of it.

The other one takes more oratory skill. It’s the one Obama played and Kennedy as well for that matter. Appeal to a unifying positive vision that has no them (at least no domestic them, threat of Russia, etc. is potentially allowed). Appeal to how we want to think of ourselves, in service of a greater good.

Making the “them” be a group that most rural Americans and a sizable number of working class ones feel they are part of is not IMHO a best possible option. Don’t forget that there were a good number of Obama-Trump voters. Those are the Trump voters worth chasing. And you want the Obama-stayed home ones back too, while keeping the Romney-Clinton ones.

I think this is a good summary of the messages the Ds need to project. Emphasize a positive empathetic message. This is why I’d like to see a candidate from the Rust Belt (Brown, Klobuchar, perhaps Biden) rather than a candidate from the “Coastal elites.”

But *I'm* not running for office, and *I* feel free to vent my ire against the sub-literates we allow to vote.  While Mencken's invective, linked to above, is NOT the message we should project, I still appreciate his writing enough to quote the first few paragraphs:

[QUOTE]
Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

[/QUOTE]

[DSeid]

So septimus by your love for that quote we are to understand that you like being able to think of yourself as part of the intellectual “betters” … the elite who knows more, resented by “the great masses of men” a.k.a. the “vermin”. Got it.

Meanwhile I think the op has it wrong when he shorthands it Northern and Southern:

“The Northern Strategy”: seek victory without even trying to convince the conservative demographic.

There is a definite argument to made for “The Northern Path”, which accepts that Sunbelt states are likely not yet ripe to be picked and that the key states to invest most in are just a few states in question: PA, MI, WI in particular with maybe MN added in.

But a shoving Trump supporting conservatives as “Southern” as opposed to the enlightened folk of “Northern” abodes is really very misleading.

Rural v Urban is a bit less inaccurate with Southern states being more rural … but even that fails. As does no college education v college educated … even though that captures more of the divide. Highly religiously observant v secular? Nope, even though there is some trend.

Enlightened v ignorant? Arrogant elite v common working man and woman? No question that when one parses it as the former one is also indulging in the latter.

This does not btw mean that anti-intellectualism is not a real and even growing threat. It is. But placing “us” as the intellectually superior betters and “them” as the ignorant mob, the vermin, is an intellectually inferior train of thought. IMHO.

OF COURSE one should not waste ones breath on those who cannot be won over no matter how much effort you spend, just as it would be wasteful to spend lots of money on CA or NY. But it is a huge mistake to cede an entire demographic to the other side. Losing a demographic less poorly than you otherwise would can be the deciding factor in elections. Think in converse: if a GOP presidential nominee kept their other support but picked up Black share from 8 to 15%, well that’s the election. You cannot cede to your opponent’s strength; you have to try to undercut it … but in ways that do not undermine your own strengths … and that is a tricky thing.

[septimus]

@DSeid

So septimus by your love for that quote we are to understand that you like being able to think of yourself as part of the intellectual “betters” … the elite who knows more, resented by “the great masses of men” a.k.a. the “vermin”. Got it.

Here are some Trump supporters. I feel intellectual superior to them. You don’t, I guess. Got it.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

I am with Dseid where that quote is concerned. The campaign should not be one long self-congratulatory celebration of superiority over the vermin. The article is titled “Homo Neanderthalensis”- literally dehumanizing from the word go. If one group is really superior to the other, why do they behave like such jerks? Seems instantly self-contradictory to me.

A major cause of political turmoil these days is that the goodies are not evenly distributed. I got something of an education, and I worked hard for it, but if I had been born elsewhere I probably would not have. I was able to escape the Midwest and get to a place where I could find a decent job. Not everyone gets out of places where the jobs are drying up- those left behind end up poorer and probably pissed off. If I had been born a Hutu, I would probably hate the Tutsis.

For those if us lucky enough to be able to take a perspective above it all, well, a lot of it is luck. From this vantage, it is just wrong to take a side in Hutu vs Tutsi and help one kill off the other. No, the truly superior thing to do would be to help the whole lot of them escape the cycle of murderous madness.

Same with demagogued Trump supporters. Maybe they are ignorant/uneducated, but they are also having that ignorance taken advantage of by powerful forces. If all you can do is point and laugh and insult them, you aren’t accomplishing anything. They need help, and the Mencken attitude is the opposite of helping.

[septimus]

I don’t think the message I projected is so different from yours:

@septimus

But I’m not running for office, and I feel free to vent my ire against the sub-literates we allow to vote. While Mencken’s invective, linked to above, is NOT the message we should project, I still appreciate his writing enough to quote the first few paragraphs:

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

It seems kind of twisty to at once admire dehumanizing sentiments and also not want to project them. Which is it?

[Kolak_of_Twilo]

@DSeid

… Don’t forget that there were a good number of Obama-Trump voters. Those are the Trump voters worth chasing. And you want the Obama-stayed home ones back too, while keeping the Romney-Clinton ones.

This is the key in a nutshell and is why the idea of a “Northern Strategy” makes sense. If the future nominee of the Democratic party makes it their mission to keep the base while at the same time bringing back the Obama voters who stayed home in 2016 or went to Trump then this electoral map should not be too difficult for them in 2020.

[CarnalK]

@septimus

Here are some Trump supporters. I feel intellectual superior to them. You don’t, I guess. Got it.

I feel intellectually superior to people who post blind links to youtube.

[Wrenching_Spanners]

@septimus

Here are some Trump supporters. I feel intellectual superior to them. You don’t, I guess. Got it.

So you self-identify as an elitist?

Welcome to the club!

[Velocity]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

It seems kind of twisty to at once admire dehumanizing sentiments and also not want to project them. Which is it?

The attitude of some seems to be, “We know we’re better than those Trumpers, but for the sake of elections let’s not make them sense that.”

[DSeid]

@Kolak_of_Twilo

This is the key in a nutshell …

Nice avatar post combo!

[DSeid]

@septimus

Here are some Trump supporters. I feel intellectual superior to them. You don’t, I guess. Got it.

Half of all Americans are below average. Hell almost all of us are below average on at least more than one dimension. Certainly I am. Personally I have great appreciation that I know more about some things and others know more about other thing. That which I am ignorant of will always exceed that about which I have great knowledge about. I happen to get better compensated for my knowledge base and skill set. Not complaining!

Am I better educated? Yes. Was I raised in an environment that did more to foster an open mind and intellectual curiosity? Probably. These are privileges I have.

Am I, by virtue of those privileges, being one of the “men of the educated minority”, superior to the masses, one of “the betters”? No, of course not.

Again this in no way excuse willful and arrogant ignorance, especially when such is coupled with intolerance and lashing out at one or more “others.” But I know quite a few who are well educated (men and women) and guilty of that. Some of the biggest idiots I know are very well educated idiots. (And they generally think they know much more than they do; they are fools and they consider themselves one of “the elite.”)