The Rocky Road Forward
Last edited Sun Jan 26, 2025, 10:01 PM - Edit history (3)
To move forward you need to know where you are as well as where you need to go.
My first observation about where we are is that we are fighting on an uneven playing field. The field is uneven due to the other side's money advantage, which has been increased exponentially by Citizens United and by the preponderance of right-wing ownership and control of the media, including recently emerged social media platforms. The internal discussions of Democratic messaging ignores the unhappy fact that, on balance, the media amplifies Democratic messages selectively and often to fit within rightwing frames. We need to differentiate between what we say and what most voters actually hear and see. Only the latter is our "message."
A recent example was the use of statements by a small handful of congresswomen calling to "defund the police." Those pronouncements were used to paint the entire Democratic Party as soft on crime despite the pro-police and pro-public order messages from the vast majority of Democratic candidates. The media ignored those messages or reported them in the context of an answer to the intentionally awkward question "do you support defunding the police?" Given recent events, that media frame is more than a little ironic.
Much of the current opinion discussion about "polarization" fits comfortably inside a frame in which simple humane policies like Medicaid expansion have been rebranded as fringe radical-left positions, inhabiting an equally radical but opposite pole from policies like criminalizing abortion care, deporting American-born children of immigrants, calling climate change a hoax, and vaporizing institutions like WHO, NATO, the Department of Education, the CDC, etc. The implication is that there is a rational, but indescribable, midpoint between these "two extremes." If you were a self-described moderate Democrat ten years ago and didn't change a single preferred policy, the media is happy to redefine you as part of the lunatic left that rational people shouldn't be stigmatized for avoiding.
The media has generally taken an uncritical (complicit) stance on "the woke mind virus" smears that enable Republicans to vilify Democratic politicians for entirely imaginary sins. The attacks on CRT being taught in grade and secondary schools comes to mind. Pronouncements that Republicans are the ones who will protect our children from going to school as a boy in the morning and coming home as a girl at night are dismissed as normal political speech.
This is the field on which we must compete. It's unfair but we ignore reality only at our absolute peril. Meanwhile, the media and media's consumers/voters have evolved in ways that make rational policy discussion less relevant than ever to electoral politics. Video, and to a lesser extent podcasts and radio, have displaced the written word as an information source for many voters. As the media have changed, so has the predominant content. Reliance on objective facts and dispassionate analysis has been supplanted by stories, anecdotal evidence, and especially in social media posts- fables and lies.
I wrote a post about Tiktok videos in the recent election back in June. See here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219019254. My general conclusion is that Republican/Russian/troll posts targeted particular segments of the disengaged and therefore, "persuadable" public. The goals of these campaigns was both to mislead their own voters into believing they needed to be and would be protected and to give would-be "liberal" voters reasons to stay home.
This leads to my first suggestion, which is not completely tongue-in-cheek, on how an individual can engage in the fight. BE A TROLL. Go on Tiktok and do the same thing to them. There are better ways to become an active participant in the fight- but they are all more difficult and involve at least occasional direct contact with hostile individuals, not anonymous contact with anonymous people.
The story of the 2024 election was largely a matter of Democratic voters staying home. Negative framing and trolling worked. I believe the most effective elements of that campaign were the ubiquitous ads of Kamala saying she agreed with providing taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for prisoners and "illegal aliens." Kamala was for they/them, Donald Trump was for you. It's true that Kamala supported what was the current law of the land during the Trump administration. That context, of course, was omitted. Since those attacks worked, we can expect them to be brought back in the next cycle, at least generically, as Democrats supporting gender-affirming surgery in any/all cases- similar in effect to the soft-on-crime frame.
Recapping: our reality is that we are competing on an unlevel playing field largely defined by money. Another feature of current reality is that our opponents have been willing to lie, cheat, steal, bite, and pull hair when we have not. My third broad observation about our situation is that the parties are competing for unequal rewards. Donald Trump ran to be a dictator who could lavishly reward those who are loyal to him and punish those who opposed him and/or offended his most unquestioning supporters.
Electing Kamala, on the other hand, would have prevented many new abuses but would not have been sufficient to restore a healthy, functional democracy. Before the election we already had a de facto oligarchy that had veto power over law by exercising the senate's 60-vote filibuster roadblock. Laws that weren't liked were subject to reinterpretation or outright dismissal by the captive Supreme Court. State legislative majorities and redistricting maps were locked in by recent voter suppression laws and gerrymandered districts. "Moderate" Republicans were rendered obsolete by the Citizens United-enabled ability of billionaires to primary the uncooperative. Fat purses enabled oligarchs to dominate media ownership and use their control to alternately censor or frame the terms of public discussion.
Democrats have been championing what looks like slow, continuing decline. Maybe we should campaign on radical change. Bulldozing the Supreme Court might be a good place to start. Suggestions?
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