I’ve written a number of posts about the Democrat’s seeming inability to grab control of the narrative. They always seem to be on the defensive and rarely, if ever, speak in unison, unlike the Republicans who will come up with a line of attack which is repeated endlessly and by practically all of them.
One of the reasons that the press “both-sides” everything, even when they know the Republicans are either lying or full of shit is that the Republicans accused them of liberal bias for years, and in their attempt to prove that’s not true they have essentially become Republican biased. A great example is the fact that they fell all over themselves emphasizing Biden’s age and alleged cognitive decline, while ignoring the fact that Trump is practically as old and is showing clear signs of senility, which amplify his underlying mental illness.
I don’t think the Democrats have improved much, but it does appear that maybe the Republicans are losing it. Case in point is Katie Britt’s widely mocked response to Biden’s State of the Union address. Republicans have managed, with the help of Fox and other purveyors of right wing propaganda, to train a certain number of people to believe anything they are told by said propaganda purveyors, even if it directly contradicts what they were told yesterday. “Reprogrammable meatbags” I believe Driftglass calls them. There are far too many of such people, but there aren’t enough of them to win enough elections to maintain control of Congress or the Presidency, even though our sainted Founding Fathers did fix the deck so states with a minority of the population (and coincidentally more propaganda imbibers) control the Congress and the Electoral College.
The problem for Republicans is that folks like Katie Britt have come to the conclusion that everyone is a reprogrammable meatbag, and they are incapable of speaking in a manner that can reach those of us who program ourselves. Thus we have them criminalizing abortion and now IVF, and getting all excited about non-issues like trans kids. They haven’t even been able to sell the Hunter Biden laptop story and their entire Biden impeachment effort has, to the extent anyone has paid attention, drawn nothing but derision.
Their strategy since Nixon has been to distract from their real agenda, the enrichment of the already rich, by distractions usually centered on some sort of vilification of an out group. The Southern strategy involved coded racism, which continues to this day. Along the way they’ve attempted to demonize other groups, though the problem is that those demons tend to become de-demonized in the process. Remember when they were pushing anti-gay referenda to whip up hatred and of course distract from their real agenda? That doesn’t work well anymore because, I would suggest, as a result of the gay rights movement too many people now have friends and acquaintances who are openly gay, so they had to move on, trying it out now on trans people. Of course there’s always racism in the background, but the appeal of anti-gay and anti-trans stuff, as well as anti-immigrant stuff, is that they are perfectly comfortable saying the quiet part out loud, and they can even get their black flunkies like Tim Scott to join in.
I would suggest that the Democrats should constantly make the point that all this hate has only one purpose: to distract from their real agenda. They should constantly be asking this question: What have Republicans done for you lately. For that matter, what have Republicans done for you since they freed the slaves? Along the way, of course, it’s not hard to find examples of ways in which they intend to do things to most voters rather than for them, such as destroying Social Security.
Post a Comment