Where do we go from here?

  • Thread starter Thread starter rodoheel
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 992
  • Views: 13K
  • Politics 
I have not posted in a while as I have been attempting to process what happened. I have been reading the analyses others have posted and what media figures have said.

I think the focus on the Dems being out of touch because they are too elite (whatever the hell that means) or too focused on fringe issues (trans rights) is treating symptoms.

There is much fretting about how the Democrats need to reach the white working class. Then there is also much fretting about how the Democrats lost so many Hispanic voters. Etc.

That's all well and good but too many of the media are wanting to play the "I told you so" game. "I told you focusing on fringe issues would hurt you..."

The Democrats are hurt by minutia. They are hurt by details. Voters respond to simple, clear ideas. They respond to simple slogans.

The first thing the Democrats need to do is to come up with simple core values. "We believe all people should be treated with respect..." for example (and that may not should be one, but it is just an example). You come up with something that simple and direct and then when others argue with you, you can play the fallacy game just like they do. "Oh, so you don't think people should be treated with respect? Wow, you really look down on people." Build your messaging around that.

There needs to be a basic core, an easily explainable core, of this is who we are. Yes, personally, I believe that the core should be liberal, that's me. But regardless, without a clear, easily digestible core, the infinite minutia will take over.

Just some random thoughts of mine.
 
LeoBloom said:
I have not posted in a while as I have been attempting to process what happened. I have been reading the analyses others have posted and what media figures have said.

I think the focus on the Dems being out of touch because they are too elite (whatever the hell that means) or too focused on fringe issues (trans rights) is treating symptoms.

There is much fretting about how the Democrats need to reach the white working class. Then there is also much fretting about how the Democrats lost so many Hispanic voters. Etc.

That's all well and good but too many of the media are wanting to play the "I told you so" game. "I told you focusing on fringe issues would hurt you..."

The Democrats are hurt by minutia. They are hurt by details. Voters respond to simple, clear ideas. They respond to simple slogans.

The first thing the Democrats need to do is to come up with simple core values. "We believe all people should be treated with respect..." for example (and that may not should be one, but it is just an example). You come up with something that simple and direct and then when others argue with you, you can play the fallacy game just like they do. "Oh, so you don't think people should be treated with respect? Wow, you really look down on people." Build your messaging around that.

There needs to be a basic core, an easily explainable core, of this is who we are. Yes, personally, I believe that the core should be liberal, that's me. But regardless, without a clear, easily digestible core, the infinite minutia will take over.

Just some random thoughts of mine.
Click to expand...
I agree with you that Dem messaging has been too sophisticated for the average voter. Dems need to develop the skill of KISS( keep it simple stupid )

If you cannot explain how you are going to help the voters in one sentence and limit the number of issues to emphasize to three, then they will get lost in the details and tune you out
 
heelinhell said:
I agree with you that Dem messaging has been too sophisticated for the average voter. Dems need to develop the skill of KISS( keep it simple stupid )

If you cannot explain how you are going to help the voters in one sentence and limit the number of issues to emphasize to three, then they will get lost in the details and tune you out
Click to expand...
I was thinking a little about this last night, as well as super's thread from a few days ago about Dems reclaiming the religion high ground. I wonder if the "He Gets Us" campaign is a potential exemplar. I know the origins and funding of that organization are somewhat suspect, but the ads are really moving, and to your point, they're about as KISS as it can get.

I know a lot of people here will not want the Dems to center their messaging around religious concepts, but if the goal is to get some of the working class reinvested, that's probably going to be necessary.
 
Being Christian and being Liberal are not mutually exclusive. I don't know how the American Flag and Christianity became MAGAfied but if you want more of the simpletons to vote in their best interests, start there.
 
lawtig02 said:
I was thinking a little about this last night, as well as super's thread from a few days ago about Dems reclaiming the religion high ground. I wonder if the "He Gets Us" campaign is a potential exemplar. I know the origins and funding of that organization are somewhat suspect, but the ads are really moving, and to your point, they're about as KISS as it can get.

I know a lot of people here will not want the Dems to center their messaging around religious concepts, but if the goal is to get some of the working class reinvested, that's probably going to be necessary.
Click to expand...
My family was discussing this

The party needs to focus on getting elected. Once elected they can address any issue they need. If it means dropping some of the more fringe issues from the core beliefs, then so be it.
 
UNCatTech said:
My family was discussing this

The party needs to focus on getting elected. Once elected they can address any issue they need. If it means dropping some of the more fringe issues from the core beliefs, then so be it.
Click to expand...
Religious is fine but we really need to examine the favorability at all levels to Christians. They need to be treated as no more than equals. Society hasn't done that since 1800.
 
lawtig02 said:
I was thinking a little about this last night, as well as super's thread from a few days ago about Dems reclaiming the religion high ground. I wonder if the "He Gets Us" campaign is a potential exemplar. I know the origins and funding of that organization are somewhat suspect, but the ads are really moving, and to your point, they're about as KISS as it can get.

I know a lot of people here will not want the Dems to center their messaging around religious concepts, but if the goal is to get some of the working class reinvested, that's probably going to be necessary.
Click to expand...
The most successful social justice campaigns in history have been either explicitly religious (Gandhi, MLK) or religion-tinged (South Africa). That's likely because most modern religions put concepts of justice front and center. Indeed, concepts like Hell and undesirable reincarnation (e.g. in Hinduism, a person who acts badly in life will be reincarnated into something terrible) are essentially efforts to believe that there will be justice for evildoers in some capacity.

I don't want to scare away atheists. We want a big tent. But atheists and liberal Christians (or Jews or Muslims) need not be rivals. We just all need to realize that the world is complex because there are so many people and thus a diversity of views. Like, I think Dems should talk more about God. That shouldn't be a threat to atheists; it's not as if Dems are suddenly going to turn into Christian nationalists because we quote MLK or sing "Amazing Grace" at funerals. And it should be OK also to express our goals in terms of purely secular values too. Right now, I think the vast majority of committed atheists support Dems, so we don't need to firm up that side of our coalition.

There are some atheists, including atheists on this board, who basically freak out at any mention of religion. I don't know if that's why liberals don't talk about God too much any more. Guys, get over it. Religion is not in fact the worst thing in the world or the cause of our problems. You can live next to tolerant religious folks and your lives will not be worse for it.
 
heelinhell said:
I agree with you that Dem messaging has been too sophisticated for the average voter. Dems need to develop the skill of KISS( keep it simple stupid )

If you cannot explain how you are going to help the voters in one sentence and limit the number of issues to emphasize to three, then they will get lost in the details and tune you out
Click to expand...
This is why I was thinking about religion. Let's think about the problems with KISS -- namely, it's really hard to do without being reductionist, vapid and caricature-level simplistic. The amount of content that can be crammed into a sentence is quite small, and it's not nearly enough to capture complexity. That's why KISS is the natural approach of right-wingers. There's a famous Onion piece contrasting the messaging of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan: "Let's all save energy by wearing sweaters" versus "kill the bastards."

But KISS becomes more effective when the single sentence explanation hearkens to a much larger and complex set of principles that people have come to intuitively understand through experience. Religion isn't the only one of them, but it's a main one. So what if we had an animating principle like:

Trumpism is not the way of God.

There's a lot more content there than meets the eye, because understanding the sentence requires an understanding of the "way of God," and that is a complex idea that encapsulates many different values. It's a way to sneak books and books of content into a single sentence.

By no means is religion the only language that can accomplish this, but it might be the most accessible for a non-college educated population.
 
I think that whether as part of the Democratic party or ,by my preference, on their own, the more mainstream Christians need to strongly and openly reject the Christian Nationalists and sympathizers on the right.

Fwiw, I want them to do it on their own because the more religion and politics mix, the worse they both become. Won't the Thirty Years War about the entanglements of state and religion in large part? Thought enough blood had been shed over this.
 
CFordUNC said:


Lololol under $360,000 huh? Going to be a whole lot of middle class Trump voters with this face:
200.gif
Click to expand...

I've made a variation of this post (what follows below) half a dozen times now.

Everything unpopular will be blamed on the Dems/not-MAGA folks by right-wing media. They are the critical part of keeping this all going and - coupled with their already baked-in cultish denialism of non-MAGA reality - you can bet the farm the Trump supporters will eat that shit up. For the foreseeable future. The analogy I've used is the Oceania/Eurasia narrative pushed in 1984.

And sincerely, I would love to be wrong here and hope I am, but I don't think I will be. :(
 
I've been thinking a lot about what comes next after Trump and as much as I know a lot of folks may find this to sound absurd while we are currently in the throes of Trump 2.0 stupidity, I truly do think that MAGA has a shelf life that is approaching expiration.

I think we are already finding out in real time that MAGA does not have a bench roster that’s capable of stepping in for Trump and winning national elections. Not one single other person in the MAGA movement has the winning combination of bluster, bravado, and lizard-brained charisma that Trump has. Hell, it can be reasonably argued that the only Republican who had a good day on Election Day was Donald Trump himself. The GOP lost all sorts of races downballot that they had no business losing in a year where the top of the ticket won only the second Republican popular vote in decades.

I truly think that Trump’s own incompetence will scatter the effectiveness of his efforts- we are already seeing it happening in real time as we speak with these absurdly outlandish cabinet appointments and the looming fight that he is picking with the GOP establishment in the Senate. I think that Trump's policies will likely make enough of a mess economically that he will lose one or both houses of Congress in 2026. Trump is much closer to the end than the beginning of his time, both politically and actuarially, and once he’s gone, I think that the most dangerous elements of MAGA will fizzle. Even a Ron DeSantis type, although I'd never, ever vote for someone like him, is much less prone to encouraging political violence and norm-busting than Trump, and we have already seen that the most shameless MAGA ballwashers flat out can’t win national elections on their own, IMO.

None of the above is intended to sound like hopium or to sound pollyanna-ish, but just my attempted take on what I personally think is realistic. Trump doesn't want to govern. He wants to enrich himself. The GOP *can't* govern- it's only effective as an oppositional out-party. There are a whole lot of people who are about to realize the hard way that all of that blustering and bullshitting about illegal immigrants, open borders, transgender people, and the like aren't going to reduce the price of eggs, aren't going to make housing more affordable, aren't going to make them and their families more prosperous, etc. And I'm not someone who is willing to buy the whole "well we might not have free and fair elections in 2028" thing. Yes, we will. And I also don't buy the "Trump is never going to voluntarily leave office." He won't have a choice. Not one single Democratically-led state, and likely all but the most hopeless of red states, are going to even participate in an election where the top of the ticket violates the Constitutional prohibition on a third term presidency.

TL;DR: this, too, shall pass. It may not be without tons of annoyance, or without quite a bit of hardship and suffering for certain groups, but it shall pass.
 
CFordUNC said:
TL;DR: this, too, shall pass. It may not be without tons of annoyance, or without quite a bit of hardship and suffering for certain groups, but it shall pass.
Click to expand...
Only if free and fair elections are preserved. And that's very much an open question right now. Trump and his transition team are naming exactly the people you'd expect to name if the goal was to end free and fair elections.

And that's probably because they realize that Trump has a limited shelf life. And that's why Elon jumped on board in 2024 and not earlier. He sees an opportunity here. He can't be president per the constitution, but he could be dictator if that's thrown out. Or more likely, he will be the kingmaker and wield power behind the scenes.

It also doesn't matter if Trump decides to abuse the adjourn Congress power that was included in the constitution only because legislators were only part-time and often had to return to their homes to do stuff like oversee the harvest, and one chamber could fuck with the other by denying a recess or scheduling it weirdly. If he's able to get away with that, then there will be no legislature at all and the 2026 elections will not matter.
 
korgguy1971 said:
I've made a variation of this post (what follows below) half a dozen times now.

Everything unpopular will be blamed on the Dems/not-MAGA folks by right-wing media. They are the critical part of keeping this all going and - coupled with their already baked-in cultish denialism of non-MAGA reality - you can bet the farm the Trump supporters will eat that shit up. For the foreseeable future. The analogy I've used is the Oceania/Eurasia narrative pushed in 1984.

And sincerely, I would love to be wrong here and hope I am, but I don't think I will be. :(
Click to expand...
Maybe. I think it's different when it hits close to home. If inflation goes up to 15%, then maybe they will want to blame Dems but they will also be facing 15% inflation and they might draw the causal connection. Anyway, sure there will be some ride or die MAGAs but could the GOP gather even 40% of the vote if we have 15% inflation, 8% unemployment, and no safety net?
 
superrific said:
Only if free and fair elections are preserved.
Click to expand...
So I'm definitely going to reveal my ignorance of how elections work here, but wouldn't we just theoretically need free and fair elections to work in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and perhaps Arizona and North Carolina, all of which will have Democratic governors? Obviously if we don't have free and fair elections in the other 45 states, we have unfathomably big problems, but I just mean that strictly from a election integrity standpoint, what could be done to rig elections in those swing states where a Democratic governor presides?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top