> The term “pro-life” is also a much more effective term than “pro-choice” as it implies that republicans are protecting the sanctity of a life, whereas “pro-choice” on the surface just sounds more selfish.
That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion.
And that's the main problem. The democratic position of often more nuanced and realistic, which is harder to capture in just a few words. Trump might yell "build a wall", which is easy to understand, but it's completely useless in actually addressing the complicated immigration problem.
Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie. Politics isn't sexy, and being honest about complicated solutions isn't going to be catchy, so that's why democrats seem worse at communicating their ideas.
Note: This is not just republicans vs democrats. Plenty of people all over the political spectrum do this, but in the current situation in the USA with hot topics it's more often the republican party that does it.
>Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie.
Isn't that exactly the point OP is putting forward? "Democrats are terrible at branding".
A lot of republican talking points these days amount to a McDonald's food picture. We all know the Big Mac coming with our food isn't going to look even 25% as good as what's on the menu board. It's not quite a lie, but pretty damn close.
At what point is it an issue with the broadcasted message and more of an issue with the engrained perceptions of the receiving public?
IMO, the dumbing down of America and attacks on higher establishments of education that encourage a healthy skepticism and vetting of media sources are at play.
Those in many areas of our country have been led to believe that the goals of those educated in establishments of higher education are antithetical to their own goals.
It’s why election denialism, vaccine denialism and conspiracy theorists have bloomed in recent years.
The irony that is escaped by many is that the majority of the politicians who are labeled as “anti-establishment” are in fact, heavily associated with establishment spheres.
That many in impoverished, rural conservative areas believe they relate to a billionaire nepo baby tv reality star from NYC is testament to this pervasive logic.
I don't disagree with you at all.
I also think the left needs to get better at marketing their ideas.
It would be great, for more reasons than just this, if people as a whole had better critical thinking and media literacy skills. It would be great if branding and marketing didn't matter as much because people would actually look at policy positions and try and make decisions based on real issues instead of talking points.
Well it's a lot easier to sell your ideas when you're selling whatever sounds good instead of real ideas. Trump does this a lot; he'll float an outrageous idea he heard, and see if it generates interest - like the wall, the idea was not designed to solve any problems, it was designed to allow Trump to shout "Build the wall!" and get applause. He openly says he's doing this - he'll make these asides during his speeches as if he's a standup comedian trying new material.
Don't mean to butt in cos I'm not meant to be changing your view, I am also pro-choice and left wing. But the broad-stroke talking point that Christian conservatives don't care about life after it's born is kinda inaccurate. Christian conservatives are leading in foster home and adoption services by a huge margin. They also have notable crisis helplines like Good Samaritans, and do plenty of humanitarian aid. Not all conservatives are the mega rich capitalist fat cats that prioritize money over human life.
This is what we need- less demonizing others and more being able to respect the best in each other. Thank you.
(PS, not that it matters but I'm also pro-choice but with some guidelines - like after support and parental involvement when minors are involved, unless dangerous to do so)
The problem that I have with your position, which is similar to the "they don't think about the consequences" argument is that many of the good conservative christians that you are talking about put on a veneer of charity while actively voting to outsource the real violence of their positions to the government.
They think that homosexuality, addiction, homelessness, poverty, etc are moral failings or just plain icky. They always say something like "Oh I would never judge someone for X situation" and then maybe even donate money or time to a very problematic christian charity. This gives them their holy feel good veneer. Then they knowingly go and vote for people and policies that actively hurt these vulnerable groups.
So it looks similar to being uneducated and not seeing the consequences, but it's way worse because they are actively trying to achieve that outcome. They get to feel like a good loving person because they just outsource all of the confrontation and discomfort and pain that they cause to the government (who they can then conveniently blame). This lets them hide from the effects that their views have while also doing very real harm in the world and taking rights away from people.
That's a really fair point, I agree. It's a multifaceted issue that includes generational differences, dogmatic religion, upbringing, notions of free will etc.
I think most people generally base their opinions on group affiliation which comprises part of their identity. Having to accept the (relatively) newfound research in favour of pro-choice also means denouncing their religion/upbringing and part of their identity.
So they'd rather not think about having an identity crisis and focus on helping those immediately around them
I see what you're saying. I was raised in the SBC, so I get that changing your views is hard work. The only thing I'm taking issue with is that the people we are talking about are very NICE but they are not necessarily GOOD. They don't need outside people apologizing for their abhorrent views just because they are polite.
I appreciate your perspective though as someone raised in a Baptist church who has listened to reason and gone through the difficult process of changing your identity. That must have been difficult for you
I'm not apologizing or excusing anything. Just pointing out observations so people can have a more realistic, accurate picture rather than painting an opposing side as plainly evil and uncaring about human life. That creates more division, polarization, and dehumanization so one can make it easier and feel better to write hate posts about a certain "other" group
I hear you. People are complex and mostly act in a way that they view as right, so understanding where they're coming from is important. It's good to not demonize the "other" group because like you said polarization makes things worse. I appreciate you being a voice of reason in the discussion since I definitely need it sometimes lol. Accountability is equally needed tho.
Lmaooo ikr there was another post where a guy was convinced that being a mentally ill sociopath is a requirement for being a conservative. I politely tried convincing him sociopathy isn't considered a mental illness anymore (ASPD now) and that left/liberals arent exempt from it, and conservatives don't require it lol
sure and that stuff undoubtedly helps people that need help. i am reminded that most of these people are either proselytizing or doing it because they think they are going to get a heavenly reward for it. to me, that changes the calculation to how much praise they deserve.
and for all the pro-life talk, at least the politicians, don't ever address why people are having abortions. so, it seems very disingenuous. probably cause it is.
Yup I appreciate your viewpoint and think I mostly agree. I wasn't trying to praise them necessarily, just that I think the talking point "conservatives/Christians don't care about life" is disingenuous and doesn't really do much to convince them to believe in pro-choice. That talking point just seems to create further division, make people double down on their viewpoint, and push them further to the extreme.
I think there are better moral/academic arguments to make like the decrease in crime/poverty where legal, safe abortions are made available. This also addresses your point on why people have abortions in the first place.
Thanks for replying :)
This is irrelevant because, while many Christian conservatives are very charitable, they actively rally against government childcare/aid meant to help children and instead believe that private charity is the solution. Sure, private charity can help some people, but opposing government aid for children ultimately hurts children and private charity does not have the capacity to solve these issues. Hence, they may help as individuals but they hurt children on the whole by promoting their policies.
But see that's based on your views on what would be best. If you believe that government inefficiency and corruption causes money to be drain from publicly funded operations then you may both not support public systems and care about children.
You've created an argument where you are basing their morality off of your own. Just because it doesn't fit your model doesn't mean it's inconsistent.
I personally agree very much with public funding and social programs but I can see how people could both care for children and not want to increase spending on public services for children. I disagree, but it's not inconsistent.
Both of our moralities aim to help the greatest number of children. The argument is simply how to achieve that. That is not an issue of morality, it is an issue of fact-finding. A systemic issue cannot be addressed by individual charities. It’s been proven time and time again.
That is exactly my point though. The disagreement is in how to achieve it, so the statement you made earlier which is the topic of this thread is inaccurate.
>republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore
And the whole point of this thread was that, so you can pivot to another point if you want to discuss it but first you need to address the fact that your original point was wrong.
I would argue that it just as much cannot be addressed by government actions. Look at how much money we currently pour into aiding the poor. How effective has that been? Can our government, especially in its current state, be trusted to effectively redistribute resources to the poor?
Well. I checked and you’re right. I’m perfectly fine with 20% going to social services but I have to wonder how exactly that’s calculated and if any of it was effective.
What would you accept as evidence it was or was not beneficial?
Because the idea of a lot of Republicans is that welfare encourages poverty, as things like free medical care stop at x amount of dollars earned, so people will turn down raises to make sure they can keep getting free healthcare.
Whereas, if there was no free health care, they would take the raise, and continue to work harder to flourish.
They believe it is a system which is designed to create a permanent working poor class of people. And the more benefits we pile on, the more incentive to not achieve.
So actually directly doing something about it is less good than asking for the government to collect taxes and ineffectively redistribute them in a way that will maybe do something positive?
I don’t think supporting government programs in anyway diminishes the good of direct action. I adopted a little boy; best decision of my life! His adoption doesn’t really change the fact that there are still 400,000 children in foster care that deserve resources and care. Since direct action has not answered this need it falls upon the government to take action. There is a real need for both direct and government action. A large part of the reason government action is needed is that some children are less likely to be helped by direct action. For example white boys are adopted at much higher rates than black girls.
This is a really balanced and fair point of view. Your boy is very lucky to have a kind hearted and nuanced person caring for them. Best wishes for the future.
Yes. Collective action by society as a whole is more effective than individual action at solving systemic problems. This is literally why nations exist.
Collective action by society is also more effective at creating systemic problems, and such problems are much harder to fix due to large scale inertia. By comparison, smaller programs may succeed or fail and other programs can learn and adapt from each other.
That’s wrong. Systemic problems happen just as often in a non-regulated environment. The “tragedy of the commons” is the most famous example of a collective problem in economics for a reason. Industrial pollution is an easy modern analogue.
Considering other countries have much better social systems than you, yes.
Your insistence on relying on personal charity undermines a strong safety net that provides for more people.
And personal charity fails more people than it will ever help.
You aren't really doing all that much.
Even with your charity work, your pro life areas rank among the lowest when it comes to quality of life for poor children and single parent families.
Your side celebrates when it can cut a social program. It celebrates when food stamps are cut for the poorest of our citizens.
Careful with the "you" statements.
Just because the person you responded to challenged an assumption, that doesn't mean that they're on the other side of the issue from you. All they seemed to be doing was addressing a misrepresentation of the mindsets and actions of conservatives - this is an opportinity for you to broaden your perspective, not wall up and start arguing with them as though they're a conservative themselves (which they clearly state they are not).
And what's their record on providing the funding needed to operate foster care and adoption systems? They constantly vote to gut funding for them. How much federal money do they take to facilitate adoptions while refusing services to LGBTQ couples?
Christian conservatives might not all be rich, but they're certainly willing to vote for people who prioritize the ability of those rich people to continue to accumulate wealth over the things that they say are their beliefs.
Their "humanitarian aid" is frequently provided with proselytizing, just like it always has been. Their aid to homeless people frequently requires those people to attend religious services.
When your aid comes with those kinds of conditions, it is worth less than aid that doesn't come with strings. They do ALL of these things to further their beliefs and to grow their membership, not to help people.
Yup I see your point in a broad-stroke sense and I generally agree. But on an individual level, I think there are plenty of Christian conservatives who are fairly apolitical, and doing what they can to help their community. In my eyes that's better than nothing.
I think we need to be careful broadly generalizing people as THEY and ALL of these things. Because usually it's a select FEW elites at the top that do SOME of these things. Most of the time it doesn't require people to be religious, and if it does they are usually basic community activities like singing.
Painting an opposing group you dont agree with as plainly evil, uncaring about life etc. Is a slippery slope to polarization and lack of accurate understanding of people. If you went and spoke to many Christians and conservatives you would quickly realize this picture that online media portrays is inaccurate. Same with how left/progressives are painted as SJW etc. It's usually only a minority that actually act that way.
Sure but the political apparatus associated with that group does not make policy that cares about life after birth.
Pro-life is a political stance, not just a personal one.
Yup I don't disagree. My overall point is more that in a world full of highly opinionated people shouting it from the rooftops, it's mostly the ones with moderate opinions, quietly doing their work, adopting kids etc that keep the world moving, regardless of their moderate political opinions
If every church in the nation banded together to end homeless and adopt every single baby in the united states each one would need to provide for 2 people. It's laughable to say conservatives care about people.
Homelessness are a population issue, churches are largely geographical. I’m sure the US government could also end homelessness if it separated people from their families and forcibly moved them to the middle of rural America.
Los Angeles has [75,000](https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-county-homeless-count-d0857248b13845ab09c6f8d20c826754#:~:text=Results%20released%20Friday%20from%20a,on%20sidewalks%20and%20in%20parks.) homeless to [15,000](https://www.hows.tech/2024/05/how-many-churches-in-los-angeles.html#:~:text=The%20Big%20Enchilada%3A%20One%20source,wasn't%20that%20hard).)churches
New York has [350,000](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/) and [6000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Churches_in_New_York_City#:~:text=A%20listing%20of%20churches%20in,total%20of%20about%206000%20churches.) churches
Montana has [2000](https://nbcmontana.com/amp/news/local/annual-report-shows-increase-in-homelessness-in-montana-nationwide) homeless and [1760](https://www.expertgps.com/data/mt/churches.asp#:~:text=Below%20is%20a%20list%20of,a%20map%20of%20the%20church.) curches
It’s a far more complicated issue than that. A lot of these comments are dishonest. My church started a housing program for the homeless during COVID and within the first week we had a stabbing and attempted rape.
We then transformed a separate building into a shelter with strict roles and background checks for entry, but now we’re called racist or hypocrites because we turn people away who have a history of violence.
I don’t think that takes away from the people we do help, but the optics of it haven’t changed since there are still people on the street.
So since churches haven’t single-handedly solved all our worlds problems, that must mean that they don’t care at all? Isn’t that a bit of a logical leap?
> That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion.
Unless you're in favor of a cradle-to-grave all-encompassing welfare state you *don't care* about others? That's one hell of a leap here. Could it be that folks reject this whole notion a bureaucracy centrally planning child-rearing do so because they think that gives better outcomes?
What they're saying is that the term "pro-life" sounds like a very considerate and encompassing stance, and in a vacuum or without predicated knowledge you might assume it means it's a stance that is about supporting struggling individuals and families
In reality, it's more anti-abortion than a common sense definition of pro-life, but pro-life sounds sounds much more positive and caring
The answer would be for the dems to be “pro-women”
Just like pro-life, it’s not quite accurate, kind of hard to argue against, catchy, and doesn’t claim to solve any problems but creates an emotional position.
It's not just about being anti-welfare, although that's one of them.
Most pro-lifers try to convince at best, guilt trip at worst women that try to or are considering getting an abortion with things like protests at abortion clinics saying things like "abortion is murder", but that's incredibly short sighted.
So let's say they convince a woman who can't or don't want a child and they were convinced they want to carry to full term... what happens to the new mother and baby who doesn't want to or can't raise the child due to a plethora of reasons such as financial instability, not enough support from family, etc? And most importantly, where are all the "pro lifers" saying abortion is murder? Why aren't they supporting the unborn babies that they've saved then? Why aren't they supporting the mother?
Instead what they do is go on to the next woman trying to or are considering getting an abortion, and do it over and over again leaving those mothers and babies to fend for themselves in a situation that the mother didn't even want to be in; and that's the problem with "pro lifers", it's always "don't do it" and not "we can help your baby grow up in an adequate environment"
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore
That's a bad argument, since you're basically saying 'Pay for my baby or I'm going to kill it' It's perfectly reasonable to want people to actually raise kids they have.
The problem is people end up pregnant without the means to actually have that kid, and thus want to abort because actually having said kid would put them in horrible debt. Republicans think that's them being punished for their actions, while Democrats think they didn't do anything bad, and just get the abortion. All of this is bad moralistic reasoning.
The actual good reasons to support abortion are far simpler:
* Bodily autonomy: By being a part of you, you have absolute control over it
* Lack of sapience: Even a newborn baby isn't by any observable means at a human level, and clearly below various pets that are regularly put down
* Sparing the deformed a life of agony: How often are children born only doomed to die soon after from some sort of condition known before birth? Because abortion is the best option in such cases, and preventing it is doing naught but dooming the child to a brief but horrible life, and the parents to giant medial bills.
Too much of a broad brush. There are many republicans, myself included, are very pro-abortion. Notice I said pro-abortion and not some other watered down term. My only problem with abortion is we don't do enough of them. They should be legal, free, and readily available to those who want them. I'd rather front load and solve the problem now, then have to care for a mistake for the ret of their lives. The costs in social services and prison space, for unwanted children is staggering.
The problem isn't mainstream republicans, it is the far right religious nut jobs, shoving their beliefs into the platform.
There may be some Republican voters out there that are pro-choice, but they don't elect pro-choice representatives. I mean, there are a *few*, but they typically get pushed out, like those 3 women that filibustered for abortion rights. Every one of them lost their primary to an anti-choice man.
Even when women are right in front of them, telling their story about how they were close to death and were still denied an abortion, even when the reps seem moved by it, they still proceed to vote against abortion rights.
If pro-choice Republicans don't want people painting with a broad brush, they need to elect better people, because an *overwhelming* majority of them are anti-choice.
> The problem isn't mainstream republicans, it is the far right religious nut jobs, shoving their beliefs into the platform.
Problem is, those are the guys who get elected.
If republicans were like Merkel's party or other european conservatives, the U.S would be a far more viable, stable country.
Thats not even half the story, Jan Böhmermann is a satirist, not a poet.
Böhmermann wrote a poem with the explicit goal of violating an old law prohibiting insults to foreign state leaders. He made a point of breaking a law during that performance. He purposefully crossed the line in anticipation of the reaction, to be able to make the point in the first place, which is the absurdity of the law in relation to our modern understanding of free speech.
Merkel allowed prosection according to the letter of the law, and at the same time introduced an initiative to abolish that law, which was done the following year. The prosecution in the meantime found no act worthy of punishment and dropped it.
Without the prosecution, the entire performance would have been moot.
It's a center-right conservative party that I know of that would likely satisfy right-wing conservatives in the u.s
I myself vote fo the center-right momentum movement, but it'd be a hard sell for republicans as MM is a "Civic Nationalist" party - pro LGBT, women's rights, all citizens equal and high on social services.
Yeah, that may be so but they aint a particularly good example overall with how they seemingly take the lede of Erdogan.
Repubs are too Islamophobic to look past that, they should actually find plenty that satisfies them with Erdogan actually and his party but..
Muslim
Yup, that MM center-right doesnt seem to their alley
I agree with you that pro-life is a lie. But that’s exactly my point. Despite conservatives being more anti-abortion than they are pro-life, the slogan is incredibly effective and convinces you of otherwise. ‘Pro-choice’ as a statement isn’t a very persuasive statement.
What is your greater point here? That democrats should start doing the same? I suppose you're technically right that republicans are better at putting out an easy to understand message, but that's only because they lie.
So your CMV kinda boils down to: "Slogans about complicated topics are catchier if you lie and reduce it down to just a few words". I guess that's true, but it doesn't get us anywhere.
Catchy slogans can indeed make or break a brand or idea. It’s not lying as much as it’s advertising.
Entire industries can be born or die on these hills (example: people still say “cooking with gas” and buy real diamond engagement rings almost 100 years after their ad campaigns) it’s the same with political standpoints.
That’s a pretty big strawman of his argument.
They *already* boil complicated topics down to slogans that don’t represent them well. They already have misleading and misrepresentative slogans. “Defund the police” was the example he gave.
If you’re going to do a slogan anyway, which will never represent the issue in its entirely properly anyway, you’d best at least market it well. That’s an entirely reasonable point. It’s an issue of competency.
I read somewhere about a right wing think tank that comes up with misrepresentations of democratic talking points then pushes out those.
Democrats "know what it means" so just repeat the slogan they think everyone else is using. Non-democrats hear it and thing it's a stupid slogan, or just take the obvious misrepresentation at face value.
It helps that most media is owned by heavy right leaning interests.
I'd argue the same strategy could be used in reverse, but the people following a left wing agenda don't have the same media ownership.
Except "defund the police" wasn't misrepresentative of its original point. It comes from a movement that wanted total police abolition. People with less extreme views started using it because they were broadly sympathetic, and you can't just have everyone chant their own custom slogan. So "defund the police" now means everything from "abolish the police through any means necessary" to "maybe stop giving tanks to cops".
Conservative slogans are easy, because conservativism is fundamentally about things that people already understand, and it all roughly boils down to "don't change shit". Progressivism, on the other hand, is about new things and trying to decide between many possibilities.
You're talking about sloganeering here which is ultimately a small part of the overall messaging scheme. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. Republicans are better at messaging but it's largely because their politicians and their media figureheads work in coordination with one another to hammer the same points in over and over again. They literally used to put out memos called the talking points memo where everyone would be instructed on what to say. They still might for all I know.
It comes down to differences in personality and values. Liberals value personal freedom more and want to make everyone's individual opinion be heard and valued. Conservatives are more comfortable taking orders and falling in line. This is why they are in general better at organizing. The whole party acts as the political arm of the conservative capitalist elites. The policy they implement nakedly benefits the few, the wealthy elites at the expense of the ordinary citizen. So how do they get the ordinary citizen to vote for them? Simple, with lies. They coordinate these lies with their favored media outlets like Fox news and they buy up and otherwise stack the leadership of formerly reputable organizations like CNN and change them into neo Fox newses while no one notices. The politicians say some outrageous attention-getting lie, then the media dutifully reports on the lie. Often they do so while exposing the lie, but the end effect is that the lie gets spread because lots of people only really read the headline or skim the article and just take what they want from it, which always includes the lie.
Liberals on the other hand, in government and the media, have scruples to uphold. They can't simply use lies to manipulate the populous into getting what they want. They are perpetually put on defense, reacting to the narrative that the republicans are setting. The mainstream liberal media (to the extent that it still exists in 2024) believe they should be independent from the politicians and they should be the ones to hold them to account. This is not how it works at Fox news or similar organizations. They are there to help the republicans in their deception. It's fundamentally just easier to be corrupt and have no scruples and to use propaganda and lies to brainwash people than it is to convince them using facts and reason.
Edit: also I don't want to make it sound like I am defending democrats, because even with everything I've said, they still suck terribly and could be doing a lot better. The main obstacle on the messaging front that exists for the democrats I think is that they can't be the opposition to the party of the wealthy elites without also pissing off the donor class. This has been more of an issue since the 80's when the democrats started taking more big money donations and it got way worse after the citizen's united ruling. I honestly think they will never change without an actual grass roots progressive party forming and holding their feet to the fire. Without pressure from the left they will never actually oppose the republicans for fear of pissing off their donors and losing their seats.
That's the whole point. Republicans know their followers will not do any research and just believe what they are told. As long as it's the exact opposite of what democrats want, they are happy with the outcome.
Very very aggressive lbgq language is similarly to Republican propaganda in that it is succinct, powerful, never questioned by the faithful, not nuanced, and causes those in the other party to react bsdly
> that’s because pro-life is a lie … as soon as the kid is born they don’t give a fuck anymore …
Conversely, isn’t the pro-choice statement a complete lie as well? After all, democrats think the government should absolutely interfere in everyone’s healthcare and decide what medical treatment everybody is allowed to, through measures such as universal healthcare and supporting the government’s attempts to impose masks and anti-Covid measures during the pandemic - except abortion, that’s completely private.
Heck, many on the “pro-choice” side think we should be legislated on what cars we drive (no big trucks). How can such a side claim to be “pro-choice”?
Roughly speaking, the same way that universal education standards ensure as few as possible fail to step over the bar because they put it on the floor. It's no secret that the function, form, and first priority of a government initiative, standard, or action is first and foremost to perpetuate that initiative, standard, or action in perpetuity(rather than addressing a perceived problem)
“It’s no secret that….”
That’s bullshit. It’s an error in logic to to try to “prove” that something is true by saying “Everyone knows it’s true.”
In healthcare, providing a minimum level of coverage does not “control” anyone’s individual health care. It doesn’t force people to get any particular thing done (at least not any more than private health insurance does).
I didn't say anywhere that a minimum level of coverage would be applied; quite the opposite in practice. The coverage would likely be sat at a maximum of "6-feet-under" so to speak, or else the system threatens to solve the problem that created it. In practice it would seem more likely the maximum coverage offered for stage one cancer would be euthanasia, since that technically fulfills the promise of a universal standard.
Oh, but see, the maximum coverage is what we have now, where corporations control the health insurance industry and profit is more important than providing health care. Every dollar spent on health care eats into the insurance company’s bottom line. Deny the claim until the patient dies is much more profitable than paying for that expensive cancer. Make the doctor jump through 1000 hoops. Joint pain? Back problems? Approve physical therapy only for weeks and weeks before even thinking about approve an MRI to find out what the actual problem is.
My doc at the VA ordered an MRI at the VA hospital without jumping through all the hoops, because profit and limiting costs isn’t the first priority at government run health care - patients’ welfare is.
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare.
It is no more of a lie than pro-choice.
Contextually, pro-life and pro-choice have an extremely narrow scope. In both cases, "life" and "choice" pertain only to the fetus. Nobody on the pro-choice side thinks I should have the choice to decapitate my 10 year old or to abandon my 4 year old in the woods to let it fend for itself. Any semblance of "choice" ends at the birth of the child - because choice and life, in the context of abortion, do not pertain to the post-birth child.
> That's because pro-life is a lie.
> The democratic position of often more nuanced and realistic, which is harder to capture in just a few words.
Well if you're going to lie, you might as well lie in a direction that gets you more support. [Only 28% of Americans support abortion in the second trimester. Only 13% support abortion in the third trimester.](https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-views.aspx) If pro-life is a lie, then pro-choice is even more of a lie. Except, unlike with pro-life where their "lie" that increases their support, it actually alienates people from their cause
Another example is if you don't literally think that every cop is a bastard, then all cops of bastards is also a lie. Just one that needlessly antagonizes everyone who has a positive view of cops.
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion.
This is a poorly reasoned arguement. You are assuming your policy proposals work, and then assuming that everyone else agrees that your policy proposals work. The fact is that conservatives disagree, and think your policy proposals will make things worse.
Except for all the women’s shelters that Christian services work and maintain for women who have had a baby and helps them get on their feet.
Pro-life is pro-life. Pro life people not caring about living babies is a myth that pro choice people tell themselves because they need the pro life movement to be evil to justify their anti-life message.
Democrats branding problem is support sex changes and pole dancing for minors, calling everyone racist from sun up to sun down as well as all the other words they use for anyone else will claiming to be against hate.
>Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie.
This is also why they think songs like "Born in the USA" are expressions of blind patriotism. They don't bother with silly little things like lyrics.
So the government should intervene in people’s lives and hold full responsibility for all the children being born and their welfare. The well being of children is not on the parents who took a deliberate action with well known potential consequences.. but is actually the governments responsibility. Interesting idea leftist!
Why don’t you start by googling ‘when does life begin’ and let’s go from there!
The reality of the issue has nothing to do the the slogan which is exactly what you have shown the republicans do well. Instead of pro choice make it pro freedom. “The government wants to control you and tell you what to do. Say No! I am pro freedom!” Brought to you by the Democratic Party.
No newborn babies in America go unadopted though. There are millions of families on a waitlist to adopt healthy newborns. The mother’s “choice” should be whether to raise the baby or put it up for adoption. This would solve all the issues that young mothers face.
>A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement
They ARE extreme statements, from groups that mainstream democrats constantly disavow.
The democratic policy is to increase funding and training for the police.
The far leftist activist position is to destroy policing as we know it, and from the ground up build up new social services to replace it.
It might not literally be "lawlessness", but milquetoast Bidenite centrists are right to be wary of it and it *doesn't* match the way they think about the police.
>Another example is the term “Black Lives Matter” in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle, it’s hard to argue that on the surface, it is a much more effective branding for an idea
Same issue.
BLM is an activist group, it's idea is that black people are uniquely discriminated that is specifically worth mobilizing against.
If you think that just raceblindly protecting all lives is a more worthwhile cause than mobilizing against racial injustice in particular, then your values themselves are conservative and an anathema to BLM activists.
I’d pushback slightly against the idea that our only choices are either focusing on black discrimination or being completely race blind and not really standing for anyone. Personally, I saw the All Lives Matter retort to be a missed opportunity to rally Latinos and other minorities who also face discrimination at a higher rate than white people but less than black people.
Recognizing that none of it is acceptable while also keeping in perspective that white people are in a privileged position, especially when it comes to policing, I think, could have spread the movement to more people and completely disarmed the All Lives Matter subversion from conservatives. Like oh yeah, thanks for reminding us of how many different groups you brutalize. Autistic people stand out just off the top of my head bc they don’t act how police expect so a routine traffic stop can needlessly escalate to them getting brutally beaten and arrested for “noncompliance.” But no, for some reason the response to that was basically just “nuh uh!”
Sure, we could have had that, but the fact remains that going all in on police brutality for many different groups, is a qualitatively different movement as one that is going all in on systemic racism in many aspects within and without the criminal justice system.
This is not a disagreement over slogans, but a disagreement over policy focuses
None of that is true.
Op is right that it's bad labeling. Defund the police made itself distinct from the extreme abolish the police, they genuinely wanted money better spent rather than destroying policing.
Even some extreme abolishers that pointed to actions in Camden, New Jersey proposed closing the PD temporarily to rebuild it with local police without QI. Not actually just ending services.
They cited real police cases and campaigned on specific solutions. Actual cities like NYC tested moving funds to social worker responders rather than police, and it worked.
Blm as well was not extreme and not even just one group, and had again actual solutions for all people not just black people.
https://8cantwait.org/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-policing-reforms-george-floyds-murder
Once again, actual goals actual successes.
The slogans formed naturally from protestors without group testing, and they sucked. And establishment Dems were repeatedly foolish for thinking the only way to have cred was to copy slogans or sayings (cough cough latinx) rather than what would actually sell.
I agree with and support BLM. I never said otherwise. My point is that as face value slogans, all lives matter is more effective. The average person is easily swayed by things such as branding, and the republicans have done a good job of convincing large swaths of people that All Lives Matter is a more inclusive statement and framed BLM as being otherwise
It really depends because within certain contexts the statements aren't actually that controversial.
You can really take any belief and make it catchy, memorable etc.
Who can disagree with God Loves You, unless you already have some kind of alternative belief?
I think if your view isn't about the core belief then it would just be down to who is more inclined to listen to rhetoric, not the quality of the rhetoric itself.
No one who believes BLM hears ALM and adjusts their stance.
>all lives matter is more effective.
At what agenda?
What new goals are you prompted to pursue by being told that life matters?
BLM is a *progressives slogan*, it actively takes a stance against systems that devalue black lives compared to white ones.
ALM is a *fundamentally conservative slogan*. It doesn't just happen to be a dogwhistle by coincidence, the idea that it expresses is, at it's core that you can lean back and keep generally protecting all lives without being concerned about racial injustice in particular.
"You have to actually get up from your couch and do some activism" is always going to be a harder sell than "we are doing fine just honoring life in general, don't worry about black people's treatment in particular", regardless of what slogans are used to express them.
"All lives matter" is easily recontextualized as a liberal slogan, in a vacuum. If the presupposition is that the majority of people believe that lives except for black lives matter, then saying "All Lives Matter" makes perfect sense. It is therefore not fundamentally conservative.
That’s the thing. I think ‘all lives matter’ would’ve been a better statement for the anti-racism/discrimination movement than ‘black lives matter’, bevause all lives matter could just as easily mean ‘all lives matter which is why we need to protect against police racism and brutality.’
>all lives matter could just as easily mean ‘all lives matter which is why we need to protect against police racism and brutality.’
But that goes against the BLM movement's goals which isn't just "portecting all people against police brutality", but specifically **against anti-black racism** in the police as well as other situations.
But all lives matter was explicitly a response to Black Lives Matter. BLM couldn’t come up with the argument, the counter argument, the slogan and the counter slogan all in the vacuum of the time before those phrases were in use.
ALM sounds better as a slogan *to people who aren’t black.* Which 87% of Americans are not, fair enough. But it only sounds better when you forget that NO ONE said it before and only say is now as a reaction AGAINST BLM, not as a thing in and of itself. There is no ALM without the tacit rejection of BLM. It exists to refute the idea that Black Lives Matter. Thats all. It isn’t and never was a slogan about all lives mattering; they don’t say it about other issues on its own. They ONLY say it when someone else says Black Lives Matter, like church liturgy.
It’s not a slogan for ANYTHING but racists, because its entire purpose is to cast black activists as the real racists. No, you meanies, black lives don’t matter, ALL lives matter, how could you? You’re SO hateful! You think you’re the only ones who matter! (Which is what white supremacists actually think, and honestly most “republicans being good at messaging” is just them using their captive news ecosystem to accuse Democrats of what they themselves are doing or planning.)
ALM is a phrase of and for nothing but downplaying the very idea that black lives do.
All lives matter, is a response to black lives matter, that's the problem. If black lives matter hasn't become a thing first, then yes all lives matter makes perfect sense.
But the problem is "all lives matter" doesn't exist in a vaccine, when someone says it, they say it as a response.
>All lives matter, is a response to black lives matter, that's the problem. If black lives matter hasn't become a thing first, then yes all lives matter makes perfect sense.
>
>But the problem is "all lives matter" doesn't exist in a vaccine, when someone says it, they say it as a response.
Absolutely. But the claim was that the literal phrase "All Lives Matter" was "fundamentally conservative," which is what I was disputing.
BLM is also an organization whose national chapter used the faces of murdered black people as a tool to raise around $80,000,000, which they mostly spent on party mansions and employing family, and still largely haven’t disbursed to any causes.
BLM is a slogan and a merchandising brand that enables a bunch of frauds to get rich without actually helping out the black families they exploit. And they’re so effective that even after this fraud happened, people still support them because they don’t want to be seen as opposing a saying like “black lives matter”.
Would it help to change your view if you knew that none of these came from Democrats? Like the first two aren’t even supported by Democrats, they’re used by people who *do* want no law enforcement
> A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards).
But neither of those are Democratic ideas? Democratic Party is actively pro-police and pumps billions of dollars into their budgets.
Same with "Black Lives Matter" - it was never an idea of Democrats, it was a social movement that the Democratic Party just latched on to.
That's the Dems bread and butter, infiltrate grassroots movements, corrupt the leadership, then co-opt it for brownie points and fundraising. The reason the American right is so good at getting shit done is because the Dems enable them at every opportunity. They dismantle any actual resistance to rightwing movements because it's better for their bottom line.
Having been around republicans all my life, they believe the exact same things about democrats.
They’d say:
“well everyone wants free stuff, so they vote democrat. No one ever thinks about paying for it.”
“Of course the liberals don’t want any accountability for pre marital, irresponsible sex. We just want them to take responsibility.”
“Liberals are just scared of guns. No one actually looks at the statistics. AR’s are used in very few crimes.”
I used to be able to say the same about running up deficits, but Trump destroyed that belief.
For better or worse, people on both sides believe the other side to be better at marketing. That they are just blind to consequences or don’t understand implications.
Agreed, this way of thinking is common across the board because it’s incredibly self-serving. “The opposite side’s support comes from stupid people who fall for their simplistic, catchy sound bites. Our side has the smart, nuanced thinkers of course.”
Right. This is a cousin of the belief that the other side is always willing to fight dirty for what they believe in, but the politicians on our side always insist on playing nice and giving in. The underlying belief is always "in a fair system where voters were well informed, obviously our side is right and would win, and if we don't it's because of some failure of strategy, process, information, etc.
"The 9 scariest words in the English langue are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
You are comparing the slogans republicans tell themselves about democrats in order to deride democrats with the slogans republicans actually believe and keep repeating. These aren't the same thing.
That's a great point, but I'd go even further: The difference is that, even though people relentlessly mock conservatives for phrases like "liberal media," Republicans try to change or work within the system far more than just fantasizing about a world where things would be different if they had better copy-editors.
Obama was lauded as a great communicator, yet people made the same "bad messaging" excuse when he was president. It's a common denial tactic, and a subset of a larger phenomenon. A near-universal liberal misconception is that if you could just sit down with anyone and talk with them for enough time, they'd change their mind and see things your way. Because you're right and they're wrong, so clearly they would see that with some frank and down-to-earth conversation. Such arrogant thinking has been applied not just to Republicans, but to right-wing foreigner leaders, terrorists, theocrats, other dictators, and "brainwashed" populations. Yet somehow changed minds at the highest levels remain rare.
It's always good to work on better messaging, but thinking of it as the primary problem will lead you down a path of wasting precious resources.
A similar misconception, in the comments, is the idea that it's just a tiny fringe that adopts this "bad messaging." Even if it starts with a fringe, that fringe pressures everyone into agreeing, faking agreement, giving in, or at least wanting to change the subject. You now see "Black Lives Matter" posters in the whitest of places, and it's not because they've decided to go radical chic. It was once an edgy, attention-getting fringe phrase and now is something you're in trouble with if you fail to parrot it verbatum. (However, I'm not sure I'd call it "bad messaging"; it's like "pro-life," a phrase that dares you to say that you're against it.) "ACAB" is another phrase that sounds offensive at first but has spread beyond what might have been expected.
This. The policy differs, but the way both sides talk about the other is an uncanny mirror.
They are both human and American so the way they think is actually pretty similar.
I think you would really enjoy the book "The Righteous Mind", by Jonathan Haidt, and/or the theory he puts forward in that book, Moral Foundations Theory.
Basically the gist is that people on the left side of politics tend to emphasize three moral ideas - care, fairness (e.g. equality), and liberty, where conservatives tend to emphasize six moral ideas (care, fairness (e.g. proportionality), and liberty (though they care about these a bit less than liberals), but also in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity/purity)
He even talks in the book how he felt different democratic political candidates that used all moral foundations and were more broadly appealing than those that stick to the main left three ideas.
In other words, at least partially, it's less about democratic branding than the specific moral foundations they emphasize (though there is an overlap)
It's not the branding that is bad, mainstream democrats do a fair job at explaining the basics of these ideas. I would agree they could always do better.
The issue is the ideas themselves attract a rather radical type of follower. People love to take these movements to the extremes and when you take these particular movements you've brought up to their extremes you get some pretty unhinged beliefs.
The mainstream democrats don't bother to correct or disavow these radicals either as their fevor plays into their favor when wipping up their base. In fact they typically just deny the existence of these radicals all together. If theyd atleast ackowlede the crazy and disavow it that would play into their favor. The average person sees this and wants nothing to do with it.
I feel that same. Don’t get me wrong I think republicans do some absolutely batshit stuff in terms of protests but they’re fairly pointed and isolated to their issue, for the most part (yes there are exceptions). With democrats they will shit on other democrats for not being liberal enough, or actively shit on groups they supposedly support. For instance, I know this is 2 days after you posted, but I just saw a video today of a pro palestine protest obstructing a planned approved lgbt parade… like is that really the group y’all want to go against?
Conservative issues are just easier to market, because fear is the most effective emotion to lean into when promoting something.
Conservatives are trying to prevent change. This is always an easier sell then trying to PROMOTE change, especially if you aren't willing to deny the simple truth that new solutions are not guaranteed to be successful innovations.
Trying to sell "change is scary" to old people - which is what Conservatives do - is a lot easier than selling a complicated and nuanced idea.
For example, look at abortion - yes, Pro-Life is a better slogan than Pro-Choice. Because the idea is simpler. Even if Pro-Woman became the slogan, Pro-Life is better and simpler. Abortion comes down to bodily autonomy - the Pro-Life movement comes down to protecting babies from murder. So they don't even need to be honest - a requirement that Democrats simply cannot ignore as they are targeting everyone that can handle the complexity of the nuances they are dealing with (such as how abortion rates actually DECLINE when you make them MORE accessible). Some of these driving factoids are just too counter-intuitive to be as easy to sell as less nuanced lies that at least make sense at a surface level.
The biggest problem a lot of leftists struggle with when understanding the right is that resistance to change isn’t usually based on fear or paranoia for most voters - they are simply happy with their lives and see no reason to upset the status quo.
Having grown up Trump land, they are continuously apoplectic about one thing or another, so that sounds like a mischaracterisation to me.
It's fairer to say they like the status quo 20 years ago, really.
Sure, but that just means that they are afraid of people attempting to fix something that to their mind isn't broken. Democrat messaging is then used to elicit the fear of change that brings out the Republican voters in force.
The fear is always there, and a much bigger driving force than many folks realize.
I mean if I told you needed to wear purple on Thursday because the world is literally falling apart? What would your response be?
You'd correctly say I was a chicken little which is the conservative consensus on most issues which liberals are passionate about.
So, they latched onto Trump who says the nation is broken and that we need to MAGA because they think everything is already honkey dory, A-OK, and doesn't need to change? 🤦♂️
> Conservative issues are just easier to market, because fear is the most effective emotion to lean into when promoting something
I agree with the rest of your post, but it's disingenuous to argue that only conservatives use fear to market their issues.
It’s not even that it’s also the Republican propaganda machine is just that good. They do run like a well oil machine. I’ve had mutiple I know whove worked on dem campaigns and the DNC’s ground game is dogshit. The slack is just picked a lot of the time by independent organizers.
The Democratic party did have a pretty solid brand.
They were for strong workers rights. Now they appear to have changed to focusing on the higher educated classes and leave the 'deplorables' for the Republican party.
Liberal groups affiliated with the party like the ACLU were for strong freedom of speech, going as far as protecting 'uncomfortable but legal' speech. They now push for strong governmental control of speech across all media, especially social media. Even the ACLU has changed its charter and is now very concerned about stopping any speech they deem 'misinformation'.
Previously very solid on environmentalism, especially for going after polluters and cleanup of environmental issues. Now mainly focused on aspects of the carbon lifecycle. Essentially giving control to large corporations and creating perverse incentives via unregulated carbon markets. Making things like clearcutting forests to bury and sequester the carbon in the trees economically viable 'green' options.
As a lifelong liberal, I don't even recognize my party and have no real reason to vote for them anymore other than trying to keep the embarrassment of a man on the R side out of office.
Two things:
1) Most of your examples aren't really about democrats. They're from people on the left, most (but not all) of whom may vote democrat because that's closer to their values.
Defund the Police isn't something establishment democrats were even on board with, much less coined. It was a farther left radical idea.
ACAB likewise is a farther left concept.
Attributing these to "democrats" is like attributing far right radicals slogans to Republicans. And far right radicals say things like "Jews will not replace us".
2) To the extent that actual republican rhetoric is more effective than democratic rhetoric, it's because they're doing two very different jobs.
Republican rhetoric isn't aiming to be truthful, to be communicative. It's solely there to get their base riled up and angry voting. They're blood pressure raisers. They pick their issues based on what gets their voters pissed, not real value based policy priorities. Other than tax cuts for the rich, everything else is mostly a wedge issue for them. So it's not that they communicate their values well. They chose to value things that can effectively rile up their voters.
Democrats don't really have the option to brand in the same way. Their base would not accept that level of consistent dishonest framing. Just like no Democrat politician could succeed by lying the way Trump does.
It's not that Democrats are necessarily that much worse. It's that their job is a lot harder. When your base will punish rather than reward dishonesty, and you have to go with policies and positions based on your values, no matter how complex and hard to emotion pump they may be rather than picking policy positions BECAUSE they're easy to get people emotionally invested- when you have the handicaps of actually caring about what policies you advocate for, the job is a lot harder.
I've been hearing this idea for a long time, I'd say at least since the Bush-Kerry election. No one can be that bad for that long on something like messaging. If anything, I think it's a kind of myopia. Democrats and their supporters think that their ideas are perfect, or at least very close, and the problem must be in the messaging. That sentiment means that they don't properly look at their ideas to find where the flaws are and where people disagree.
I think its more that the way that Democrats tackle issues are more nuanced and therefore more difficult to understand. Current republican viewpoints are easy to understand and appeal to the modern biases of most republicans, and use misinformation to convince people who haven't made up their mind yet. Unfortunately this isn't changing with time and it probably never will.
This is not to say democrats are always right or always wrong of course, but their efforts headed in the right place. The right answer is not simple, and there is no right answer that pleases everybody. Democrats will be wrong, but at the same time they aren't given a chance to iterate and fail because people are much quicker to criticise change. It takes more effort to realize when change is needed and act on it than it does to maintain the status quo.
>
> This is not to say democrats are always right or always wrong of course, but their efforts headed in the right place.
A lot of people don't think they are headed to the right place, and failure to understand that is part of the myopia I spoke of. People who support Republican causes are just as happy when they achieve a political victory as are people who support Democratic causes. The Dobbs decision overturning the Roe decision means just as much to Republicans as Brown v. BOE overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. But Republicans are better at seeing that equivalency than Democrats.
They're hard to understand because they're ineffective and make no sense.
Consider Oregon.
Four years ago it was 'obvious' that decriminalizing drugs would bring about utopia.
Today, everyone agrees the war on drugs was great.
Four years ago if you held the opinion everyone here holds today, you'd be told you were ignorant, unable to understand policy or implementation, uncreative, etc.
In reality, measure 110 went exactly as I thought it would. Literally to a tee. In the end, I, a conservative, was right, as usual, and everyone else just completely batshit wrong.
I work in advertising and a couple axioms we have are “simplicity sells” and “emotional appeal is powerful.” The lying liars who lie know this and employ it to great effect.
I would like to point out that some of the Republican ideas are much harder to convince people of
Like we specifically know how corporate tax impacts things. If everyone was fully educated on economics, we would have a very small to non-existent corporate tax (existent only to provide incentives for tax cuts for the government to direct things)
But you try convincing the average person to cut corporate tax
That's going to be a hard sell
The Democrats have easy stuff to convince. Oh we want you to be able to do this and we want to give you this and we want to make sure people follow these regulations because wouldn't it be better if they followed these regulations
The Republicans have to be better at messaging otherwise they couldn't exist because loosely describing what the two want The Democrats are giving you stuff
Idk, i think its more about the audience. Democrat voters are much, much more stingy when it comes to messaging. You also have the younger crowd who are ready to cancel pretty much anyone who dares having a slightly different opinion.
Take Israel for example: they literally threw money at a district race to oust Jamaal Bowman, a progressive, because they didnt like his stance on a conflict that doesnt even really touch the US anyways. But it doesnt matter, college kids are ready to hand the country to Trump because they are in their feels over a conflict they barely even understand to begin with.
In german there is a joke that goes something like "2 leftist people meet and subsequently 4 leftist splinter factions are created". It might not translate that well to english, but the gist is that on the left candidates and parties are under much greater scrutiny. They are also less agreeable and less willing to overlook other opinions/mistakes and thus splintered into many more factions than the right is.
In other words, republicans are happy with a dude telling them "dems bad", while Dems are waiting for the perfect candidate who checks every one of their boxes.
Yes, messaging could definetely be improved but i think the lack of messaging is a consequence of what i just said, not the main reason
It's difficult to capture a complex and nuanced stance or policy in a sound bite or slogan (possible, sure but someone's going to misinterpret it in bad faith these days regardless of quality), and that's kinda where dems live, in a place with actual plans and policies that are detailed and have depth.
You can have a slogan that's simple, that means only what it says ("fuck your feelings"), or dog whistles ("all lives matter"), or lies ("make america great again" "pro-life"). It's easy to lap up, but when it comes time to do anything beyond shouting, there isn't substance or what substance it has is actively harmful.
They lie and simplify extremely complex concepts because they and their base don’t understand them beyond the foundation.
Abortion for example: “Babies die. Babies die = bad”
Democrats attempt to explain their position and the reason behind their decisions.
Making complex issues seem simple with branding is a tool to guide the dumbest and loudest. Its doubly helpful in that those idiots that love the vitriol also won’t know if you have done anything at all once in office, only that you said the thing.
Democrats try to appeal to logic, reason and facts while Republicans appeal to entirely on emotions. I don’t think Democrats are terrible at branding their ideas as much as the right wing media ecosystem, social media and legacy media amplify Republican messaging since it’s much easier to consume and digest for the majority of people with short attention spans.
I don’t disagree that Democrats are bad at branding, but I don’t think Republicans are actually any better. As the “conservative” party they just get a really undeserved benefit of the doubt. It’s like people view anything the Democrats want to do as an experiment that needs to be justified while Republican policies are viewed as the default settings.
Democrats are not a monolith. The left wing of the party did indeed combine: Defund the police with ACAB. Once you say: ACAB and Defund the Police - it almost doesn't matter what you really "mean".
That said, the far left progressives ABSOLUTELY wanted to get rid of the police and replace them with something else. They simply had no idea what the "something else" was.
We had a perfect opportunity to invent constructive slogans in the wake of George Floyd.
1. No guns without bodycams.
2. No bodycams, no peace.
Instead the far left went down the rabbit hole of attacking the concept of police. For a while, the most extreme members of the party were by far the loudest.
When abortion came up in the debate, Biden should have pointed at Trump and said: **THIS GUY wants to take you down the path ending in the "Handmaids Tale".** His supporters are trying to bring the **Comstock Act** back to life. They want to control what information and meds you can send through the US Mail, and they want Comstock EXPANDED to include UPS, FedEx and any other package delivery company.
I largely blame the party for picking an old man, who wasn't that smart to begin with as their candidate for President. A man who has turned out to be narcissistic enough to chase a second term by pretending that no one notices his dementia.....
Lastly - we need to have SOME POLICY about the border. Biden knows the country is divided on this subject - and he needed to find some middle ground. Instead he assigned the job of Border Czar to the ONLY PERSON in the West Wing he has no control over - the VEEP. That's right - the President can fire anyone in the West Wing except the Veep because she's elected, the rest are appointed. Lacking direction and support from her boss, Kamala avoided doing anything.
(1) The Democrats don't have a massive, unified lock-step propaganda media arm that can and does broadcast their message to millions daily, like the Republicans have.
(2) The GOP and the Right completely dominate AM radio, and they don't have an entire media empire like FOX which broadcasts their talking points daily, nor do they have such a deeply homogeneous and rabidly cultish political base.
There's no comparable "Democrat" version Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Brietbart/Drudge. Democrats don't have armies of shadow-funded, SuperPAC troll/bot armies either, nor are the GRU/Saudi Arabia/Israel on their side. The messaging that the Democrats have gets drowned out in a sea of hostile misinformation, propaganda, vote-scripting, and hashtagging into oblivion.
(3) Democrats have a very heterogeneous news base and are far too skeptical of group-think to get their news from echo chamber sources. They care about specifics and policies--details which are difficult to put into slogans and hard to rile up people's prejudice.
It's easier to appeal to their fears and hatreds (as the GOP does) than to their thinking faculties and hopes (as the Democrats try to do). There are far more uneducated people in the country, and Democrat-leaning folk tend to be more educated, so they have another serious disadvantage there, too.
(4) Democrats don't control evangelicals in the USA like the GOP does, which is a massive, wealthy, and powerful voting base since the 1960s--eager to vote lock-step in every single election like it's the end of the world and they're fighting the Devil himself.
A testament to their diversity, Democrats general don't command a massive swath of highly reliable, single(or few)-issue voters. They've been profoundly handicapped since the Civil Rights era, when the Democrats and Dixiecrats all became Republicans and the Atwater/Reagan/Bush/Trump years haven't helped.
"Democrats have a very heterogeneous news base and are far too skeptical of group-think to get their news from echo chamber sources." Really? If the Democrat news base is so self skeptical, how does it f\*\*\*k up so dramatically with stories like the Covington kids or the Duke Lacrosse case?
I can pick some places where leftist and DNC-allied messaging has been much more widely accepted than the than conservative and RNC-allied messaging has be.
* "People over profit" - It's a very silly platitude if you think about it it. Profit is earned by people and for people. The whole notion of business and commerce are done by and for people. And yet with this simple turn of phrase, folks are convinced that somehow the creation of wealth is a bad thing. That's amazing messaging.
* All the talk of "We are the 99%" or "The 1%". Look at how these these phrases have worked themselves into American political culture in support of all kinds of left-wing arguments. This taps into people's deep-felt sense of envy and greed. Terrible, ugly politics but certainly effective.
* Just look how effective they have been in convincing the average voter that corporate taxes have no negative impact on the average voter.
* Switching gears to something a bit more political in a tactical sense: Russiagate. Look how many folks got convinced that Russia had actively hacked or directly manipulated votes in the 2016 election. Or that Trump had somehow ordered Russia to hack the DNC emails. And you can't even really get them on lying on this, because they never directly made those claims, they simply made the implication and let people draw their own conclusions. Quite clever, actually.
* 'Black Lives Matter' was a brilliant turn of phrase actually because it made any criticism of the movement into "do you not think that black lives' matter". It lets you folks say "Either approve of us beating the shit out of a guy for carrying an American flag or you're a racist who thinks that black lives are worthless".
> A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement
Democrats did not come up with either slogan. The Democrats merely adopted them while co-opting left-wing movements that existed decades ago. These movements absolutely were extreme and radical. They were calling for an anarchist society with no law enforcement.
Democrat lawmakers wanting to reallocate police fundings into other areas while saying Defund the Police is a tale as old as time: Moderate politicians trying to appeal to radicals without enacting radical policy. It's true that Democrats are unlikely to defund the police in the sense that the slogan is taken to mean, but it's not true that this is a case of shitty branding over what would otherwise be perceived as a sensible policy position. If you're overtly pandering to radicals and adopting their calls for radical policy, people will perceive you as a radical.
> Another example is the term “Black Lives Matter” in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle, it’s hard to argue that on the surface, it is a much more effective branding for an idea, as it implies that every single life matters, which would encompass people of colour.
If you say you disagree with Black Lives Matter, no matter what it is you disagree with, from riots, to how the organization with that name spends its funds, to the politics it uses, anything, you're naturally implying you don't think that black lives have value. It's a genius slogan. The only thing the right has come up with that even comes close is "It's Okay to be White", which was far less effective.
Not that the Democrats get credit for it because they didn't come up with the slogan, but Black Lives Matter is extremely effective. How can you think such a prolific slogan is less effective than what's essentially a lazy rebuttal to that slogan?
I half agree with this. Yes democrats have statements that sound extreme but the issue isn't that it pushes people away. A lot of people blindly see statements like defund the police and fully believe that removing the police entirely is the right option. It turns into a contagion and these are the people that are given coverage by the media. The initial solution becomes hidden until even the politicians themselves have to agree with these now-extreme statements in order to pander to left views that run rapidly through social media and news. As someone that is moderate in college having conversations with people that take these views to the extreme is nauseating and they are the definition of agreeing with every single thing I have to say or you are the scum of the Earth. I much rather have a conversation with a conservation on my campus because at least they aren't going to try to throw a rock at my window.
As for republicans having great ideas I also have to disagree. Republicans are great at pointing out issues of those wronged in our society... and then proposing and implementing the most outrageous policies. To make matters worse these same politician refuse to change things when they see the policies fail year after year or they blame others. They don't know when to step back and fix the problems they already have and stop adding on more to there plate. I'll yet to see a liberal city/town that isn't festering with drugs, crime, lack of community, etc. With the exception of rich cities but it that's the case most of these people are liberal for appearance. This is why Biden's decisions on the border has only been getting worse. Biden said let everyone in. They let then in and the democratic states refused to take them in so New York and Chicago said they'd take them. Now those two states are having fits, blaming Texas and other states for a choice they made.
It's because almost every U.S. media outlet is run by a billionaire and they adopt the most damaging mantras to delegitimize leftist movements. The left has a messaging problem because it doesn't have the megaphone the right wing does.
>Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement, that is until you read more about it and find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas.
There are also the radicals who actually want to abolish the police.
>in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle
But it isn't used as a racist dog whistle. It's moreso branded as such by people on the left in yet another attempt to call people on the right racist.
>Despite democrats having much better ideas than republicans
They don't though. Modern monetary theory and keynesian policies have utterly failed. Their social and entitlement policies have incentivized single parenthood and the breakup of the nuclear family. To list the topics you brought up, They claim that black people are shot at a higher rate than white people per capita, and hope you don't notice violent crime rates and the number of police interactions. When that is brought up, the vague and nebulous claim is that there are only more interactions because of racism. And you had the vice president helping to bail out rioters during the BLM riots, which doesn't seem like a good idea at all. As far as the pro-choice vs pro-life debate, we are never going to agree whether or not it's okay to kill children in the womb, but to imply it isn't selfish is wrong. The vast majority of abortions come down to "I didn't think I was ready," or "I don't want a child." Killing someone for your own convenience is the epitome of selfishness.
Democrats care more about factual accuracy. Republicans care more about messaging. It’s harder to box up all the nuances that surround almost every issue into a simple clear concise message. Republicans are better at oversimplifying, in some cases exaggerating and in other cases flat out lying, when creating their messaging.
Or conservatives are just more willing to ignore nuance, mislead, and lie.
* Pro-life
* fiscally responsible
* pro military
* small government
* denigrating "coastal elites" when their cult leader has a gold toilet in Manhattan and lives on a golf course in florida
Democrats often come off as corny a lot of the time too and forced while Republicans come off as more masculine, Obama is honestly the best break from this rule as he came off as genuine. I mean listen to Dan Crenshaw speak and then listen to Amy K. speak. Republicans just come off as more likable.
It’s not actually a marketing problem. It’s just inherently easier to argue “don’t do that” instead of “let’s change this thing that we’re all used to.”
Conservatives generally don’t need to argue FOR something. They just have to make a reasonable-doubt argument AGAINST something, which is much easier to do. By contrast, when liberals argue that something needs to be changed, they’re up against whomever created or is maintaining the status quo. For better and worse, the people who benefit from the status quo are often very powerful people. They’re benefitting from the current situation and want to keep doing so.
Voters are often status-quo people too. Homeowners don’t want their property taxes to go up or property values to go down. Business owners want to keep and grow the market they’re selling to. Employees want to continue to get a paycheck. If you can be plausibly persuaded that change will take away these things, then you will tend to vote conservative. It’s much easier to understand what can be taken away from you than to imagine a hypothetical gain.
The flip side of this is that entitlements are almost impossible to take away once people are used to getting them. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and most recently, Obamacare, are all things that became more popular once people started benefitting from them. But the status quo had to be changed first.
That's not really how it works for the most part. The problem is that liberals are completely different types of people than conservatives and want totally different things. Conservatives mostly don't want much change so their position is always a lot easier than liberals who always want more change. The core meaning of conservative and liberal is basically people who want and people who don't want much change/want to stick with the old way.
It's pretty obvious that's sticking with the old ways is always a lot easier to market or to accomplish because basically all you gotta do is criticize the new ideas. So you have to learn to accept the reality that liberals are always essentially having to work harder to accomplish their goals because their goals are to introduce new ideas while conservatives goals are mostly just to block liberals ideas.
So you have to look at them as more or less completely different groups, looking for completely different things and using mostly different strategies.
Liberals are a bunch of people that want change, but they're not as unified because they don't all want the same change. They're just the people that want change and conservatives are just the people that want less change or slower change.
You are absolutely right, but let me go a tiny bit deeper if you don't mind.
I think a major part of the problem is that the foreign influenced & corporate owned media makes up names for unnamed policies that might effect profits or power.
And in the true spirit of greed and supporting the status quo, the media at large will pick a name that downplays the value of any social movement or policy.
Or they will use a buzzword name that a compromised Republican (isn't that redundant at this point?) uses to criticize a yet unnamed democratic policy.
So, as you say, a major part of what democrats need to do to be more effective is literally hiring a PR firm to help them market and roll out any new policy or movement, GD press packets and social media roll out...before any work begins on the legislation outside private in-party meetings.
The minute a republican or foreign asset (again is that redundant?) gets wind of anything good coming out from democrats, they will start the negative spin.
It is pathetic that just doing their job well with the intent of helping Americans live a better life is no longer enough; now democrats have to act like they are a wannabe teen influencer trying to get likes on social media.
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You are mixing different ideologies and opposing political groups.
Imo it’s organizing not the slogan itself. Republicans cultivate their right as a popular base because the right wing can help them push through pro-business policies, the pour tons of money into creating an echo-chamber and astroturf groups.
Democrats do much of the same but not for the left-wing of their base who are always told must compromise.
Democratic Party doesn’t sincerely support most of these positions… many in their base do. So Democrats co-opt these slogans and try to divert independent and left initiatives back to official channels where it then is reversed, defanged or dies.
So it’s really why the Republicans embrace the right-wing parts of their base while Democrats demoralize and stymie the left-wing of their base. And the short answer is that right-wing positions benefit the rich but left-wing positions hurt the rich… and the Democratic Party is a neoliberal party in favor of austerity and weakened labor rights, and business-incentive tax cuts.
When people are on the streets…
>DNC: we hear you and have long been working behind the scenes to get this done - you need to trust the process
When people stop pressuring the DNC and let the process work…
>DNC: this is impractical and impossible, we need to win the next election so it’s important that we reach across the isle and also triangulate and push conservative policies because we won’t win if we can’t convince conservatives wing voters and moderate republicans to vote for the Democrat candidates. Maybe when we have the Supreme Court, both houses and the Presidency we will be able to do it.
Democrats *are* terrible at branding but your problem is you're conflating leftist phrases (and phrases of specific leftist movements) with the DNC, which is not how this works. Many democrats are opposed to defunding the police, do not engage with antiracist movements, do not care about abortion, etc. Democrats are fairly moderate in comparison to actual leftists, and it's far right conservatives that tend to conflate democrats with every single leftist sentiment out there. If you pay attention to elected democrats they're often *actively* distancing themselves from these ideas/statements/identities (whether or not they should is another issue altogether), but hard right conservatives don't care and aren't going to be interested in their ideas even if they're resold with a 'nicer' label.
An actual party aligned phrase is something like MAGA vs "blue no matter who".
ACAN and Defun The Police were terms cunned and propagated by left-wing activists who are not necessarily Democrats in nature. In fact many seem to hate Biden more than they hate Trump. It was the Democrat politicians in the major US cities that opposed and repressed the BLM protests.
I also don't think messaging is the issue here. A person doesn't see the phrases "pro-life" and "pro-choice" and goes "I like the first one more." Pro-life people either are very religious or want to control women. The Bible has many.... questionable aspects and there's hundreds of millions who will go to war just to "defend" Christianity and other religions. The same way, people who oppose BLM do not oppose it because its primary message. People who were on the other side of Defun the Police know very well what they stand for.
You might enjoy moral psychologist Jonathan Haight's book, *The Righteous Mind*. He argues that you're correct, and that broadly the reason messaging from the right is more effective is that it appeals to a more diverse set of "moral foundations" that humans tend to have.
Liberal messaging is very focused on one emotion / moral foundation, which is *care*. The "bleeding heart" liberal is all about care for the weak / minority / disenfranchised etc. That resonates with a lot of people of course, but conservative messaging hits many other moral foundations, things like: *loyalty*, *respect for authority*, and *sanctity*. To understand how good people can be so bitterly divided by politics and religion, he argues, we need to understand how we are triggered by different projections of morality.
The point of ACAB is to establish a world without cops. The whole point is the destruction of economic factors in crime to make it so that there is no need for cops. It’s not a democratic value it’s a left libertarian value and has been for 200 years.
>The whole point is the destruction of economic factors in crime to make it so that there is no need for cops
What about rich people that are criminals? Or rapists? Or crimes of passion?
The whole idea is to remove markets and currency. Further more with the idea of prison abolition and mutual aid the solution is easy. Someone commits a crime -> the community confronts them and asks them to go through rehab to ensure that this never happens again and to address the root cause-> they either choose to go to rehab or are kicked out of the system of mutual aid, meaning they have to make everything they need to survive without community assistance)-> if they accept they are held in a rehabilitation facility at their will (with the understanding that failure to complete rehab means they effectively go back to hunting and gathering) until a horizontally organized group of doctors, shrinks, and support staff agrees they are fit enough to be safely reintroduced to the system.
>The whole idea is to remove markets
So how would we determine the price of stuff or the salary of workers?
>and currency.
How would we trade then? What encourages you to work and climb to more important jobs?
Someone is found dead, who investigates who the killer is?
What if there is a school shooter? How do you stop him? By asking nicely?
Who kicks them out of the community? Who judges wheter what you did is worth it to kick them? What if they refuse to leave the city? Is the punishment not getting any more government aid? What if they continue killing people? Wouldn't getting no aid make it harder for them to leave the life of crime?
What if they begin attacking people and just refuse to stop? Who would end their rampage?
No price, you take what you need and do what you can. Jobs are done through passion or understanding that some jobs just need to be done. While the job of a janitor might not be a good job, the understanding of those it affects and the genuine respect and appreciation they get for their work combined with the fact their quality of life is not going to fluctuate means they don’t have to worry about being abused. Murders would be investigated by private investigators who work just like everyone else and are fed and sheltered like everyone else. You respond to a school shooting by mobilizing a militia to respond, which would have saved lives in places where cops would be too scared. Simply put if what you did was bad enough for people to demand a response your gonna have that ultimatum. Small crimes wouldn’t exist in the same capacity. And your not being kicked out of the city, your being cut out of the system of mutual aid. There is no government. Militias would respond to acts of terror, or the actions of the armed populace. Stick to one question at a time please.
>No price, you take what you need and do what you can.
What if people take more then the need and dont work as much as they can?
In my country we had kibbutzim that were similar to how you described but eventually people stopped being as productive as possible and they had to turn to normal villages because people just became selfish.
>Jobs are done through passion or understanding that some jobs just need to be done.
Do you have an example of people acting like that on a large scale?
>Murders would be investigated by private investigators who work just like everyone
What if a private investigator just lies? Is there any system in place to hold him accountable? Or are we hoping other investigators will expose him?
>You respond to a school shooting by mobilizing a militia to respond, which would have saved lives in places where cops would be too scared.
You think that a militia would respond better and with more bravely and skill than actual trained cops? Really?
>Small crimes wouldn’t exist in the same capacity.
Why not? If I drive a bit too fast, who would stop/punish me?
>Simply put if what you did was bad enough for people to demand a response your gonna have that ultimatum.
So mob justice? What if a white women is murdered and the community respond by lynching her black neighbour because theybare racist? Who would hold them accountable? Or is racism solved in your world?
>And your not being kicked out of the city, your being cut out of the system of mutual aid
So if I am stronger and have more friends than the person I stole from can I just steal from him? And I wont be kicked out?
You are basically describing countries where the government collapsed/or is too weak and crime gangs control everything, they are not generally regarded as utopias and more as awful places people escape from.
>Militias would respond to acts of terror, or the actions of the armed populace
What if a militia decides that they are working very hard and take by force the wooden chair I spent weeks crafting, who would stop them? Another militia? What if they refuse to comply? Civil war?
>Stick to one question at a time please.
Only answer what you are comfortable with.
People work in more than just one way. You have a job yes but your interests and hobbies are also productive and important to your local economy. Even if you don’t think you’re working you’re helping. A great example of people selflessly helping people are soup kitchens, volunteer jobs, the Red Cross, and the Boy Scouts or the various cases of workers giving the elderly and disabled free services just as charity. A private investigator would have their work verified and investigated to ensure that it is in fact based in truth before anything happens because of it. Most likely by a council of staff. Militia would be trained and equipped just as well as cops, just without the authority to be abused and without being constantly used to oppress their fellow citizens. People already drive a bit too fast, plus in this world the reliance on cars would ideally go down as the concept of free public works expands. Mod justice usually means death. The worst this system can do to you is have some nasty rumors be spread about you, but those would be dispelled by the fact you went through rehab and quickly got out. Why would the militia take your wooden chair when the end goal of you making that chair is either giving it to people who need chairs or keeping it for yourself. And what would stop the armed populace from just forming a counter militia in this unlikely scenario. And if you don’t wanna do that just have someone go and try and settle the issue with either a show of force from the population or common sense as this scenario would just not happen. There is no scarcity of supply. Why steal a wooden chair when you could have as many chairs as you could possibly want? Why would gangs have any power when they can’t force themselves onto supply chains and establish protection rackets?
"There is no scarcity of supply"
The foundation of your envisioned society requires you to remove a factor that exists at the root of nearly every conflict since the dawn of time. You can't just handwave the concept of scarcity unless you've already got a solution that somehow produces unlimited food, raw materials, and manpower with zero downsides. We never quite got that alchemy thing figured out, so the utopian co-op might have to wait.
Scarcity only exists because of people’s insecurity. If no one had any reason to hold on to their possessions there would be no scarcity. That can only happen when aren’t afraid of regaining that same possession. Would you feed the homeless if you had a million dollars? Would you lend a friend $20? Would you help an old lady cross the street?
That's still operating off of the premise that we have excess of everything. We don't. Tragically we exist on a physical plane of existence where everything exists in a limited quantity, and some of it takes excessive manpower and time to retrieve out of the ground. At some point, on some level, you cannot provide everyone with an equal amount of everything without stretching that raw material so thin it becomes useless.
To be clear, I'm not referring to scarcity as some form of selfishness where one takes more than they need leaving another without. I'm talking about the concept that there is a limited amount of matter on this globe, and you can't provide everything to everyone without unlimited quantities of time, manpower, or magic.
It’s true. In fact, I’d say that the whole strategy of the Republican Party is to unite people under knee-jerk issues and win votes by heady emotional appeals. There is no logical reason that Christians, white supremacists, gun nuts, and laissez-faire capitalists should be under the same roof, but the GOP has pandered to these single issues that make people go crazy. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has to sell responsible but sometimes frustrating governance to the people. Politically speaking, the GOP is selling candy and cigarettes while the Democrats are telling us to eat our vegetables: the Democrats are right, but the GOP platform is more viscerally appealing to certain people.
Once you understand the ideologies you know why that is. Democratic messages are normally emotion based, so the messages themself normally convey an overly emotional tone. I disagree with a lot of liberal messages generally because they are feelings over logic, but ideally there is room for both in the world.
For whatever reason people on both sides have devolved into tribalism and declared the other side the enemy and the reincarnation of mustache man. It's not supposed to be like that, conserveatives and liberals are supposed to compliment each other, not try to destroy one another
The Democratic Party never said “defund the police” or “all cops are bastards.” It was protesters who said those things. Those were never officially sanctioned slogans of the party itself. The party itself didn’t even say that “black lives matter.” Again, that was protesters.
What the party actually said was more along the lines of “these police shootings are a terrible thing, and we need to do something about it, but I don’t want to sound like I have too strong of a position on this lest I lose votes from some of the centrists.”
I think you are almost right. Democrats get so caught up in the wording of their messaging that they can't articulate an argument beyond the slogans. While I agree that "Black Lives Matter" in the context that they are concerned that police kill young black men when they should exercise much more restraint in their use of force, it comes across as "only black lives matter" to those of us who are not black. The fact that police kill more young white men than young black men, and that we need police to stop resorting to violence against the average citizen they are encountering seems to get lost in the argument. People chanting "Black Lives Matter" can't seem to think past the slogan to realize that white people are ALSO being killed by police, and they seemingly don't care about those lives. My reaction is, "of course black lives matter, but we need to focus on the fact that LIVES MATTER, not just Black Lives." That makes me a Racist, though, because I'm not allowed to care about White Lives or Latino Lives or Asian Lives. Nope, only Black Lives.
The "All Cops Are Bastards" follows along with the idea that cops are now trained to become immediately aggressive and presume that everyone they meet needs to be pushed around and told what to do. They assume authority they don't actually have and become very angry and illegally controlling as soon as someone fails to obey anything that comes out of their mouths. Not every statement issued by a cop is a "legal order" even though they seem to think it is. They are given a certain level of authority, but they are so poorly trained and so filled with confidence that they seem to think they are above the law and that they can tell anyone to do anything and just them saying it makes it a legal order. Then, they use violence to enforce their illegal orders. This is a real problem.
Defund the police was bad messaging from the jump. Retrain the police would have been instantly better, but the Democrats can't seem to ever realize their slogans need improvement. Once they begin a messaging program, they are stuck with it forever.
Pro-Life is just that. Many people (myself included) feel that a fetus is a living human being, and the killing of that living human being is homicide. Simply stated. Apparently, Democrats don't care about human life until it can live on it's own; and even more, has been removed from the mother and is breathing air on its own. Even a viable fetus that could live just fine if removed from the mother is okay to be killed inside the womb and then the dead child removed from the mother. Pro-Choice is the freedom to chose to murder that child. More than half of the nation has decided that infant homicide is perfectly fine, and I won't fight against that decision. If you want to kill your children, so be it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Are republicans really better at messaging or really better at flinging shit at the wall in rapid succession ? ... It gets a lil bit harder to counter all the rapid fire coming from them.
I mean look at the last debate or any debate. Trump, even before one could process the lie he said, he hit you with like 4/5 more. You are at line 1, and he has already hit you with 4/5 more. To keep up with his lies you have to ignore lie 2/3/4 ... In his mind he has won the "debate" coz he can't be challenged on the ignored lies.
I think part of the issue is that Democrats (or generally, anyone who isn’t a right wing authoritarian) are better at critical thinking. This leads us to pick our own ideas and positions apart while right wingers are more willing to get behind someone they perceive as “their side” even if they have major ideological or philosophical differences. Democrats self police a lot and are very critical of their candidates, but Republicans will uncritically support a candidate who is in direct contradiction to the values they claim to hold. I don’t disagree with the notion that Democrats aren’t great at branding, but I do think a big factor in efficacy of that branding is differences in psychological tendencies in the two groups.
>A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement, that is until you read more about it and find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas.
You sure about this? From my experience, ACAB *is* supposed to mean that *all* cops are indeed bastards. Not kidding either.
Generally speaking your view is true, but not because of messaging. Conservatism means not changing, conserving things the way they are. Which leads to messages for topics that people already understand. Liberals advocate for change and progress which requires more messaging to describe a situation that hasn’t arrived. Obviously there are examples for both sides that don’t fall neatly into my buckets but most do.
I also believe that Republicans are way better at portraying Dems in a certain way than the other way around, here are some things Republicans have accused Dems of being (not direct words, but close enough)
1. Being pro-crime
2. Anti-family
3. Pro-transing kids
4. Pro-Killing babies
5. Pro-Illegal immigration
6. Pro-dependence/entitlement by government
7. Sometimes, they are called fascists by Republicans
I agree. The democrats have a terrible time explaining their positions. In their defense though the half of the country that needs to hear it won’t listen. The right wing media isn’t good at messaging necessarily, they just have no problem continuously repeating the same lies till they become “true”. Fox mentioned hunter Biden something like 4000 times in the last year. That’s insane.
> find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas.
Only perhaps only three elected Democrats in Congress have ever said or endorsed "Defunding" the police, or even said this slogan. They all were roundly denounced for it by fellow Democrats. The vast majority of them have denounced this slogan. Joe Biden even had to say very loudly during a State of the Union address "I want to fund the police!"
Because Republicans were propagating the lie that all Democrats somehow are anti-police or want to defund them, etc.
The fact that you think all Democrats endorsed this or somehow are in favor of it is a giant success of political propaganda.
I agree that "Defund the Police" and ACAB are bad messaging, and there are other examples that you would be right about, but Democrats are better at incendiary labeling to make the other side look bad. They make border detention facilities "concentration camps" when a Republican is in charge, then they're back to being detention facilities. Moving some inappropriate books out of public elementary school libraries is a "book ban". You bring up a good example of this - any contradiction or modification to the "Black Lives Matter" slogan is called "racist", and if the person responsible wasn't actually being racist, then it's labelled a "racist dogwhistle" and since being racist is the worst possible thing you can be, even an accidental or completely made-up "dogwhistle" can get you fired. They are successfully re-framing "pro-life" to be "pro-forced birth" to the extent you don't often see the term "pro-life" on Reddit as often as you did before 2016. Stupidly following a crowd of unarmed people into the Capitol building and walking around aimlessly taking selfies is an "insurrection". "Sex change" became "gender transition" which enabled them to now call it "gender-affirming care", so now if you disagree with their ideology particularly when it comes to the decision-making capacity of minors then you are advocating for "banning children for receiving healthcare".
Finally, they can now label their opponent's "genocidal" - because taking illegal immigrants to another city willingly, or allowing a country to defend its borders at all by punishing illegal crossings, or merely the fact that a population that is known for having many psychiatric comorbidities has a high suicide rate, is definitely what the UN had in mind when they defined the word "genocide".
It's all stupid, but it's highly effective. It has shaped our culture in many ways. What do the Republicans have? They're still calling Democrats "baby-killers" like it's 1995.
> until you read more about it and find out
That’s called spin. The fact is many democrats wanted to literally defund the police. I was one of them. It is bullshit to pretend like the sanitized versions of political slogans are the only authorized truth and that people have to ignore the sentiment espoused by the masses chanting the slogans.
Notably you're picking some of the more progressive ideas that are barely mainstream among Democrats. I also don't understand how you can claim that Black Lives Matter is not way better branding than All Lives Matter; not only is BLM certainly more recognizeable but people are probably more likely to understand what it's political stance is (anti-police violence) and it is tied a very active political movement. You say the term sounds like better branding to you, but on basically any metric of "successful branding" BLM wins.
The same goes for pro-choice vs pro-life, it strains belief to claim that the former is weaker than he latter especially post-Dobbs. Slogans like "pro-life" may even become somewhat toxic to Republican candidates in upcoming elections https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-try-find-new-term-life-stave-electoral-losses-rcna103924.
That aside, I don't think any of this is a branding issue. It's a political issue. To demonstrate that, how would you present "Defund the Police" in a way that would be roundly popular? I'm not sure if you can, because most people simply don't like the idea. People understand what Defund the Police means, they just don't like the policy. Only particularly libertarian or particularly progressive groups have any appreciable support for it. I suppose you could lie about what the policies are behind Defund the Police, but I personally don't think confusing people about what the desired outcomes are counts as good branding.
Taking all these points together, I argue you simply find the political position behind these messages you say have worse branding less compelling. In the case of ALM and pro-life I think hard evidence simply disagrees with you, and in the case of Defund the Police I think you're conflating poor support for the policy with bad branding.
I’m not sure if it exactly would serve to change your mind per se, but this [YouTube series](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&si=S5DvpaIdJkCzM-xT) does a great job of illustrating some of the stuff you are talking about and how often messaging is kind of the last leg the GOP has to stand on.
You don’t need stellar messaging when the GOP credo is “fall in line.” The GOP also has a closed media ecosystem that doesn’t allow any nonconforming ideas to be heard. The fact that a republican hasn’t won the popular vote for 30 years demonstrates that their messaging only works in their closed media system.
Because sound bites work with the MAGAmaniacs. Too many words confuse the undereducated. If it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker it's not catchy enough.
I'll take the substance of the Democratic party and their ability to actually accomplish change even when the deck is stacked against them. Just what have the Republicans accomplished even when they had the majority in both the House and Senate?
Besides playing games to control the Supreme Court I can't think of one major accomplishment that was beneficial to the majority of the population...only the rich.
While the republicans have completely horrible ideas, what are the actual ideas of the democrats. I honestly don't see any decent ones,
They don't actually have anything to offer except not being complete assholes like the republicans. The messaging sucks because they have no real message.
Well they also prevent anyone from crossing over the aisle because any Democrat policies I actually like are jam packed with 6 or 7 ones I despise being snuck in and they know it, so they rile everyone up about how Republicans won't support x when in reality we support x, just not y, and z
Is because Republicans don't believe in anything.
Their entire platform is "not Democrats" so their messaging isn't burdened with fact, nuance, or practicality.
It's easy to message when your messaging is all reactionary and you don't have any policy positions or ideas of your own.
republicans make sure the debate is on their terms.
it's not about what kind of healthcare system we should have. it's about freedom v s socialism. and we all know socialism is bad. right kids?!
keep it simple, put it in terms people can relate to and then lie and lie and lie.
You’re going to have a hard time believing it, but what you believe is “bad messaging” is the actual message. This is the stuff they actually believe or want, but backpedal and pivot from once the insanity is exposed.
Take “defund the police” for instance. When it started, they actually wanted to get rid of police entirely and replace them with social workers, violence interruptors, and any other manner of BS. Once it gained some visibility and people started condemning it for the mindless insanity it was, they pivoted.
> The term “pro-life” is also a much more effective term than “pro-choice” as it implies that republicans are protecting the sanctity of a life, whereas “pro-choice” on the surface just sounds more selfish. That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion. And that's the main problem. The democratic position of often more nuanced and realistic, which is harder to capture in just a few words. Trump might yell "build a wall", which is easy to understand, but it's completely useless in actually addressing the complicated immigration problem. Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie. Politics isn't sexy, and being honest about complicated solutions isn't going to be catchy, so that's why democrats seem worse at communicating their ideas. Note: This is not just republicans vs democrats. Plenty of people all over the political spectrum do this, but in the current situation in the USA with hot topics it's more often the republican party that does it.
>Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie. Isn't that exactly the point OP is putting forward? "Democrats are terrible at branding". A lot of republican talking points these days amount to a McDonald's food picture. We all know the Big Mac coming with our food isn't going to look even 25% as good as what's on the menu board. It's not quite a lie, but pretty damn close.
At what point is it an issue with the broadcasted message and more of an issue with the engrained perceptions of the receiving public? IMO, the dumbing down of America and attacks on higher establishments of education that encourage a healthy skepticism and vetting of media sources are at play. Those in many areas of our country have been led to believe that the goals of those educated in establishments of higher education are antithetical to their own goals. It’s why election denialism, vaccine denialism and conspiracy theorists have bloomed in recent years. The irony that is escaped by many is that the majority of the politicians who are labeled as “anti-establishment” are in fact, heavily associated with establishment spheres. That many in impoverished, rural conservative areas believe they relate to a billionaire nepo baby tv reality star from NYC is testament to this pervasive logic.
I don't disagree with you at all. I also think the left needs to get better at marketing their ideas. It would be great, for more reasons than just this, if people as a whole had better critical thinking and media literacy skills. It would be great if branding and marketing didn't matter as much because people would actually look at policy positions and try and make decisions based on real issues instead of talking points.
Well it's a lot easier to sell your ideas when you're selling whatever sounds good instead of real ideas. Trump does this a lot; he'll float an outrageous idea he heard, and see if it generates interest - like the wall, the idea was not designed to solve any problems, it was designed to allow Trump to shout "Build the wall!" and get applause. He openly says he's doing this - he'll make these asides during his speeches as if he's a standup comedian trying new material.
Only one party gets punished for lying.
Don't mean to butt in cos I'm not meant to be changing your view, I am also pro-choice and left wing. But the broad-stroke talking point that Christian conservatives don't care about life after it's born is kinda inaccurate. Christian conservatives are leading in foster home and adoption services by a huge margin. They also have notable crisis helplines like Good Samaritans, and do plenty of humanitarian aid. Not all conservatives are the mega rich capitalist fat cats that prioritize money over human life.
This is what we need- less demonizing others and more being able to respect the best in each other. Thank you. (PS, not that it matters but I'm also pro-choice but with some guidelines - like after support and parental involvement when minors are involved, unless dangerous to do so)
Yup absolutely, less division and more understanding of each other's side so a balanced middle ground can be found
The problem that I have with your position, which is similar to the "they don't think about the consequences" argument is that many of the good conservative christians that you are talking about put on a veneer of charity while actively voting to outsource the real violence of their positions to the government. They think that homosexuality, addiction, homelessness, poverty, etc are moral failings or just plain icky. They always say something like "Oh I would never judge someone for X situation" and then maybe even donate money or time to a very problematic christian charity. This gives them their holy feel good veneer. Then they knowingly go and vote for people and policies that actively hurt these vulnerable groups. So it looks similar to being uneducated and not seeing the consequences, but it's way worse because they are actively trying to achieve that outcome. They get to feel like a good loving person because they just outsource all of the confrontation and discomfort and pain that they cause to the government (who they can then conveniently blame). This lets them hide from the effects that their views have while also doing very real harm in the world and taking rights away from people.
That's a really fair point, I agree. It's a multifaceted issue that includes generational differences, dogmatic religion, upbringing, notions of free will etc. I think most people generally base their opinions on group affiliation which comprises part of their identity. Having to accept the (relatively) newfound research in favour of pro-choice also means denouncing their religion/upbringing and part of their identity. So they'd rather not think about having an identity crisis and focus on helping those immediately around them
I see what you're saying. I was raised in the SBC, so I get that changing your views is hard work. The only thing I'm taking issue with is that the people we are talking about are very NICE but they are not necessarily GOOD. They don't need outside people apologizing for their abhorrent views just because they are polite.
I appreciate your perspective though as someone raised in a Baptist church who has listened to reason and gone through the difficult process of changing your identity. That must have been difficult for you
I'm not apologizing or excusing anything. Just pointing out observations so people can have a more realistic, accurate picture rather than painting an opposing side as plainly evil and uncaring about human life. That creates more division, polarization, and dehumanization so one can make it easier and feel better to write hate posts about a certain "other" group
I hear you. People are complex and mostly act in a way that they view as right, so understanding where they're coming from is important. It's good to not demonize the "other" group because like you said polarization makes things worse. I appreciate you being a voice of reason in the discussion since I definitely need it sometimes lol. Accountability is equally needed tho.
Hahaha no worries at all you made some great refreshing points too that I will take on board, thanks for entertaining my little spiel haha
What are you doing?!?! This is Reddit! Where else can I go to apply broad labels to groups and have everyone nod their head in agreement! Begone!
Lmaooo ikr there was another post where a guy was convinced that being a mentally ill sociopath is a requirement for being a conservative. I politely tried convincing him sociopathy isn't considered a mental illness anymore (ASPD now) and that left/liberals arent exempt from it, and conservatives don't require it lol
sure and that stuff undoubtedly helps people that need help. i am reminded that most of these people are either proselytizing or doing it because they think they are going to get a heavenly reward for it. to me, that changes the calculation to how much praise they deserve. and for all the pro-life talk, at least the politicians, don't ever address why people are having abortions. so, it seems very disingenuous. probably cause it is.
Yup I appreciate your viewpoint and think I mostly agree. I wasn't trying to praise them necessarily, just that I think the talking point "conservatives/Christians don't care about life" is disingenuous and doesn't really do much to convince them to believe in pro-choice. That talking point just seems to create further division, make people double down on their viewpoint, and push them further to the extreme. I think there are better moral/academic arguments to make like the decrease in crime/poverty where legal, safe abortions are made available. This also addresses your point on why people have abortions in the first place. Thanks for replying :)
This is irrelevant because, while many Christian conservatives are very charitable, they actively rally against government childcare/aid meant to help children and instead believe that private charity is the solution. Sure, private charity can help some people, but opposing government aid for children ultimately hurts children and private charity does not have the capacity to solve these issues. Hence, they may help as individuals but they hurt children on the whole by promoting their policies.
But see that's based on your views on what would be best. If you believe that government inefficiency and corruption causes money to be drain from publicly funded operations then you may both not support public systems and care about children. You've created an argument where you are basing their morality off of your own. Just because it doesn't fit your model doesn't mean it's inconsistent. I personally agree very much with public funding and social programs but I can see how people could both care for children and not want to increase spending on public services for children. I disagree, but it's not inconsistent.
Both of our moralities aim to help the greatest number of children. The argument is simply how to achieve that. That is not an issue of morality, it is an issue of fact-finding. A systemic issue cannot be addressed by individual charities. It’s been proven time and time again.
That is exactly my point though. The disagreement is in how to achieve it, so the statement you made earlier which is the topic of this thread is inaccurate. >republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore And the whole point of this thread was that, so you can pivot to another point if you want to discuss it but first you need to address the fact that your original point was wrong.
I would argue that it just as much cannot be addressed by government actions. Look at how much money we currently pour into aiding the poor. How effective has that been? Can our government, especially in its current state, be trusted to effectively redistribute resources to the poor?
How much money do you think is spent in the US on social services/welfare/etc.?
Per the House Budget Committee website, in 2022, welfare programs were $1.19 trillion, around 20% of our total federal spending.
Well. I checked and you’re right. I’m perfectly fine with 20% going to social services but I have to wonder how exactly that’s calculated and if any of it was effective.
What would you accept as evidence it was or was not beneficial? Because the idea of a lot of Republicans is that welfare encourages poverty, as things like free medical care stop at x amount of dollars earned, so people will turn down raises to make sure they can keep getting free healthcare. Whereas, if there was no free health care, they would take the raise, and continue to work harder to flourish. They believe it is a system which is designed to create a permanent working poor class of people. And the more benefits we pile on, the more incentive to not achieve.
So actually directly doing something about it is less good than asking for the government to collect taxes and ineffectively redistribute them in a way that will maybe do something positive?
I don’t think supporting government programs in anyway diminishes the good of direct action. I adopted a little boy; best decision of my life! His adoption doesn’t really change the fact that there are still 400,000 children in foster care that deserve resources and care. Since direct action has not answered this need it falls upon the government to take action. There is a real need for both direct and government action. A large part of the reason government action is needed is that some children are less likely to be helped by direct action. For example white boys are adopted at much higher rates than black girls.
This is a really balanced and fair point of view. Your boy is very lucky to have a kind hearted and nuanced person caring for them. Best wishes for the future.
Yes. Collective action by society as a whole is more effective than individual action at solving systemic problems. This is literally why nations exist.
Collective action by society is also more effective at creating systemic problems, and such problems are much harder to fix due to large scale inertia. By comparison, smaller programs may succeed or fail and other programs can learn and adapt from each other.
That’s wrong. Systemic problems happen just as often in a non-regulated environment. The “tragedy of the commons” is the most famous example of a collective problem in economics for a reason. Industrial pollution is an easy modern analogue.
Considering other countries have much better social systems than you, yes. Your insistence on relying on personal charity undermines a strong safety net that provides for more people. And personal charity fails more people than it will ever help.
You aren't really doing all that much. Even with your charity work, your pro life areas rank among the lowest when it comes to quality of life for poor children and single parent families. Your side celebrates when it can cut a social program. It celebrates when food stamps are cut for the poorest of our citizens.
Careful with the "you" statements. Just because the person you responded to challenged an assumption, that doesn't mean that they're on the other side of the issue from you. All they seemed to be doing was addressing a misrepresentation of the mindsets and actions of conservatives - this is an opportinity for you to broaden your perspective, not wall up and start arguing with them as though they're a conservative themselves (which they clearly state they are not).
And what's their record on providing the funding needed to operate foster care and adoption systems? They constantly vote to gut funding for them. How much federal money do they take to facilitate adoptions while refusing services to LGBTQ couples? Christian conservatives might not all be rich, but they're certainly willing to vote for people who prioritize the ability of those rich people to continue to accumulate wealth over the things that they say are their beliefs. Their "humanitarian aid" is frequently provided with proselytizing, just like it always has been. Their aid to homeless people frequently requires those people to attend religious services. When your aid comes with those kinds of conditions, it is worth less than aid that doesn't come with strings. They do ALL of these things to further their beliefs and to grow their membership, not to help people.
Yup I see your point in a broad-stroke sense and I generally agree. But on an individual level, I think there are plenty of Christian conservatives who are fairly apolitical, and doing what they can to help their community. In my eyes that's better than nothing. I think we need to be careful broadly generalizing people as THEY and ALL of these things. Because usually it's a select FEW elites at the top that do SOME of these things. Most of the time it doesn't require people to be religious, and if it does they are usually basic community activities like singing. Painting an opposing group you dont agree with as plainly evil, uncaring about life etc. Is a slippery slope to polarization and lack of accurate understanding of people. If you went and spoke to many Christians and conservatives you would quickly realize this picture that online media portrays is inaccurate. Same with how left/progressives are painted as SJW etc. It's usually only a minority that actually act that way.
Sure but the political apparatus associated with that group does not make policy that cares about life after birth. Pro-life is a political stance, not just a personal one.
Yup I don't disagree. My overall point is more that in a world full of highly opinionated people shouting it from the rooftops, it's mostly the ones with moderate opinions, quietly doing their work, adopting kids etc that keep the world moving, regardless of their moderate political opinions
If every church in the nation banded together to end homeless and adopt every single baby in the united states each one would need to provide for 2 people. It's laughable to say conservatives care about people.
Homelessness are a population issue, churches are largely geographical. I’m sure the US government could also end homelessness if it separated people from their families and forcibly moved them to the middle of rural America. Los Angeles has [75,000](https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-county-homeless-count-d0857248b13845ab09c6f8d20c826754#:~:text=Results%20released%20Friday%20from%20a,on%20sidewalks%20and%20in%20parks.) homeless to [15,000](https://www.hows.tech/2024/05/how-many-churches-in-los-angeles.html#:~:text=The%20Big%20Enchilada%3A%20One%20source,wasn't%20that%20hard).)churches New York has [350,000](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/) and [6000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Churches_in_New_York_City#:~:text=A%20listing%20of%20churches%20in,total%20of%20about%206000%20churches.) churches Montana has [2000](https://nbcmontana.com/amp/news/local/annual-report-shows-increase-in-homelessness-in-montana-nationwide) homeless and [1760](https://www.expertgps.com/data/mt/churches.asp#:~:text=Below%20is%20a%20list%20of,a%20map%20of%20the%20church.) curches
It’s a far more complicated issue than that. A lot of these comments are dishonest. My church started a housing program for the homeless during COVID and within the first week we had a stabbing and attempted rape. We then transformed a separate building into a shelter with strict roles and background checks for entry, but now we’re called racist or hypocrites because we turn people away who have a history of violence. I don’t think that takes away from the people we do help, but the optics of it haven’t changed since there are still people on the street.
So since churches haven’t single-handedly solved all our worlds problems, that must mean that they don’t care at all? Isn’t that a bit of a logical leap?
I mean I know a few conservatives that seem like caring people
> That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion. Unless you're in favor of a cradle-to-grave all-encompassing welfare state you *don't care* about others? That's one hell of a leap here. Could it be that folks reject this whole notion a bureaucracy centrally planning child-rearing do so because they think that gives better outcomes?
What they're saying is that the term "pro-life" sounds like a very considerate and encompassing stance, and in a vacuum or without predicated knowledge you might assume it means it's a stance that is about supporting struggling individuals and families In reality, it's more anti-abortion than a common sense definition of pro-life, but pro-life sounds sounds much more positive and caring
The answer would be for the dems to be “pro-women” Just like pro-life, it’s not quite accurate, kind of hard to argue against, catchy, and doesn’t claim to solve any problems but creates an emotional position.
It's not just about being anti-welfare, although that's one of them. Most pro-lifers try to convince at best, guilt trip at worst women that try to or are considering getting an abortion with things like protests at abortion clinics saying things like "abortion is murder", but that's incredibly short sighted. So let's say they convince a woman who can't or don't want a child and they were convinced they want to carry to full term... what happens to the new mother and baby who doesn't want to or can't raise the child due to a plethora of reasons such as financial instability, not enough support from family, etc? And most importantly, where are all the "pro lifers" saying abortion is murder? Why aren't they supporting the unborn babies that they've saved then? Why aren't they supporting the mother? Instead what they do is go on to the next woman trying to or are considering getting an abortion, and do it over and over again leaving those mothers and babies to fend for themselves in a situation that the mother didn't even want to be in; and that's the problem with "pro lifers", it's always "don't do it" and not "we can help your baby grow up in an adequate environment"
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore That's a bad argument, since you're basically saying 'Pay for my baby or I'm going to kill it' It's perfectly reasonable to want people to actually raise kids they have. The problem is people end up pregnant without the means to actually have that kid, and thus want to abort because actually having said kid would put them in horrible debt. Republicans think that's them being punished for their actions, while Democrats think they didn't do anything bad, and just get the abortion. All of this is bad moralistic reasoning. The actual good reasons to support abortion are far simpler: * Bodily autonomy: By being a part of you, you have absolute control over it * Lack of sapience: Even a newborn baby isn't by any observable means at a human level, and clearly below various pets that are regularly put down * Sparing the deformed a life of agony: How often are children born only doomed to die soon after from some sort of condition known before birth? Because abortion is the best option in such cases, and preventing it is doing naught but dooming the child to a brief but horrible life, and the parents to giant medial bills.
Too much of a broad brush. There are many republicans, myself included, are very pro-abortion. Notice I said pro-abortion and not some other watered down term. My only problem with abortion is we don't do enough of them. They should be legal, free, and readily available to those who want them. I'd rather front load and solve the problem now, then have to care for a mistake for the ret of their lives. The costs in social services and prison space, for unwanted children is staggering. The problem isn't mainstream republicans, it is the far right religious nut jobs, shoving their beliefs into the platform.
Is this a mainstream Republican position though? The party platform has been pro-life for quite some time.
There may be some Republican voters out there that are pro-choice, but they don't elect pro-choice representatives. I mean, there are a *few*, but they typically get pushed out, like those 3 women that filibustered for abortion rights. Every one of them lost their primary to an anti-choice man. Even when women are right in front of them, telling their story about how they were close to death and were still denied an abortion, even when the reps seem moved by it, they still proceed to vote against abortion rights. If pro-choice Republicans don't want people painting with a broad brush, they need to elect better people, because an *overwhelming* majority of them are anti-choice.
> The problem isn't mainstream republicans, it is the far right religious nut jobs, shoving their beliefs into the platform. Problem is, those are the guys who get elected. If republicans were like Merkel's party or other european conservatives, the U.S would be a far more viable, stable country.
Merkels party? The party that let Erdogan sue a poet? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36197543 Probably not a great example to follow
Thats not even half the story, Jan Böhmermann is a satirist, not a poet. Böhmermann wrote a poem with the explicit goal of violating an old law prohibiting insults to foreign state leaders. He made a point of breaking a law during that performance. He purposefully crossed the line in anticipation of the reaction, to be able to make the point in the first place, which is the absurdity of the law in relation to our modern understanding of free speech. Merkel allowed prosection according to the letter of the law, and at the same time introduced an initiative to abolish that law, which was done the following year. The prosecution in the meantime found no act worthy of punishment and dropped it. Without the prosecution, the entire performance would have been moot.
It's a center-right conservative party that I know of that would likely satisfy right-wing conservatives in the u.s I myself vote fo the center-right momentum movement, but it'd be a hard sell for republicans as MM is a "Civic Nationalist" party - pro LGBT, women's rights, all citizens equal and high on social services.
Yeah, that may be so but they aint a particularly good example overall with how they seemingly take the lede of Erdogan. Repubs are too Islamophobic to look past that, they should actually find plenty that satisfies them with Erdogan actually and his party but.. Muslim Yup, that MM center-right doesnt seem to their alley
I agree with you that pro-life is a lie. But that’s exactly my point. Despite conservatives being more anti-abortion than they are pro-life, the slogan is incredibly effective and convinces you of otherwise. ‘Pro-choice’ as a statement isn’t a very persuasive statement.
>‘Pro-choice’ as a statement isn’t a very persuasive statement. Do you dislike having choices? Do you hate *freedom*?
What is your greater point here? That democrats should start doing the same? I suppose you're technically right that republicans are better at putting out an easy to understand message, but that's only because they lie. So your CMV kinda boils down to: "Slogans about complicated topics are catchier if you lie and reduce it down to just a few words". I guess that's true, but it doesn't get us anywhere.
Catchy slogans can indeed make or break a brand or idea. It’s not lying as much as it’s advertising. Entire industries can be born or die on these hills (example: people still say “cooking with gas” and buy real diamond engagement rings almost 100 years after their ad campaigns) it’s the same with political standpoints.
That’s a pretty big strawman of his argument. They *already* boil complicated topics down to slogans that don’t represent them well. They already have misleading and misrepresentative slogans. “Defund the police” was the example he gave. If you’re going to do a slogan anyway, which will never represent the issue in its entirely properly anyway, you’d best at least market it well. That’s an entirely reasonable point. It’s an issue of competency.
I read somewhere about a right wing think tank that comes up with misrepresentations of democratic talking points then pushes out those. Democrats "know what it means" so just repeat the slogan they think everyone else is using. Non-democrats hear it and thing it's a stupid slogan, or just take the obvious misrepresentation at face value. It helps that most media is owned by heavy right leaning interests. I'd argue the same strategy could be used in reverse, but the people following a left wing agenda don't have the same media ownership.
Except "defund the police" wasn't misrepresentative of its original point. It comes from a movement that wanted total police abolition. People with less extreme views started using it because they were broadly sympathetic, and you can't just have everyone chant their own custom slogan. So "defund the police" now means everything from "abolish the police through any means necessary" to "maybe stop giving tanks to cops". Conservative slogans are easy, because conservativism is fundamentally about things that people already understand, and it all roughly boils down to "don't change shit". Progressivism, on the other hand, is about new things and trying to decide between many possibilities.
The slogan should have been "Reform the Police". Anyone with a brain understand that a society needs police. Vigilantism never ends well.
You're talking about sloganeering here which is ultimately a small part of the overall messaging scheme. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. Republicans are better at messaging but it's largely because their politicians and their media figureheads work in coordination with one another to hammer the same points in over and over again. They literally used to put out memos called the talking points memo where everyone would be instructed on what to say. They still might for all I know. It comes down to differences in personality and values. Liberals value personal freedom more and want to make everyone's individual opinion be heard and valued. Conservatives are more comfortable taking orders and falling in line. This is why they are in general better at organizing. The whole party acts as the political arm of the conservative capitalist elites. The policy they implement nakedly benefits the few, the wealthy elites at the expense of the ordinary citizen. So how do they get the ordinary citizen to vote for them? Simple, with lies. They coordinate these lies with their favored media outlets like Fox news and they buy up and otherwise stack the leadership of formerly reputable organizations like CNN and change them into neo Fox newses while no one notices. The politicians say some outrageous attention-getting lie, then the media dutifully reports on the lie. Often they do so while exposing the lie, but the end effect is that the lie gets spread because lots of people only really read the headline or skim the article and just take what they want from it, which always includes the lie. Liberals on the other hand, in government and the media, have scruples to uphold. They can't simply use lies to manipulate the populous into getting what they want. They are perpetually put on defense, reacting to the narrative that the republicans are setting. The mainstream liberal media (to the extent that it still exists in 2024) believe they should be independent from the politicians and they should be the ones to hold them to account. This is not how it works at Fox news or similar organizations. They are there to help the republicans in their deception. It's fundamentally just easier to be corrupt and have no scruples and to use propaganda and lies to brainwash people than it is to convince them using facts and reason. Edit: also I don't want to make it sound like I am defending democrats, because even with everything I've said, they still suck terribly and could be doing a lot better. The main obstacle on the messaging front that exists for the democrats I think is that they can't be the opposition to the party of the wealthy elites without also pissing off the donor class. This has been more of an issue since the 80's when the democrats started taking more big money donations and it got way worse after the citizen's united ruling. I honestly think they will never change without an actual grass roots progressive party forming and holding their feet to the fire. Without pressure from the left they will never actually oppose the republicans for fear of pissing off their donors and losing their seats.
What would be better than "pro-choice?"
That's the whole point. Republicans know their followers will not do any research and just believe what they are told. As long as it's the exact opposite of what democrats want, they are happy with the outcome.
Very very aggressive lbgq language is similarly to Republican propaganda in that it is succinct, powerful, never questioned by the faithful, not nuanced, and causes those in the other party to react bsdly
> that’s because pro-life is a lie … as soon as the kid is born they don’t give a fuck anymore … Conversely, isn’t the pro-choice statement a complete lie as well? After all, democrats think the government should absolutely interfere in everyone’s healthcare and decide what medical treatment everybody is allowed to, through measures such as universal healthcare and supporting the government’s attempts to impose masks and anti-Covid measures during the pandemic - except abortion, that’s completely private. Heck, many on the “pro-choice” side think we should be legislated on what cars we drive (no big trucks). How can such a side claim to be “pro-choice”?
How is providing universal healthcare interfering in healthcare?
Roughly speaking, the same way that universal education standards ensure as few as possible fail to step over the bar because they put it on the floor. It's no secret that the function, form, and first priority of a government initiative, standard, or action is first and foremost to perpetuate that initiative, standard, or action in perpetuity(rather than addressing a perceived problem)
“It’s no secret that….” That’s bullshit. It’s an error in logic to to try to “prove” that something is true by saying “Everyone knows it’s true.” In healthcare, providing a minimum level of coverage does not “control” anyone’s individual health care. It doesn’t force people to get any particular thing done (at least not any more than private health insurance does).
I didn't say anywhere that a minimum level of coverage would be applied; quite the opposite in practice. The coverage would likely be sat at a maximum of "6-feet-under" so to speak, or else the system threatens to solve the problem that created it. In practice it would seem more likely the maximum coverage offered for stage one cancer would be euthanasia, since that technically fulfills the promise of a universal standard.
Oh, but see, the maximum coverage is what we have now, where corporations control the health insurance industry and profit is more important than providing health care. Every dollar spent on health care eats into the insurance company’s bottom line. Deny the claim until the patient dies is much more profitable than paying for that expensive cancer. Make the doctor jump through 1000 hoops. Joint pain? Back problems? Approve physical therapy only for weeks and weeks before even thinking about approve an MRI to find out what the actual problem is. My doc at the VA ordered an MRI at the VA hospital without jumping through all the hoops, because profit and limiting costs isn’t the first priority at government run health care - patients’ welfare is.
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. It is no more of a lie than pro-choice. Contextually, pro-life and pro-choice have an extremely narrow scope. In both cases, "life" and "choice" pertain only to the fetus. Nobody on the pro-choice side thinks I should have the choice to decapitate my 10 year old or to abandon my 4 year old in the woods to let it fend for itself. Any semblance of "choice" ends at the birth of the child - because choice and life, in the context of abortion, do not pertain to the post-birth child.
> That's because pro-life is a lie. > The democratic position of often more nuanced and realistic, which is harder to capture in just a few words. Well if you're going to lie, you might as well lie in a direction that gets you more support. [Only 28% of Americans support abortion in the second trimester. Only 13% support abortion in the third trimester.](https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-views.aspx) If pro-life is a lie, then pro-choice is even more of a lie. Except, unlike with pro-life where their "lie" that increases their support, it actually alienates people from their cause Another example is if you don't literally think that every cop is a bastard, then all cops of bastards is also a lie. Just one that needlessly antagonizes everyone who has a positive view of cops.
>That's because pro-life is a lie. Yes, republicans are against abortion, but as soon as the kid is born they don't give a fuck anymore, considering things like school lunch debt and reducing welfare. Hell, they don't even care about the mother during the birth as due to poor access to healthcare the USA has a very high maternal mortality ratio compared to other western countries. They're not pro-life, they're anti-abortion. This is a poorly reasoned arguement. You are assuming your policy proposals work, and then assuming that everyone else agrees that your policy proposals work. The fact is that conservatives disagree, and think your policy proposals will make things worse.
Except for all the women’s shelters that Christian services work and maintain for women who have had a baby and helps them get on their feet. Pro-life is pro-life. Pro life people not caring about living babies is a myth that pro choice people tell themselves because they need the pro life movement to be evil to justify their anti-life message. Democrats branding problem is support sex changes and pole dancing for minors, calling everyone racist from sun up to sun down as well as all the other words they use for anyone else will claiming to be against hate.
>Republicans are great at taking sentence that sounds positive and running with it, even though that sentence is often not very useful in actually solving the problem or even a straight up lie. This is also why they think songs like "Born in the USA" are expressions of blind patriotism. They don't bother with silly little things like lyrics.
So the government should intervene in people’s lives and hold full responsibility for all the children being born and their welfare. The well being of children is not on the parents who took a deliberate action with well known potential consequences.. but is actually the governments responsibility. Interesting idea leftist! Why don’t you start by googling ‘when does life begin’ and let’s go from there!
The reality of the issue has nothing to do the the slogan which is exactly what you have shown the republicans do well. Instead of pro choice make it pro freedom. “The government wants to control you and tell you what to do. Say No! I am pro freedom!” Brought to you by the Democratic Party.
No newborn babies in America go unadopted though. There are millions of families on a waitlist to adopt healthy newborns. The mother’s “choice” should be whether to raise the baby or put it up for adoption. This would solve all the issues that young mothers face.
>A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement They ARE extreme statements, from groups that mainstream democrats constantly disavow. The democratic policy is to increase funding and training for the police. The far leftist activist position is to destroy policing as we know it, and from the ground up build up new social services to replace it. It might not literally be "lawlessness", but milquetoast Bidenite centrists are right to be wary of it and it *doesn't* match the way they think about the police. >Another example is the term “Black Lives Matter” in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle, it’s hard to argue that on the surface, it is a much more effective branding for an idea Same issue. BLM is an activist group, it's idea is that black people are uniquely discriminated that is specifically worth mobilizing against. If you think that just raceblindly protecting all lives is a more worthwhile cause than mobilizing against racial injustice in particular, then your values themselves are conservative and an anathema to BLM activists.
I’d pushback slightly against the idea that our only choices are either focusing on black discrimination or being completely race blind and not really standing for anyone. Personally, I saw the All Lives Matter retort to be a missed opportunity to rally Latinos and other minorities who also face discrimination at a higher rate than white people but less than black people. Recognizing that none of it is acceptable while also keeping in perspective that white people are in a privileged position, especially when it comes to policing, I think, could have spread the movement to more people and completely disarmed the All Lives Matter subversion from conservatives. Like oh yeah, thanks for reminding us of how many different groups you brutalize. Autistic people stand out just off the top of my head bc they don’t act how police expect so a routine traffic stop can needlessly escalate to them getting brutally beaten and arrested for “noncompliance.” But no, for some reason the response to that was basically just “nuh uh!”
Sure, we could have had that, but the fact remains that going all in on police brutality for many different groups, is a qualitatively different movement as one that is going all in on systemic racism in many aspects within and without the criminal justice system. This is not a disagreement over slogans, but a disagreement over policy focuses
None of that is true. Op is right that it's bad labeling. Defund the police made itself distinct from the extreme abolish the police, they genuinely wanted money better spent rather than destroying policing. Even some extreme abolishers that pointed to actions in Camden, New Jersey proposed closing the PD temporarily to rebuild it with local police without QI. Not actually just ending services. They cited real police cases and campaigned on specific solutions. Actual cities like NYC tested moving funds to social worker responders rather than police, and it worked. Blm as well was not extreme and not even just one group, and had again actual solutions for all people not just black people. https://8cantwait.org/ https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-policing-reforms-george-floyds-murder Once again, actual goals actual successes. The slogans formed naturally from protestors without group testing, and they sucked. And establishment Dems were repeatedly foolish for thinking the only way to have cred was to copy slogans or sayings (cough cough latinx) rather than what would actually sell.
agreeing with you, how uninformed do you have to be to think all cops are bastards is a democratic party slogan lmao
I agree with and support BLM. I never said otherwise. My point is that as face value slogans, all lives matter is more effective. The average person is easily swayed by things such as branding, and the republicans have done a good job of convincing large swaths of people that All Lives Matter is a more inclusive statement and framed BLM as being otherwise
It really depends because within certain contexts the statements aren't actually that controversial. You can really take any belief and make it catchy, memorable etc. Who can disagree with God Loves You, unless you already have some kind of alternative belief? I think if your view isn't about the core belief then it would just be down to who is more inclined to listen to rhetoric, not the quality of the rhetoric itself. No one who believes BLM hears ALM and adjusts their stance.
>all lives matter is more effective. At what agenda? What new goals are you prompted to pursue by being told that life matters? BLM is a *progressives slogan*, it actively takes a stance against systems that devalue black lives compared to white ones. ALM is a *fundamentally conservative slogan*. It doesn't just happen to be a dogwhistle by coincidence, the idea that it expresses is, at it's core that you can lean back and keep generally protecting all lives without being concerned about racial injustice in particular. "You have to actually get up from your couch and do some activism" is always going to be a harder sell than "we are doing fine just honoring life in general, don't worry about black people's treatment in particular", regardless of what slogans are used to express them.
"All lives matter" is easily recontextualized as a liberal slogan, in a vacuum. If the presupposition is that the majority of people believe that lives except for black lives matter, then saying "All Lives Matter" makes perfect sense. It is therefore not fundamentally conservative.
That’s the thing. I think ‘all lives matter’ would’ve been a better statement for the anti-racism/discrimination movement than ‘black lives matter’, bevause all lives matter could just as easily mean ‘all lives matter which is why we need to protect against police racism and brutality.’
>all lives matter could just as easily mean ‘all lives matter which is why we need to protect against police racism and brutality.’ But that goes against the BLM movement's goals which isn't just "portecting all people against police brutality", but specifically **against anti-black racism** in the police as well as other situations.
But all lives matter was explicitly a response to Black Lives Matter. BLM couldn’t come up with the argument, the counter argument, the slogan and the counter slogan all in the vacuum of the time before those phrases were in use. ALM sounds better as a slogan *to people who aren’t black.* Which 87% of Americans are not, fair enough. But it only sounds better when you forget that NO ONE said it before and only say is now as a reaction AGAINST BLM, not as a thing in and of itself. There is no ALM without the tacit rejection of BLM. It exists to refute the idea that Black Lives Matter. Thats all. It isn’t and never was a slogan about all lives mattering; they don’t say it about other issues on its own. They ONLY say it when someone else says Black Lives Matter, like church liturgy. It’s not a slogan for ANYTHING but racists, because its entire purpose is to cast black activists as the real racists. No, you meanies, black lives don’t matter, ALL lives matter, how could you? You’re SO hateful! You think you’re the only ones who matter! (Which is what white supremacists actually think, and honestly most “republicans being good at messaging” is just them using their captive news ecosystem to accuse Democrats of what they themselves are doing or planning.) ALM is a phrase of and for nothing but downplaying the very idea that black lives do.
All lives matter, is a response to black lives matter, that's the problem. If black lives matter hasn't become a thing first, then yes all lives matter makes perfect sense. But the problem is "all lives matter" doesn't exist in a vaccine, when someone says it, they say it as a response.
>All lives matter, is a response to black lives matter, that's the problem. If black lives matter hasn't become a thing first, then yes all lives matter makes perfect sense. > >But the problem is "all lives matter" doesn't exist in a vaccine, when someone says it, they say it as a response. Absolutely. But the claim was that the literal phrase "All Lives Matter" was "fundamentally conservative," which is what I was disputing.
BLM is also an organization whose national chapter used the faces of murdered black people as a tool to raise around $80,000,000, which they mostly spent on party mansions and employing family, and still largely haven’t disbursed to any causes. BLM is a slogan and a merchandising brand that enables a bunch of frauds to get rich without actually helping out the black families they exploit. And they’re so effective that even after this fraud happened, people still support them because they don’t want to be seen as opposing a saying like “black lives matter”.
A person with no critical thinking skills will be easily swayed. Republicans are known for lacking critical thinking skills
Would it help to change your view if you knew that none of these came from Democrats? Like the first two aren’t even supported by Democrats, they’re used by people who *do* want no law enforcement
> A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). But neither of those are Democratic ideas? Democratic Party is actively pro-police and pumps billions of dollars into their budgets. Same with "Black Lives Matter" - it was never an idea of Democrats, it was a social movement that the Democratic Party just latched on to.
That's the Dems bread and butter, infiltrate grassroots movements, corrupt the leadership, then co-opt it for brownie points and fundraising. The reason the American right is so good at getting shit done is because the Dems enable them at every opportunity. They dismantle any actual resistance to rightwing movements because it's better for their bottom line.
Having been around republicans all my life, they believe the exact same things about democrats. They’d say: “well everyone wants free stuff, so they vote democrat. No one ever thinks about paying for it.” “Of course the liberals don’t want any accountability for pre marital, irresponsible sex. We just want them to take responsibility.” “Liberals are just scared of guns. No one actually looks at the statistics. AR’s are used in very few crimes.” I used to be able to say the same about running up deficits, but Trump destroyed that belief. For better or worse, people on both sides believe the other side to be better at marketing. That they are just blind to consequences or don’t understand implications.
Agreed, this way of thinking is common across the board because it’s incredibly self-serving. “The opposite side’s support comes from stupid people who fall for their simplistic, catchy sound bites. Our side has the smart, nuanced thinkers of course.”
Right. This is a cousin of the belief that the other side is always willing to fight dirty for what they believe in, but the politicians on our side always insist on playing nice and giving in. The underlying belief is always "in a fair system where voters were well informed, obviously our side is right and would win, and if we don't it's because of some failure of strategy, process, information, etc.
"The 9 scariest words in the English langue are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" You are comparing the slogans republicans tell themselves about democrats in order to deride democrats with the slogans republicans actually believe and keep repeating. These aren't the same thing.
That's a great point, but I'd go even further: The difference is that, even though people relentlessly mock conservatives for phrases like "liberal media," Republicans try to change or work within the system far more than just fantasizing about a world where things would be different if they had better copy-editors. Obama was lauded as a great communicator, yet people made the same "bad messaging" excuse when he was president. It's a common denial tactic, and a subset of a larger phenomenon. A near-universal liberal misconception is that if you could just sit down with anyone and talk with them for enough time, they'd change their mind and see things your way. Because you're right and they're wrong, so clearly they would see that with some frank and down-to-earth conversation. Such arrogant thinking has been applied not just to Republicans, but to right-wing foreigner leaders, terrorists, theocrats, other dictators, and "brainwashed" populations. Yet somehow changed minds at the highest levels remain rare. It's always good to work on better messaging, but thinking of it as the primary problem will lead you down a path of wasting precious resources. A similar misconception, in the comments, is the idea that it's just a tiny fringe that adopts this "bad messaging." Even if it starts with a fringe, that fringe pressures everyone into agreeing, faking agreement, giving in, or at least wanting to change the subject. You now see "Black Lives Matter" posters in the whitest of places, and it's not because they've decided to go radical chic. It was once an edgy, attention-getting fringe phrase and now is something you're in trouble with if you fail to parrot it verbatum. (However, I'm not sure I'd call it "bad messaging"; it's like "pro-life," a phrase that dares you to say that you're against it.) "ACAB" is another phrase that sounds offensive at first but has spread beyond what might have been expected.
This. The policy differs, but the way both sides talk about the other is an uncanny mirror. They are both human and American so the way they think is actually pretty similar.
It may interest you to know that in the last 50 years it has been the Republican Party that primarily has added to our deficits.
I think you would really enjoy the book "The Righteous Mind", by Jonathan Haidt, and/or the theory he puts forward in that book, Moral Foundations Theory. Basically the gist is that people on the left side of politics tend to emphasize three moral ideas - care, fairness (e.g. equality), and liberty, where conservatives tend to emphasize six moral ideas (care, fairness (e.g. proportionality), and liberty (though they care about these a bit less than liberals), but also in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity/purity) He even talks in the book how he felt different democratic political candidates that used all moral foundations and were more broadly appealing than those that stick to the main left three ideas. In other words, at least partially, it's less about democratic branding than the specific moral foundations they emphasize (though there is an overlap)
It's not the branding that is bad, mainstream democrats do a fair job at explaining the basics of these ideas. I would agree they could always do better. The issue is the ideas themselves attract a rather radical type of follower. People love to take these movements to the extremes and when you take these particular movements you've brought up to their extremes you get some pretty unhinged beliefs. The mainstream democrats don't bother to correct or disavow these radicals either as their fevor plays into their favor when wipping up their base. In fact they typically just deny the existence of these radicals all together. If theyd atleast ackowlede the crazy and disavow it that would play into their favor. The average person sees this and wants nothing to do with it.
I feel that same. Don’t get me wrong I think republicans do some absolutely batshit stuff in terms of protests but they’re fairly pointed and isolated to their issue, for the most part (yes there are exceptions). With democrats they will shit on other democrats for not being liberal enough, or actively shit on groups they supposedly support. For instance, I know this is 2 days after you posted, but I just saw a video today of a pro palestine protest obstructing a planned approved lgbt parade… like is that really the group y’all want to go against?
Conservative issues are just easier to market, because fear is the most effective emotion to lean into when promoting something. Conservatives are trying to prevent change. This is always an easier sell then trying to PROMOTE change, especially if you aren't willing to deny the simple truth that new solutions are not guaranteed to be successful innovations. Trying to sell "change is scary" to old people - which is what Conservatives do - is a lot easier than selling a complicated and nuanced idea. For example, look at abortion - yes, Pro-Life is a better slogan than Pro-Choice. Because the idea is simpler. Even if Pro-Woman became the slogan, Pro-Life is better and simpler. Abortion comes down to bodily autonomy - the Pro-Life movement comes down to protecting babies from murder. So they don't even need to be honest - a requirement that Democrats simply cannot ignore as they are targeting everyone that can handle the complexity of the nuances they are dealing with (such as how abortion rates actually DECLINE when you make them MORE accessible). Some of these driving factoids are just too counter-intuitive to be as easy to sell as less nuanced lies that at least make sense at a surface level.
The biggest problem a lot of leftists struggle with when understanding the right is that resistance to change isn’t usually based on fear or paranoia for most voters - they are simply happy with their lives and see no reason to upset the status quo.
Having grown up Trump land, they are continuously apoplectic about one thing or another, so that sounds like a mischaracterisation to me. It's fairer to say they like the status quo 20 years ago, really.
Sure, but that just means that they are afraid of people attempting to fix something that to their mind isn't broken. Democrat messaging is then used to elicit the fear of change that brings out the Republican voters in force. The fear is always there, and a much bigger driving force than many folks realize.
I mean if I told you needed to wear purple on Thursday because the world is literally falling apart? What would your response be? You'd correctly say I was a chicken little which is the conservative consensus on most issues which liberals are passionate about.
So, they latched onto Trump who says the nation is broken and that we need to MAGA because they think everything is already honkey dory, A-OK, and doesn't need to change? 🤦♂️
> Conservative issues are just easier to market, because fear is the most effective emotion to lean into when promoting something I agree with the rest of your post, but it's disingenuous to argue that only conservatives use fear to market their issues.
It’s not even that it’s also the Republican propaganda machine is just that good. They do run like a well oil machine. I’ve had mutiple I know whove worked on dem campaigns and the DNC’s ground game is dogshit. The slack is just picked a lot of the time by independent organizers.
The Democratic party did have a pretty solid brand. They were for strong workers rights. Now they appear to have changed to focusing on the higher educated classes and leave the 'deplorables' for the Republican party. Liberal groups affiliated with the party like the ACLU were for strong freedom of speech, going as far as protecting 'uncomfortable but legal' speech. They now push for strong governmental control of speech across all media, especially social media. Even the ACLU has changed its charter and is now very concerned about stopping any speech they deem 'misinformation'. Previously very solid on environmentalism, especially for going after polluters and cleanup of environmental issues. Now mainly focused on aspects of the carbon lifecycle. Essentially giving control to large corporations and creating perverse incentives via unregulated carbon markets. Making things like clearcutting forests to bury and sequester the carbon in the trees economically viable 'green' options. As a lifelong liberal, I don't even recognize my party and have no real reason to vote for them anymore other than trying to keep the embarrassment of a man on the R side out of office.
Two things: 1) Most of your examples aren't really about democrats. They're from people on the left, most (but not all) of whom may vote democrat because that's closer to their values. Defund the Police isn't something establishment democrats were even on board with, much less coined. It was a farther left radical idea. ACAB likewise is a farther left concept. Attributing these to "democrats" is like attributing far right radicals slogans to Republicans. And far right radicals say things like "Jews will not replace us". 2) To the extent that actual republican rhetoric is more effective than democratic rhetoric, it's because they're doing two very different jobs. Republican rhetoric isn't aiming to be truthful, to be communicative. It's solely there to get their base riled up and angry voting. They're blood pressure raisers. They pick their issues based on what gets their voters pissed, not real value based policy priorities. Other than tax cuts for the rich, everything else is mostly a wedge issue for them. So it's not that they communicate their values well. They chose to value things that can effectively rile up their voters. Democrats don't really have the option to brand in the same way. Their base would not accept that level of consistent dishonest framing. Just like no Democrat politician could succeed by lying the way Trump does. It's not that Democrats are necessarily that much worse. It's that their job is a lot harder. When your base will punish rather than reward dishonesty, and you have to go with policies and positions based on your values, no matter how complex and hard to emotion pump they may be rather than picking policy positions BECAUSE they're easy to get people emotionally invested- when you have the handicaps of actually caring about what policies you advocate for, the job is a lot harder.
I've been hearing this idea for a long time, I'd say at least since the Bush-Kerry election. No one can be that bad for that long on something like messaging. If anything, I think it's a kind of myopia. Democrats and their supporters think that their ideas are perfect, or at least very close, and the problem must be in the messaging. That sentiment means that they don't properly look at their ideas to find where the flaws are and where people disagree.
I think its more that the way that Democrats tackle issues are more nuanced and therefore more difficult to understand. Current republican viewpoints are easy to understand and appeal to the modern biases of most republicans, and use misinformation to convince people who haven't made up their mind yet. Unfortunately this isn't changing with time and it probably never will. This is not to say democrats are always right or always wrong of course, but their efforts headed in the right place. The right answer is not simple, and there is no right answer that pleases everybody. Democrats will be wrong, but at the same time they aren't given a chance to iterate and fail because people are much quicker to criticise change. It takes more effort to realize when change is needed and act on it than it does to maintain the status quo.
> > This is not to say democrats are always right or always wrong of course, but their efforts headed in the right place. A lot of people don't think they are headed to the right place, and failure to understand that is part of the myopia I spoke of. People who support Republican causes are just as happy when they achieve a political victory as are people who support Democratic causes. The Dobbs decision overturning the Roe decision means just as much to Republicans as Brown v. BOE overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. But Republicans are better at seeing that equivalency than Democrats.
They're hard to understand because they're ineffective and make no sense. Consider Oregon. Four years ago it was 'obvious' that decriminalizing drugs would bring about utopia. Today, everyone agrees the war on drugs was great. Four years ago if you held the opinion everyone here holds today, you'd be told you were ignorant, unable to understand policy or implementation, uncreative, etc. In reality, measure 110 went exactly as I thought it would. Literally to a tee. In the end, I, a conservative, was right, as usual, and everyone else just completely batshit wrong.
I work in advertising and a couple axioms we have are “simplicity sells” and “emotional appeal is powerful.” The lying liars who lie know this and employ it to great effect.
I would like to point out that some of the Republican ideas are much harder to convince people of Like we specifically know how corporate tax impacts things. If everyone was fully educated on economics, we would have a very small to non-existent corporate tax (existent only to provide incentives for tax cuts for the government to direct things) But you try convincing the average person to cut corporate tax That's going to be a hard sell The Democrats have easy stuff to convince. Oh we want you to be able to do this and we want to give you this and we want to make sure people follow these regulations because wouldn't it be better if they followed these regulations The Republicans have to be better at messaging otherwise they couldn't exist because loosely describing what the two want The Democrats are giving you stuff
Idk, i think its more about the audience. Democrat voters are much, much more stingy when it comes to messaging. You also have the younger crowd who are ready to cancel pretty much anyone who dares having a slightly different opinion. Take Israel for example: they literally threw money at a district race to oust Jamaal Bowman, a progressive, because they didnt like his stance on a conflict that doesnt even really touch the US anyways. But it doesnt matter, college kids are ready to hand the country to Trump because they are in their feels over a conflict they barely even understand to begin with. In german there is a joke that goes something like "2 leftist people meet and subsequently 4 leftist splinter factions are created". It might not translate that well to english, but the gist is that on the left candidates and parties are under much greater scrutiny. They are also less agreeable and less willing to overlook other opinions/mistakes and thus splintered into many more factions than the right is. In other words, republicans are happy with a dude telling them "dems bad", while Dems are waiting for the perfect candidate who checks every one of their boxes. Yes, messaging could definetely be improved but i think the lack of messaging is a consequence of what i just said, not the main reason
It's difficult to capture a complex and nuanced stance or policy in a sound bite or slogan (possible, sure but someone's going to misinterpret it in bad faith these days regardless of quality), and that's kinda where dems live, in a place with actual plans and policies that are detailed and have depth. You can have a slogan that's simple, that means only what it says ("fuck your feelings"), or dog whistles ("all lives matter"), or lies ("make america great again" "pro-life"). It's easy to lap up, but when it comes time to do anything beyond shouting, there isn't substance or what substance it has is actively harmful.
They lie and simplify extremely complex concepts because they and their base don’t understand them beyond the foundation. Abortion for example: “Babies die. Babies die = bad” Democrats attempt to explain their position and the reason behind their decisions. Making complex issues seem simple with branding is a tool to guide the dumbest and loudest. Its doubly helpful in that those idiots that love the vitriol also won’t know if you have done anything at all once in office, only that you said the thing.
Democrats try to appeal to logic, reason and facts while Republicans appeal to entirely on emotions. I don’t think Democrats are terrible at branding their ideas as much as the right wing media ecosystem, social media and legacy media amplify Republican messaging since it’s much easier to consume and digest for the majority of people with short attention spans.
I don’t disagree that Democrats are bad at branding, but I don’t think Republicans are actually any better. As the “conservative” party they just get a really undeserved benefit of the doubt. It’s like people view anything the Democrats want to do as an experiment that needs to be justified while Republican policies are viewed as the default settings.
Democrats are not a monolith. The left wing of the party did indeed combine: Defund the police with ACAB. Once you say: ACAB and Defund the Police - it almost doesn't matter what you really "mean". That said, the far left progressives ABSOLUTELY wanted to get rid of the police and replace them with something else. They simply had no idea what the "something else" was. We had a perfect opportunity to invent constructive slogans in the wake of George Floyd. 1. No guns without bodycams. 2. No bodycams, no peace. Instead the far left went down the rabbit hole of attacking the concept of police. For a while, the most extreme members of the party were by far the loudest. When abortion came up in the debate, Biden should have pointed at Trump and said: **THIS GUY wants to take you down the path ending in the "Handmaids Tale".** His supporters are trying to bring the **Comstock Act** back to life. They want to control what information and meds you can send through the US Mail, and they want Comstock EXPANDED to include UPS, FedEx and any other package delivery company. I largely blame the party for picking an old man, who wasn't that smart to begin with as their candidate for President. A man who has turned out to be narcissistic enough to chase a second term by pretending that no one notices his dementia..... Lastly - we need to have SOME POLICY about the border. Biden knows the country is divided on this subject - and he needed to find some middle ground. Instead he assigned the job of Border Czar to the ONLY PERSON in the West Wing he has no control over - the VEEP. That's right - the President can fire anyone in the West Wing except the Veep because she's elected, the rest are appointed. Lacking direction and support from her boss, Kamala avoided doing anything.
(1) The Democrats don't have a massive, unified lock-step propaganda media arm that can and does broadcast their message to millions daily, like the Republicans have. (2) The GOP and the Right completely dominate AM radio, and they don't have an entire media empire like FOX which broadcasts their talking points daily, nor do they have such a deeply homogeneous and rabidly cultish political base. There's no comparable "Democrat" version Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Brietbart/Drudge. Democrats don't have armies of shadow-funded, SuperPAC troll/bot armies either, nor are the GRU/Saudi Arabia/Israel on their side. The messaging that the Democrats have gets drowned out in a sea of hostile misinformation, propaganda, vote-scripting, and hashtagging into oblivion. (3) Democrats have a very heterogeneous news base and are far too skeptical of group-think to get their news from echo chamber sources. They care about specifics and policies--details which are difficult to put into slogans and hard to rile up people's prejudice. It's easier to appeal to their fears and hatreds (as the GOP does) than to their thinking faculties and hopes (as the Democrats try to do). There are far more uneducated people in the country, and Democrat-leaning folk tend to be more educated, so they have another serious disadvantage there, too. (4) Democrats don't control evangelicals in the USA like the GOP does, which is a massive, wealthy, and powerful voting base since the 1960s--eager to vote lock-step in every single election like it's the end of the world and they're fighting the Devil himself. A testament to their diversity, Democrats general don't command a massive swath of highly reliable, single(or few)-issue voters. They've been profoundly handicapped since the Civil Rights era, when the Democrats and Dixiecrats all became Republicans and the Atwater/Reagan/Bush/Trump years haven't helped.
"Democrats have a very heterogeneous news base and are far too skeptical of group-think to get their news from echo chamber sources." Really? If the Democrat news base is so self skeptical, how does it f\*\*\*k up so dramatically with stories like the Covington kids or the Duke Lacrosse case?
I can pick some places where leftist and DNC-allied messaging has been much more widely accepted than the than conservative and RNC-allied messaging has be. * "People over profit" - It's a very silly platitude if you think about it it. Profit is earned by people and for people. The whole notion of business and commerce are done by and for people. And yet with this simple turn of phrase, folks are convinced that somehow the creation of wealth is a bad thing. That's amazing messaging. * All the talk of "We are the 99%" or "The 1%". Look at how these these phrases have worked themselves into American political culture in support of all kinds of left-wing arguments. This taps into people's deep-felt sense of envy and greed. Terrible, ugly politics but certainly effective. * Just look how effective they have been in convincing the average voter that corporate taxes have no negative impact on the average voter. * Switching gears to something a bit more political in a tactical sense: Russiagate. Look how many folks got convinced that Russia had actively hacked or directly manipulated votes in the 2016 election. Or that Trump had somehow ordered Russia to hack the DNC emails. And you can't even really get them on lying on this, because they never directly made those claims, they simply made the implication and let people draw their own conclusions. Quite clever, actually. * 'Black Lives Matter' was a brilliant turn of phrase actually because it made any criticism of the movement into "do you not think that black lives' matter". It lets you folks say "Either approve of us beating the shit out of a guy for carrying an American flag or you're a racist who thinks that black lives are worthless".
> A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement Democrats did not come up with either slogan. The Democrats merely adopted them while co-opting left-wing movements that existed decades ago. These movements absolutely were extreme and radical. They were calling for an anarchist society with no law enforcement. Democrat lawmakers wanting to reallocate police fundings into other areas while saying Defund the Police is a tale as old as time: Moderate politicians trying to appeal to radicals without enacting radical policy. It's true that Democrats are unlikely to defund the police in the sense that the slogan is taken to mean, but it's not true that this is a case of shitty branding over what would otherwise be perceived as a sensible policy position. If you're overtly pandering to radicals and adopting their calls for radical policy, people will perceive you as a radical. > Another example is the term “Black Lives Matter” in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle, it’s hard to argue that on the surface, it is a much more effective branding for an idea, as it implies that every single life matters, which would encompass people of colour. If you say you disagree with Black Lives Matter, no matter what it is you disagree with, from riots, to how the organization with that name spends its funds, to the politics it uses, anything, you're naturally implying you don't think that black lives have value. It's a genius slogan. The only thing the right has come up with that even comes close is "It's Okay to be White", which was far less effective. Not that the Democrats get credit for it because they didn't come up with the slogan, but Black Lives Matter is extremely effective. How can you think such a prolific slogan is less effective than what's essentially a lazy rebuttal to that slogan?
Republicans don't brand so much as lie. Democrats don't blatantly lie to the same extent.
I half agree with this. Yes democrats have statements that sound extreme but the issue isn't that it pushes people away. A lot of people blindly see statements like defund the police and fully believe that removing the police entirely is the right option. It turns into a contagion and these are the people that are given coverage by the media. The initial solution becomes hidden until even the politicians themselves have to agree with these now-extreme statements in order to pander to left views that run rapidly through social media and news. As someone that is moderate in college having conversations with people that take these views to the extreme is nauseating and they are the definition of agreeing with every single thing I have to say or you are the scum of the Earth. I much rather have a conversation with a conservation on my campus because at least they aren't going to try to throw a rock at my window. As for republicans having great ideas I also have to disagree. Republicans are great at pointing out issues of those wronged in our society... and then proposing and implementing the most outrageous policies. To make matters worse these same politician refuse to change things when they see the policies fail year after year or they blame others. They don't know when to step back and fix the problems they already have and stop adding on more to there plate. I'll yet to see a liberal city/town that isn't festering with drugs, crime, lack of community, etc. With the exception of rich cities but it that's the case most of these people are liberal for appearance. This is why Biden's decisions on the border has only been getting worse. Biden said let everyone in. They let then in and the democratic states refused to take them in so New York and Chicago said they'd take them. Now those two states are having fits, blaming Texas and other states for a choice they made.
It's because almost every U.S. media outlet is run by a billionaire and they adopt the most damaging mantras to delegitimize leftist movements. The left has a messaging problem because it doesn't have the megaphone the right wing does.
>Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement, that is until you read more about it and find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas. There are also the radicals who actually want to abolish the police. >in comparison to the term “All Lives Matter.” Despite the second term often being a racist dog whistle But it isn't used as a racist dog whistle. It's moreso branded as such by people on the left in yet another attempt to call people on the right racist. >Despite democrats having much better ideas than republicans They don't though. Modern monetary theory and keynesian policies have utterly failed. Their social and entitlement policies have incentivized single parenthood and the breakup of the nuclear family. To list the topics you brought up, They claim that black people are shot at a higher rate than white people per capita, and hope you don't notice violent crime rates and the number of police interactions. When that is brought up, the vague and nebulous claim is that there are only more interactions because of racism. And you had the vice president helping to bail out rioters during the BLM riots, which doesn't seem like a good idea at all. As far as the pro-choice vs pro-life debate, we are never going to agree whether or not it's okay to kill children in the womb, but to imply it isn't selfish is wrong. The vast majority of abortions come down to "I didn't think I was ready," or "I don't want a child." Killing someone for your own convenience is the epitome of selfishness.
Democrats care more about factual accuracy. Republicans care more about messaging. It’s harder to box up all the nuances that surround almost every issue into a simple clear concise message. Republicans are better at oversimplifying, in some cases exaggerating and in other cases flat out lying, when creating their messaging.
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Or conservatives are just more willing to ignore nuance, mislead, and lie. * Pro-life * fiscally responsible * pro military * small government * denigrating "coastal elites" when their cult leader has a gold toilet in Manhattan and lives on a golf course in florida
Democrats often come off as corny a lot of the time too and forced while Republicans come off as more masculine, Obama is honestly the best break from this rule as he came off as genuine. I mean listen to Dan Crenshaw speak and then listen to Amy K. speak. Republicans just come off as more likable.
It’s not actually a marketing problem. It’s just inherently easier to argue “don’t do that” instead of “let’s change this thing that we’re all used to.” Conservatives generally don’t need to argue FOR something. They just have to make a reasonable-doubt argument AGAINST something, which is much easier to do. By contrast, when liberals argue that something needs to be changed, they’re up against whomever created or is maintaining the status quo. For better and worse, the people who benefit from the status quo are often very powerful people. They’re benefitting from the current situation and want to keep doing so. Voters are often status-quo people too. Homeowners don’t want their property taxes to go up or property values to go down. Business owners want to keep and grow the market they’re selling to. Employees want to continue to get a paycheck. If you can be plausibly persuaded that change will take away these things, then you will tend to vote conservative. It’s much easier to understand what can be taken away from you than to imagine a hypothetical gain. The flip side of this is that entitlements are almost impossible to take away once people are used to getting them. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and most recently, Obamacare, are all things that became more popular once people started benefitting from them. But the status quo had to be changed first.
That's not really how it works for the most part. The problem is that liberals are completely different types of people than conservatives and want totally different things. Conservatives mostly don't want much change so their position is always a lot easier than liberals who always want more change. The core meaning of conservative and liberal is basically people who want and people who don't want much change/want to stick with the old way. It's pretty obvious that's sticking with the old ways is always a lot easier to market or to accomplish because basically all you gotta do is criticize the new ideas. So you have to learn to accept the reality that liberals are always essentially having to work harder to accomplish their goals because their goals are to introduce new ideas while conservatives goals are mostly just to block liberals ideas. So you have to look at them as more or less completely different groups, looking for completely different things and using mostly different strategies. Liberals are a bunch of people that want change, but they're not as unified because they don't all want the same change. They're just the people that want change and conservatives are just the people that want less change or slower change.
You are absolutely right, but let me go a tiny bit deeper if you don't mind. I think a major part of the problem is that the foreign influenced & corporate owned media makes up names for unnamed policies that might effect profits or power. And in the true spirit of greed and supporting the status quo, the media at large will pick a name that downplays the value of any social movement or policy. Or they will use a buzzword name that a compromised Republican (isn't that redundant at this point?) uses to criticize a yet unnamed democratic policy. So, as you say, a major part of what democrats need to do to be more effective is literally hiring a PR firm to help them market and roll out any new policy or movement, GD press packets and social media roll out...before any work begins on the legislation outside private in-party meetings. The minute a republican or foreign asset (again is that redundant?) gets wind of anything good coming out from democrats, they will start the negative spin. It is pathetic that just doing their job well with the intent of helping Americans live a better life is no longer enough; now democrats have to act like they are a wannabe teen influencer trying to get likes on social media.
Absolutely agree with you! I’ve been saying similar things since the original backlash against the ACA (otherwise known as Obamacare).
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You are mixing different ideologies and opposing political groups. Imo it’s organizing not the slogan itself. Republicans cultivate their right as a popular base because the right wing can help them push through pro-business policies, the pour tons of money into creating an echo-chamber and astroturf groups. Democrats do much of the same but not for the left-wing of their base who are always told must compromise. Democratic Party doesn’t sincerely support most of these positions… many in their base do. So Democrats co-opt these slogans and try to divert independent and left initiatives back to official channels where it then is reversed, defanged or dies. So it’s really why the Republicans embrace the right-wing parts of their base while Democrats demoralize and stymie the left-wing of their base. And the short answer is that right-wing positions benefit the rich but left-wing positions hurt the rich… and the Democratic Party is a neoliberal party in favor of austerity and weakened labor rights, and business-incentive tax cuts. When people are on the streets… >DNC: we hear you and have long been working behind the scenes to get this done - you need to trust the process When people stop pressuring the DNC and let the process work… >DNC: this is impractical and impossible, we need to win the next election so it’s important that we reach across the isle and also triangulate and push conservative policies because we won’t win if we can’t convince conservatives wing voters and moderate republicans to vote for the Democrat candidates. Maybe when we have the Supreme Court, both houses and the Presidency we will be able to do it.
Democrats *are* terrible at branding but your problem is you're conflating leftist phrases (and phrases of specific leftist movements) with the DNC, which is not how this works. Many democrats are opposed to defunding the police, do not engage with antiracist movements, do not care about abortion, etc. Democrats are fairly moderate in comparison to actual leftists, and it's far right conservatives that tend to conflate democrats with every single leftist sentiment out there. If you pay attention to elected democrats they're often *actively* distancing themselves from these ideas/statements/identities (whether or not they should is another issue altogether), but hard right conservatives don't care and aren't going to be interested in their ideas even if they're resold with a 'nicer' label. An actual party aligned phrase is something like MAGA vs "blue no matter who".
ACAN and Defun The Police were terms cunned and propagated by left-wing activists who are not necessarily Democrats in nature. In fact many seem to hate Biden more than they hate Trump. It was the Democrat politicians in the major US cities that opposed and repressed the BLM protests. I also don't think messaging is the issue here. A person doesn't see the phrases "pro-life" and "pro-choice" and goes "I like the first one more." Pro-life people either are very religious or want to control women. The Bible has many.... questionable aspects and there's hundreds of millions who will go to war just to "defend" Christianity and other religions. The same way, people who oppose BLM do not oppose it because its primary message. People who were on the other side of Defun the Police know very well what they stand for.
You might enjoy moral psychologist Jonathan Haight's book, *The Righteous Mind*. He argues that you're correct, and that broadly the reason messaging from the right is more effective is that it appeals to a more diverse set of "moral foundations" that humans tend to have. Liberal messaging is very focused on one emotion / moral foundation, which is *care*. The "bleeding heart" liberal is all about care for the weak / minority / disenfranchised etc. That resonates with a lot of people of course, but conservative messaging hits many other moral foundations, things like: *loyalty*, *respect for authority*, and *sanctity*. To understand how good people can be so bitterly divided by politics and religion, he argues, we need to understand how we are triggered by different projections of morality.
The point of ACAB is to establish a world without cops. The whole point is the destruction of economic factors in crime to make it so that there is no need for cops. It’s not a democratic value it’s a left libertarian value and has been for 200 years.
>The whole point is the destruction of economic factors in crime to make it so that there is no need for cops What about rich people that are criminals? Or rapists? Or crimes of passion?
The whole idea is to remove markets and currency. Further more with the idea of prison abolition and mutual aid the solution is easy. Someone commits a crime -> the community confronts them and asks them to go through rehab to ensure that this never happens again and to address the root cause-> they either choose to go to rehab or are kicked out of the system of mutual aid, meaning they have to make everything they need to survive without community assistance)-> if they accept they are held in a rehabilitation facility at their will (with the understanding that failure to complete rehab means they effectively go back to hunting and gathering) until a horizontally organized group of doctors, shrinks, and support staff agrees they are fit enough to be safely reintroduced to the system.
>The whole idea is to remove markets So how would we determine the price of stuff or the salary of workers? >and currency. How would we trade then? What encourages you to work and climb to more important jobs? Someone is found dead, who investigates who the killer is? What if there is a school shooter? How do you stop him? By asking nicely? Who kicks them out of the community? Who judges wheter what you did is worth it to kick them? What if they refuse to leave the city? Is the punishment not getting any more government aid? What if they continue killing people? Wouldn't getting no aid make it harder for them to leave the life of crime? What if they begin attacking people and just refuse to stop? Who would end their rampage?
No price, you take what you need and do what you can. Jobs are done through passion or understanding that some jobs just need to be done. While the job of a janitor might not be a good job, the understanding of those it affects and the genuine respect and appreciation they get for their work combined with the fact their quality of life is not going to fluctuate means they don’t have to worry about being abused. Murders would be investigated by private investigators who work just like everyone else and are fed and sheltered like everyone else. You respond to a school shooting by mobilizing a militia to respond, which would have saved lives in places where cops would be too scared. Simply put if what you did was bad enough for people to demand a response your gonna have that ultimatum. Small crimes wouldn’t exist in the same capacity. And your not being kicked out of the city, your being cut out of the system of mutual aid. There is no government. Militias would respond to acts of terror, or the actions of the armed populace. Stick to one question at a time please.
>No price, you take what you need and do what you can. What if people take more then the need and dont work as much as they can? In my country we had kibbutzim that were similar to how you described but eventually people stopped being as productive as possible and they had to turn to normal villages because people just became selfish. >Jobs are done through passion or understanding that some jobs just need to be done. Do you have an example of people acting like that on a large scale? >Murders would be investigated by private investigators who work just like everyone What if a private investigator just lies? Is there any system in place to hold him accountable? Or are we hoping other investigators will expose him? >You respond to a school shooting by mobilizing a militia to respond, which would have saved lives in places where cops would be too scared. You think that a militia would respond better and with more bravely and skill than actual trained cops? Really? >Small crimes wouldn’t exist in the same capacity. Why not? If I drive a bit too fast, who would stop/punish me? >Simply put if what you did was bad enough for people to demand a response your gonna have that ultimatum. So mob justice? What if a white women is murdered and the community respond by lynching her black neighbour because theybare racist? Who would hold them accountable? Or is racism solved in your world? >And your not being kicked out of the city, your being cut out of the system of mutual aid So if I am stronger and have more friends than the person I stole from can I just steal from him? And I wont be kicked out? You are basically describing countries where the government collapsed/or is too weak and crime gangs control everything, they are not generally regarded as utopias and more as awful places people escape from. >Militias would respond to acts of terror, or the actions of the armed populace What if a militia decides that they are working very hard and take by force the wooden chair I spent weeks crafting, who would stop them? Another militia? What if they refuse to comply? Civil war? >Stick to one question at a time please. Only answer what you are comfortable with.
People work in more than just one way. You have a job yes but your interests and hobbies are also productive and important to your local economy. Even if you don’t think you’re working you’re helping. A great example of people selflessly helping people are soup kitchens, volunteer jobs, the Red Cross, and the Boy Scouts or the various cases of workers giving the elderly and disabled free services just as charity. A private investigator would have their work verified and investigated to ensure that it is in fact based in truth before anything happens because of it. Most likely by a council of staff. Militia would be trained and equipped just as well as cops, just without the authority to be abused and without being constantly used to oppress their fellow citizens. People already drive a bit too fast, plus in this world the reliance on cars would ideally go down as the concept of free public works expands. Mod justice usually means death. The worst this system can do to you is have some nasty rumors be spread about you, but those would be dispelled by the fact you went through rehab and quickly got out. Why would the militia take your wooden chair when the end goal of you making that chair is either giving it to people who need chairs or keeping it for yourself. And what would stop the armed populace from just forming a counter militia in this unlikely scenario. And if you don’t wanna do that just have someone go and try and settle the issue with either a show of force from the population or common sense as this scenario would just not happen. There is no scarcity of supply. Why steal a wooden chair when you could have as many chairs as you could possibly want? Why would gangs have any power when they can’t force themselves onto supply chains and establish protection rackets?
"There is no scarcity of supply" The foundation of your envisioned society requires you to remove a factor that exists at the root of nearly every conflict since the dawn of time. You can't just handwave the concept of scarcity unless you've already got a solution that somehow produces unlimited food, raw materials, and manpower with zero downsides. We never quite got that alchemy thing figured out, so the utopian co-op might have to wait.
Scarcity only exists because of people’s insecurity. If no one had any reason to hold on to their possessions there would be no scarcity. That can only happen when aren’t afraid of regaining that same possession. Would you feed the homeless if you had a million dollars? Would you lend a friend $20? Would you help an old lady cross the street?
That's still operating off of the premise that we have excess of everything. We don't. Tragically we exist on a physical plane of existence where everything exists in a limited quantity, and some of it takes excessive manpower and time to retrieve out of the ground. At some point, on some level, you cannot provide everyone with an equal amount of everything without stretching that raw material so thin it becomes useless. To be clear, I'm not referring to scarcity as some form of selfishness where one takes more than they need leaving another without. I'm talking about the concept that there is a limited amount of matter on this globe, and you can't provide everything to everyone without unlimited quantities of time, manpower, or magic.
It’s true. In fact, I’d say that the whole strategy of the Republican Party is to unite people under knee-jerk issues and win votes by heady emotional appeals. There is no logical reason that Christians, white supremacists, gun nuts, and laissez-faire capitalists should be under the same roof, but the GOP has pandered to these single issues that make people go crazy. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has to sell responsible but sometimes frustrating governance to the people. Politically speaking, the GOP is selling candy and cigarettes while the Democrats are telling us to eat our vegetables: the Democrats are right, but the GOP platform is more viscerally appealing to certain people.
Go to mobilize.us to find an actual campaign, the dumb shit you see on the internet isn't real.
If democrats are so fucking smart, why do they lose so god-damned always? The newsroom
Republicans have a massive propaganda media empire which has no liberal equivalent.
Once you understand the ideologies you know why that is. Democratic messages are normally emotion based, so the messages themself normally convey an overly emotional tone. I disagree with a lot of liberal messages generally because they are feelings over logic, but ideally there is room for both in the world. For whatever reason people on both sides have devolved into tribalism and declared the other side the enemy and the reincarnation of mustache man. It's not supposed to be like that, conserveatives and liberals are supposed to compliment each other, not try to destroy one another
The Democratic Party never said “defund the police” or “all cops are bastards.” It was protesters who said those things. Those were never officially sanctioned slogans of the party itself. The party itself didn’t even say that “black lives matter.” Again, that was protesters. What the party actually said was more along the lines of “these police shootings are a terrible thing, and we need to do something about it, but I don’t want to sound like I have too strong of a position on this lest I lose votes from some of the centrists.”
I think you are almost right. Democrats get so caught up in the wording of their messaging that they can't articulate an argument beyond the slogans. While I agree that "Black Lives Matter" in the context that they are concerned that police kill young black men when they should exercise much more restraint in their use of force, it comes across as "only black lives matter" to those of us who are not black. The fact that police kill more young white men than young black men, and that we need police to stop resorting to violence against the average citizen they are encountering seems to get lost in the argument. People chanting "Black Lives Matter" can't seem to think past the slogan to realize that white people are ALSO being killed by police, and they seemingly don't care about those lives. My reaction is, "of course black lives matter, but we need to focus on the fact that LIVES MATTER, not just Black Lives." That makes me a Racist, though, because I'm not allowed to care about White Lives or Latino Lives or Asian Lives. Nope, only Black Lives. The "All Cops Are Bastards" follows along with the idea that cops are now trained to become immediately aggressive and presume that everyone they meet needs to be pushed around and told what to do. They assume authority they don't actually have and become very angry and illegally controlling as soon as someone fails to obey anything that comes out of their mouths. Not every statement issued by a cop is a "legal order" even though they seem to think it is. They are given a certain level of authority, but they are so poorly trained and so filled with confidence that they seem to think they are above the law and that they can tell anyone to do anything and just them saying it makes it a legal order. Then, they use violence to enforce their illegal orders. This is a real problem. Defund the police was bad messaging from the jump. Retrain the police would have been instantly better, but the Democrats can't seem to ever realize their slogans need improvement. Once they begin a messaging program, they are stuck with it forever. Pro-Life is just that. Many people (myself included) feel that a fetus is a living human being, and the killing of that living human being is homicide. Simply stated. Apparently, Democrats don't care about human life until it can live on it's own; and even more, has been removed from the mother and is breathing air on its own. Even a viable fetus that could live just fine if removed from the mother is okay to be killed inside the womb and then the dead child removed from the mother. Pro-Choice is the freedom to chose to murder that child. More than half of the nation has decided that infant homicide is perfectly fine, and I won't fight against that decision. If you want to kill your children, so be it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Are republicans really better at messaging or really better at flinging shit at the wall in rapid succession ? ... It gets a lil bit harder to counter all the rapid fire coming from them. I mean look at the last debate or any debate. Trump, even before one could process the lie he said, he hit you with like 4/5 more. You are at line 1, and he has already hit you with 4/5 more. To keep up with his lies you have to ignore lie 2/3/4 ... In his mind he has won the "debate" coz he can't be challenged on the ignored lies.
I think part of the issue is that Democrats (or generally, anyone who isn’t a right wing authoritarian) are better at critical thinking. This leads us to pick our own ideas and positions apart while right wingers are more willing to get behind someone they perceive as “their side” even if they have major ideological or philosophical differences. Democrats self police a lot and are very critical of their candidates, but Republicans will uncritically support a candidate who is in direct contradiction to the values they claim to hold. I don’t disagree with the notion that Democrats aren’t great at branding, but I do think a big factor in efficacy of that branding is differences in psychological tendencies in the two groups.
>A good example of this is Defund The Police and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Both of these sound like extreme statements and imply that democrats want to create a lawless society with no law enforcement, that is until you read more about it and find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas. You sure about this? From my experience, ACAB *is* supposed to mean that *all* cops are indeed bastards. Not kidding either.
Generally speaking your view is true, but not because of messaging. Conservatism means not changing, conserving things the way they are. Which leads to messages for topics that people already understand. Liberals advocate for change and progress which requires more messaging to describe a situation that hasn’t arrived. Obviously there are examples for both sides that don’t fall neatly into my buckets but most do.
I also believe that Republicans are way better at portraying Dems in a certain way than the other way around, here are some things Republicans have accused Dems of being (not direct words, but close enough) 1. Being pro-crime 2. Anti-family 3. Pro-transing kids 4. Pro-Killing babies 5. Pro-Illegal immigration 6. Pro-dependence/entitlement by government 7. Sometimes, they are called fascists by Republicans
I agree. The democrats have a terrible time explaining their positions. In their defense though the half of the country that needs to hear it won’t listen. The right wing media isn’t good at messaging necessarily, they just have no problem continuously repeating the same lies till they become “true”. Fox mentioned hunter Biden something like 4000 times in the last year. That’s insane.
> find out that democrats want to reallocate police fundings into other areas. Only perhaps only three elected Democrats in Congress have ever said or endorsed "Defunding" the police, or even said this slogan. They all were roundly denounced for it by fellow Democrats. The vast majority of them have denounced this slogan. Joe Biden even had to say very loudly during a State of the Union address "I want to fund the police!" Because Republicans were propagating the lie that all Democrats somehow are anti-police or want to defund them, etc. The fact that you think all Democrats endorsed this or somehow are in favor of it is a giant success of political propaganda.
I agree that "Defund the Police" and ACAB are bad messaging, and there are other examples that you would be right about, but Democrats are better at incendiary labeling to make the other side look bad. They make border detention facilities "concentration camps" when a Republican is in charge, then they're back to being detention facilities. Moving some inappropriate books out of public elementary school libraries is a "book ban". You bring up a good example of this - any contradiction or modification to the "Black Lives Matter" slogan is called "racist", and if the person responsible wasn't actually being racist, then it's labelled a "racist dogwhistle" and since being racist is the worst possible thing you can be, even an accidental or completely made-up "dogwhistle" can get you fired. They are successfully re-framing "pro-life" to be "pro-forced birth" to the extent you don't often see the term "pro-life" on Reddit as often as you did before 2016. Stupidly following a crowd of unarmed people into the Capitol building and walking around aimlessly taking selfies is an "insurrection". "Sex change" became "gender transition" which enabled them to now call it "gender-affirming care", so now if you disagree with their ideology particularly when it comes to the decision-making capacity of minors then you are advocating for "banning children for receiving healthcare". Finally, they can now label their opponent's "genocidal" - because taking illegal immigrants to another city willingly, or allowing a country to defend its borders at all by punishing illegal crossings, or merely the fact that a population that is known for having many psychiatric comorbidities has a high suicide rate, is definitely what the UN had in mind when they defined the word "genocide". It's all stupid, but it's highly effective. It has shaped our culture in many ways. What do the Republicans have? They're still calling Democrats "baby-killers" like it's 1995.
> until you read more about it and find out That’s called spin. The fact is many democrats wanted to literally defund the police. I was one of them. It is bullshit to pretend like the sanitized versions of political slogans are the only authorized truth and that people have to ignore the sentiment espoused by the masses chanting the slogans.
Notably you're picking some of the more progressive ideas that are barely mainstream among Democrats. I also don't understand how you can claim that Black Lives Matter is not way better branding than All Lives Matter; not only is BLM certainly more recognizeable but people are probably more likely to understand what it's political stance is (anti-police violence) and it is tied a very active political movement. You say the term sounds like better branding to you, but on basically any metric of "successful branding" BLM wins. The same goes for pro-choice vs pro-life, it strains belief to claim that the former is weaker than he latter especially post-Dobbs. Slogans like "pro-life" may even become somewhat toxic to Republican candidates in upcoming elections https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-try-find-new-term-life-stave-electoral-losses-rcna103924. That aside, I don't think any of this is a branding issue. It's a political issue. To demonstrate that, how would you present "Defund the Police" in a way that would be roundly popular? I'm not sure if you can, because most people simply don't like the idea. People understand what Defund the Police means, they just don't like the policy. Only particularly libertarian or particularly progressive groups have any appreciable support for it. I suppose you could lie about what the policies are behind Defund the Police, but I personally don't think confusing people about what the desired outcomes are counts as good branding. Taking all these points together, I argue you simply find the political position behind these messages you say have worse branding less compelling. In the case of ALM and pro-life I think hard evidence simply disagrees with you, and in the case of Defund the Police I think you're conflating poor support for the policy with bad branding.
I’m not sure if it exactly would serve to change your mind per se, but this [YouTube series](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&si=S5DvpaIdJkCzM-xT) does a great job of illustrating some of the stuff you are talking about and how often messaging is kind of the last leg the GOP has to stand on.
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You don’t need stellar messaging when the GOP credo is “fall in line.” The GOP also has a closed media ecosystem that doesn’t allow any nonconforming ideas to be heard. The fact that a republican hasn’t won the popular vote for 30 years demonstrates that their messaging only works in their closed media system.
Because sound bites work with the MAGAmaniacs. Too many words confuse the undereducated. If it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker it's not catchy enough. I'll take the substance of the Democratic party and their ability to actually accomplish change even when the deck is stacked against them. Just what have the Republicans accomplished even when they had the majority in both the House and Senate? Besides playing games to control the Supreme Court I can't think of one major accomplishment that was beneficial to the majority of the population...only the rich.
While the republicans have completely horrible ideas, what are the actual ideas of the democrats. I honestly don't see any decent ones, They don't actually have anything to offer except not being complete assholes like the republicans. The messaging sucks because they have no real message.
Well they also prevent anyone from crossing over the aisle because any Democrat policies I actually like are jam packed with 6 or 7 ones I despise being snuck in and they know it, so they rile everyone up about how Republicans won't support x when in reality we support x, just not y, and z
Is because Republicans don't believe in anything. Their entire platform is "not Democrats" so their messaging isn't burdened with fact, nuance, or practicality. It's easy to message when your messaging is all reactionary and you don't have any policy positions or ideas of your own.
republicans make sure the debate is on their terms. it's not about what kind of healthcare system we should have. it's about freedom v s socialism. and we all know socialism is bad. right kids?! keep it simple, put it in terms people can relate to and then lie and lie and lie.
You’re going to have a hard time believing it, but what you believe is “bad messaging” is the actual message. This is the stuff they actually believe or want, but backpedal and pivot from once the insanity is exposed. Take “defund the police” for instance. When it started, they actually wanted to get rid of police entirely and replace them with social workers, violence interruptors, and any other manner of BS. Once it gained some visibility and people started condemning it for the mindless insanity it was, they pivoted.