Are we organizing anything for the runoffs? I assume they will be showered in money, every Georgia resident will get 5 texts/calls a day. But where dems will fail is digital. I’m sure AOC will try to convince them, and they will ignore her because they’re dumb.
Honestly aside from organizing against R’s, trying to get Nancy from the speakership would be a super worthy cause. She gets that seat and we’re fucked. 2 more years of failing leadership heading into 2022 is not something we can afford, If the moderates know a significant amount of progressives will stay home if they select Pelosi since Trump is out, that should add some pressure.
Like why the fuck aren’t they holding hearings right now about Trumps firing of a bunch of people? And their head election guy resigning? Now that those old ghouls don’t need votes or fear being mean to Donald would hurt you, fucking GO AFTER THEM. Let the lawyers ask the fucking questions not your stupid 10 minute monologue to try to get elected.
It’s really not. These guys think of themselves as good people, and they mostly are when it comes to their in-group. They can be swayed by their attachment to morality – that’s how the right turned them out starting in the 70s, by turning abortion into a moral panic.
So the house should sit around and do nothing as always? That didnt turn out well and his base came out anyways. They need to stop playing defense and get in game
I disagree that oversight will hurt them. But Pass some legislation. Do something to help.
I got this book yesterday and chunked down roughly half of it last night. I agree with the premise that we are basically just LARPing in places like this one and that the actual work is that of convincing people to switch sides.
I was feeling pretty hurt at the beginning of the book, but then it transitioned to telling me that the work I do of trying to persuade random trucking people is the right thing to do… so past me is thankfully in the clear morally lol.
A lot of people aren’t going to like what this book has to tell them, but I think it’s right. Our job is not to argue with other mostly like minded people. It’s not to argue at all. Nobody ever wins an argument really. Our job is to be the better person and have the conversation that these people need to soften their partisanship. Expecting to flip them on one impression isn’t realistic, we’re talking about the slow burn of changing minds.
I think absolutely every out in the deck that wasn’t the war of attrition that is winning these people over one yard at a time is gone after this election result. No more talking about how if we could just get our side to turn out we’d win. We need to be talking to their people not ours.
I have a feeling there’s actually a different thread for this, but I think this site should create a podcast. As hackish as it sounds as a concept, having 2-3 progressives/lefties, with one of them being a little more so-called “e-dem” (at least by the standards of this board, which would actually still make them pretty damn progressive for the dem party) would be a great mix.
I think it could be weekly, with the first half or so reacting to the news and dunking on all deserving targets across the spectrum, and the second half would focus more on activism. It needn’t be like the Pod Save America lanyard bros essentially signing people up to man phone banks and burn money sending it to Amy McGrath (although it could certainly turn into some fundraising) but rather a discussion inclusive of a lot of the concepts in this thread, along with other meta-strategic topics (eg. is “defund the police” a useful slogan politically?).
Is there an audience for that concept? For the first half of that idea, what are you getting that you can’t get from Pod Saves America, The Young Turks, Sam Seder, and Rachel Maddow?
A podcast like Chapo Trap House gets a following from having a uniquely socialist outlook. What’s the hook for getting people to listen to a bunch of nobodies riff on politics? At best, maybe it’s having a token e-Dem hang around for the leftists to dunk on and generally abuse.
I really don’t know, I think Conservatards may have just owned our souls tbh. My dad and a close friend are right leaning independents. I could talk with them for hours, they’d concede all key points and they’d be back w/ similar shit next time.
The main traits they share imo is that they are fundamentally unhappy with their lives and the right is amazing at stoking grievance and guiding people to choose their adventure as to why the left is to blame.
Like my friend, he makes like $750k a year… but he is short, bald, and unattractive. Gets furious to his bones that he is “discriminated” against for these traits yet all the “left” talks about is other forms of discrimination. The “left” refuses to acknowledge his “problems.” No way to talk him about of that logic, lol.
One of the most scarring incidents of his life is hiring an escort that blackmailed him for money and then ran out of the room screaming rape when he didn’t pay. This is, of course, a problem for which the left is to blame.
So what’s missing here I think is that we don’t give them anything to replace what they currently have… which is a dopamine pump that runs on grievance. You can’t just tell a junkie to quit cold turkey, you have to give them something to replace it. If there’s anything that the arrival of drugs that help opiate addicts stay clean has shown it’s that replacement works massively better than removal.
I’m not saying we’ve been successful at flipping these people in a consistent way yet, but I am saying that the future of the whole planet hinges on solving that problem.
I’m still working on it myself as I’m typing this.
Anyway, circling back. I think the fact that Trump bothered people like me was like the main thing that appealed to them. So I just completely stopped talking politics with them, and hoped they either didn’t vote or found a random personal reason to vote for Biden.
Yeah they enjoyed getting a rise out of you. Another dopamine pump. Watching you freak out was probably as fun for them as watching them freak out and say stupid shit is for us. Some of the people on this board get dopamine from trolling right wing people on FB. Just because we’re right doesn’t mean the mechanism is different.
I do want to mention here that I think there’s a tangible difference between poor conservatives and rich ones. Rich conservatives are significantly more likely to be unreachable. They have the time and resources to do the work and come to the right conclusions and use that time and those resources to instead construct an alternate reality around themselves to feel like good people (because otherwise they would have to feel like me and Johnny about their place in the world which I’ll be honest sucks a LOT and takes most of the fun out of winning at capitalism). That’s a much harder nut to crack than the white working class IMO.
The right time to get a rich conservative is before they get out into the real world. “It’s impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair was a smart guy who absolutely on the money about that.
Poor whites salary does not depend on accepting that the values of the GOP are good for them.
I don’t know, you’re probably right. But I feel like I get more out of this place than I do when I check in the other ones you mention.
It’s true that it would need a better concept, but I feel like some of the ideas in this thread are novel, and a podcast that developed / explained them would be interesting to me. There’s a pretty big market of left-leaning people looking for smart people to explain why what they believe is right and what they can do to create progress beyond donating.
If we do a podcast it needs to claim to be independent of either political party. I think ‘these people all suck’ is a great title for it actually. Just have it dunk on the establishment of both parties every single episode.
You want to find points of agreement with the people on the other side so that you can turn the conversation into a conversation. I really really dislike Nancy Pelosi, just for different reasons than they do. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
I’m telling you the goal is not to replace their sense of unhappiness with their lives. This life we’ve built, even out in the suburbs, is super toxic. Our politics are super toxic. Our politicians are actively making it worse. I can find plenty of shitty things to say about eDems and eRepublicans.
This is not about making them less angry, it’s about redirecting that anger toward the right people. It’s not about making them like the Democratic Party more, because that can’t even come from an honest place, it’s about convincing them that there is a voice that is covering things from their perspective that sees how stupid all of this shit is.
Both sides is amazing propaganda. We know that because it’s getting done to us constantly and it’s working super super well. The first step is to make these people hate the Republicans as much as they hate the Democrats.
EDIT: The reason I get to trucking people is because I understand, on a very deep level, what their lives are like. I went to a forum full of truck drivers, who HATE freight brokers like me (these guys definitely hate brokers more than they hate anyone for political reasons), and made them actively like me and call me ‘one of the good ones’. I got them to admit, in public, that the brokers they dealt with the most they have genuinely good working relationships with. I made them less radical, and I helped some of them be less conservative.
If you actually take the time to understand where people are coming from you can usually figure out how to convince them in their own words. You don’t get to use your own words because you’re trying to convince them not the other way around. These people are not going to become woke anytime soon, but thankfully that’s not the bar we’re trying to get over.
This is the way, but we need to target conservatives with it somehow to get them mad at establishment Republicans and how they betrayed Trump. Trump just attacked the GA sec of state and Kemp.