Comment by beeflet
14 hours ago
The intention is to express political dominance. By panicking and responding emotionally, you are feeding the trolls. It is as much an ego trip for the right to act oppressive (within the bounds of "the rules") as it is for the left wing to act oppressed.
If the democratic party is going to win, they need to succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man. What we have had for the past decade is a ton of noise from the mainstream media explaining a million reasons why we should oppose Trump. The left wing does not equip it's supporters to argue against the right well.
Trump won in 2016 rattling on about Hillary's emails. Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1. He would have a single canned response and name for each of his opponents. The point is you have to agree on a couple of memorable weak points to attack.
> Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1.
Which 1? Building the wall? Draining the swamp? Locking her up? Making America great again? I may be missing more.
Those are just slogans. But in terms of arguments, I would say he had one major negative argument "Her Emails" and two major positive arguments "Make America Great Again" "Build a Wall".
The most important thing is that these are points that are so simple even an idiot can understand them.
I can't even keep track of all of trump's controversies because they are so numerous and complex. But if I was a democrat I would just stick to one or two points that even moderates can resonate with like the "Epstein Files" or Palantir or the nuclear secrets or something.
There were really two and you missed them both: she’s a Clinton. And she’s an aggressive woman.
> succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man
That is how democratic party loose and I suspect people who push for it know exactly that.
Trumo won by being emotional, entertainingly toxic and sucking media attention. "Stoic" calm just makes you look like a weak sucker.
Ffs dude it's lose not loose.
You missed a bunch of other ones.
One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)
Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.
He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.
Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.
They've been using the guns argument since at least Reagan, who passed gun restrictions as governor of California. I know I've heard it my entire life, but I've yet to see anyone even propose such legislation
There was the (embarrassingly bad, even if you like gun control) “assault weapons ban” but since then democrats haven’t even been able to consistently achieve the thing that Republicans often say they want instead of more gun laws: “enforce the ones already on the books” (this is so common I assume it must have been pushed initially by some major Republican figure, but I’m not sure who it was) so the risk of their passing substantial gun control laws today is extremely low, even with decent majorities in the legislature and holding the presidency.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)
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Crazy thing is that they are discussing taking guns from trans people.
It's now a cult and they're voting for him not for his policies.
"A republic, if you can keep it" -- Ben Franklin
I think this is a misunderstanding of how he works, and especially how he got elected the first time.
I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.
Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.
R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).
Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.
I could go on.
Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.
The right is a master class in political messaging. They learned this One Weird Trick™ to manipulate the masses: people are stupid and vote their emotions. By defining the language they win almost by default: family values, school choice, pro life, death taxes, etc.
They learned that it doesn't matter if it's true, relevant, or hypocritical, as long as it feeds fear and anger in their constituents.
The left fails because the issues they support can require nuance and consideration and that's a lot to ask of a voter who just wants to be told who to vote for.
My assessment isn't meant to be tribal, there's plenty to critique on the left from DNC leadership to "overexubernt" members whose excess is used to define the left as a whole (wokism).
It's heartbreaking that the divide is now complete and is not likely to change without some unfortunate actions.
I agree. It's all about the memes. I think this is a great teardown of the 2016 election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0&t=1567s
> ...as it is for the left wing to act oppressed.
I'm sorry, but "the left" hardly has a monopoly on that.
I think you're right actually. Now that I reflect on it, there are many times where the roles are reversed. For example, with this recent assassination of charlie kirk, the right wingers are role playing as the oppressed and are practicing the crybulling tactics of getting people fired from their jobs for politically incorrect speech.
But I think the right generally appeals to people with a more tyrannical personality, and vice versa.