Dear Liberals, Stop Trying to be the Good Guy.
For decades the right has worked with single-minded focus toward one goal: winning. When they abandoned the idea of winning on the merits, they threw in with criminals with ravenous greed at the prospect of catching scraps from a gilded table. While evermore depraved acts were required to get “in”, the GOP leaned into the loopholes of the law in order to limit the ability of undesirables to vote, developed propaganda networks to spread increasingly outrageous claims of persecution, and forever tied the anchor of “amoral” to the left.
What’s worse than their lying is the fact that they are good at it. By indoctrinating the far right, the GOP have turned entire voting blocs into brainwashed masses who are literally willing to die for the lies their leaders know to be gross misrepresentations. They are good at this game, and leftists simply are not. The blame, rests not just on those who exploit the system but also on each of us for letting them get away with it.
Maybe it is the cornucopia of ideals that make up the left, or perhaps the damning optimism that keeps progressives believing we will ultimately prevail by ‘doing the right thing’, but whatever the reason, our way isn’t working. We are losing the battle and the war. Even though the math works in our favor (we outnumber them); linear time works in our favor (younger voters tend to be more progressive); and actual morality works in our favor (we feed the hungry and comfort the ailing), none of that matters because we are losing the narrative, which is infuriating considering how easy it is to fix this.
1. Stop being the “good guy”.
Liberals have to dismount the high horses long enough to DO WHAT THE GOP DOES. Figure out the weaknesses in every law, in every statute, in every marginally-purple or -blue county in the country AND EXPLOIT IT. Majority matters, but so does winning. You have to win to outlaw gerrymandering…and then, you have to actually outlaw it.
2. Talk like them.
Stop being so goddamn genteel all the time. Stop preaching to the choir and frame things in a way both sides understand. So that means, stop coding everything for college grads. Spell it out in simple, easy-to-repeat phrases that the base can use against their brainwashed uncles at Easter dinner. Branding matters.
For example: Instead of saying “Family planning clinics prevent X number of unwanted pregnancies”, say “Each dollar of funding that goes into family planning saves X number of babies.”
That’s right, call them babies because let me tell you a secret, the GOP does not care about the technical definitions of life. Their mistresses and daughters get abortions. They don’t care about maternal mortality because, and I cannot stress this enough, people with uteruses are disposable obstructions to their plan. (See Ann Coulter’s advocating at Missouri State that women should no longer be allowed to vote.) They do not care. Stop making this debate about rape and medical trauma and make it about what they make it about: babies. Potential, hope-they-don’t-kill-the-host-or-grow-up-to-starve-to-death babies. Every DOLLAR of tax money that goes into Planned Parenthood, actual sex education, and birth control services SAVES this many BABIES.
Wipe the bile off your lips and say it.
Stop talking about the altruism of food stamps and start referring to it as national security. Hell, move the food stamp budget over to national security because, and here’s the kicker guys, IT IS. When people eat, they tend to be a little slower with the pitch forks. It’s no coincidence that 25 percent of the insurrectionists had recently declared bankruptcy. Poor people are desperate. Desperate people are dangerous. FEED THEM.
Instead of focusing on the education of living children the GOP does not care about, say “For every dollar we spend on preschool, we put X many people back to work.”
And on, and on. Point after point; issue after issue.
Don’t just be “good”. Be smart. Please. For the sake of our country, stop trying to look like saints in the annals of history and actually save our democracy.
3. Never, never let them get away with any of it.
No matter what comes next, never let a conversation go by where these traitorous, blood-thirsty malefactors get away with calling themselves the moral majority. There is nothing moral about aligning with child-molesting, wife-abusing, bigoted, wealth-hoarding, vote-suppressing, apathetic monsters.
The time for sweet speeches and well-reasoned arguments died on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th. There is no other moment in front of us: only this one. Only the moment in which we rise to the challenges before us, or we fall.
