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A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
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Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Friday January 31, 2025
The Politics of Politesse
From a Guardian article by Peter Rothpletz on what Democrats need to do to get their message out effectively instead of what they've been doing.
The Democrats who have emerged as the most successful communicators in the last few years—Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy, Senator John Fetterman, and the aforementioned [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez—are those who made a concerted effort to reject this conventional risk aversion. They curse, they go on Fox News, and they're extremely aggressive in calling out their conservative counterparts. They've renounced the long Democratic tradition of bringing not a knife to a gun fight but a butter knife to a bazooka fight. Their messaging reflects the urgency of this moment.
He's missing Pete Buttigieg, maybe because Pete doesn't quite fit his formula. He'd go on Fox News and politely dismantle the other side's insane arguments. Even so, Rothpletz's point stands. He adds:
In response to the Trump administration's move to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, should not have waited hours upon hours to finally issue a marble-mouthed, oddly sexual statement from behind a podium. No, the most talented Democratic communicators should have been immediately deployed to nursing homes and preschools in their respective districts. They should have taken to Instagram Live and decried—with F-bombs aplenty—the utter inhumanity of throwing the future of Medicaid and Head Start into doubt.
100%. Stop playing by the rules. These people are not your friends. Don't let America end because you were too polite to stop it.
For decades Democrats have misdiagnosed why Reagan was popular. They think it was the “Morning in America” bullshit, that old-time American secular religion, the smile and the wave and the Cheerios, and they've been trying to play into that for years. They've forgotten an important ingredient: resentment. Reagan was all about that, too. He built his base that way, as Trump has. So Dems just need to figure out what's on the Republican ledger that most Americans resent. I have a few ideas.