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Quote of the Day: We Must Mock the Left
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”
The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera
I’ve said this before here on Ricochet and I’ll say it again: One of the best ways to fight the Left is to ridicule and mock them. President Trump was great at that Montana rally, mocking the fake Cherokee. Let’s face it: every time a leftist opens his/her mouth, s/he sounds like an idiot. Case in point: Nancy Pelosi, or better yet, Maxine Waters.
Published in General
How does mocking change hearts and minds? All it seems to do is play to the crowd who like to see the other side mocked.
How about the mocker?
(It’s a risk I’m willing to take.)
If successful, it delegitimizes the individual or concept mocked. Ask the average person in the ’80s or ’90s if Gerald Ford was a klutz. Or since 2009 about whether Sarah Palin is a serious person. Their reputations have been shaped by mockery.
If through mockery we can link anthroprogenic global warming to belief the earth is flat, it would put a stake through the heart of that movement.
Set the pages to polishing the armor, and the stable boys to rubbing down the mounts. Keep the weapons sharp.
It’s a craft I need to hone. I’ll practice on Percival.
Have at, varlet!
Later. Too busy writing a chapter right now.
Just remember, satire has to be funny, or it’s just whining.
It’s a wonderful weapon to use against the Left because they are so damn humorless.
That’s not funny.
I’m stealing this.
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This is the quite poignant. As others have mentioned they intend for said mockery to “delegitimization” other positions. The point is to not show that the conservative position is the better position but rather to show why one should not pick left-wing position. That does not get conservatives votes, at best it takes away votes from the left (and betrays a lack of confidence in our own ideas).
It hardens the hearts of its true believers and probably hardens our hearts about them. It is aimed at our lesser and not our better angels. It is not the way to victory.
Sheila Jackson Lee is another brain surgeon that comes to ind . . .
It won’t change the hearts and minds of those on the left, but it could have a great impact on the large swath of people who simply want to go about their lives without paying much attention to politics. When they do pay attention and see the left being made fun of, coupled with the left’s insane, humorless reaction, hopefully they’ll get a feeling of revulsion and not pull the levers for leftist candidates . . .
Delegitimizing a position is justifiable. There was a period after the collapse of the Soviet Union when announcing that one was a Marxist was equivalent to announcing that one had a learning disability.
Did the USSR fall from mockery or its own contradictions? You and I both know it fell because of the contradictions, it’s delegitmacy was its own doing. The stigma to not be labeled a Marxist was thus a result of the practical example of said contradictions. Even then, all it did to the true believers was make them relabel themselves for a time.
Again mockery is not going to get votes.
Have you ever heard the jokes circulating in the CCCP? There was smoke seeping out here and there for years. The flames only appeared in ‘91.
An American was visiting the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. He was trying to explain freedom of speech to a Russian citizen.
“In my country, Yuri,” the American said, “we have freedom of speech. For example, I can stand on the steps of the White House, call the American President a stupid jerk, and not be shot.”
Yuri replied, “We have freedom of speech in Soviet Union too. I can also stand on the steps of the Kremlin, call the American President a stupid jerk, and not be shot.”
There is humor wherever there are humans, nothing new there. The flames were apparent back in 1945 when there were 28 million dead Soviets from WW2. The point remains, the USSR fell because of how god awful a regime it was, both in theory and practice. Mockery was not the cause of the USSR’s fall.
Well that’s the thing, to be effective beyond a pre-selected audience it has to be genuinely funny, and comedy is hard.
Correct. However, I think mockery acts like the tunnelers who dug under castle walls to weaken the structures from beneath.
However, we’re not trying to destroy a system of government. We’re trying to undermine the support of a political party and philosophy that wants to destroy our system of government.
The Soviet Union fell because for years people told jokes such as “the holes in the bottom of Yuri Andropov’s coffin were there for the worms to vomit through.” Then one day there was a rally in the park across from the Moscow White House. It got bigger. And bigger. The army showed up — and turned the turrets of their vehicles facing out.
The mockery came first.
Indeed, the global warming hystericists work pretty hard to link empirical climate skepticism with anti-GMO hysteria and anti-vaccine hysteria.
Sorry, but no. Scientists like Judith Curry and Bjorn Lomborg are nothing like GMO-nuts and anti-vaxxers.
I did, from Stan Freberg. I steal only from the best.
Refraining from mocking absurd positions legitimizes them.
The idea that conservatives should seriously engage in debating some of these concepts and the people who promote them is how we got here.
I think some people here are mixing up mockery used like a sharp knife and mockery like a 2×4 as the left has been using it for the most part.
Al Gore certainly is. And the Climategate e-mails and their creators are certainly mockworthy. As is the concept that global warming is unremittingly bad. It could be the best thing that could happen to Canada.
Sappers.
I’ve tried your suggestion, but every time I come up with what seems the perfect satire I learn that it’s a new Leftist policy!
I remember someone saying that WW11 could have been averted if, when Herr Hitler stood up and began his rants in the biergartens, he had been greeted with hoots of laughter and a few thrown beer steins.
I think you are right. John Stewart made a whole great big career out of simply mentioning a Republican position or action on anything, then turning to the camera with a big eye-roll. No engagement, no counterargument. Just “srsly?”, and that mugging face. It worked wonderfully. Many people don’t want to get all in the weeds of policy, they just want to be told who to disregard, who they can laugh at, by somebody hip and cool. Then they feel smart and confident and cool, too. (And safe.)
When you mock somebody, you put him on the defensive. You place his position on an issue as beneath consideration by a serious person; as a physicist once said of another’s theory: “Not even wrong”.
And these resultant attitudes are tenacious. Who on the Left doesn’t still today think Ford was clumsy, Reagan had Alzheimers, Palin is a ditz, Cheney will shoot you if you go hunting with him, Catholic priests are all child molesters, etc. etc. etc.
Mockery is a powerful tool.
Definitely both. The two went hand in hand.