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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.
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If that were at all true I would reject him too. Where do you find appeals to ethnicity in Trump, except in the fevered imagination of the Dems? He does put US citizens above others, but that is not blood or soil. In Europe, there is plenty to be concerned about. Here? BTW, I hope you know that he did not say in Charlottesville what now is established as what “he said”–as any fair reading in context would show. He did not say there are good people among white supremacists but among those who protest the tearing down of statues. And he even said there are good people on the other side, which is a stretch for me.
No revolution or uprising ever succeeded because of jokes. Those joking were imprisoned because it was an act of dissent, the mockery is a secondary concern at best.
This right here highlights my point.
1. How does making fun of Warren for her fake heritage prove that free markets or social conservatism is the right option in public policy? The answer is that it does not. The mockery, as several have unwittingly pointed to again and again, is self congratulatory. I type this as someone who very much enjoys South Park (which is mockery of everything and thus has common ground with everyone).
2. Mockery as you and others have mentioned is not being used as dissent but against the minority opposition. Conservatives are currently not being repressed by government so the dissent does nothing in the sense of “speaking truth to power”.
3. Mockery as I have mentioned several times now requires a mean in social values, enough common ground between citizens, otherwise it comes off as just being contemptuous. Polarity is the watchword currently because common ground has been disappearing, hence the lack of success with mockery. Trump and Clinton both mocked the other repeatedly and were disliked by the majority of Americans and neither received a majority of the popular vote.
If mockery were shaving off Democrats and gaining Republicans we would be seeing changes in overall party registration but current data does not suggest that.
In fact if we look at elections with the mocking candidates in Trump’s mold, like Moore in Alabama, then it appears that mockery did not take away Democrat votes but most likely negatively affected Republican votes.
Perhaps it’s the difference between mocking the idea and mocking the person holding the idea. The former can discredit the idea, but the latter just makes you a jerk.
To some extent, yes. On the other hand, public personages often become stand-ins for the ideas they promote. Mocking public personage’s persons definitely has a place in persuasive humor.
You mean, other than Barack Obama.
It’s pretty well know Trump trolls the left by not doing much to dissociate himself from alt-right trolls. A lot of people simply think that’s good strategy on Trump’s part — that what makes Trump better at practical politics than many other recent Republicans is that he won’t be pressured into dancing to the left’s tune. And maybe it is good strategy.
But it’s impossible for that strategy to not have, as a side effect, less distance between the figurehead of the Republican party and alt-right trolls, including the blood-and-soil trolls. That’s how some people get an impression of increased association: less effort is being made at dissociation. The lessened effort may be strategically smart, on net, but it is what it is, and has the effect it has. It’s to be expected that some who aren’t fevered Dems may find it a strategy with some dismaying tradeoffs.
No, I mean Clinton. Obama took advantaged of system already corrupted by Clinton and ready for him to use. Clinton is the one who trained Democrats to lie in defense of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, etc. Not that he invented the lie, but he turned it into an instinctive behavior for them.
Conservatives tend to dismiss Alinsky. However, once I read Rules For Radicals, I was convinced the guy knew what he was talking about. His politics are wrong, but his rules for manipulating people show either genius, or his being a keen observer of how people think and behave. Maybe both . . .
I placed an order for South Park: Bigger, Longer, And Uncut yesterday. Thanks for the recommendation!
Definitely a soft-spoken approach. His “my opponent’s youth and inexperience” zinger is thought to have sealed Mondale’s defeat . . .
It’s the same with Sarah Palin. She never said she could see Russia from her house.
Trump seems to have shaved off a bunch of Democrats to get elected.
Registration is one thing, voting is another. Voter registration is one indicator, but it is not the best. The actual result is the best indicator . . .
They didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left them.
The empirical literature on the matter supports the assertion that party ID is a reliable predictor for voting patterns. Trump won in 2016 by the hair of his chin with a few thousand votes in a few states. He even performed worse at the polls than most Republican Senators did by state, which indicates his mockery was not winning him the votes you assert he was winning (he had negative coat tails; parties that win the White House take seats in the legislature, but Republicans had net losses in the legislature).
I get that people like victories. Particularly against those they dislike in unlikely circumstances. But pyrrhic victories, especially in short term political cycles, are not evidence of sea changes. They are evidence that both sides were doing poorly at the Presidential level.
It wasn’t genius. It was a distillation of advice gathered from other classic texts of strategic and communications theory, from Sun Tzu to Edward Bernays.
Don’t get me wrong. Summarising best practices ain’t nothing, but it doesn’t rise to the level of genius.
I tend to subscribe to the hypothesis that Hillary was the bigger factor. She was counting on all the new voters that Obama brought to the polls in 2008 and 2012. Obama won largely thanks to all the people he got out who had never voted before, and most of them stayed home in 2016.
That’s not to say that the Republican candidate was irrelevant. It’s probable that no other candidate could have rallied Rust Belt voters the way that Trump did.
However, that being said, if the Democrats had nominated someone who could have retained all those new voters that Obama had recruited, it’s possible that it could have nullified Trump’s success in the Rust Belt.
The Democrats don’t actively disassociate themselves from radical left-wing extremists either, and there’s lots more of them lurking about than there are actual honest-to-goodness neonazis.
It’s generally bad communications strategy to actively disassociate oneself from a potentially embarrassing support group unless that support group becomes actively embarrassing. Trying to get “ahead of the issue” just gives that embarrassing support group free publicity. It’s a corollary of the Streisand Effect.
So, in other words, yes Trump probably should have been stronger in his denunciation of the Charlottesville thugs (they were actively embarrassing), but it would be foolish for him to denounce every whackjob who posts nonsense on the Internet. That would simply provide the whackjobs with more oxygen.
Oh, I agree with that.
Ohhh, you had me right up until this.
One of the biggest problems with expending energy denouncing fringe groups like the Charlottesville thugs is that it lends credence to the Left’s paranoid fantasy that rising neo-Nazism is a thing. If one of those idiots hadn’t freaked out and run over and killed a counter-protester, this would have been one more pathetic demonstration of an impotent and dying fringe idea.
On the other hand, the Left shows up wearing black masks, destroying property, acting violently toward police and others, and otherwise causing mob mayhem on a regular basis.
Danger on the Left.
Oh, and it didn’t matter what President Trump said about Charlottesville. The Left was going to align him with racism (antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia…) because that’s all they have in the way of “argument.” Political (character) assassination.
Fair enough. Still, the bottom line for us to read and understand (and possibly use) what is considered the bible by the left . . .
SNL was very effective. Some conservatives I know, those who should know better, believed she said it.
Palin was a good sport when she appeared on the show. IIRC, there was an opening sequence where one of the male stars greeted the real Sarah, thinking it was Tina Fey in costume as Palin. Real Sarah took everything he said in, then (IIRC) Tina walked by and said “Hello”. The guy had this look of horror on his face (realizing he had talked to the real person), then broke into the “Live, In New York . . .”
Now, I could be totally hallucinating about this, and I cannot find the clip on YouTube.
Although to be fair, not denouncing thugs who freak out and kill their ideological opponents also lends credence to the suspicion that the thugs’ ideas have become more normalized.
We complain leftists have normalized their thugs in this way, by not denouncing them hard enough, by turning a blind eye and making excuses. Well, gander, goose.
Category error. Leftists are the thugs and bullies. I have zero expectation they’ll denounce themselves. When I say “leftist,” I’m not talking about some shallow hereditary Democrat or malleable liberal who’s been bamboozled into thinking his enemies are on the Right. Leftism is a cult of power. Ends justify means. It turns people into what they claim to hate.
The ratings for both Dems and “R”s has been in the toilet since Spring 2008. (At that point in time, Pew Research discovered that independents were the new phenomena.)
Finally by Summer 2016, Gallup caught up. Obama won because of swing voters. So did Trump.
This data is not new, and does not reflect on Trump. If you think that mockery is the worst thing ever, it wasn’t used by McCain and he lost. And it wasn’t used by Rmoney except for his ill advised quote about how 47% of all Americans are lazy luggards. (Or whatever the unfortunate and taped remark happened to be.) Yet despite avoiding mockery, they both lost.
Perhaps not, but we often treat these “non-leftists” who are nonetheless on the left as if they were no better than leftists. Heck, we’ll even treat our fellow righties that way if we suspect them of being “too abetting of the left” in some “crucial” way! It even happens on Ricochet!
As for ordinary people who identify as hard left, not infrequently they’re the ones persuaded to be really afraid that their enemies are on the right. The intensity of that fear is why they’re knitting pussy hats and attending demonstrations, and encouraging others to do the same. Doubtless, some are actual thugs, a topic I’ve written on, in fact. But deciding they’re not really hard left unless they’re thugs… meh…
One use of hard-and-fast categories in politics is as a shell game shifting the alleged category errors to whoever’s the opponent in a dispute. I guess it’s a reasonable political tactic, but it seems to come up short in describing flesh-and-blood people as they really are.
Not just thugs (people willing to commit violence). Bullies. I had a friend of a friend say, when someone asked about my political position and I described myself as a committed conservative, “You’ll never convince her of anything.” At a party where we were meeting for the first time! I’ve been in many social settings with this woman since — even camping! — and I’ve never treated her with anything like that public humiliation. Despite the fact — fact! — that I’ve changed my mind 180 degrees from my youth and she has remained immovable in her leftism.
A beloved family member is similarly Left, and although this person doesn’t attack me, I’ve seen him bully others. This is not unusual on the Left. This is a feature of the ideology — Alinsky tactics.
I appreciate the desire to be fair to both sides, but I think it’s a mistake to draw equivalencies between one worldview that values individual liberty and the opposition which desires power over others above all things — for our own good, of course.
I can make a list of leftist bullies as long as my arm, starting with Barack and Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Joe Biden (look what he did to Paul Ryan at the VP debate — that was bullying), … Maybe you think Trump is a bully, but he stands out as an exception.
I’ll agree with you that there are plenty of leftist bullies, but calling Trump an exception implies that he’s the only bully on the right. Not by a long shot. Just going from recent potential candidates for President – Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Rudy Giuliani. Politicians and bullies both want power, so there’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of the two categories. If your point was that there are fewer bullies on the right overall, that’s defensible. And there are some notable politicians on the right who aren’t bullies – all of the Bushes, Ryan, Ben Sasse, just to name a few.
Some hard leftists seem to desire the power in a defensive fashion — they really do believe we will crush them under our heel if we’re given the chance. I’m not claiming they’re being sensible about this, just that they’re being honest.
I wasn’t thinking about Trump at all, actually, but other bullies who self-identify as being on the right. I like to believe we have a lot less of them. I cannot believe we have none, having seen the bullying for myself.
Specifically, a lot of horse-race politics is oriented toward conflict theory rather than mistake theory. Conflict theorists often come across as bullies to their opponents, and especially to the opponents who are also other conflict theorists.
Conflict theorists tend to see their opponents as oppressors, either actual or potential, and consequently believe that “taking their oppressors down a peg” isn’t bullying, but merely retributive justice and self-defense — necessary for the good order of society as well as the survival of their own kind.
The spread of a conflict-theory worldview goes along with rise in political polarization. There are a lot of conflict theorists on the right as well as the left these days. Many conflict theorists on the right will tell you they’ve been bullied into the conflict-theory worldview: they didn’t start out as conflict theorists, they didn’t want to be conflict theorist, but they believe the left has left them no choice, and so conflict theory it is. They tend to see those on the right who remain mistake theorists as wimps and dupes.
Decoupling versus contextualizing is another wrinkle in this mess.