As it must be practiced to succeed, Leftism uses a combination of deception, character assassination, and fear-mongering to implement its goals. As an example, the Great Depression was clearly lengthened by people more concerned–in their own words at the time–with “reform” than with recovery. Social Security had nothing to do with recovery. Neither did their fascist price controls, granting the right to labor to form legally protected, monopolistic labor cartels, or the decision to legalize labor violence. All of these things helped a few people, and hurt far more. But they were implemented because people were scared, and FDR said they would help. When people are panicked, they are susceptible to stupid ideas.
But that wasn’t the point of this post. The point was that the essence of leftist political strategy has come to be dominated by the Alinskyan tactic of personalizing and defaming. You can attack figures like Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush without too much trouble. It is much harder to personalize and attack a broad-based movement based upon principles and a rational understanding of the facts of the issues at hand. You can demonize people for wanting to take dog food away from starving old blind ladies living in cans, but you can’t demonize them for pointing out that if you spend more than you have on a long term basis, you have nothing. There will be NO money for the little old ladies in the shoes.
This is obvious to many people, and these people are now politically active. They are not just voting, but they are educating themselves, taking to the streets, and organizing.
If you demonize a large-scale, heterogeneous movement with no clear leaders–we have de facto spokespeople, but not leaders–you necessarily demonize the individuals within that movement. And to the extent that you are telling patent lies about those people–the most obvious example being that racism somehow underlies a desire to avoid financial Armageddon–you permanently alienate them.
It is one thing to tell lies about Ronald Reagan. Most people never met him, and had no prospect of ever meeting him. He was an abstraction, outside of his public speeches, which of course the media covered selectively to control the narrative.
But when you start attacking normal Americans, that is an entirely different animal. To be effective, propaganda has to keep people within its informational space. Good propagandists understand they have to back down at times–they have to control the boil–so that when they need the outrage, and when they need to tell the large lies, they have an open conduit. Often, this will mean telling the actual truth 95% of the time.
Calling normal Americans racists who are not even remotely racist violates this principle. It is bad propaganda, but the Left really has no choice. This really is a broad-based, grassroots movement that has set as its task the destruction of all the destructions the Left had planned for America, many of which are already in place, such as broad-based control of our retirement system in the form of Social Security.
So what to do? Attack people who will in that very process wake up decisively and permanently; or let the movement grow, foster actual debate, and pursue ends which are inimical to the tyranny that is the end goal of all radicals on the Left?
This is an interesting year, and this will be an interesting election. Bachman can be demonized, as of course have been Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Horowitz and others. But you can’t attack the people whose support you need. All you can do is protect your base, which in my view is at best a third of the electorate.