This election season, the GOP is taking four key strategies to their
recent success to the extreme. Extremes radical enough to impinge on
Americans' conscious minds.
It is obvious that these strategies
have been incredibly successful. But, I would suggest that the main
condition for their success has been that they confirm the biases and
prejudices of their audience and so are repeated daily by the right wing
echo chamber aimed solely at the low effort thinking of the average
low-information voter.
These tactics are:
1. Money shoveled into advertising.
The
ridiculous and patently partisan Supreme Court ruling opened the doors
to unlimited amounts of plutocratic cash, and it is pouring into ridiculous levels of advertising. But intrusive advertising has a
powerful tendency to lose its effectiveness, as commercial advertisers
know all too well. Will the American people begin to react negatively to
one party outspending the other by massive margins?
2. The constant scapegoating of minorities and the dismissal of women as equal citizens.
When
the political attacks on minorities and women, who form a small
majority of the country, become aggressively overt, will they lead to
political blowback?
3. Voter suppression and caging.
It's been
going on since 1789, of course, and when you suppress the rights of a single
minority group, other folks can shrug it off. But now, they are
suppressing the votes of multiple minority groups, the poor and the elderly. Which means us, our neighbors, friends and our grandparents. These suppression tactics will be experienced by
millions of Americans, some who have been voting in what they perceive as their
interests for decades. Is this blatant attack on democracy going too
far even for complacent America?
4. Lying as a campaign tactic.
Lee
Atwater taught the lessons of Josef Goebbels to the GOP--lie large and
often, and if repeated, people will believe the lies. The GOP has been lying above and
beyond the spin-line since the 1980s. But normally, they lie with
message discipline, so it can be repeated by by right wing media, and
pundits verbatim. However Romney and Ryan are lying impulsively, without consistency, often contradicting their previous positions and statements. And the lies increasingly contradict the
actual lived experience of most Americans. Will the GOP finally develop a
serious credibility problem?
Obviously, it is my hope that these
tactics finally begin to backfire this year and lying to America will
begin to engender consequences. If that happened, I think we would see a
break in the rigid fervor of right wing ideology that has gripped the
nation since they canonized Reagan.. Credibility once lost is almost impossible to
regain, and we in the reality-based world have for decades been yearning
for a return to some form of intellectual consistency in the nation.
The GOP is basically betting the house on taking their trusted tactics
to the horizon. It would be ideologically satisfying to see them lose
that bet.
But will it happen? There are some encouraging signs I think. But these Goebbels-inspired tactics are still awfully strong.
What do you think?
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