And the Winning Answer Is
What we Democrats are up against is not something as clear-cut as an ideology that differs from Republican ideology. We are no longer doing battle with voters on “the other side of the aisle” based on achieving the same goals, while arguing what the best way to accomplish those goals should be.
It is a fact that there are Republicans we will never win over – in the same way there are Democrats who can never be lured to the other side. Things like the abortion issue, GLBT rights, gun control, and a clear separation of Church and State will always keep the majority of us firmly planted in one camp or the other.
But what we are really up against right now is the almost unbelievable stupidity of our nation’s voters – and saying “don’t call them stupid, because they’ll never vote for us if you do” is denying the obvious. They’ll never vote for us because they are stupid, and that is now an undeniable fact.
How do you win over someone who insists that 9/11 happened because President Obama was on vacation and was oblivious to what the intel was telling him? How do you convince someone that unemployment didn’t skyrocket on Obama’s watch, when they are convinced that it did? How do you combat the fallacy that it’s been proven that Obama IS a Kenyan-born Muslim who the whole world hates – and any and all evidence to the contrary has been cooked-up by a liberal media?
The truth is that the lies have become “the facts” to a wide swath of voters. You can point to all kinds of real facts, graphs, pie-charts, Excel spreadsheets, and various and sundry things that disprove what they believe – but they’ll just shake their heads and tell you that you’re wrong. They’ll tell you that Obama WAS the president when Katrina struck NOLA, that the Democrats promoted the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq, that Reagan’s trickle-down economics policy was a huge success that liberals refuse to acknowledge.
We can educate the ill-informed; we can enlighten the misled. But fighting rampant stupidity is fighting an enemy we seemingly can’t destroy.
I admit that I personally don’t know the answer as to how we respond to The Stupid, or how we even get them to listen to reason. I don’t know how we combat the bullshit being spewed, 24/7, by FOX-News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones. I don’t know how we get through to people whose minds are forever closed, people who have seen their American dream destroyed and yet, time and again, vote for the very people who destroy those dreams.
How do we combat the proudly dumb, the arrogantly mis-informed, those woefully bereft of facts who simply refuse to accept ANY views other than their own?
I’ve seen hundreds of posts, here and elsewhere, decrying the fact that Democrats lost this election because they failed to deliver “the right message” to enough voters. So what IS the “right message” that would have turned the tide in our favour?
I’m open to suggestions. I’d especially like to hear from the “Dems didn’t deliver the right message” crowd. I’d like to hear their strategy for convincing The Stupid that facts aren’t a serving suggestion open to debate, that the truth isn’t a moving target to be interpreted by Rush Limbaugh, and how people who believed that “outsourcer-in-chief” Donald Trump was going to bring their jobs back could have been convinced otherwise.
G’head – I’m listening.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And I can attest that you can't fix stupid. The fake news/Alex Jones craziness is rampant here. One friend/acquaintance is a rabid fundamentalist Christian who truly believes Obama is a closet Muslim and all that crap. The kicker is that she's a 60 YO African American woman, married for 35 years to a white man. They actually had to leave here (both natives of the county) and move north for a time because of the hate they were dealt early on.
But they were stalwart Trump supporters, because life. 
Stupid people need simple, even over-simplified messages. The Republicans have shown some skill at crafting such propaganda ("Build the Wall!" "Lock her up!"
, while Democrats kept trying to carefully explain policy positions and made eyes glaze over. It disappoints me, but I think you have to fight repeated propaganda slogans with your own repeated propaganda slogans. I'd like to think sticking closer to the truth has some value. I think making the opposition look ridiculous helps, too. That's where Hillary's lack of comedic skills hurt her.
For example, with regard to her private e-mail server, I think she should have said, "I confess! I DID use a private e-mail server . . . just like every Secretary of State before me, all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. It's true! Really, it's true. Thomas Jefferson was the first Secretary of State. And even back then, the State Department did not have good e-mail servers."
With regard to Trump's Wall, I wish she had branded it a "Magic Wall." "Because it would take a Magic Wall to keep Mexicans from climbing over. Without magic, it would just be a waste of twenty billion dollars." After making fun of his stupid magic wall, then she could discuss some of the difficulties, and some of Obama's successes, in fighting illegal immigration. But if you repeat the joke often enough, maybe you can get regular people to laugh at the stupid people when they chant, "Build the Wall!" "You mean the Magic Wall?"
In my experience, stupid people tend to shut up if you laugh at them. If you try to argue with them sensibly, following the rules of formal logic, they just start shouting so much BS you can't fact-check it all. And then they'll argue that objective facts are liberal lies. But making fun of them puts them on the defensive. I don't know that it would win over their votes, but it demoralizes them and they might stay home. Meanwhile, the fence-sitters might say, "Yeah, I can't vote for the guy who wants to build a magic wall."
People have lost so much faith in the media over the last few decades, that "facts" really aren't "facts" anymore because everyone believes that half of what comes out of the media's mouths are lies for their own purposes. If they don't believe something to be an outright lie, they believe it to be selectively biased ("you told me this but not that" .
On the positive side, we have become a much more tolerant and relativistic society over the last few decades. Marriage quality is pretty much expected, and those who oppose it are rightly publicly shamed. We're as quick to remind people not to blanket blame all Muslims for acts of violence as we are to actually condemn those acts of violence. In many ways we are a much more tolerant, level-headed, and rational society.
On the dark side, this tolerance and relativism has also found its way into everyday political discourse; people now have the right to their own facts. "False equivalency" is a meaningless phrase in 2016 because who gets to decide that it's false?
Up is not up, blue is not blue, and right is not right. We're in a dangerous place.
