It's time for this destructive meme about shutting up during elections to stop,

[woo me with science]

73. Interesting. The corporate one percent foment and use the tribe mentality

Last edited Tue Dec 11, 2012, 03:59 AM - Edit history (4)

to keep voters focused on the team colors instead of the policies that are in play.

When people cannot make their voices heard, recommend policy, or disagree with policy even within their own parties, without eliciting a storm of accusations of helping the other tribe, you have a perfect recipe for co-option of the parties by the one percent. When people cannot point out clear apologism for policies that cause devastating harm to human beings and to the core principles of our party without eliciting accusations of incivility to a team member or disloyalty to the team or the President, then we are dealing with a tactic for co-option of the party.

Why do people form political parties in the first place? So that like-minded people can band together around shared values and goals, to work toward policies that reflect those goals. I think what we are seeing in so much of our media and political discourse today is a planned strategy by the corporatists who have bought into both parties to strip real meaning from party and turn elections into a sport instead...in which you root for your team regardless of policy and regardless of direction. You are on the blue team, and don't you dare go disagreeing with anything the blue team EVER does, or you are obviously an evil red team supporter.

Our social alliances are perhaps the most powerful behavioral shapers there are, and Wall Street knows this. Detaching our team loyalties from policy and making it all about the color of the team jersey or the man who is President is a perfect recipe for getting people not only to support, but to fight for, policies that run directly counter to their own interests.

I think this witch hunting, accusing, silencing dynamic happened in the Republican party first, because corporate money corrupted their party first and most thoroughly. Any hapless Republican who dares to point out to other Republicans that the party is not really working toward the small government they claim to espouse, but instead is using government to feed corporate profits, will be hounded and witch hunted until he shuts up.

Until recently, Democrats were better about avoiding this dynamic, but with increasing Third Way/corporate presence in our party, we are seeing much more of that now. Who would ever have thought, ten years ago, that simply stating, on a Democratic board, that Democrats should not *attack* Social Security benefits would elicit the calls for banning and the insults that you see here in these threads?

That's why it's so critical to remind people how our representative system is designed to work....that raising our voices about principles and policy is absolutely NECESSARY to ensure that the parties reflect our interests, and keep reflecting them.

We must keep pointing out the flaws in the "shut up and be loyal" logic that reveal it as the propaganda it is. It defies logic that a party that is representing the people would need to be PROTECTED from people mentioning those policies, for fear of losing the election. On the contrary, our voices should be in constant, public conversation with our party, so that the party reflects the people's views.... and draws more people hungry for representation to our side.

Americans support defending Social Security benefits. Even Republicans support defending Social Security benefits. All these calls to shut up about defending Social Security benefits for fear of losing the election are.....nonsensical. They are corporate-derived, even if the people repeating them do not realize it.

Hand out civics books. Talk about representative political systems. Remind people about how our elections are REALLY supposed to work. Enforced silence is NEVER a part of a healthy democratic electoral process. We drown in corporate propaganda that is now trying to tell us that citizen participation in our elections, and even discussion on our discussion boards about what policies we would like to see, is somehow disruptive or harmful to the Democratic process.

Don't buy it.