General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I will tell you why Maddow's "Hubris" aired NOW and not back then. And you won't like it. [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)of the necessity, even though they own the media and government and the Pentagon, of DOING the one on one, face to face, piece of building their base and they have two groups of functionaries for that: churches and employers.
Some of the enforcement from those two agents, churches and employers, is outright intentionally strategic, managed by folks like Ralph Reed and James Dobson, the Koch brothers, ALEC, Chambers of Commerce, and the NRA, but some effects are de facto propaganda, amongst, more or less ignorant, more or less naive grassroots, that is, the alleged spontaneous fruits of all of the cultural engineers and the social inertia that their deliberate actions set in motion.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because I think the best way to respond to what you describe is to address that face to face piece in a way that works better than it has previously. The reason it works so well for the 1% and their LiberTea Tories is because it's happening in churches, where there's a social motive for civility and compliance, and in the workplace, where there's a financial motive for civility and compliance.
Those two environments need to be effectively addressed. In our state, a past attorney general, Phil Kline, even outright bragged about campaign fund raising in our churches and has been protected ever since by the Republican party for giving the green light on such activities. Now, our state has regular Justice Sundays in which national campaigns to elect our entire judiciary are implemented.
Trying not to over-simplify here. I recognize the profound challenge you sketch, CoffeeCat, just trying to suggest there are steps we could take, but are ignoring because they represent a different kind of commitment than conventional, and obsolete, political models, and I think one step that should be fully prioritized would be to go around the Torie propaganda apparatus and go directly to the people themselves to commit to face to face with one another and then to DIFFERENT others.