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In reply to the discussion: Why Hasn't The American Left Convinced More Americans To Vote For More Progressive Candidates? [View all]Liberal_Stalwart71
(20,450 posts)give up. The political right NEVER does that. Their voters NEVER threaten to stay home and not vote. They seldom start third parties (ironic, since the Republican Party was a third party) to hurt their own party. They just never give up no matter how badly they lose, no matter what issues haven't been taken up. They are resilent.
The political left is unorganized, sloppy, and whiny. Rather than come together and support a person, we tend to run away from candidates who are not ideologically pure on every single issue. There are too many issues on the left. If the candidate neglects to address any one or more of the millions of issues, we get angry and fail to support that candidate. The political right keeps things simple: God, guns, and gays. That's it. Pretty simple. Idiotic but simple. Dumbed-down, but still simple.
We also don't have a masterful language manipulator working for us like a Frank Luntz. There are great people out there like Drew Westen, for instance, but the Democratic Party is an ideologically fractured and diverse party. That's the good news. The bad news is that it is because the party is so diverse that it is often difficult to come up with a unifying message or messages on more than a few issues.
And finally, we must realize that the machine that the conservative right has created has taken decades to build. From the think tanks, to the political mastery of grooming candidates at the local level for office. The left is impatient and lazy. Democrats used to excel at running local candidates for office. The party's recruiting efforts were unmatched. But then we lost the drive and the message. The Republicans built their conservative empire from the ground-up and they were able to manipulate the message through dominance of talk radio and mainstream media. The creation of think tanks funneled that message, too, and an effort to color facts with a conservative bias became the norm.
When Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, conservatives were able to push their *simple* messages through a filter. Anti-government sentiment is not new. It's always been here since the country's founding. But for some reason, conservatives have been able to push the message that the government does nothing good...to the point where you hear Democrats buying into this crap, too.
Liberals need to realize that in order for the president to get anything progressive done, you must MAKE him do so by electing more progressive Democrats to Congress. It's really that simple. However, if we liberals continue to fail at messaging, continue to be disorganized and divided, and rather than taking action, whine about what's not being done, then we have to accept the status quo.
Just my thoughts.