A Twitter (X) thread highlighted the book The MAGA Diaries, by Tina Nguyen, about her experiences early in her career, embedded in the right wing media machine. She has emerged from that now, more concerned with truth than ideology. So that's good.
The poster highlighted the handicap that the Democrats have compared to the Republicans in spreading a coordinated and continuous message to voters. One point stuck out more than any other: The poster referred to Republicans as having "the professional right," well-funded indoctrination programs to attract and train young talent to continue to push the aims of old plutocrats to keep their power intact. She complained that there is no "professional left," despite right wing claims that Democrats wield such an apparatus.
The left is represented by hundreds of small, underfunded groups, broadcasting what seems important to them, but with little reach. The poster calls for a coordinated program funded to the tune of billions of dollars. The goal is to construct a left-wing echo chamber that is equal to or greater than the one on the right.
Two problems with that right away: First, most of the billionaires are Republicans or Libertarians. And rich Libertarians don't really believe in liberty for all, they just believe in avoiding taxes and using their own freedom to protect their wealth. Second, the left revolts at the notion of moving in lockstep. The downfall of diversity is that it's hard to organize, even to protect that diversity.
When the United States finally entered World War II, it was not to protect diversity. The military only integrated to the extent absolutely necessary. We were protecting "freedom," but without defining it so precisely that the white majority would start to wonder if the battle was worth their blood.
The right wing echo chamber is full of tough talk, religious fervor, combat metaphors, and justifications for bigotry. The left has no comparable package of literal bullet points. How do you make acceptance of diversity sound badass? The right pushes oversimplification. How can you distill the positions of the left into attractive oversimplified packets?
I hear that we should de-emphasize the culture war issues, but the right will continue to use them as a weapon. Also, a "normal person's" culture war irrelevancy is a trans or other marginalized person's life and death threat. So when we try to focus on purely economic or environmental progress that will be good for everyone below the top 1 percent, the minions of the 1 percent will insist on sacrificing the marginalized people as the cost of enlisting right wing support for those programs. We can't leave anything or anyone out.
The left's message is disjointed and complicated because it is made of all of the chunks that the machine of plutocracy has jettisoned to make their fighting force the envy of political organizers everywhere. Gavin Newsom recently groveled at the feet of Charlie Kirk with his admiration of right wing effectiveness at spewing their narrow-minded crap. If the left put together such a machine, would we have given up everything we were supposed to be working for in order to "win?"
The answer to human survival lies in marketing. The left does need to identify where the general population stands, and how to get in front of them with counterpoints to right wing infomercials. The answer lies not so much in indoctrinating a generation of young leaders and communicators to reinforce old ideas, the way the right does. The left has to find young people who already communicate through currently fashionable channels, fund and support them. Their diversity can't be corporatized. It should not be. Corporatization is what made our current mess.
Money is a problem. If an economy is doing well, it will generate a certain amount of value. Right now, the right wing believes that a handful of super wealthy people are the best stewards of that value. A full-on socialist in the formal sense believes that the state is the best steward of it. Neither of those viewpoints has much use for empowered workers. Is our goal as a society and a species quality of life for everyone or some nebulous concept of "productivity" dependent on serious income inequality and grinding toil by a permanent underclass? What are we producing for?
Figure that out and the messaging will fall into place.
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