Another problem I'm having.
There's a narrative that "the GOP gave the voters a solution to their problems, and the DNC didn't".
There's something wrong with that assessment, and one that was a main part of the election season. The GOP's solutions were bullshit. Debunked, disproven, shown to be faulty, and damaging. The Democrats repeated this, the media repeated this, the speeches repeated this. The Trump voters didn't care. They apparently preferred to be lied to, to be comforted, to be pacified, to be pandered to.
Repeatedly, fingers pointed to basic math, simple global politics, elementary science, and the voters decided that irrationality was more comfortable.
"Trump offered a solution" is not the truth. Trump offered comfortable lies. The Democrats offered a solution, but all people could talk about were bullshit email servers. Their solution wasn't great, but it was plausible.
There's a story being developed now, heading towards "lying to the public is the best way to win elections."
We are living in the aftermath of the Perfect Storm. Its winds were the intersection of politics and entertainment. Its clouds were self serving media and poor media literacy. I think the current hydra has numerous heads, and there will be no simple approach - they have to be combatted individually.
I'm a pragmatist. I am mostly concerned with figuring out what specific actions will push the pendulum back to the left.
Since the election I've been keeping an eye on 4chan's /pol/ subforum (which is a disgusting place, don't go there) because I like to understand the shitbag's thinking in their own terms. It has highlighted, to me, how useless it is to appeal to some of these people in moral terms.
Aside from them -- I think that some victories can be won by appealing to people's better nature, ie, encouraging them to resist these racist trends.
But meanwhile - for many of the people who didn't vote blue (whether they voted Trump or just abstained), that approach has not been working. In some ways it's made the problem worse. I saw Facebook FLOODED with these posts: "If you are voting for trump, you are a racist, unfriend me". And I talked to some Trump voters who said that kind of energy, over time, made them disengage. It didn't persuade them, it just made them tuck in and wait for it to blow over. And for those people, I think a different approach is needed.
I think about my Dad... He was a Sanders supporter. And then his property tax got jacked up by almost 30% in one quarter. Suddenly, his house was underwater. Once year after retirement, he had to sell his house and auction off most of his belongings. At that moment, he was reborn as a single issue voter: Taxes. And I can engage him about racism and he largely agrees, but that's not what he's basing his decision on.
So I'm not saying we have to abandon progressive principles and values... But I am saying that
in the service of those principles we need better techniques, more tools in the kit.
I don't think that there's a single approach that will win working-class people back left. I think we'll need a mix of education, pointing out Trump's failures, and a healthy feel-good dose of Shaming.
Also, I think there is a lot of shitty liberal behavior out there, and that's become a narrative weapon against liberals. Though pinpointing that and addressing it will probably only further splinter the left.
I am also trying to imagine a news source which doesn't feed into the bubble-phenomenon of delivering the exact narrative people want to hear... Could one exist?
Because if a news source was CAPABLE of attracting both liberals and conservatives, it would beat out the partisan sources.