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Blue America’s Messaging Problem
The American Mind ^ | 01/04/22 | Michael Anton

Posted on 01/04/2022 1:09:55 PM PST by PoliticallyShort

It’s tempting to call “democracy” meaningless in today’s parlance. Except it has a meaning: the opposite of what its dictionary entry says. “Democracy” now means not the rule or sovereignty of the people but the fiat of elites and “experts.” When the people can be persuaded, duped, or bullied into ratifying expert insistence, so much the better. That extra pretense of legitimacy helps quiet and discredit dissent. When they can’t, no matter. The “right thing” will be done, come what may, and that too is “democratic” under the new meaning. The cloyingly disingenuous phrase “our democracy” really means “their oligarchy.” Reds are not included—except as subjects.

Like converts who become more Catholic than the pope (admittedly, not hard to do with this pope), none are more aggressive in promoting the Blue message than ex-“conservatives.” Case in point: in a widely noted September op-ed, longtime neoconservative fixture and now Blue enforcer Robert Kagan declared that the only legitimate posture for Republicans going forward is complete acquiescence to the Democratic agenda. From “government spending” to “defense” to “immigration” to “the persistent covid-19 pandemic” to ”election reform” to the filibuster, the message is the same: give us everything we want or you will be fomenting “mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

We may indeed be drifting toward such terrible things. But it’s reasonable to ask: who’s more responsible for that drift? Those demonizing half the country and telling them that it’s our way or the highway, and if you object, you’re a Confedero-Nazi? (Perhaps unaware of Godwin’s Law, Kagan actually includes a Hitler comparison.) Or those who object to being constantly called Confedero-Nazis and told that their role in our civic life is to get nothing and like it?

(Excerpt) Read more at americanmind.org ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: blogpimp; blueamerica; redamerica
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1 posted on 01/04/2022 1:09:55 PM PST by PoliticallyShort
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To: PoliticallyShort
There's nothing wrong with their "messaging." It's very clear to those whose eyes are open and want to see...


2 posted on 01/04/2022 1:13:00 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom (81 million votes...and NOT ONE "Build Back Better" hat)
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To: PoliticallyShort

An excellent piece. He siezes on the left’s rhetorical use of the phrase “our democracy” as a way of hiding its real agenda and demonizing any resistance to it.


3 posted on 01/04/2022 1:13:57 PM PST by Steve_Seattle
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To: PoliticallyShort
" . . . those who object to being constantly called Confedero-Nazis and told that their role in our civic life is to get nothing and like it?"

And in recent months we are being told by the MSM how much we will prefer things when we have no house, no car, no beef, no pork, no options, no right to our own opinion, no right to information, no right to practice our religion, no right to influence our own children, and no say in how anything is done. And they say we are the enemies of "democracy."
4 posted on 01/04/2022 1:19:56 PM PST by Steve_Seattle
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To: PoliticallyShort

It is NOT a messaging problem. They do what they damned well please because they have defeated all of our republic’s mechanisms of accountability to the people.


5 posted on 01/04/2022 1:25:02 PM PST by RatRipper (The Biden Adm is leading an attack against US citizens . . . pure evil.)
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To: PoliticallyShort

[Democracy] == [doing what Democrats want]


6 posted on 01/04/2022 1:34:18 PM PST by Steely Tom ([Voter Fraud] == [Civil War])
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To: PoliticallyShort

Robert Kagan is a neocon warmonger and William Kristol associate who has no hands-on military experience but whom Bush listened to in entering useless long-term wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the devastation that caused for American veterans and their families as well as the people of those countries. He is married to Victoria Nuland of the Biden State Department who was a leader in pushing the damaging lie known as the Steele Collusion Dossier. Kagan needs to go with the Dems, stay there, and take his plague of beliefs with him.


7 posted on 01/04/2022 1:38:39 PM PST by laconic
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To: AdvisorB; Aggie Mama; Alberta's Child; alexander_busek; alfa6; Amagi; aMorePerfectUnion; ...
I rarely invoke the Federalist/Anti-Federalist ping list, but two articles today touch tangentially on the subject from opposite poles.

This is the second article, which is the view from the Right.

8 posted on 01/04/2022 1:57:15 PM PST by Publius
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To: Steely Tom

Yep. Exactly.

When they say

“Why can’t we be civil and get along?”

What they really mean is:

“Why won’t you do everything we force you to do so we can be civil and get along?”


9 posted on 01/04/2022 2:00:56 PM PST by rlmorel (Nothing can foster principles of freedom more effectively than the imposition of tyranny.)
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To: Publius

Thanks for the ping, Publius...:)


10 posted on 01/04/2022 2:01:17 PM PST by rlmorel (Nothing can foster principles of freedom more effectively than the imposition of tyranny.)
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To: Steve_Seattle

Don’t forget no energy, so we can freeze in the dark like good little serfs.


11 posted on 01/04/2022 2:13:20 PM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: ProtectOurFreedom

Yeah...it’s not communism...it’s ‘messaging’! Got it!


12 posted on 01/04/2022 2:37:51 PM PST by gr8eman (When you're bought and paid for by commies...you're a commie!)
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To: Publius

Michael Anton is solid. I’ve worked with him a couple of times, where he talked and I listened.


13 posted on 01/04/2022 3:40:07 PM PST by Loud Mime (A living and breathing Constitution empowers evil; living and breathing Commandments do was well. )
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To: PoliticallyShort

I have been against Communism from the day that I learned a bearded cigar chomping sumbitch in Cuba was threatening my very life with missiles.

I do not suffer well the less than dirt politicians that call themselves socialist or communist without impunity.
Not in a land that stands against all things they preach.


14 posted on 01/04/2022 3:46:42 PM PST by Terry L Smith
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To: PoliticallyShort

This is a good read. The author nails it.


15 posted on 01/04/2022 4:18:35 PM PST by 43north (Its hard to stop a man when he knows he's right and he keeps on comin'.)
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To: PoliticallyShort

.


16 posted on 01/04/2022 5:26:55 PM PST by sauropod (Resident Bidet. A confused old man at the wrong bus stop.)
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To: Publius
Wow! Anton seems to have familiarized himself with some of the lingo of neoreaction. I wonder if he is a fan of the Dark Enlightenment?

Props for a shout out to John Derbyshire; one of the more recent victims of NROs cancel culture.

17 posted on 01/05/2022 12:45:06 AM PST by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: PoliticallyShort
This part caught my eye:

"Blue America offers to Red nothing but scorn, contempt, hatred, insult, humiliation, calumny, outsourcing, open borders, layoffs, lower wages, opioids, losing wars, censorship, trumped-up treason accusations, surveillance, anarcho-tyranny, pre-trial detention, mask mandates, lockdowns, Critical Race Theory, and cancellation. And then not only gets enraged when Red America objects, but demands Red reverence and gratitude in return."

If you read any site that talks about domestic abuse, its the same dynamic. And if this dynamic is not stopped, it will have the same results.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, some of the people quoted in the article are either mentally ill, or cynically manipulative for whatever their own ends happen to be.

I think what they (as in the people the author is referring to) fear is either their victims just walk away (abandonment), or their victims decide the only way to make it stop (disclaimer-I am not advocating, just making an observation) is to kill their abusers.

My fear is we may be getting too far along in the dynamic without one of those two options, because it seems one side is incapable of stopping themselves.

18 posted on 01/05/2022 8:13:46 AM PST by Tench_Coxe
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To: PoliticallyShort
Reds are not included—except as subjects.

Reds in this case means conservative Republicans.   Reds in the past meant Communists, like the Red Chinese and the Soviets under The Internationale Red Banner of the hammer and sickle ☭.

Words mean something so TPTB change the meaning of the word.   Like Liberal now means Leftist but Classic Liberal once meant what we now call Conservative.

Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market, civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on limited government, economic freedom, and political freedom.
I'm sick of being rebranded and marginalized while we just take it without a complaint.
19 posted on 01/05/2022 11:41:06 AM PST by higgmeister ( In the Shadow of The Big Chicken)
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To: PoliticallyShort
Longtime neoconservative fixture and now Blue enforcer Robert Kagan declared that the only legitimate posture for Republicans going forward is complete acquiescence to the Democratic agenda. From “government spending” to “defense” to “immigration” to “the persistent covid-19 pandemic” to ”election reform” to the filibuster, the message is the same: give us everything we want or you will be fomenting “mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

Or.....they (the idiots) could just immediately acquiesce to everything we normals want and peace would be preserved. If they're unwilling to do that, dividing the country might be a necessary evil. And since when is unchallenged feral authority a good thing anyway??

20 posted on 01/05/2022 12:38:05 PM PST by Still Thinking (Freedom is NOT a loophole!)
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