Terralthra, the flip side is that they DID lose some states they were clearly expecting to win.
Sure, they got support from union members- but union membership has been shriveling up for decades. There are a lot of voters in the same demographics as the union members, who
aren't union members. Their support would have been helpful.
Sure, among minorities who turned out to vote they got support- but it would have been really,
really helpful if a few hundred thousand more black voters had shown up to the polls in a few critical states. They didn't.
These are things that represent missed opportunities that a competent political operator really, really ought to be able to see.
There's going to be a lot of debate in the DNC, and probably some changes in who is in charge and just what leadership culture they bring to the table. That nearly always happens in political parties where the leadership backs the wrong horse. The question is what comes out of that.
Dragon Angel wrote:I'll be the first to say there are quite a few hot take meisters who should really cool it, especially when speaking about groups they don't belong in. The left's tendency to devour itself over petty differences also irritates me to no end whenever it happens.
Of the quotes you pasted from the SSC article, I mainly took issue with the racism / police brutality excerpt, because the assumption of "perfectly settled" is not perfectly settled in a universal scope. Common sense is not so common, after all. There are many who really do believe Eric Garner deserved his death, that the police were right in their extrajudicial punishment or they were just merely doing their jobs, and Garner's death was completely accidental, with no negligence whatsoever.
Yes, but the point is that Garner got a lot more sympathy, and
unambiguous sympathy.
You can't convince them all, but you can at least hope to convince a majority, including those who are growing up with this as one of their first exposures to this category of national scandal.
The lesson should be "Don't make it
easy for the bastards to paint you as a hysterical liar."
If we stuck to hypothetical "perfectly safe" subjects, though, as much as they existed? The finer nuances of cases like the "controversy" over Michael Brown will end up being slanted toward the status quo's interpretation. No comment from one viewpoint will end up giving those in power's narratives more precedence over those not in power.
The catch is, there's a huge difference between "which cases happen" and "which cases get publicized."
Michael Brown's case wouldn't have gotten massively publicized if people on the left hadn't
chosen to give it massive publicity. The Ferguson police wouldn't have done it by themselves. We know this because not every black teenager the police kill gets that level of publicity.
If every ounce of the publicity that went to Michael Brown had gone to (for example) Freddie Gray instead, we'd have been better off. Because while Gray's death can be ruled an accident, getting mad over a man who clearly didn't deserve to die "accidentally" dying of getting his neck broken for the offenses he was arrested over is a lot more sympathetic than getting mad over a man getting shot who ten eyewitnesses say picked a fight with an armed police officer and who pretty strongly appears to have gotten caught on video robbing a convenience store.
Picking your battles isn't the same as letting the enemy write the narrative. It's making sure that your narrative won't end up getting inconveniently disemboweled if the facts turn up not to be quite what you thought they were in the specific case you chose to make your poster child.
Honestly, I think that makes it
harder for the enemy write the narrative, not easier.
The question then becomes: Should we allow some moderate percentage of cases to go unnoticed, in fear of any possible backlash? If we do allow this, are we prepared to live with the prevailing narrative that will emerge to dominate the discourse out of this silence?
Nonono. The question is as follows. Of the literally hundreds of cases that occur every year, only a very few rape cases and police shootings and so on will "go viral."
Which ones should I be seeking to publicize?
Should I go looking
really hard for the rape case where everyone in authority decided the woman who lodged the complaint was lying, accepting the risk that a facts-based and neutral investigation really will reveal that she actually
was lying, as happens a certain narrow minority of the time?
Should I go rushing to the press with news that a policeman just shot a teenager in cold blood, risking that I might wind up with egg on my face after he's caught on a security camera robbing a convenience store and after ten eyewitnesses swear up and down they saw him charge the officer?
Dig in on the moral high ground. But think things through. Make sure one hasn't picked a hilltop that has the enemy giggling with manic glee because of the umpty dozen barrels of TNT they buried under your position before you arrived on the scene.
Don't make it easy for the bastards to paint you as a hysterical idiot. They're good enough at doing that to people as it is.
I'm not sure I can possibly do that. For me, personally, it would be like standing idly by while evil does its work. This reaches out beyond my own marginalized status; it forces me to let something possibly immoral pass by in fear of appearing politically insecure. Any possible benefits of being non-controversial would be washed away by the prevailing narrative being allowed to speak with no consequence. The prevailing narrative will almost invariably be against me in any case, even if I only spoke out on the safer subjects.
This is perhaps why so many left-leaning people loathe the Democrats and other liberal centrists. They feel, and in the majority of cases very justified, that the American liberal party is too willing to throw them under a bus for other political gains. They can't believe in a group that is so willing to sacrifice their interests whenever it is convenient. I guess this goes back to "picking our battles" ... one must be careful, but one cannot be complacent.
What I'm trying to speak up for is the kind of clear-eyed, hard-minded determination that a good general has in a war zone. Every good general knows which side of the war they're on, knows who their troops are, and isn't going to abandon or betray any of them.
But every good general is capable of saying "Yep, that piece of ground over there? That is not worth sending my people to bleed over."
Someone who can't do that will spend an awful lot of time walking into traps and getting blown sky high.
That is what I'm talking about here. I hope you find that more sympathetic than "I suggest we throw inconvenient and difficult-to-defend groups under the bus."
What I want is determined advocacy for
groups, but with careful attention to who we let be transformed into the poster children of our movements. And of which specific grassroots-level events we turn into national issues.
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