The latest installment in the ongoing saga of "Why Liberals are Perennial Losers":
So, if judging by my FB feed, the two things that liberals have grabbed on to over the past few days are: Trump's behavior during the national anthem at the Super Bowl, and Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of Trump's speech at the SOTU. And in typical fashion, they are promoting both of these items with the typical zeal of when anything paints Trump in a negative light from their perspective. Viva la #resistance!
But here's the thing: neither of these things matter. I'll even shout it for those in the back. NEITHER OF THESE THINGS MATTER! People already opposed to Trump will look at these and say, "See! He's a hypocrite! He's an embarrassment! Nance really showed him up!"
People already supporting Trump will look at the national anthem thing and shrug, because they know deep down that it's not something to be treated as a uniform standard but rather a means to take down their political opponents or, among the more hardened of them, keep those minorities "in their place." And they'll look at Nance ripping up that speech and say, "How disrespectful to our President!"
In the end, not a single person will move an inch as a result of either of these symbolic items. And overall the right will win, because liberals cannot bring themselves to do anything other than react to what the right is doing on the terrain that the right has chosen. Anyone who has studied even basic military tactics knows that continually fighting your enemy on terrain of their choosing is a recipe for defeat -- which seems to be the only thing that the national Democratic Party is consistently good at anymore.
What is missing from liberals' approach is the complete lack of a STORY that speaks to people. Sure, we'll hear the endless platitudes from brain dead sycophants to power like Tom Perez that Democrats win "when we focus on our values," but the reality is that the Democratic Party has become so captured by and craven in the face of moneyed interests, no one really knows what their values are anymore. It's an empty slogan from a largely bankrupt wing of the political establishment, and it's an approach that has succeeded only in losing well over 1,000 state house seats, 12 governorships, and a full congressional majority over the past decade. And it helped to get one Donald J. Trump elected when the outgoing President said that a Hillary Clinton Presidency would be like a third term for him, and many people who had been initially filled with hope by Obama in 2008 only to see him betray almost all his campaign promises checked out of the process altogether or voted for Trump as a sort of political Molotov cocktail to throw through the window of the Establishment.
Now this is something that the insurgent left in the US political scene understands in spades. If you watch Bernie Sanders rallies, you may see him up there giving speeches where he hammers on the same themes over and over again. But if you look deeper, you'll also see him taking the microphone to members of the audience and having THEM tell THEIR story. This breaks down the walls of neoliberal atomization that have conditioned us all to believe that any struggles we're going through are ours alone, and helps us realize that actually we are NOT alone. It's an approach that uses story to create solidarity -- something not too far off from what religious texts and apocryphal stories in them do with people who share that faith (and which may help underscore the zeal of many of his supporters, myself included).
Taken a step further, shortly after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal in Congress, a short animated video was put out by The Intercept with her narration. The video was set 20 years in the future as AOC traveled by high-speed train from NYC to Washington to see a young woman inaugurated into the House seat that she holds now. And then she went on to tell the story of how the GND didn't stop climate change nor was the effort without losses but did manage to stave off some of its worse effects, how it created (and PAID) people in efforts of ecological repair and restoration, how it expanded (and PAID) people involved in important care work, and how this young girl from The Bronx who got involved in a vastly expanded Americorps participating in projects to mitigate damage from climate change used that as a springboard to get more involved in her community and now... was being sworn into AOC's former seat. This was a master class in how to spin a narrative that has the potential to bring people together and inspire them toward a larger cooperative purpose than narrow self-interest.
Now, ask yourself when you have ever heard of such a thing coming from the mouths of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, or any of the countless establishment politicians or hangers-on with the Democratic Party. You can't, because they don't do such a thing. Instead they talk about reforms around the edges and "protecting the middle class" and telling people they can't have nice things like M4A while supporting an overbloated military budget and incursions and coups around the globe. And that is why they lose so consistently.
Want to stop losing? Look at what this insurgent left is doing and get on board, because they understand that we human beings are hard-wired through some 250,000 years of evolution to communicate in stories. And the way you reach people is by telling them a story that gives them hope and purpose -- and sometimes even a little bit of who is to blame for the current predicaments, not out of a spirit of hatred, but rather to point out those who stand in the way of that story being made into reality.
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