I was reading “Lessons from the Health-Care Wars” by Peter Dreier at The American Prospect, and this sentence just about jumped off the page at me: “The job of a social movement is to change the public debate so that progressive reforms become politically viable.”
Let me provide a little bit of a larger context:
Reform activists sometimes disagreed on tactics. Some hoped to gain leverage by explicitly criticizing Obama. Others, particularly the major unions, MoveOn, and consumer groups, believed that attacking the newly elected president, already under siege from the right, was counterproductive and wanted to focus public ire on the insurance industry and its allies in Congress.
But this argument misses the point. The job of a social movement is to change the public debate so that progressive reforms become politically viable. Activism on the ground creates pressure for bolder reform and gives liberal elected officials more room to maneuver.
See, this is exactly what all of us smartypants liberal bloggers and activists are not doing — trying to change the public debate.
For example, during the protracted health care fight there were endless arguments about whether we liberals should support the bill with a watered-down public option, or no public option, or with or without mandates, and whether President Obama was fighting hard enough for a public option, or whether he never intended there to be a public option and that the plan all along was to kill the public option and mandate that people purchase private insurance, etc. etc.
And then there were frequent updates on which congresspersons were going to vote for what, and which ones might be persuadable, and which ones needed to be “primaried.”
But we did not do a good job changing the national debate to make the public option important to a broader swatch of the public. And because we didn’t do that, the public option was politically expendable.
It didn’t help that some activists claimed support for the public option in Congress that probably was never there. Those claims quickly hardened into Accepted Fact by many on the Left, who then felt “sold out” and blamed the White House when the public option disappeared.
Like it or not, the Tea Baggers were more effective at setting the terms of the nation’s health care discussion, if only as plants in the right-wing echo chamber. Yeah, they went off script a lot, but they helped reinforce what the medical-industrial complex wanted people to think — that the Democrats’ bill would be too expensive, would raise their taxes, would disrupt the patient-doctor relationship, is mostly an entitlement for poor people, and is somehow taking us down the road to socialism.
Of course, it’s also true that in our current twisted media-political climate, the truth carries a greater burden than propaganda, and teaching the public about how a complex policy might actually work is darn near impossible. Yet that is what we must do if progressives are ever going to stop playing defense.
I’m not entirely sure how to go about changing the public debate, but here are some tactics that won’t work:
Building alliances with Tea Baggers. You’ve heard the story about the scorpion and the frog? ‘Nuff said.
Tea Party-Progressive Dialogue. Annabel Park’s “coffee party” idea was well intentioned, but it was doomed from the beginning. And that’s not just because one cannot have a rational conversation with someone who sincerely thinks the new health care reform law is “socialism” and that the President is a secret Muslim from Kenya. It’s because there is also an element on the Left more interested in acting out and “self-expression” than in doing anything useful. Think Code Pink.
Public Demonstrations Featuring Giant Puppets, Vulgar Signs, Young Men With Megaphones Who Don’t Know When to Shut Up, and Stupid Costumes. I’ve complained about this before. But, folks, people who marched with Gandhi and Martin Luther King managed to be effective without the giant puppets, etc.
I continue to hope that only about 20 percent of the American public is completely unreachable. I’d like to think that there’s a large portion of the American electorate that maybe aren’t as well informed as we’d like, but who are capable of learning if we could find a way to reach them.
YES! I have argued before that any reform – health care, immigration, finance, etc.. is only possible when it can be packaged as moderate. The ‘war’ is about the perception of what IS moderate. Those who fought in the health care perception war know that what was passed was not progressive, and (thankfully) not totally gutted. The culture war from the right is to paint HCR as socialism soon enough to repeal or neuter it before it becomes accepted and mainstream as Social Security and Medicare are now perceived as moderate and accepted programs.
What we need to do is change the perceived ‘middle’ ground which is where legislators can pass reform.
An example. I do battle on Hubpages forums. A recent post featured an article from the NY Times that said Health Care Costs will go up. I extracted the figures from the article and the net is that costs will go up less than 1% in order to cover an addition 10% of the US population. How can this not be a deal?
For anyone with an open mind, I changed the perception with the facts. This must be our goal. (That and pissing off wingnuts for fun.)
I’d like to think that the 20% figure is correct. I believe it is, but have no way of proving it.
First, one of the Yahoo groups that I belong to is composed mostly of Navy veterans. Most of the members believe everything Beck, Limbaugh and Palin say. If a senior military figure, say Adm Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, comes out and says the military is all for doing away with DADT, he is branded as a pinko-commie-homo-loving traitor. They are so fixed in their thinking that they will not listen to any discussion that goes against their view of the world. Their minds are closed.
Second, white males. I suspect that the percent of white males that is unreachable is significantly higher than 20%. You got the John Wayne/Chuck Norris crowd that couldn’t hack the military, but now want to prove their man-hood.
A “manly” republican probably cannot be recruited to explain reasonableness to them, b/c that Repub has a constituency he is pandering to.
I think the Closed Minded Twenty Percent has to be written off. Period.
The undecideds, however are a different kettle of fish. How do you pry them away from the TV, from the corner bar?
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Well, there’s making things better, and then there’s finding meaning in making things better. The successes of the latter are what’s celebrated in history books, despite it’s abysmal failure rate compared to the former.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0423/Tea-party-activists-Do-they-hate-liberals-more-than-they-love-liberty
Suzanne Plummer – 1993 Miss New Jersey.
Miss NJ, Miss Alaska, Miss what this country used to be
Ever feel like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” when he got the Orphan Annie Decoder ring and his firt message was “Drink More Ovaltine?” Well Jan 1, 1999 I was sitting in a trailer in Cartersville Georgiia with a sullen girl whose cable was out. I thought surely it gets better from here – Praise BOB it did. I think.
http://people.forbes.com/profile/suzanne-lowden/7103
http://people.forbes.com/profile/suzanne-lowden/7103
Anybody catch the $50,000,000.00 in assets part. Truly a woman of the people – as long as your realize those are the “people” at the country club and campaign donors. NOT the peasants – as long as we’re clear on that.
Sorry about that second link was supposed to be this:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Sue_Lowden
New definitions for “Nine Most Feared Words In The English Language”:
I’m Sue Lowden and I’m here to help
I knew Ronald Reagan and I’m here to help
What little news people get now comes from TV for the most part. Newspapers are dying, and the internet is not pervasive yet.
Reasonable people meeting and sharing ideas, or marching quietly, doesn’t garner attention. It’s not entertaining enough, which is what news has become – another moneymaker for the entertainment divisions.
Sure, giant puppet’s seem silly, but the were/are used to make a point. Unfortunately, giant puppets don’t come close to garnering as much attention as real human puppets, dressed in tri-corner hats with t-bags hanging from them, in colonial outfits, carrying inflammatory signs.
When someone can figure out how to reach the media, we can begin to think about how we can begin to change peoples minds. Yes, the internet is better than screaming into the wind, but right now, it’s not as effective as having cartoon-character politicians and puppet followers parade in anger on every major TV news show.
They’ve figured that out. What do we do to respond?
Patrick Moynihan once famously said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”
Trouble is, in much of the media even the most blatant falsehoods are rarely called out and, consequently, total or semi fabrications, baseless opinions and outright lies carry as much influence as actual facts.
What I would love to see is a weekly tv show devoted entirely to fact-checking. Something along the lines of what factcheck.org, politifact.com and snopes.com are currently doing on the web. As things stand right now, we’re like the six blind men who went to see the elephant and wound up thinking an elephant was like: a rope, a wall, a fan, a spear, a snake, a wall.
So oft in information wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an elephant
Not one of them has seen!
(appologies to John Godfrey Saxe)
Changling the debate sounds a lot like “framing”, one reason why I subscribe some but not all of George Lakoff’s ideas. I see better framing among my more intelligent friends that I do of the democratic leadership. It has been easy to stop many who don’t have insurance yet decry Obama’s “socialism” by asking what they do when they are injured. They reply that they go to the emergency room… and are the beneficiaries of socialism.
There’s more than just goody-two-shoes moral issues involved. There is practicality.
WIth healthcare, why aren’t tea partiers and others marching on hospitals, the instigators of “income redistribution”?
Dems try to ignore the opposition with a naive belief that the average person’s moral basis will guide their choices between the dems and GOP. That is only partly true. Sometimes, some people seek practicality, some their own benefit and some will are willing to sacrifice. Some can be shamed and some can be scared. Each can be motivated differently at different times depending upon context, triggers and circumstances.
It’s counterintuitive, but each individual grabbing for everything they ca results in less for everyone. You can’t just tell people that. They have to be confronted with it in story form, with examples and anecdotes…it has to be put in story form.
How do we respond? I’m even bothered with the form of that question. Part of the problem is that we are “responding.”
I don’t think most people, including most self-identified Democrats, actually know what the Democratic ethos is – social obligations, economic security, industrial democracy (not industrial autocracy.) (And, on the practical/viable/necessary side, equal access to power.)
I think most people would readily agree with the Democratic ethos if they knew what it was – but they don’t because Democratic leaders/movers/shakers spend the bulk of their time trying to avoid blow-back from Repubs rather than ignoring them and pushing their own really simple philosophy.