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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Dealing With Populists

“The populist recipe is universal. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Cartoon them. As vermin, evil masterminds, flavorless hipsters, you name it. Paint yourself as the savior. Enrapture your followers with a good story. One that starts in anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.”

Populism works through caricature, through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. You’re the enemy, you, with the Starbucks cup. Trump needs you to be the scapegoat. “But facts!”, you’ll say, missing the point entirely....

.....don’t feed polarization, disarm it. This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind....

Trump, however seemingly evil, is not stupid. Getting to the highest office in the world requires great, calculated rhetorical precision. By looking down on Trump’s supporters, you’ve lost the first battle. Instead of fighting polarization, you’ve played into it.....

Remember, our far left almost certainly handed Trump the election. Yes, even Jill Stein’s votes would have been enough to stop Trump, never mind the votes for Johnson and the even greater number who didn’t vote. And then we tried to swing the electoral college and looked like idiots when more electors abandoned Clinton for Bernie surrogates than abandoned Trump.....

.....people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind and look like an enemy of democracy [the way UC Berkeley protesters just turned against free speech, right where the free-speech movement began in 1964....

.....Ditch all the big words. The problem, remember, is not the message but the messenger. You’re more valuable to Trump supporters as an enemy than as a compatriot. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them — that you are American in exactly the same way they are.....

.....if you want to be part of the solution, the road ahead is clear: Recognize you’re the enemy they need; show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those that brought Trump to power; by all means be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.

https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2017/01/20/culturejam/

Berkeley protestors assailed free speech:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/everyone-has-a-right-to-free-speech-even-milo/515565/