Republicans are playing the long game, Democrats are not
NOTE: this text was not written by me and is from user u/GodEmperorNixon. The only changes were minor formatting for readability. I would merely link to reddit if they had a way to highlight comments, but they do not.
The original post.
I am begging the Democrats to realize that doing politics extends beyond the legislature and into electoral work and dominating the narrative.
People bring up well, the Republicans always came out and voted, why can’t we?! No, that’s only half the story. The other half of the story, the important part of the story, is that the Republicans spent a decade and a half—at least—laying the ideological and messaging infrastructure and now they’re utterly dominant in messaging, information, and in setting the terms of the conversation.
Key religious groups were seized by GOP ideologues. In 1979, 70% of the pastors of the Southern Baptist Conference were in favor of legalized abortion; one year later, the GOP seized control and made pro-life policies and article of faith. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in the same year and began using it to mobilize conservative Christians.
Let’s be clear: the traditional Baptist principle here was a total separation of religion and politics. (There are still liberal Baptist groups that fight for that separation.) Falwell was able to do away with that and mobilize Baptists as a political force.
Then you had Weyrich, Feulner, and Coors founding the Heritage Foundation in 1973; Fisher and Casey the Manhattan Institute in 1977; the Koch Bros founded the Cato Institute in the same year. These, along with a rightward shift in AEI, would launder Conservative and (“Libertarian”-Conservative) policy initiatives, set the policy orthodoxy, and generate pro-Conservative policy narratives that operatives would wield like a cudgel in the halls of power.
And we’re not even getting into the Federalist Society, which promised ambitious young law students with a route to clerkships and mentorships with prestigious judges if they advanced a conservative legal ideology.
And then Rupert Murdoch, who had already made a bundle in sensationalist print journalism, brought on ex-GOP operative Roger Ailes (who founded and ran MSNBC!) to begin and run Fox News.
And none of this is getting into Rush Limbaugh and the rise of conservative talk radio!
And so, in more than a few places in America (and not in the sticks!) you could wake up, watch Fox News, get in your car, listen to Limbaugh (or later even Infowars) on the way to church, and then hear a sermon that repeated what you just heard on the TV and the radio, given by a pastor who was trained at a conservative, GOP-aligned evangelical seminary.
If that Republican was of a more intellectual bent, it wouldn’t be far different —he’d just be listening to Cato, Heritage, AEI, and conservative public intellectuals.
That Republican, in any case, is more than “a guy who votes.” He’s a person that lives in, swims in, is suffused with a Republican narrative. That narrative exists in every sphere of life and touches on even basic notions of history and society.
We Democrats have no equivalent of any of this.
So Christopher Rufo can come in and invent a panic about Critical Race Theory or trans strippers out of whole cloth (seriously, he’s open about it on his Twitter), just an utterly absurd but brilliantly coded piece of vapid propaganda, and he’ll get the New York Times writing about it in a month and Florida passing laws on it in three.
We have nothing even remotely close to that kind of bold command of the narrative. Nothing. And we’re consistently outperformed because of it.
That desperately needs to change. We need to remember that doing politics is controlling the message, controlling the discussion, setting the terms of the environment. It’s not herding people to the polls like they’re cats, it’s building that movement on the narrative and compelling world-view you’ve built for your electorate.
We Dems need to be doing that. Not reciting poems, not posting pictures of us doing yoga, not debating over legislative procedure. We need Dem lawmakers out there seizing the moment by the throat.