Progressives (Liberals)

The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) is a federation of Green state political parties in the United States.[8] The party promotes green politics, specifically environmentalism; nonviolence; social justice; participatory, grassroots democracy; gender equality; LGBTQ rights; anti-war; anti-racism and ecosocialism. On the political spectrum, the party is generally seen as left-wing.[3]

Setanta has this right, Leadfoot.

Quote:

The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) is a federation of Green state political parties in the United States.[8] The party promotes green politics, specifically environmentalism; nonviolence; social justice; participatory, grassroots democracy; gender equality; LGBTQ rights; anti-war; anti-racism and ecosocialism. On the political spectrum, the party is generally seen as left-wing.[3]

I think there's nobody here who describes themselves as a leftist or a Dem supporter who finds those political goals as wrong-headed (though, as always, they might be if taken to extreme ends). Progress made on each of those issues in US culture has come almost entirely
from the left - that is, from the Dem Party. Resistance to each has come consistently from the GOP.

Lash is not a representative of nor a proponent of the Green Party. She is merely attempting the same strategy as a contingent in the Russian bot game and GOP bad faith actors. Foment anti-Dem sentiments, foster division and discontent, reduce if possible the number of pro-Dem voters. All of which leads to ends quite in the opposite direction of stated Green goals.

Not quite sure how you fail to make these differentiations.

I used to believe the self-professed liberals here were legitimately liberal.

Why, if they aren’t conservative, don’t they champion liberal policies and parties?

Why, if they aren’t conservative, don’t they champion liberal policies and parties?

It’s easy to see.

(...)
The United States doesn’t have an electoral system, such as proportional representation, in which lots of parties compete for power. (It isn’t, as Neumeier puts it in his 2007 book Zag, a “cluttered” market.) Our system is dominated, pretty much always and everywhere, by two parties. In this sense it’s comparable to corporate sectors in which two competitors have an enormous market share and as a consequence engage in hostile, or comparative, marketing. (See, for example, Coke vs. Pepsi, DISH vs. DirecTV, Miller Lite vs. Bud Light.) They do it because each brand can increase its market share only at the expense of the other. The same logic applies to Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans make it their business to wage a permanent war of partisan defamation. It has been very effective. Recall what happened to the Democrats after they took over from the tremendously unpopular Republican administration of George W. Bush: they got destroyed in the 2010 midterms even though they had introduced a historic health care expansion, restored financial stability, saved the auto industry, and turned the economy around. It was bizarre—as if the tenant who’d wrecked a property and hadn’t paid his rent had persuaded the landlord to let him back in and evict the exemplary new tenant who’d just fixed the place up. It happened because the Republicans consistently held the Democratic administration responsible for the effects of the Republican Recession (as it could have been, but never was, called) and because Democrats declined to market their accomplishments in partisan terms, presumably betting that their accomplishments would be self-evident to the fair-minded, supposedly post-racial American voter.

This morbid dynamic—Republicans break things, Democrats fix them, Republicans win even more power—won’t change unless Democrats commit to doing what Republicans do: systematically diminishing the standing and credibility of the other party.

A negative brand strategy would involve, first, a master narrative; and second, messages that express and amplify the master narrative. Pepsi’s narrative is that its cola tastes better than Coke’s. The “Pepsi Challenge” ads are its messages.

The Democratic story about the GOP would be designed for a particular audience. The audience isn’t the Democratic base, which already has a strongly negative perception of the GOP. Nor can it be the Republican base, whose gut feelings are fixed. The audience for negative branding is squishy voters who occasionally check the (R) box, which they associate with competence and patriotism. Currently, that audience may be smaller than usual, but it is crucial. We’re talking, as always, about winning at the margins and winning for years. Democrats want marginal Republican voters to feel that they can’t trust the Republican Party—not anymore. There’s something off about those guys.

There’s your master narrative, by the way: Republicans can’t be trusted anymore. “Anymore” is important, because your audience may have a history or culture of trusting them. The nature of your audience also dictates that your messaging can’t consist of trashing the other side. That would backfire. Your messaging goal is simply to make your audience feel uncomfortable about what (R) now stands for.

Here’s a case study. On the morning of January 12, the Republican president published a tweet in which he called the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “Crazy Nancy.” That day, George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi to comment. She replied, “It’s Sunday morning, I’d like to talk about some more pleasant subjects than the erratic nature of this president of the United States. But he has to know that every knock from him is a boost.” Later she added:

- So again, I don’t like to spend too much time on his crazy tweets, because everything he says is a projection. When he calls someone crazy he knows that he is. Everything he says you can just translate it back to who he is. Let’s be optimistic about the future, a future that will not have Donald Trump in the White House one way or another.

Pretty good, right? Now imagine if Pelosi had said something like this:

- It’s very unfortunate. It’s what the Republican Party has turned into. I’m not sure what has happened to them. It’s very sad for our country. A lot of folks used to look up to people in the Republican Party, used to trust them to do what was right for Americans—to do their job. But that’s all changed. Their values have changed radically. Americans are asking, “What’s happened to the Republican Party?” I can’t answer that. But I can tell you one thing: Americans will have their say in November.

Pelosi’s actual response was impressive: it showed her to be a calm, dignified grownup, and it favorably differentiated her from Trump. But going after Trump by name and criticizing his personal attributes has little value so far as partisan branding goes: in fact, by positioning Democrats as the alternative to Trump, by positioning Trump and not the GOP as the problem, Pelosi absorbed the provisionality of the Trump brand into her own party’s brand. The imaginary Pelosi response, by contrast, would tell the brand story: Americans can’t trust the Republican Party anymore. What’s relevant about the president’s misconduct is that it’s Republican misconduct. Americans are right to be worried about the Republican Party.

It would be a problem for GOP strategists if every time Trump tweets, Democrats from across the ideological spectrum respond in unison, in a tone that’s more in sorrow than anger, that the Republican Party has lost its values. Nor would this messaging tactic be confined to presidential tweets. Republican politicians say and do horrible things every day. With a clearly understood negative brand strategy, Democratic officials would be able to plug into their basic narrative in response to every new datum of right-wing viciousness or incompetence. Hundreds of gun extremists are occupying Richmond, Virginia, on Martin Luther King Day? Easy: “I have lots of conservative friends. They’re all asking, ‘What has happened to the Republican Party?’”

This communication structure is applicable to the biggest issues, too. Take the impeachment trial:

The Republican president was caught red-handed trying to sabotage the election. Now Republican senators have sabotaged the impeachment trial. Americans see what’s happening. They get that Republicans will do anything to hold onto power. They’re asking themselves: Can Republicans be trusted with power?

There’s more to be said, yes—and indeed if you’re a Democrat on Twitter and you’re communicating with your base, it is your duty to reflect what your base is thinking and feeling. But when squishy conservatives are listening and watching—almost 40 percent of Republicans get their information from sources other than Fox News—they must hear the same message again and again and again.

In addition to the basic narrative, you adopt two subnarratives that weaken the GOP’s most consequential brand advantages with your audience: national security/patriotism, and the economy. Democrats should have one, maximum two, repeatable messages that incidentally take ownership of the “America” concept—let’s say, “Republicans always crash the American economy” and “This new Republican Party can’t be trusted to keep the country safe.” In Words That Work, Luntz shows how such messages must be approached with great care: Does “crash” or “wreck” work better? Is it more effective to talk about “our national security” than “keeping the country safe”? Just imagine the hole the GOP would now find itself in if these narratives were already in place.

If Democrats start repeating direct statements that weaken trust in the GOP, these ideas would also influence media coverage of the latest news. It’s a common, and accurate, complaint that the mainstream media (which a lot of squishy voters watch) fail to acknowledge the Republican threat to our democracy. But the media takes its cues from the parties. When Republicans talk nonstop about Benghazi, that fabricated issue becomes a mediated reality. Conversely, if Democrats fail to assert, explicitly and repeatedly, that the Republican Party as such is unfit for power, how can it expect TV journalists to broach the issue?

When, at some point in the future, the GOP tries to distance itself from Trumpism, Democrats should already have affixed in people’s minds that the GOP, not Trump, is the problem. What Democrats cannot do, at any point, is help the GOP rehabilitate its own brand. That sounds crazy—why would a party do that?—but Joe Biden appears intent on precisely this course of action. Currently there is an almost complete absence of will within the Democratic Party to strategically diminish the GOP’s reputation.

This lack of will has several strands. First, there are powerful senior Democrats—Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, and Representative Richard Neal—who came of age when backslapping cross-party legislative compromise was normal, and for whom negative partisan branding would be an alien and disagreeable concept. Second, many Democratic politicians have risen primarily because they are good at fundraising, not because they are talented partisan communicators—Senator Chuck Schumer, for example. They would struggle with negative messaging even if they supported the concept and could set aside tacit loyalties to corporate or special-interest donors. Third, there are the younger, more leftist members whose idealism and ambition make the Democratic establishment, rather than the GOP, the target of their efforts.

Fourth, and fundamentally, the Democratic brand has long involved a refusal to engage in hostile partisan rhetoric, the better to convey a highminded focus on facts and policies.

The republic, however, finds itself in extremis. The Democratic base expects its elected politicians to do something—specifically, whatever it takes to win elections. Disciplined messaging has never been the forte of Democrats, it’s true. But that’s no longer acceptable.

(...)

The right-wing legal network spawned by the Federalist Society has finally gone full Trumpian. It has morphed from a group of apparently principled conservatives debating high-minded theories of legal interpretation, into a secretly-funded cabal spouting conspiracy theories such as the myth of widespread voter fraud. We’ve certainly seen hints that this was the case and also signals that it was coming. But we have now approached peak-hackery, and that hackery is now being directed at manipulating elections. That part really is new, and it is a dangerous development that threatens the rule of law...

The Right-Wing Legal Network Is Now Openly Pushing Conspiracy Theories