My parents and others are looking at the protest marches and other demonstrations and seem genuinely clueless on what, why, and in their view see it as people that dislike what they see as a strong forceful leader unafraid to act and isn’t acting like a politician.
Now can anyone help me get an easy to read doc written up that is easy to distribute, post to social media, and so forth? The thing here is the language of the document needs to avoid the usual dog whistle Nazi allusions, alarmist language, and the sort of doom slinging the Teabaggers have been employing to avoid an out of hand ‘they didn’t get their way so are being crybabies.’ Never mind it would be easy to go ‘yea and what were you doing for the past eight years?’ We are needing to aim this at the ‘average voter’ rather than someone that keeps track of events. Avoid overly big words that to the layperson makes it seem like you’re trying to browbeat if at all possible.
The goal is to educate as well as clearly state what we believe is wrong, not to ratchet up the fear meter.
What I have found works is to use only the statements of wealthy white hetero Christian men with many generations in the U.S. who are on record as having been affiliated with the Republican party at some point if not currently.
Be sure to preface every statement with WHO said it. It’s not your statement, ever…it’s from Warren Buffet, for example.
Any statement connected to a woman, person of color, registered Democrat, non-Christian, etc. etc. will count against you. So don’t use them.
I applaud your effort but I don’t think it’s possible. There are people (myself included) who see an obvious trend toward nationalism, protectionism, and authoritarianism. We see unqualified people being appointed to lead government agencies that they have worked to undermine and dismantle. We see our interntiaonal relationships strained, our friends becoming enemies and our enemies becoming our friends. We see a clear path to an America that will be much weaker, both in terms of its position as the paradigm of freedom, as well as in pure economic terms, and the vast majority of our citizens in a worse position because of changes to health care, education, social safety nets, environmental policy, wages, taxes, and human rights.
And then there are people who think those are good things. That they will make us stronger and richer as a country. I don’t think we can convince the other side through logic, only through evidence. When the republican health care plan is revealed to make health care less accessible, when the deficit goes up instead of down because of increased military spending, when Russia invades Ukraine, when there are more terrorist attacks against the US at home and abroad, when more peoeple fall below the poverty line and more families become homeless, only then will some (though far from all) realize that Trump’s plan (if one could call it that) was only to enrich himself and his cronies, not make America great.
Have you seen that ad about patriotism with John Cena that was out a few months back? Good place to start IMO. And it’s powerful stuff. Dude practically bleeds moderate Republican.
Like, use the language of patriotism, of freedom, of what America really is all about. Aim for the heart, rather than the brain. Feels are just as important in getting a message across and it’s pretty easy to show how Proper American Values aren’t things like Visa bans, cronyism and corruption.
I endorse what everyone posted above, in terms of tactics most likely to be effective.
However: it is not possible to describe the Trump administration in a “GOP-friendly” way that is not extremely misleading and dramatically minimises the threat represented.
TrumpGOP is a fascist government, Americans of colour are in substantial danger, climate change is an urgent existential threat, Trump/Ryan’s declared tax policies will crash the American economy and the global geopolitical situation is rapidly heading towards war.
I think to really get anywhere with some of those folks you’d need them on a regimen of one of the newer atypical anti-psychosis medication’s for at least a month. If they ever get reality bound you could just talk to them like regular people.
I’m not actually convinced that even evidence will suffice. (After all, evidence is used to establish facts, and look at how facts have come to be viewed by some people.) Even if a result is presented, there are too many people that will look for causes that suit the narrative they’ve been told to believe, after all if only Trump had been allowed to do all the things he wanted to do, surely things would be better. (I.e., it’s obviously the fault of those evil liberals.)
This isn’t to say I don’t think it shouldn’t be tried … but personally, I don’t have enough spoons to talk to that crowd without getting too pissed off to continue. I have conservative(*) friends with which I get along well, but Trump supporters are another breed entirely.
(* - Oddly enough, the conservatives I know are almost as horrified over this presidency as I am.)
There is that, yes. Then again I’m not sure if the people I refer to as conservative are actually conservatives. I mean, sure they self-identify as such, but they welcome people (like myself) that are queer, poly, pagan, etc. into their lives without condemning us!
And that is completely unproductive. We want to try finding a dialogue, not go ‘WE ARE RIGHT YOU ARE STUPID BOW TO US AND LET US SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELVES’ because right now that’s how this thread seems to be going. Well that and ‘why bother they are beyond saving.’
Neither sentiment is productive, and to be blunt I am insulted by each. These people, my family, are not morons. They might have conclusions I dislike, mostly because it comes off as the same ‘tut tut look at all these ignorant children ruining MY nation’ that I see here. However they see the same corruption we see, the same erosion and malaise that benefits nobody except for a privileged few.
That alone shows you and them are not so different. Stop treating your fellow countrymen like a pack of fucking retards you have to swoop in and save like motherfucking superman.
And yet here we are fighting. So can you please either help, or stop talking, because this kind of ‘haha we’re gonna make fun of these people’ bullshit only drives the wedge deeper.
You can’t have a simple primer, because people grow up in many different cultures in the US. And because people have many different sets of values.
My dad abstained from voting this election, but he would have voted for trump, because abortion is his #1 concern.
It took me quite a few conversations until he agreed that funding stuff like birth control, providing safe abortions, comprehensive sex-ed, and that not caring about who screws who, and using the government to reduce poverty all lead to fewer abortions.
I convinced him that if his main goal is for there to be fewer abortions, then he should vote for liberals. But it took a lot of work, careful references to scientific studies, and pointing out that he’s letting his lesser personal preferences get in the way of his main goal. Now he agrees with me that Bernie should have been president.
Every single time there’s been a significant increase in the education of the population, human suffering is decreased, until they decided that the cost of education should increase faster than the increase in GDP and the real wages of actual humans.
American prosperity is illusory for the most part. We’re great at inflating numbers by forcing the poor to bear the weight of the rich.
A lot of trump supporters, enough to be part of the calculation for such a primer, are proud to be stupid. The official Texas Republican platform explicitly opposes the idea that critical thinking and reasoning skills are a good thing. To the point of saying, essentially, that changing one’s mind is anti-republican and dangerous.
Requiring that “fixed beliefs must not be challenged” is antithetical to intellectual honesty.
What I’m saying is that there’s no simple solution.
A 2 paragraph or whatever statement isn’t going to work on anyone but fence-sitters.
If you actually want to convince people who say they support trump, you’re going to have to do a lot of things besides showing them they’re wrong. You’ll need to gain their trust. You’ll need to teach them how to evaluate evidence. You’ll need to teach them that when something “sounds true” it’s very risky to just accept it, and it needs confirmation from independent sources.
You want to convert people from a dogmatic and denialist philosophy to an open and skeptical philosophy based on reason and reliable evidence and facts, and that’s admirable, and something I want to do too. But it’s not something you can do in a Facebook post, or a tweet. It’s something that takes time and dedication.
See that’s a lot better. This is useful information rather than upthreas ‘I will not speak with them until they are heavily medicated for a long duration.’
Anyway, I feel that attitude is rather Dunning-Krueger. Some of us might be trained psychologists. But none of us actually know these people. All we can do is judge them on their actions and words from afar. A message they themselves can choose to project.
