A very appropriate recasting of Postel’s law into the public sphere and a winning strategy.
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Again, I appreciate the quality of the exchange.
I’m talking about lefties like me of course and other human beings prone to emotional responses over tactical ones in the face of very emotionally troubling circumstances. It’s hard to keep our tempers but we must sometimes if we want to win.
Re: the know-nothing 27%, yes, there is a certain portion of people who cannot be reasoned with, but regarding the rest of Trump voters I would rather have them vote in our favor than just stay home.
So, how do talk to “implicitly biased but not ideologically racist” Aunt June who just thinks Sanders is a classy lady? She and others like her constitute a huge voting block. She used to vote Democrat until they dropped they unions and made her uncomfortable with LGBT stuff.
She took a chance on Obama, and it didn’t work for her, so she took a chance on Trump. If we want her to take a chance on whoever we offer in 2020, we need to not look like assholes.
Don’t call Aunt June a Nazi. When you talk to Aunt June, don’t call Sarah Sanders a Nazi. Don’t mention Richard Spencer (an actual Nazi) to her because it’s not really that relevant to the conversation.
Instead, play to Aunt June’s heart strings about the poor kids behind chain link fences. I know she’ll feel it because I feel it too. If we tone down the divisive rhetoric, we can maybe connect over our shared humanity.
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It’s not a documentary. The whole thing was staged for the cameras.
There’s no point in arguing about any of the other subjectivities.
ETA: Although there’s an apposite Orwell quote about walls which I’m tempted to hunt down.
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Time for lefties like you to get smart, then. Stick around this site and you’ll see quality ideas.
It’s a game of slim margins and realistic goals, so having them stay home might be best in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.
You identify her leverage points and work them. For example, an “Aunt June” type I know went through almost the exact same process you described, but it became clear that she wasn’t going to vote Dem again. That meant that the goal changed to getting her to stay home or perhaps waste her vote on a third party.
So when she started complaining about the liberals and such my response was always, “yeah, those politicians are all crooks and phonies.” She couldn’t really argue with that based on her own viewpoint, and she’s smart enough to know that claiming Il Douche isn’t a crook at this point would not be a winner with either of us, so it may push her to stay home next time. I’m OK with that, especially if the Dems can replace her by giving a long-standing non-voter something to come out for with a Sanders-wing candidate offering something substantive.
I don’t have to do any of those things if I’ve convinced her there’s no reason for her to vote in 2020.
The discussions about Nazis and fascists and the alt-right for me aren’t as much about the 2020 election as they are raising the alarm about a longer-term threat to liberal democracy.
If that works, sure. But my “Aunt June” would assign as much blame to their “irresponsible” parents as she would to those setting up the cages.
And again, on a mass level this is about identifying market segments in the remaining 24% and figuring out how to appeal to them. Some of those segments (admittedly smaller and more educated ones) will indeed respond to our comparing the statements and actions of the regime to those of the German Reich.
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How do you think we got here? Trump is not an isolated incident, he’s the cumulative result of decades of trying to find common ground, always inching rightward as we let them define where common ground was going to be.
The Democratic Party is not part of the political left. Going along, hoping to win people who think it is will only drag things further to the right. Any “compromise” the right offers involves them giving up little, and the left giving up a lot.
Those tactics you’re proposing aren’t working and haven’t worked for a long time. We keep losing, right down to our basic humanity. To keep using them makes zero sense. We need new tactics. Even if it means leaving Aunt June behind, because Aunt Julìa wasn’t a racist to start with, but also never voted because nobody noticed her existence before.
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I’ve been a daily BB reader for about a decade or so. I usually find internet comment forums to be a waste of time but I’m here because I normally value what I see here and would like it to see it be better. I am probably 90% allied with the politics I see here but am distressed but when I see ad hominem attacks, disfiguration of faces, etc. It’s bad when they do it, it’s bad when we do it even if it makes us feel better, and I just don’t think it works.
I don’t mean this as an insult, but perhaps you are more cynical than I am. I’d like to see more people voting not less. I’d like to believe that there is a way to keep Aunt June voting but change her vote. A democracy in which only 25% of those eligible to vote do so is in real trouble. Yes, I already know we’re in already real trouble but I do not view fewer people voting as an improvement, even if it helps me get what I want.
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There’s no need to shout; I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m an “Angry Black Woman” or anything…
Okay, then.
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Pointing out that someone is acting or speaking like a Nazi is not an ad hominem attack. It distresses me more that in 2018 those someones are the occupant of the Oval Office and his staff and electoral base.
Also, keep in mind that if you’re tone policing you probably enjoy some level of privilege that others ahead of you on the fascists’ lists don’t.
Sure, in order not to offend Aunt June one might ask that we (for example) avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism, but the response might not be flattering to you.
When talking about political campaigning I take it as a compliment. It’s a dirty business of superficiality where the price often does matter more than value.
I’d like to see more people voting as well – the participation rate in the U.S. is shameful. But you’re always going to have people who don’t vote, and I’d rather they be a bunch of Aunt Junes than a bunch of disaffected young people who aren’t being offered anything by both party establishments.
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For what it’s worth:
But I see others already have noted this stuff. FWIW, I’m all about historical context. And as the general reaction to Riefenstahl shows, plenty of people were in opposition to the nazis, as well as, to antisemitism in general at the time. People were aware of what was going on in Germany and were in full reaction to it. It’s hard not to take the fact that Disney was the only studio head willing to meet with her, when literally everyone else in Hollywood refused to do so.
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Yes, the daring technical innovations and deft camera work are why so many contemporaries were in awe of Riefenstahl. TotW might actually be her worst film. I remember being blown away the first time I watched Das blaue Licht:
Undeniable genius, later put to odious use for a monstrous patron.
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Also, @gracchus, here is a counter point that supports the view that he wasn’t personally antisemitic:
At some point, supporting groups that are racist or antisemitic can rub off by association. He seemed like he was donating to Jewish charities, etc, but he’s also trying to get into the German film market during the Nazi period. Sounds like capitalism was privileged over social issues at that point in his career.
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I’ve read both articles, but based on what I discussed in my follow-up comment I think that while it’s pretty clear that Disney wasn’t anti-Nazi before the war there’s little to support the claim that he was a Nazi sympathiser.
As I made clear above, I have no doubt he was a casual anti-Semite, as were most of the non-Jewish business elites at the time.
That gets closer to the truth (at all points in his career). It was always business-first for him, followed closely by the purity of art which he felt served the former. Politics and social issues were very low on his list of priorities unless they directly affected him negatively (unions) or positively (contacts for film distribution in the Reich). This is reflected in the Gabler biography, in the work of the historian who analysed his business diaries, and also in the statements of colleagues who didn’t much care for him.
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Not denying that, but at what point does it become a problem, being silent on an issue like this? When does silence become complicity? I know we’re not supposed to project back into the past and put our modern sensibilities on those in the past, but it’s not like people (even business elites) were blind to what was happening in Germany.
True. And those choices (since he was a powerful cultural voice in the US at the time, and continued to be after the war) does have consequences. I think even people at the time understood that. This was well after the development of public relations as a field, and Edward Bernays was a prominent figure in the public imagination (and in Hollywood, having worked with studios during the first world war to make anti-German propaganda films).
Again, no one was blind about what was happening, and no one was unaware of the power of propaganda and the role of hollywood in shaping American propaganda. I mean, I doubt that Disney coming out with a strong anti-nazi message would have changed much, but at what point does being neutral become a problem?
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I wonder if this story is covered in Hitler in Los Angeles by Steven J. Ross
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hitler-in-los-angeles-9781620405642/
Saw him speak on CSPAN’s Book TV and was shocked that it was a private group which kept an eye on the organizing of Nazis in LA in the 1930s. They foiled plots to kill people, including Busby Berkeley, and other criminal activities and some, it seems, paid with their own lives.
Might be some useful lessons here as we confront our own Fascistic times.
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At the point where it isn’t being neutral, but being indifferent.
Then was Disney indifferent at that point?
Is this tone policing, or am I content policing? I would argue that calling someone a Nazi (which is what got me started on this) is more content than tone. But I did literally say “tone it down” in other parts of the thread so I guess the charge is fair.
I can’t (or rather shouldn’t) respond to everything else you said because I have other stuff to do today, but I really have appreciated the exchange. You’ve given me something to think about and i hope the reverse is true.
It’s a big problem, no doubt. But as you know at the time not only were some American business elites silent about what was going on in the Reich but several high-profiles ones were speaking out in support of it. In that atmosphere the problem of Disney being opportunistically apolitical becomes less of a problem than Henry Ford regularly praising Hitler’s campaign against the Jews.
Disney better than most when it came to understand cultural influence and the power of PR. However, by all accounts he wasn’t a cynic in that regard, either. He was a sentimentalist who believed good art could transcend politics (priority #2), which is probably why he took the Riefenstahl meeting when no-one else would before priority #1 prompted him to tell her “love the art, it makes me forget about who you work for back in Germany, but hiring you would be bad business because the public is very aware of what’s going on in Germany.” That combination of sentimentalism and gimlet-eyed business acumen is one of the cornerstones of the Disney brand to this day.
Tone policing. If someone is going to the extent of calling someone a Nazi (in contrast to comparing her to one) I’m willing to understand that he’s doing so because he’s higher up on the regime’s hit list and not co-incidentally usually excluded from civil discourse in a way that privileged people are not. On that basis I’ll cut him some slack.
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