Con Brown

Ty for Tygers

As we know that the Republican party who has a exit strategy for victims of New Orleans who lost everything they had and were kicked out of hotels and motels accross the country! But have no exit for Iraq! The play from the same playbook as they always have had divide and conquer! Democrats need to be visionaries not reactionaries!

They use the same tactics attack patriotism i feel like i am my dad  in the 1930s 

thanks for your 30yrs of service to ohio

Russ 

The Dems are so wimpy when it comes to rhetoric.

Rule: Rebutal doesn't cut it. You need to go on the offensive.

Example: The standard rightie attack that objecting to some outrageous giveaway to the richie-rich is 'class warfare'.

 Counter-Attack (not rebuttal!): The righties have replaced American values of freedom, democracy, and opportunity with one value: Kiss Rich Butt. They want you to believe that if you Kiss Rich Butt and if you elect representatives who Kiss Rich Butt, that the rich will sprinkle some wealth fairy dust over you and your family. It doesn't work that way...

Next, trot out some stats, rising income disparity, shrinking middle class, stagnant or declining wages, etc we know the litany. *Now* you've got their attention: use that! Shape the argument, don't just respond to Republican terms, or you will *always* be at a disadvantage.

 Rule: Use strong language when defending American values and the American people. It is a demonstration that you care!

Rule: Don't use rhetoric that assumes what you say will be the basis of a specific policy.

If you do that, you'll empty the rhetoric of all urgency and emotional appeal - and Dems are *not* a governing party anymore!  Dem rhetoric has the purpose, at this point in time, of defining values and giving citizens the gift of transformative insight, so they can better understand the political and economic forces wrecking their lives. It is not the beginning of a policy discussion!!!

 

 

 

Re: Reliance on Drugs-----------
I think cutting down on drinking, smoking, and eating does wonders. Plus, I have to make a pitch for daily intake of fish/flax oils and Vitamin C. Sorry about that Rep. Brown.
Plus, my family is from OHIO. Farmers and Artists. Now they consider themselves as Ivy League sophisticates 
Talking about Big Macs reminded me of Cincinnati Chili. It must be lunchtime. 

Gold Star 5 Ways!

Yum!

A working class treat if ever there was one..... 

camilleRoy,

How are Democrats supposed to get all that information out to the public when the means of communication have been so thoroughly privatized, and our arguments are not in the interest of those who control the means of communication?

"Kiss Rich Butt" plays right into the news-business' conflict dynamic.  And they have all the conservative think tank talking heads they need to analyze it all for their loyal viewing public.

Republicans have had a lot of help from leftwing Democrats.  When Democrats only want to make policies that help the poor or go on the warpath against Wal-Mart and those who work and shop there Democrats are serving themselves up on a platter to the Republicans.  Then Democrats demonstrate a spinelessness that is remarkable.

Democrats need to change the debate. It needs to leave behind the the arguments of the Depression or pretending that we are in a depression.  The ideas that work best of those like Social Security and Medicare which are social insurance programs.  They ask everyone to pay something and they help  a broad array of Americans.  

Part of why Guiliani and Bloomberg have won the last four mayoralties in New York is they offer programs that are often good for most New Yorkers not just the dispossed.

The issue should not be who will be helped.  All Americans should benefit.  Democrats should show and fight for using government in a positive way to make all Americans have better lives.

America isn't ready for this message. Visit Memekiller's thread on "Are you the type to be a Democrat".

At this moment it isn't cool to fly the flag of class warfare - this is tantamount to acknowledging relative weakness in the face of stronger, wealthier, more influential opponents. At this moment, the coolest thing a person can be is a successful, cutthroat individualist who apologizes for nothing. Nothing.

We will need to see much, much more corruption and suffering before this changes.

I liked the phrase about the House: "It's the people's House, not the Auction house." Don't know if you can have a similar catch phrase for the Senate.

As a person who grew up barely middle class even though both parents worked full time (and a lot of overtime), and someone who grew up with friends who lived in dire conditions, I feel I have a good perspective on this issue. Many progressives have good intentions, but their rhetoric is often condescending. Working class Americans work hard and are proud of their work ethic. When progressives go on rants about "helping" the working class, it can come off as condescending. Few really wants to be dependent on others to survive and often progressive rhetoric makes it seem like the poor won't survive without the beneficence of the elite. And the GOP plays that card well.

What I grew up around were parents who worked hard and at least wanted a fair shake for their children. My father told me this all the time. But our system is such that many people don't have a fair shake. How fair is it for a child with painful dental problems (that she/he deals with every day at school) due to lack of dental insurance to compete with a more well to do child who doesn't have debilitating pain every day? (Read Jonathan Kozol for more stories like this.) How fair is it that child care is too expensive for some families that older siblings often have to skip school to take care of a younger sibling? I witnessed this and it is unfair. Children did nothing to be in their current place in life.

The point I'm trying to make is that we need precision guided policies not just big showy rhetorical bombs. The former addresses the real issues and puts the GOP on the defensive. The latter can often have collateral damage in that it often demeans hard working Americans who want a fair shot, not "help".

As Paul Krugman once said, there is a class warfare, and they started it. We should fight this class war, but we don't have to go on a crusade to "help" the poor. If the system was fair, they wouldn't need any help, they'd probably wouldn't be poor.

Are we the poor class, the working class, the working poor class, the semi-well-educated-but-not-rich class or what?

I'd follow the lead of the Socialists who claim the existence of only two classes: Those who have to go to work in the morning and Those who don't.

I'd go with Working Class.

Mr. Brown,when they trot that one out, agree and reply: The republicans have been carpet bombing the middle class for 25 years. It doesn't really matter who's getting married when your working 3 jobs to pay the gas bill.

Colorado bob

Yeah, I would like to agree with that. It's just that, anecdotally, most of the people I know who align themselves with the Republican Party do the nine to five (more like 7:30 to 6:30) themselves.

 

OK, what I'm getting at is that we still have a large middle class. It's the overwhelming shadow of the fear of that middle class in it's downward drift, the soon to be  proletariat that is preventing the growth of class conciousness.(IMHO) It's in that shadow that the Republican cabal can carry out its vile plans. It's that shadow, under which people really only want to go one way, that makes it so hard to fight a class war from the bottom.

 

There is an inexorable logic to class warfare that also must be faced eventually. I doubt if I need to lay it out here (volumes have been written about it), but if you think about it it can make a lot of people very uneasy, not just the few.

Part of the reason it's so easy is because the Democrats don't have their house in order on this one. A large contingent of the Democratic party spends its time vilifying progressive policies, and by extension, the people who progressive policies serve. I don't see them forging a new vision aligning the needs of the middle class with the needs of the working class. I don't see them coming up with solutions. I see them spending a lot of time talking the same kind of class-bashing crap Reagan made popular, just trying to widen the discussion slightly to admit some middle-class voters so they can cater to the rich without guilt. Even many Democrats don't want to be seen with the poor and downwardly mobile these days; they'd rather be in with the rich kids too.

Very well put, gqmartinez. Somehow the Republicans managed to turn the New Deal project into a debate over "deserving poor", and the Dems got stuck there. We need to move back to "keep an eye out for" and "fair shake" - no freebies, but fair chances.

From what I've seen few people resent welfare more than folks who make just a bit more - after all, why should they have to work at the same kind of jobs welfare recipients refuse to go get? In the long run, I think Dems could improve the state of services to the poor by making a big show of eliminating cut-a-check welfare (which has been pretty dismanlted anyway) and instead building up wages via an Earned Income Tax Credit or "negative income tax" approach.

Most people who aren't rich, want to be rich or at least reasonably well off so as to not have to worry about providing for their families and have the occasional perk. Government, in my ideal situation, would give people the tools to live how they want and should not allow societal constraints (e.g. being born into poverty) to prevent people from attaining as much.

OK, no more pontificating.

I still feel it is important to reiterate, without being rude or snotty, that the key questions of what the differences are with Hackett, and of the Iraq War not only need to be addressed, but addressed with enough specificity so we know whether to look for someone who, like Murtha and Feingold, is trying to get us out of Iraq with reasonable speed.  (Of course, everyone, including Bush claims they are, but only some give even tentative timetables).  Even a general statement of support for the position on Iraq taken by Kucinich/Feingold/Murtha would suffice, at minimum.

Now, as for memes of the RW, Cong. Brown is right to point to the enormous class bias of the press, for the upper crust and against the restivus.  It is one reason that the RW is able to get away with so much.  But there are other reasons, some visible and some not.  First, the RW has a certain kind of discipline, partly resulting from a politics that puts obedience uber alles, and partly because of a willingness to exercise solidarity and loyalty.  There are also many who "serve" among the ranks of progressives precisely to snipe where the RW would have them snipe, in the name of being progressive.  Since our polity is not a level playing field, this is found almost exclusively towards the left half of the spectrum, but never bedevils the underground privileged Tory RW the same way.

"Class Warfare" is one of the many "chorus memes" of the RW.  Like 'support the troops, it has little content'.  Is it suggesting that seeking to roll back the tax cut on the top 1% is somehow the equivalent of the Communist Manifesto?  Actually, I think that it draws most of its appeal, to the extent it has any, from an aversion to struggle and negativity, including among many who are hardly RW partisans themselves -- 'Deepak Chopra' consciousness.  C Wright Mills noted long ago in White Collar (1951) the aversion of white collar workers to what he called the 'urgent political clash'. (And for decades, the US has had the overwhelming majority of its workforce in the white collar as distinct from blue collar or agricultural sectors).  So the appeal is against 'conflict' that somehow 'divides' society. 

The proper counter to this and other memes is to brazenly point out their rootedness in the politics of organized hate, now at the heart of the RW.  And generally, there is a relaxed standard of tolerance for the RW in this area, with their being able to practice hate freely without accountability (sort of like the kinds of practices advocated in Cosmopolitan that Bill Maher rightly notes would be considered stalking if pursued by males), while for progressives, there is the implicit whine: 'how can they be mean for love?' (re:U2).  This is silly -- a politics that accords one side wide permission to be negative that is denied to the other side simply favors the side accorded the wide latitude.  On the other side of the same coin, you have Dennis Prager on Dennis Miller's show describing Gore -- Gore, mind you -- as a "hater" after he surprised the public with a slightly passionate speech about two years ago.  And, of course, there is a built in media and cultural  bias against calling the RW on things like that.

In particular, the first chorus meme and the Democratic Party's response to it that I would cite is the widespread use of the epithet, over decades, "Democrat Party".  I know that a few people, such as Ben Wattenberg, in the Democratic Party, to remind art appraiser, not as self crit of the RW,  have said something about this practice.  But generally the Democrats have characteristically let it slide.  When I bring up the issue at a RW Repuglican website -- and I insist on using the term Repuglican as long as they so use the term "Democrat Party" as an epithet, as they do -- such as protein wisdom, the responses revealingly in one instance talk about my lack of 'priorities', which in that context was only a chortling and all-too-clever reference to the idea that Democrats were somehow lower down in a political hierarchy of sorts, and were obliged to "serve" the Repuglicans -- perennially, I might add -- in the most central and misused notion of all US politics.  The conservatives don't "conserve", they believe in "serving", or rather, in others "serving them" while they "serve" themselves collectively.  This politics of obedience is part of how they keep their discipline in their chorus memes.

    So we have Democrat Party, class warfare (an example of Dennis Pragerian accusing the other side of one's own sins, also like Bush calling the Democrats "revisionists" of history), death tax, partial-birth abortion, and, of course, the major arguments of RW ideology, which are also basically hypocritical and hollow chorus memes: tax-and-spend liberals, judicial activism, legislation from the bench, etc.  I have critiqued the latter issues elsewhere.  I addressed the fallaciousness of the latter RW arguments in a discussion post here:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/3/181014/040

But it is as chorus memes, as the privileged mobilization of hate in our culture, and as the I'm-rubber-you're-glue-whatever-you-say-about-me-bounces-off-me-a nd-sticks-to-you mentality of the privileged RW in our culture that these issues need to be understood, and to be debunked.  And the place to start is to get liberals and progressives to understand the underlying patterns, and then confront the RW, as they do us, as a solidary phalanx, rather than a few comments here and there.

Sherrod,1. Thanks for your leadership2. It will take a decade of good ideas spoken by many Democrats to create an enduring alternative to the "class warfare" frame. In the short term, however, why not say something like this:
"Huge inheritances create a leisure class with no incentive to work. They cut off the lifeblood of our country: initiative and the great American work ethic." (This takes the focus off of inheritance taxes and onto the inheritances themselves.)
OR
"The problem with huge inheritances is that they create tiny kingdoms. America is not a country of kingdoms. We are a democracy."
OR
"When we point out the obvious problem with increasing big estates, Republicans whine that we're starting some kind of a war. You know how ridiculous that is? Let me tell you. It's like if I started feeding my oldest kid big meals while starving the two youngest. If those two said, "Hey, Dad, how come Bob is getting all the food?" imagine if Bob then said, "Dad, Jenny and Dan are starting a war against me." That would be ridiculous! But that's exactly what the Republicans are doing."

I expect because of my position on trade, my opposition to the fleecing of the American people by the drug industry and oil industry, I will lose almost every newspaper endorsement in this state.

I start this race understanding the media will be very critical of me on trade, on energy, on prescription drugs and health insurance.

And why?  Isn't the media supposed to be independant?  They will side with the GOP in attacking liberals for "raising" the class warfare "issue" but bristles when criticized for not fact checking bogus GOP claims on Iraq and terrorism.

All of "The media" are owned by corporations whose officers are part of the class warfare...on the winning side.

No, the press is to the right of "independant"...

Class warfare is a confusing term because there is no well defined concept of class in America.  The real struggle is between people who have to work for a living and inherited wealth.  There are lots of leaders in the democratic party who represent inherited wealth.  They love to wring their hands about the poor but couldn't care less about people who actually earn their keep.  In a similar vein there are rich twits in the republican party who yak about entrepreneurship and pass laws to primarily benefit people like Bush who never did anything but get born into a wealthy family.  If we really want to have a class war it should be everybody whose main source of income is reported on a W-2 form vs those who primarily report interest and dividends.