The left’s superpower is also its Achilles heel.
Pew Research defines the “Progressive Left” as “very liberal, highly educated and majority white,” comprising 7% of registered voters and 12% of Democrats. They “broadly support substantial hikes in tax rates for large corporations and high-income households. They are the only typology group in which a majority express positive views of political leaders who describe themselves as democratic socialists.”
A measly 7%! Why so powerful?
Was Yeats, in The Second Coming, right that the best (Us!) lack all conviction and the worst (Them!) are full of passionate intensity? Or is there more to the story?
Pew says: “Although they are one of the smallest political typology groups, Progressive Left are the most politically engaged group in the Democratic coalition. No other group turned out to vote at a higher rate in the 2020 general election, and those who did nearly unanimously voted for Joe Biden. They donated money to campaigns in 2020 at a higher rate than any other Democratic-oriented group.”
That’s only part of it.
We Committed Conservatives are ensconced in the Republican coalition of Faith and Flag conservatives, the Populist Right, and the Ambivalent Right, together making up around 40% of the national electorate… of which Dems make up 45%. (15% are “Stressed Sideliners.) Advantage: Dems!
Yet more than majority sentiment is needed to prevail. As Samuel P. Newman discovered, in 1827, there are four modes of persuasion, three weak, one strong.
The left is better at using the strong one, storytelling, thus appealing to the popular imagination. That’s the left’s superpower.
And its Achilles heel.
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once observed, “We didn’t win the elections but we’ve won every fight.” How?
My old archenemy Patrick Reinsborough, with Doyle Canning, laid it out in what I called at Forbes “the most important political book of our era: Re:Imagining Change: How to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world….”
“This book lays out, chapter and verse, the culture, strategy and tactics by which the left continues to achieve policy victory after policy victory notwithstanding political defeats. It is the hidden-in-plain-sight secret blueprint to the left’s most powerful ‘secret weapon.’ It is a blueprint the progressive movement has been following … often with great success, for decades: the innocuous-sounding ‘story-based strategy.’
“The good news? The culture, strategy and tactics they use … would be as powerful in the hands of the right as they are in the hands of the left, at least if the right ups its game and powerfully stands for justice for all as well as liberty. (We certainly ought to be doing that.)
“How powerful are these tools? They are the very tools which Donald Trump … used to propel himself to the presidency. Yet Trump, not exactly a man of the right, stands virtually alone in the GOP in so doing.”
We conservatives tend to bitterly cling to Newman’s three weak modes: description, exposition, and argument. (I, a professional propagandist, have discovered a second strong mode, Declaration, which I keep secret for fear that the left will appropriate it and grow even stronger.)
Much popular confusion stems from obsolete High School civics classes. These misrepresent what “the” government really does, teaching that the capital’s products mainly are enacting and enforcing laws and … governing. Ha!
Stories — epic drama — are what government excels at. We conservatives lost our core story on December 25, 1991 … when the Soviet Union dissolved itself and the West won the Cold War.
The factions of the right tend to be antagonistic: Throne-and-Altar conservatives at the throats of the free loving libertarians, and so forth. Only our mutual opposition to Communism united us.
Consider the current struggle between the liberty-loving republican Freedom Conservatives (The Autobots) and the populist National Conservatives (The Decepticons). We conservatives can beat the left… by dropping our argumentative personas and casting ourselves as heroes in an epic drama.
As Napoleon once said to a group of his captured enemy POWs — who shouted Viva Bonaparte! upon espying him in their midst — “What a thing is imagination! Here are men who don't know me, who have never seen me, but who only knew of me, and they are moved by my presence, they would do anything for me! And this same incident arises in all centuries and in all countries! Such is fanaticism! Yes, imagination rules the world. The defect of our modern institutions is that they do not speak to the imagination. By that alone can man be governed; without it he is but a brute.”
Imagination rules the world.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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