When you get as many cold-call importunings (mainly from pitchmen with Indian accents) as I do, the subject of marketing can frequently be on your mind. Political marketing isn’t entirely unique, though it is distinct from the commercial sort in several ways. The one on my mind this morning is its aspirational / emotional component.
The Democrat Party has become the Party of Hatred:
“The reality is, they have no vision, no policy. They have nothing to sell but hate, and Americans are not buying it. – Governor Greg Abbott of Texas.
Governor Abbott, whatever you think about him, is right on both counts. Democrats are selling their own brand of toxic hate in the streets and in the nation’s capital, but sensible citizens aren’t buying. We’re talking about real, visceral hate here. Not dislike or disapproval, but active hate democrats have become so good at. Generally, when people talk about hate, they mean dislike. If someone says they hate broccoli, they usually mean they dislike it and do not want to eat it. They see broccoli, they leave it on their plate, and forget about it. They do not obsess over broccoli, keeping their hatred for it burning in their minds 24/7.
Real hate is an active emotion, one whose energy consumes those engaging in it. It is the type of thing that leads individuals to obsess over the object of their hatred. Eventually, if kept up long enough, it consumes the hater.
Diogenes and Texas Governor Abbott are both correct. Active hatred is qualitatively different from dislike or distaste. It’s front and center in the hater’s consciousness. That’s required to get the hater off his ass and into the streets with a Molotov cocktail.
One engaged with hatred is looking for a target to destroy.
To one who is not engaged with hatred, the thing can be puzzling. “What’s the payoff?” we mutter. “What do you get for it?” That the hater’s sole reward is destruction and harm to those he hates makes it all seem pointless.
Yet there is a point. It’s just not one with which a healthy mind would resonate.
When Adolf Hitler came to power, he was backed by a militant minority that possessed disproportionate political power because of its militancy. A large part of his appeal was that he provided many Germans, disheartened by defeat and weighed down by the reparations burden, a target to resent. “Stab in the back” politics must have a target: there must be a stabber as well as a stabbee. By providing such a target, Hitler was able to mobilize those semi-slumbering resentments into a street movement with its own army.
It wasn’t all hatred, of course. Hitler also provided Germany with a nationalist-expansionist vision: “Greater Germany.” The combination raised him to power much more quickly than his opponents realized. Once he’d become Chancellor, he kept the momentum by steady acceleration, both domestically and by international maneuvering. Hatred plus triumphalism very nearly brought all of Europe under his sway.
So while – as Governor Abbott has said – the Democrats have no positive vision to offer their supporters, that doesn’t guarantee that they’re no longer politically competitive.
Easier to get people to hate than to get them to love. — Robert A. Heinlein
The Right cannot afford complacency. The Right has a positive vision, and moreover it’s one that has caught the allegiance of a majority. But the Left has all the most advanced scholars of political and revolutionary maneuvering.
Note that in the early Twentieth Century, when British Socialists set out to become politically powerful, they were few in number and knew it. They had their icons and their scriptures, but they were marginal players in British political thought. Yet they captured the Labour Party by design, by emphasizing infiltration and colonization of the two things a rising movement must strive control: education and journalism.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw were untiring in their efforts to infect British educators and journalists with socialist ideas. The London School of Economics, which was founded by the socialist Fabian Society, gradually became prominent among educational institutions. Membership in a socialist “book club” was promoted as a “must” for the British intellectual. Gradually, Britons not aligned with the Fabians migrated from Labour to Conservative, leaving the field to the socialist infiltrators. Much the same has happened in the United States.
The hard-Left has already captured the Democrat Party. Should they find any sort of positive vision to couple to the hatred that’s become their main offering, they could well rise from the grave to trouble us once more.
