Ever since springtime 60 years ago my people — the folks on my side of the fence, my tribe, the Left, progressives, whatever descriptor you’d care to use — have been losing the battle for America’s hearts and minds.
We’ve been so wrong in strategy, tactics, optics, and messaging that the more conspiracy-minded among us might be tempted to think we’ve been infiltrated by agents provocateurs all these years. Do Nixon’s ratfuckers and their heirs walk among us?
BTW, the spring I refer to, above, followed immediately after the events of March 7, 1965. the day voting rights marchers attempted to walk from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. Alabama, at the time, posed any number of roadblocks, “legal” and illegal, to block Blacks attempting to register to vote. Peaceful demonstrators on the way to their destination were viciously beaten by state troopers and local ad-hoc deputies after crossing the Edmond Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. Now known as Bloody Sunday, that day more than 500 marchers were attacked and gassed by the white men, some mounted on horseback, with march leader and future US Congressperson John Lewis clubbed to the ground, his skull fractured. Some 67 marchers were injured with 17 requiring hospitalization.
Bloody Sunday
The whole rotten mess was captured on film and broadcast by the major national networks that evening. So many Americans were repulsed by the televised spectacle that civil rights legislation efforts were kicked into higher gear.
That, I propose, was the last time America was moved positively by my people.
Here we are a half century plus ten years removed, still in the midst of the mother of all losing streaks, still screwing up the picture we’d like the rest of the country to see. Which brings me to Los Angeles, where the President of the Untied States has sent the Marines in to suppress the protests against ICE snatching people off the street and disappearing them.
And, yeah, the Li’l Duce regime — or, as Susan Sandberg has dubbed him, The Mad King — is clearly attempting to turn this holy land into his personal, private kingdom. He has become the single most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps during World War II. Or since public officials and private business leaders unleashed deadly violence against labor union organizers. Or 13 states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Or the US gov’t waged genocidal war against the Indians. Or the Founders decided to allow white men to “own” dark-skinned human beings. Pick whichever atrocity you prefer.
But a significant percentage of the American populace continues to feel that Li’l Duce is the best thing to happen to us since the development of the internal combustion engine. A lot of that can be ascribed to echo chamber news sources, misinformation, Big Lies, AI-doctored images, fear-mongering, grievance-wallowing, and, of course, flat-out idiocy. But another lot of it has to do with my side’s awkward, clumsy, ill-conceived, shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot presentation.
While Trump has famously humped the American flag time and again, protesters in the streets of LA are waving Mexican flags. That ain’t gonna win us any more converts, I assure you.
Here’s Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark:
There is a strain of thinking which maintains that all of these protests are beyond reproach. I’ve seen people say, for instance, that it’s perfectly fine for protesters to be waving Mexican flags. That this is their God-given right, etc.
A lot of the uncritical support of the protests is based on moral judgments about what should be true.
It should be fine for people to wave Mexican flags. But I don’t think should is a very useful frame right now. I’m much more interested in will.
Will the rest of America—rightly or wrongly—become more sympathetic to the people opposing Trump after seeing Mexican flags?
We can expand the frame of will for the entire scene—the people in the streets, the torching of cars, the throwing of bricks. Protests are a tool for leveraging public opinion. It does not really matter what the public shouldthink. It matters what it will think.
Jonathan V. Last then quotes Peter Coyote:
A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, the Congress, etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.
Last then concludes that what the LA protests, and the anti-Trump movement in general, need are leaders and discipline. And now he’s about to get his mouth washed out with soap for uttering two of the foulest expletives in the Left-ese language