Mockery and satire are sometime the most potent weapons. Nobody likes to be mocked - especially not if there is no possible reasonable response. Nobody wants to be aligned with the side that is consistently mocked in a way that shines light on lies and hypocrisy. The partisans will get mad. But the independents can be turned away from the liars:
daveawayfromhome: Rock, Paper, Scissors:
Republicans play upon our fears to maintain their power, and, as much as Democrats would like it to, careful explanations and reasoned arguments have simply not worked at all with much of the average electorate (it's only worked those elitist intellectuals, victims, no doubt, of too much knowledge).Instead, Democrats need to simply make fun of the Republicans and their fears. Mock their fear-mongering. Maybe call them pussies. Done properly, the mockery can become self-sustaining, turning doom-saying Cassandras into hysterical fools. As an added bonus, Republicans tend to have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves, and so their bluster and defensiveness upon being made the butt of a joke adds to their ridiculousness.
One of the beauties of using comedy to fight fear is that the only real way to combat it is to use logic. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, many of their current policies do not hold up very well when put to intellectual tests or (especially) to conservative ideals.
Omen expands on the idea with reasons why it should, in theory, work.
Politics
Comments
"fear-mongering ... doom-saying Cassandras"
Conservatives have overblown fears of external enemies and their infiltrators; liberals have overblown fears that the establishment is in imminent danger of morphing into a fascist dictatorship.
Posted by: Colugo | September 6, 2008 4:52 PM
If you study what they are actually doing, the fear of dictatorship is not overblown.
Posted by: Coturnix | September 6, 2008 5:04 PM
Dictatorship, or a carefully controlled "democracy" where the only choices we have are those we are given by the Machine? What's the difference?
Posted by: daveawayfromhome | September 7, 2008 8:00 PM