Professor Jacobson just analyzed how the left effectively uses web-pages to deride conservatives and their policies, and observes it is worthwhile looking at the integration of culture and politics.
Anne Sorock offered a hands-on approach to change the direction of local media.
And I stress the importance of getting involved directly in local politics through school boards, zoning commissions, or city-level governance.
These actions have an important aspect in common: They get away from a nationalized approach that relies on establishment icons and elite news venues.
In this vein, Breitbart contributor Dr. Timothy Daughtry calls for a revision of the conservative strategy from being oriented towards national elections to being focused on the local society.
Conservatives have already won strongholds in talk radio, Breitbart News, and other sites that provide alternatives to the left’s narrative. Conservative filmmakers such as Steve Bannon and Dinesh D’Souza are putting out documentaries that are visually powerful as well as informative. The Heritage Foundation and other institutions provide policy analysis and guidance founded upon conservative principles. Conservatives have our footholds, but our institutions primarily reach the conservative base. While conservatives preach to the choir, however, the left is outside tempting the neighborhood children with free contraceptives. A true conservative strategy has to move conservative thinking beyond our strongholds and into the population at large, into schools, newsrooms, and even entertainment.
Conservatives have rallies and conferences all over the country for education and for policy updates. Now is the time to put some hard strategic questions on the agenda at those gatherings. How will libertarians, social conservatives, tea partiers, and traditional Republicans stop the circular firing squads that divide the movement?
Instead of compromising in vain attempts to appease the left, how can we use compromise strategically, in ways that advance our agenda over time? We did not lose the country overnight; and we will not get it back overnight. Recovery will require craftiness as much as courage.
How do we get a foothold for conservative ideas in the public schools, and how do we expand that foothold over time? And how do we buy time for such a long-term strategy to work? That is, how do we enlist and equip the grassroots to counteract the left’s narrative with our own children, our friends and neighbors, and our co-workers? The left does not yet control the conversations at our dinner tables or across our backyard fences, and these can become the trenches where we stall the advance of socialism and buy time for the next generation of conservatives to make real gains.
Daughtry is the author of Waking the Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game.
He is absolutely right: We need to work on persuading tomorrow’s voters today.
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Comments
How about some wealthy conservatives “stepping up to the plate” and putting their money where their mouths/voices are? It’s the only way to “fight back” in this atmosphere.
I think you miss the point if you only focus on money, and especially the wealthy ponying up more of it.
Money certainly doesn’t hurt. There are many Conservative bloggers who are struggling to stay afloat who could use a couple of dollars now and then. These bloggers work hard and are doing the job the MSM are not doing. Many bloggers have a Paypal account, as Prof. J does, to make it convenient to donate to them.
This recommendation is already part and parcel of tea party member methods, mostly because many TPers were doing this stuff long before there was a Tea Party movement, long before Obama, before Bush, etc. Twenty years of it have finally produced here in NC a GOP governor and GOP state congress – for the first time since 1870.
Is this a call for non-TP conservatives and/or non-TP GOP-ers to join the effort already long underway by local TP-ers? Is there a perception that this isn’t occurring out there?
In terms of local action, I can have only one perspective, but it worries me to see calls by experts to begin activities my local peers have already been doing for a long time. Are they unaware of our work (revisit the 2010 midterms for evidence of local action like ours turning into major nationwide successes), or are they, ahem, leading from behind?
What Daughtry calls “the conservative strategy” most certainly is not. That has been the GOP leadership strategy, run by them despite its failures and quite in the face of conservatives, whom they now work to purge from their ranks. The only strategy this conservative follows is the coordination of personal principles with local political activism.
It would be helpful if, perhaps, some day the SCOTUS will decide that the 9th Amendment actually means something.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I wonder if the progressives’/Dems’ current strategy doesn’t recognize some of the points made by Dr. Daughtry. Their strategy to divide and create infighting at all levels has so far gotten some traction, making the power of persuasion less effective to the general population. You don’t have to look beyond either LI or Breitbart comment sections to see that there are conservatives who see libertarians to be “just as bad” or that so many are seen as RINOs, etc. I’m not pointing to any given beliefs or believers, but simply highlighting there isn’t a huge consensus as assumed by the writer.
The progressives has figured out how to ‘speak’ to and ‘win over’ those who are not fully on board. They have built a level of partial cohesion, perhaps (best words I can come with at the moment). There seems to be less ‘dissent’ in the ranks which can be used to split the far left from the moderate left. How rare is it, for example, for us to see public outcry on a topic as we see about the use of drones (even though very low key so far)? Until the right/center-right/libertarians/conservatives/(pick a label) find that same amount of cohesion I am guessing they can’t be as successful. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it. Yet.
Part of the problem about GOP tent cohesion is that the current moderate GOP leadership believes it needn’t kowtow to conservatives, libertarians, and/or TPers because those factions have no where else to go with their vote, despite learning just last November that large numbers of them will simply not bother to vote.
Cohesion would require some level of ‘different but equal’ inclusive attitude, an attitude not present in the GOP leadership these days, evidenced by their overt efforts to remove conservatives from positions of power in the US Congressional committee assignments and a recent history of warring against their own in local, state, and national election primaries.
Calls for bigger tents come almost always from those outside the tent, but sometimes such calls emit from the disingenuous inside the tent who, despite these calls for inclusivity, have been inside the tent with the power to loosen the tent flaps at any time.
Boehner, McConnell, Rove, et al, will embiggen the tent for one reason and one reason only – it will have become expedient to their political agenda to do so.
We were inside the tent in 2010.
We were shoved out in 2012.
The GOP as currently aligned has learned nothing.
Without intending to condemn, you post strikes me as an “it’s their fault” reply. My post suggested the new found ‘conservatives’ have some in this as evidenced by many posts/comments about RINOs, etc. We are both perhaps correct. But, it still ends up with a group thinking they are “in the tent”, blaming those outside the tent. It just depends on whose tent or who thinks they occupy the one tent (GOP tent), if there is only one.
By the way, I say “new found conservatives” simply because there is a group that finally wants to live up the the words that have often been uttered, but never appeared in deeds. You must be in that group. Terrific!
But until the tent fight ends to some degree, there will not be enough cohesion to win elections everywhere. Without trying to point any fingers, one only needs to look at how one candidate, Akin, allowed a true blue progressive, McCaskill, to get reelected. It was highly a result of Akin’s personal problems, but it also showed this lack of cohesion, and continues to show it.
Leslie-As important as I believe it is to target school boards, please be aware that the accreditation agencies have a great deal of control over school board members once the get elected. And then they start threatening loss of accreditation for school board members doing the job they believe they were elected to do. Or mandating unanimity so that a consensus must be reached however objectionable the position of the other side.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-is-really-in-charge-the-school-board-the-super-the-accreditors-or-unesco/ is something I figured out listening to a prospective school board member training session. It led to off the record thank yous from school board members from all over that I had figured out accurately what they were not allowed to tell me.
UNESCO believes in cultural evolution. Change the prevailing beliefs, emotions, values, and attitudes and you can change a society through the schools. It’s why Outcomes Based education keeps coming back under new names. So having the accreditors globally working hand in hand with UNESCO to change the nature of Western societies politically, economically, and socially at the level of the individual future voter and grounded in emotions and habits of mind is a huge deal.
And far too unknown.
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I had to chuckle at this.
The Pubs have 31 governors. Majorities in a majority of statehouses. Majority of state legislators across the nation.
Go local? We’ve been doing that already, and for quite a while.
If things worked normally that strong local control would bubble up to national prominence. But it’s precisely the Democratic-controlled and credentialed MSM that keeps that from happening.
Let’s have the Pubs keep up the local pressure.
And ask the Koch Brothers to buy up 20 magazines and newspapers.