Erasing Fear From The Message
Self-Righteousness Kills More Political Campaigns & Causes
I BELIEVE there are more people than flaming liberals who desire these things. You have hit upon a truth that many activist liberals fail to recognize. The problem with our party is less about policy and more about messaging. The "L" word has evolved to where it has not quite the stigma it had when Mike Dukakis had it hung around his neck with an anchor that sunk him like a capsized ship to the ocean floor. Even then, I had no gripes with him, but it was messaging that did him and our party in. The opposition can still get some negative play with the word liberal but by far much less. And why do they even bother when the word socialist or socialism bites out butts way harder.
This is akin to the phrase defunding the police. I firmly believe with all my heart in the BLM movement, I believe many police departments, perhaps most have issues with systemic racism. I believe persons of color are too often targets of police with no legitimate reason. But I also believe that phrase is a nail in a coffin.
Democrats need to be smarter about messaging. And by the way, we need to be smarter about leading our communities to understand how systemic racism hurts everybody. Not equally, but I believe it was Harry Truman, who once said you can only hold a black man in the gutter so long until you join him there.
Bad messaging ignites fear. It causes ignorance to take control of a person's mind and they take the path of least resistance to run as far and as fast away from the message, and they don't care that the substance of the message may have merit, they just know that what they are hearing scares the hell out of them. Fear is a powerful campaign device. But we have a habit of unwittingly using it instead of talking on a rational level that speaks to the audience without creating automatic rejection of the message.
This is hardly a new revelation, but it is one that seems to be so hard to learn because we too often make the same mistake. Our self-righteous attitude is hard to curb. I know because what often seems to us should be so obvious that we cannot even fathom that others can’t see it, which leads us to the danger of feeling somehow superior, and that my friend leads to a tone and message that reeks of superiority. Who wants to be lectured by someone who thinks they are better than you? We need to wake up.
Michael A. Wells is a lifelong Democrat. He has served as a past Chairman of the Democratic Party in a Missouri county that includes a large urban core area.
