Krugman: Progressives Worry Too Much About Being 'Respectable'

From AlterNet:

I understand where this comes from: It comes from many years of electoral defeats and always feeling that, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, always finding that you needed to appeal to conservative voters -- and the quest for respectability. At the higher levels, you find yourself in rooms full of bankers -- a lot...It’s very hard to stand up to them, and not just because they have power but because they’re, by and large, actually pretty smart. They have fantastic tailors. And to get over that and say, ‘Look, you’re just wrong,’ and, ‘My side is right’ -- that’s something that progressives still have a hard time learning to do.

More here.

Indeed, stuff like "look, you're just wrong," and "my side is right," are some of the main go-to rhetorical devices in the conservative tool box.  Not for liberals, however, not really, at least not since I've been paying attention.  This has been a really big problem: liberals have been unwilling to champion their own cause.  Okay sure, liberals like to make arguments, like to provide facts and studies, which is all good and fine because it's important, after all, to have it right as far as the real world is concerned.  But since national political campaigns effectively became national advertising campaigns, arguments alone don't cut it.  You need to have emotion, vision, narrative.  

A very big part of that is not undercutting yourself by acknowledging in any way that the other side's vision has any validity at all--sure, you can concede a point or two here and there, but the overall narrative is what's important.  Besides, it's not your job to make the conservatives' case for them; they do that quite well on their own.

Think about it this way, in the video age, emotion is what matters.  When you have all these conservatives spewing the most absurd BS on TV, the biggest thing that gets through is that they really believe what they're saying, and that they're strong enough to make it happen, if only the voters would give them the chance.  I mean, that's pure Ronald Reagan, who taught his entire party how to be Great Communicators.  It's also simple persuasive speaking: look your audience in the eye and tell them what's what.  You don't f' around on this.  You might not persuade anybody right then and there, but people will listen.  They can't help it.  It's human nature.

And if you pound away at it for long enough, you WILL persuade people.  Especially because you've already got the facts on your side.  Time to man up, liberals.  Time to tell the country what's what.

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