Krugman still has the insight that we should all be paying attention to. We progressives have a thousand ways to blame Democrats for losing elections, but maybe we ought to be looking more closely at how Republicans win elections. We all recognize voter suppression as a reason, and Gerrymandering as even a bigger reason, but what is it that makes the right wing turn out for elections as if their lives depended on it, and Democrats to sit out elections as if it simply didn’t matter? Its all about the lies!
From Krugman's column.
But the stark dishonesty of the Republican jihad against Obamacare itself demands an explanation.
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The problem is that once you accept the principle that it’s O.K. to lie if it helps you win elections, it gets ever harder to limit the extent of the lying — or even to remember what it’s like to seek the truth.
The right’s intellectual and moral collapse didn’t happen all at once.
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But looking back, it’s easy to see the rot spreading. Compared with Donald Trump, the elder Bush looks like a paragon — but his administration lied relentlessly about rising inequality. His son’s administration lied consistently about its tax cuts, pretending that they were targeted on the middle class, and — in case you’ve forgotten — took us to war on false pretenses.
And almost the entire G.O.P. either endorsed or refused to condemn the “death panels” slander against Obamacare.
While some Democrats still think that if we had only said the magic words in the right economic message…, the right wing Oligarchs spent decades building a propaganda radio network, fake news networks, delusional think tanks… And how did Trump/GOP collude with the Russians to win last Nov.? They didn’t stuff ballot boxes, or pay people to vote. They flooded our information system with lies! They targeted the uninformed independent voters who can easily swing an election, they targeted the right wing nuts to get them to turn out, they targeted the strange left to get them to stay home or vote 3rd party, and they got lucky when our main stream news outlets simply followed the sheep and made the trivial critical and the critical trivial.
We Democrats have a habit of bringing knives to a gun fight and we will not stop the authoritarian slow motion coup against our democracy by being timid in our approach to elections. I must say I’m rather discouraged to see some Democrats shower praise on a few Republicans who voted NOT to kill thousands of Americans as if it their heads should be put on Mount Rushmore. Or how about the high praise every time a Republican, who colluded consistently to steal a SCOTUS seat and supported the most extreme and dumbest cabinet in history, says that they are “concerned”, “worried”, “upset”… that Trump has torn down another institutional wall that is the foundation of our democracy? It’s one thing to call a Senator’s office and thank them for voting right once out of a hundred times, it’s something very different to publicly send a message to those uninformed voters that your Republican representative who will vote for almost anything that empowers their Oligarch contributors, is really a good person now and it’s ok to vote for them in 2018.
If we’re going to win in 2018 and save our democracy, we better toughen up, play hardball politics, and find a way to expose the GOP as the right wing lying cult that they are.
RESIST!