● NFL Kneelers: Let's start with the most recent: the NFL kneelers. As you know a handful of NFL players have followed in the knee-pads of race baiting bench-warmer Colin Kapernick and decided to kneel during the national anthem to protest their hatred of the police in America, racism and whatever else they could think of. But their message has been lost (they've been whining about this a lot recently) and their protests have led to zero social change. Why?
Well, first, this protest drew an immediately backlash because fans were pissed that they had chosen to denigrate the national anthem to draw attention to themselves. Whoops. Rather than use their fame as football players and just hold press conferences, they made the decision to attack the national anthem to get noticed and the public responded angrily. See, the public doesn't like to see its traditions sh*t upon and it definitely doesn't like anyone denigrating all the people who have sacrificed for this country. Big mistake. This basically made it impossible for them ever to win the public.
Then Kapernick turned out to be a turd who praised Castro, called cops pigs and spewed a lot of false "facts" and hate. Moreover, half the kneelers couldn't even say why they were kneeling. Then they whined that no white players were supporting them, because you know... racism. Then they took Trump's bait and fired back at him, morphing the whole kneeling thing into an anti-Trump message. At that point, the NFL stepped in and changed the message again to the nebulous "unity." At this point, only a few hardcore types are still kneeling and no one knows what they really want. Even worse, they don't even have a plan for what they want if we choose to give it to them. The end result, this is a hated, directionless movement with no agenda to offer except "I'm angry at whites and cops." They're going nowhere.
● The Pussy Hat Protests: When the Pussy Hat brigade marched on Washington, it was immediately clear to me that they would amount to nothing. This was a group who wanted... uh... gurl power? R-E-S-P-E-C-T? not-Trump? Not sure. And that was the first problem: they had no idea what they wanted. They just wanted to protest that things weren't going the way they wanted. Some whined about the election. Hollywood chicks whined about not getting paid as much as male actors. Some rich white women whined about sexism keeping them down... somehow. Many whined about a nebulous lack of respect from men, even though they'd done nothing to earn it.
They had no platform. They had no agenda. They had no plan. The confused their personal failures with public policy. They didn't even have the intent to do anything. This was a group of women who stupidly think "raising awareness" of things like Breast Cancer is the same as solving the problem, and they had brought that worthless mentality with them. This was a group of achievement-less women who thought that whining that they wanted things to change was enough and now someone else would hand them all the things they wanted, even if they couldn't identify them. It never occurred to them that the people who get what they want need to work for it. So their movement collapsed as little more than a weekend tantrum.
● Black Lives Matter: Like the others, this group had everything going for them -- historical grievance, a willing media and Democrats happy to use them to keep blacks on the liberal plantation. What they lacked was any sense of judgment. First, rather than focusing on the couple of shootings of black men that brought sympathy, they focused on the thugs. This lost them the public. Then they refused to condemn the murder of cops. This angered the public. Add in that their demands were delivered in the most obnoxious of ways all-but designed to turn off white America. So the public not only rejected them, they did their best to actively show their support for the cops.
The one thing you have to give BLM, unlike the others, is that they actually had an agenda. The problem was that it's bat-shit crazy. Indeed, their massive manifesto covered dozens of whacko and offensive demands that were either intolerable off the bat or not relevant in any way to their cause, things like redistribution of wealth, pay raises and racial-based set asides. All of that is a nonstarter and their movement has been relegated to the fringes.
● OWS: Do you remember OWS? They were an astroturf "movement" created to give the left its own Tea party. The problem was that they had no idea what they wanted. All they knew was that they hated capitalism and America and they wanted everything changed... in some way. That's a non-starter with the public. Add in that this was a gang of spoiled college-students-for-life and professional "anarchists" (read: socialists) who came across as the very people you would never give power too. Then their protests devolved in homeless camps, rapes, and whining and people were done. The public's tolerance was expended without ever coming close to considering concessions.
Pretty much the only place leftist protests have brought any change is on colleges, where it was basically whiny leftist college kids giving a list of demands to leftist administrators, and even there almost no demands were met. In fact, the only place the students really won was the University of Missouri with its sympathetic administrators and that's been in slow-motion implosion ever since, with both black and white students fleeing.
This has been fascinating to me. The left has managed to turn out large numbers of its people, but their protests have been so incompetently handled that they not only achieved nothing, I would say they set the left back on issue after issue.
Thoughts?
11 comments:
For my money the dominant pattern in American politics over the past 23 years has been the wave. Voters hand a party absolute power it does a bunch of stuff, some of which disappoints voters, the wave starts rolling out.
At some level parties recognise the wave which is why co-operation is so low. Generally speaking (there are a few exceptions) anyone who develops a rep for working with the other side has been/will be cleansed by the next wave. Similarly incumbents know that their time is limited (nobody is going to hold the legislature for decades like the Dems did for a while) and prospects of cooperation are low so they tend to be increasingly radical and willing to go it alone.
Leftist movements didn't change the pattern but neither did rightist movements. The Tea Party is meaningless it just appeared important because it lined up with a wave going out. Populism more specifically Trumpism is the only important newish movement in the Republican party.
On a related note the potential twist is that the Republican majority has gotten little done besides judicial nominees (who would have guessed that at this point Obamacare would still be a thing?). As a result Democrats don't have anything to run against besides Trump and his tweets (Clinton, Bush and Obama all did things which the opposition could unify against).
I predict that like 9/11 this might mess with the wave a bit in the short term (read: 2018) but in the medium and long terms (2020 and beyond) the pattern will hold. Democrats will slowly take the legislature and a charismatic Democrat with a short track record who makes Obama look like a moderate will win power in 2024.
I'd say the problem of BLM was the fact the police took away their reason for existence (inaction after dodgy shootings). Police departments started requiring cameras and quickly getting rid of cops involved in squirrelly stuff.
In 2017 if you are watching a video of a cop doing something that looks awful either there is more to the story than the video indicates or the cop is at least unemployed, at most facing charges.
Everybody should check this article out. It's by an anti-gun leftist who examined all the causes of gun deaths in the last couple years and concludes that gun control actually doesn't work.
LINK
Anthony, I think the camera will eventually wipe out the anti-police industry for that very reason.
On the parties, I don't doubt that the wave idea is a factor. What interests me in the article though is how these groups manages to neuter themselves and not only prevented any shift to the left, they seem to have pushed the public to the right.
I came across this interesting interactive graphic a few days ago. It shows what you guys suspect. From 1994 to 2004, both parties move leftward together. From 2004 to 2011, Democrats stay put while Republicans move right. And from 2011-2014, both parties move away from each other.
Occupy Wall Street started in 2011. As Andrew's article illustrates, its a good marker for when the Democrats' and the Left's fortunes started to fall. The Left's response was to double-down. According to the interactive graphic, the Median Republican in 2011 was in the same position as the Median Republican in 1994, and I don't think many would argue that Republican right wing conservatism was at it's strongest in the 1990s. If the Democrats in 2011 had tempered themselves, they could have Clinton-era type Republicans to deal with today. Instead, as suspected, they pushed Republicans further to the right.
The one thing I found out that was new from these "groups" is the shocking revelation that there are still so many women who actually know how to knit...
Bev, So we should call them Knitters, Kneelers and Knutters?
tryanmax, That's an interesting perspective that the parties are pushing each other left and right. I definitely think something changed with "the left." They moved to their fringe under Bush I and then moved even further when Obama disappointed them. Now they are the unhinged far left.
What's even more interesting to me though is how utterly incapable they are of forming effective movements.
LOL! Excellent! Or we can call them by their acronym...
The KK&K.
Bev, Isn't that perfect? LOL!
BTW, Bev, I suspect most bought their hats.
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