Typically, we think of conservatives as just "not getting it" or we label them "low information".
I'd like to tell you a slightly different story.
Conservatives know exactly what they're doing. Not only that, but they're often quite good at is as well.
They know that if you win on ideas, policies follow.
I know you may find this hard to believe, but the people at the heart of the conservative movement don't believe in democracy. So they have come up with a story about how we're a Constitutional Republic and that this is what our founders wanted, etc, etc.
You know the story:
They don't like to mention democracy.
The reason they do this is that they literally want to erase the idea of democracy. They understand the importance of ideas and they don't want to talk at all about democracy. Not even representational democracy. Not to mention that democracy sounds a little too much like Democratic Party and they prefer something that sounds more like another certain party.
They don't believe in democracy and they fight to win over independents using a wide variety of other ideas. They have convinced people that consumer choice equals freedom and that markets are somehow a viable form of government up to the task of replacing democracy.
We've been convinced that government should exist by and for the owners (which they will call 'producers' because it sounds a little less slavish) and that somehow this is going to benefit the rest of us.
Literally, this is what supply-side economics is. It is the idea that government should exist by and for the owners. Give to the people at the top and it will "trickle down." This is the radical idea corporate special interest groups have been pushing for the last 40 years.
Democracy runs counter to government by and for this elite class of owners.
This is why corporations have fought so hard to eliminate the idea and why, conversely, we should be fighting to revive it.
We're all familiar with the idea of democracy but we're familiar with it like a distant memory of the past. We take it for granted like a picture of a long-dead relative upstairs in our attic.
Too often we let conservatives get away with their idea fight. Our arguments look like: "B-b-b-b-but we like markets too!" This does little but reinforce corporate special interest group ideas.
Now to be fair, corporate media helps little. They focus almost all of their coverage within corporate special interest group frames. When was the last time you read about democracy in the paper (ok, who reads the paper any more?)? Or on the news? Or in traditional media?
Last week, I was asked to write an op-ed for our local paper about gerrymandering that would appear in print to over 100,000 people. I didn't really want to write about gerrymandering because it sounds like something cute forest animals do - "Oh look at those deer out in the field gerrymandering" - so I thought I'd do something a little different.
I wrote about democracy.
Here's the result in last week's Cincinnati Enquirer Ohio election is rigged. You can fix it.
Below, I'll talk a bit more about why reviving democracy is so crucial, why I chose this approach, and how to make change happen through ideas like democracy (and no, I don't think it's as obvious as you might think).
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