There’s no use wagging your finger at a political party whose leaders have no shame. They already know what your reaction to the latest outrage is going to be, and they will either ignore it or make use of it.
The big political dustup of Christmas weekend arrived this afternoon when the Republican Party’s website published a Christmas letter attributed to RNC Chair Reince Priebus and Co-Chair Sharon Day. As you know, the outrageous first paragraph of the letter heralds a “new King” in the context of a message that appears distinctly Christian.
The wording of the “king” sentence (seen in the screen capture below) is just ambiguous enough that it could refer either to the president-elect or to Christianity’s Jesus. The authors of the letter are no dummies. The ambiguity is on purpose.
Next week, on the most popular right-wing radio and television talk shows, the Christmas letter and the “Liberal” reaction to it are going to be a topic, although the hosts and guests probably will not consider the nuanced interpretations of the “king” sentence. They will spin the story as “Liberals” having a fit about a harmless Christmas letter. Their listeners will agree uncritically.
Whatever legs the story has will be entirely our fault, because our reaction to the letter is playing out exactly as the GOP authors engineered it to be. We took the bait. Our criticism will merely serve as another example that conservative leaders and pundits can use to illustrate the “political correctness” their base has been trained to see as a perpetual source of oppression.
The problem with our response to these less consequential outrages is that it makes it more difficult to alert the public and our representatives to the much more serious outrages that the Republicans and the presidential transition team are planning. The most important task in front of us right now is to build a coalition of opposition to Trump’s cabinet and agency nominees. There are a lot of things we can usefully point to as being outrageous in the context of those nominations. However the Christmas letter, along with several (not all) of Trump’s idiotic tweets, are merely invitations for us to diffuse our energy and dilute our message.
Although I do not personally know how it can be achieved, I think we need to have more discussion here at Daily Kos about how to channel Democratic and progressive outrage so it helps us rather than hurting us. If we are the media-savvy Democrats we think we are, then we ought to be able to come up with a way to bring an awareness of this into Democratic culture. Don’t snap at everything they hold out in front of us. Recognize when something is bait.
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Update: