We Democrats really don’t know how to play the long game. The NRA has been hammering the guns issue to the point where they can now expect to get away with playing footsie with White Supremacists and outright calls for political violence. Yet the Left continues to engage in nuance, whataboutism, and general lack of concise long term vision.
For instance, we just witnessed the worst flooding event in Houston’s history, and are now looking at an unprecedented Hurricane tearing up Florida. Where is the concerted message that this is climate change reality, that we need to deal with it, and that WE are the answer to this problem? Better yet, imagine if we’d been hammering this issue for the past 5, 10, or 20 years. In that world, we would be saying “I told you so” and we would probably not only persuade many voters, but also be right.
I am a scientist, and I keep hearing many of the climate change professionals warn against sensationalizing this issue. I think, for one, it’s too late; the right has already sensationalized in by making it a “libtard” issue. Second, the real world does not work like the scientific community. Much as I would love to have slow deliberate debate by the public about these issues, you can’t expect someone with some applicable scientific training like myself to keep up with the climate literature. And definitely people, very smart people, who have no scientific training should not be expected to keep up.
Instead, we need raw, unadulterated emotion. The right constantly taps into fear to make the public bend to their whim. Why are we not doing the same? Fear of a rising sea, fear of decimated crops, fear of, yes, streams of climate refugees. And guess what? In this particular case, we would win many voters in many of the places we are getting hammered. Who has the most to lose from climate change? Farmers. And these people, and their community, vote very Republican. What about the Gulf states, Texas, Louisiana, Florida? These places are getting hammered, and we should have a clear message that we Democrats will not only pay for the short term fixes, like higher road and bridge standards, better flood plain designations, etc. that the GOP refuses the fund due to their anti-government fanaticism, but also that we will do our damnedest to fix the long term problem of CO2 emissions.
I am really sick and tired of the equivocation, the wishy-washiness, the weakness. This is a winning issue for us, it will only get more so, and the quicker we adopt it as a central pillar of our platform, the better. And Scott Pruitt doesn’t want to talk climate change? Well trot that ad out in Florida RIGHT NOW and make it clear that this is what we need to defeat so that the next time, we are better prepared, and in the long term, we put out the burning inferno that our atmosphere is fast becoming.