Many Democratic Politicians Are in the Denial Stage of Grief about Losing the Republican Party to an Authoritarian Cult
Humans often try to cope by denying reality. There is a lot of denial of the evil done to our nation by the GOP and by Right Wing media. This denial of reality takes many forms.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on May 9th:
“I want the Republican Party to take back the party to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment. Here I am, Nancy Pelosi, saying this country needs a strong Republican Party. Not a cult.”
She appears to be in the denial stage of grief about losing her GOP colleagues to an authoritarian cult. Since I wrote this, someone on Twitter pointed out to me that she also is sometimes in the bargaining stage — thinking she can do something that will encourage or persuade more Republicans to be “the adults in the room” or to act less unethically. This is true. People sometimes do go back and forth between various stages of grief.
She has worked with Republicans for decades, enjoyed their company and become friends with them. She feels that same about them as many of us do about friends at work with who we don’t always agree. She misses the old times — whether real or imagined — when the GOP was not as extreme as it is now. She longs for those days to return and fantasizes that their return is just around the corner.
I have respect and compassion for grieving people — including those in the denial of reality stage or the bargaining state of grief.
There are many roles Pelosi is still performing well. Calls for her to step down as Speaker of the House are unwarranted. However, as speaker for the Democratic party, she is not able to do what needs to be done. She needs to talk to a friend or a counselor about this grief — not to talk about it to news media in the role as a spokesperson for the Democratic party. In that context, her grief and denial are distractions from the fight for our rights against the authoritarian GOP.
She should send other Democrats to be interviewed. How about Rep. AOC, Rep. Katie Porter, Rep. Swalwell, Sen. Whitehouse, Rep. Maxine Waters or Sen. Warren?
Voting rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and other civil rights are being attacked constantly now. Democratic voters need to see and hear Democratic leaders standing up to GOP bullies and con artists — not listen to Democratic leaders yearning for bygone days when the typical GOP Congress member wasn’t a con artist or a bully.
The focus needs to be on winning the fight and the power to legislate the Democratic agenda — not on the lost cause of trying to convince con artists to stop conning the public.
Mainstream media are not helping the situation, as they are Right Wing biased overall. They’re not as blatantly Right Wing biased as Fox, but still, they are Right Wing biased.
Mainstream Media’s Subtle Right Wing Propaganda Helped Elect Trump and Could Lose Congress for Democrats, if We Fail to Face It
However, Democrats themselves are enabling Right Wing biases — by falling down on their job as party spokespeople.
Republicans constantly repeat their talking points in both Right Wing media and mainstream media. Democrats don’t use repeated talking points.
What’s repeated — Right Wing points —gets remembered and believed. The points are repeated so often that even journalists, Democrats and Democratic consultants believe them as unquestioned “conventional wisdom.”
Right Wing talking points in mainstream media normalize Right Wing authoritarian behaviors like insurrection and restriction of voting rights in numerous states. Right Wing framing is also used to unfairly bash Biden and Democrats about inflation, the deficit and other issues.
The belief that “both sides” of the political spectrum are equal in credibility, in corruption and in every way, — this is also a Right Wing biased point. However, this point comes directly from mainstream media outlets themselves — not from the Right Wing.
Media have historically used this as a formula for being objective and neutral. It doesn’t work. The formula is still used though.
Some say that laziness is the most powerful force in the universe. People do love to practice simple solutions so much, that they find it easy to lie to themselves and claim simple solutions work — even if they don’t. Journalists and their bosses are not exceptions to the rule. Falsely pretending that “both sides” journalism is objective and neutral comes easily to many.
The false idea that the extreme Left is as violent as the extreme Right is a particularly false Right Wing biased belief that media repeat, due to their “Both sides are the same” habit of reporting. Millions believe that lie now.
Democrats need to fight back — by using repeated Democratic talking points — to take back at least some influence over our national narrative — which is currently framed in Right Wing ways.
Worshiped (by Dems who call themselves “Shor-pilled”) Democratic consultant David Shor performs Big Data analyses — what Democratic leaders think of as the ultimate in science & technology as applied to politics. But he — like millions of other media consumers — believe the Right Wing talking points that are repeated by mainstream media.
Therefore he interprets his Big Data analyses by using Right Wing talking points about how Democrats need to “go toward the Center” — that is, Rightward — to win elections. That may be true in some districts, while the opposite is true in others. But his overgeneralization is wrong headed.
Democrats have been given this advice for a long time and have mostly followed it. If it worked great, Dems would have had landslide wins in every election for decades. But it doesn’t work. It’s just repeated endlessly until it’s believed — just like the Right Wing talking points that inspired that advice are repeated.
Democratic leaders need to create and use repeated talking points.
Democratic voters also need some leaders who are fighters. Too many people in Democratic leadership learned, decades ago, to get along and survive by respecting their Republican colleagues — even looking up to them — and bending over Rightward to cooperate and be bipartisan.
Conditions have changed greatly now. However, not everyone is flexible enough to adapt to new circumstances. The people put in the spokesperson role for the party should be the ones who are most capable of adapting and changing their habits, when those habits don’t work.
Democratic spokespeople should shed any beliefs they have in the Right Wing talking points and frames that are repeated incessantly in media. They need to create narratives that use Democratic frames. They should also pressure Sunday TV shows to interview aggressive Democrats, and to pressure mainstream publications into publishing Democratically framed opinion articles. Right now, mainstream outlets publish and interview mostly Right Wingers, which is very unfair to Democrats.
We voters can help by contacting media outlets too and demanding that news outlets interview and publish at least as many aggressive Democrats as aggressive Republicans.
I would love for Pelosi to get the support she needs in working through her denial of reality and her grief — but not on national TV. The party spokespeople who go on TV need to be aggressively Democratic — not focused on trying to heal the GOP.
Anyone who doesn’t know what aggressively Democratic means, take a look at Strike Pac. They are an organization that’s doing that kind of messaging now. The Democratic party ought to hire them.
In the mean time, voters who want that kind of messaging done — even if the Democratic party themselves won’t do it — can donate at their web site. The more financial support they have, the more messages they can create and spread.
