Aaron Regunberg, New Republic - With his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Bernie has begun holding a series of rallies in GOP-represented swing districts to bring attention to Trump’s billionaire-boosting, middle class–busting agenda. As he’s swung through heartland states such as Nebraska and Iowa, the grassroots response has been electric. Last Friday, 4,000 people came out to hear him in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the next morning he was joined by 2,600 in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000; and then in a suburb outside Detroit he spoke to a crowd of 9,000 that filled a packed gym, two overflow rooms, and the parking lot outside.
Sanders seems to understand something that many Democratic elites do not: In today’s brutally divided attentional economy, Democrats can never take for granted that their messaging will get through to people without sustained efforts to capture and direct voters’ attention. Precisely zero swing voters give a crap when Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer holds a press conference on Capitol Hill to speak in boring generalities about the threat Trump represents (while every other aspect of their business-as-usual demeanor screams, “Actually, everything is fine”).
No one outside of Washington is reading sternly worded “Dear Colleague” letters or the latest milquetoast op-ed. But when you go into someone’s small town to hold a rally—not a campaign rally right before an election, which most people understand as somewhat instrumentalizing, but an off-year emergency rally to stop oligarchy—now that screams urgency. And it signals that something different, against the grain, or unconventional is happening—three adjectives with which Democrats could use more of an association.
By rejecting passivity, Sanders is also doing more to actually put Republicans—who’ve recently been ordered to abandon town halls in the wake of mounting anger from their own voters—under pressure, demonstrating how Democrats locked out of power in Washington can go on offense. What if, rather than simply praying that some swing-district Republican legislators will grow a spine and help Democrats hold the line against irreversible cuts to life-or-death social programs, we instead rallied their constituents to directly demonstrate to them that going along with Trump might cost them their next election?
Finally, Bernie’s approach is proving to be a far more effective mechanism for delivering new information to targeted communities, and not just through the mega-blast of social media discourse that actions like these produce. More
No comments:
Post a Comment