Can progressives learn anything from Republicans?

[TaraJo]

Sometimes..we imagine that the GOP "strategy" is a car that we can take all of the gop shit out of and fill full of other shit..but its not.  The racist bit is the fuckin wheels, it's not like a bag in the trunk.

Something about racism, though.

Lee and I watched a documentary on far right, alt-right, racist groups.  The film maker interviewed people in the KKK, in neo nazi groups and the people who bridge the gap between those groups and legitimate political power.  One of the things I found interesting was that the racist groups, they were incredibly well organized.  I don't mean organized like a militia; I mean they were organized like a PR firm.  In fact, most of these groups had PR people in them (that was most of who she talked to).  And their attention to PR has shown; there's less direct racism and you didn't hear them using the n-word nearly at all.  In fact, a lot of their talking points are alarmingly similar to Trumps talking points; they were talking about protecting America and Americans, but with a greater emphasis on 'white culture.'  

Part of what has made them successful is that they've been willing and able to change their talking points to something that's less repugnant to the general public.  And progressives should have an easy time with this; after all, if black people or women or hispanic people or glbt people are being mistreated by police or other government officials, it should be easy to translate that into something that the general public is eager to get behind.  But it's not happening.  Maybe it's just the fact that I'm kinda forced to be involved in some far-left groups, but it seems to me that they're completely unwilling to change their message in the slightest, weather it means they'll be successful or not.  

I hate the idea of being hostile towards intellectualism and academia, but I feel like a lot of progressives have become so ingrained in their far left, college kid mindset that they've completely lost sight of actual working class voters.  Find a factory worker who puts in 50 hours a week and is still struggling to pay his mortgage.  He won't have the same concerns as some upper-middle class college kid.   If that college kid is worried about gender inbalance on campus or racist twitter posts or transphobic video games, the factory worker doesn't care about those things because he's too worried about the possibility of his job being sent overseas.  Trump, to his credit, addressed these voters in his campaign; he claimed that he'd save American coal jobs and stop companies from going overseas; I know he didn't actually do any of those things (no matter how many times we try it, trickle down won't work that way), but the fact that he talked about those issues was more than what Hillary did.

Maybe if progressives want to be politically relevant again, they need to focus more on the people.  The democrats have gotten too distant, too removed from the general public and the public is starting to lose faith in them.