Ideally, I’d love for Dems to just start taking credit for everything MAGA brags about. Since apparently the Republicans aren’t in charge.
Ideally, I’d love for Dems to just start taking credit for everything MAGA brags about. Since apparently the Republicans aren’t in charge.
You’re still missing the point. Accuracy doesn’t matter first. Engagement does. Nobody listens to a perfectly factual argument if they’ve already tuned you out. Humans don’t operate on data — they operate on emotion, identity, and story. That’s why propaganda works. That’s why memes work.
If exaggeration, satire, or outright lies are what make people look long enough to even hear a truth later, then that’s the cost of entry. You can’t correct someone who never engages. You can’t educate someone who scrolls past you.
The moral panic over “lying” misses the bigger picture — refusing to adapt to human psychology isn’t virtue, it’s self-sabotage. When the other side is willing to weaponize story, fear, and spectacle, and you cling to purity, you’re not defending truth — you’re surrendering it.
Sometimes, yes, the ends justify the means. Because the alternative is letting the “truthful” side lose to those who don’t care about truth at all — and that’s how you end up with demagogues, fascists, and history repeating itself. If preventing that requires bending the truth to win hearts before minds, then it’s not immoral. It’s necessary.
And here I will not disagree with you that the accuracy doesn’t matter right now, and I’m not missing the point. I see how we on the left are losing the “cultural war,” but I’m not sure that turning to propaganda with blatant lies or half truths is going to work.
If I saw an advert for my local statesman that claimed that their republican opponent eats babies, it wouldn’t change how I vote, but it would diminish my fervor for voting for them. The end-game of this propaganda war is that nobody pays attention at all, since it can’t be trusted, or that everyone believes everything they see regardless of it’s merit. Obviously there is a spectrum, and you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but I don’t think aiming for that lowest common denominator is the way to go.
Calling back to my previous post, you don’t seem like a ‘fence-sitting lefty’ to me. You come across as a cranky lefty like myself. I know I don’t have a solution to this issue of messaging and you think you have yours. I do disagree that it would be better to meme harder at the expense of truth, but we’re broadly on the same side and have the same goals.
I’m just curious at this point: What would your memes look like? I’m such a sucker for accuracy that all I can come up with are things like: “Republicans could end the government shutdown at any point: They have the majority and can change the rules whenever they want, but they can’t even come to an agreement amongst themselves about how hard to fuck you over”, or “You can’t have informed voters if they can’t read [temple-tap]” and I don’t think those would sell.