[lbo-talk] The Ideology Problem | The Activist

[Gail Brock]

When done well, ridiculing them works.  Ignoring them doesn't.  That was the tack tried when the vicious Lee-Atwater style attacks and dog-whistles began.  The high-minded kept insisting that the public would be revulsed by the gutter tactics, but the tactics won elections and I think were successful in moving the whole discourse to the right, to neoliberal veneration of the privilege of wealth that they call markets.

I think it was a mistake to back down from the anti-theology assumptions and language.  Every incidence of "Good news as labor costs are held in check" ought to be attacked as the bad theology of "Workers are not sharing the fruits of our economy."

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Wojtek S wrote:

The proper response to the anti-government diatribes of the right is not
debating their theology and even positing anti-theology (i.e. critique of
the market) but unmasking the "men behind the curtain" i.e. attacks on the
messengers not the message (e.g. by publicly ridiculing them, as Michael
Moore has been doing, or by refusing to engage in their flame wars, as Obama does.)
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