Waterloo (again): the truth will out - and so too will GOP lies
NB: this is the text of a voice memo, which I transcribed and edited between September 20th and October 3rd, 2013
Every time a religious movement predicts the apocalypse and the apocalypse doesn't actually come to pass, there are nevertheless plenty of people within that movement who manage to come up with some sort of rationalization or pretext for remaining loyal to the creed. That is the psychology of the true believer. There's little one can do to counteract or circumvent it, because true believers are motivated not by a desire to seek and know the truth, but rather to establish and preserve a simple and clarifying set of beliefs. Their paramount psychological goal or need or purpose is not whatever the purported creed of the group is, but rather loyalty to the creed, whatever it happens to be - i.e. the point is to preserve the feelings of loyalty and identity with the group; the particular tenets of the creed are a means to this end. It's the faith itself, not the object of the faith - it's the having of the faith, the being faithful. And so such people will always remain loyal, because remaining loyal is in itself their goal.
Insofar as the anti-Obamacare cause is a subsidiary of the anti-Obama cause, and the anti-Liberal cause more generally, those people who are anti-Obama, anti-Liberal etc. are going to remain committed to those positions, they're going to remain committed to supporting the GOP and Conservatism. And it's probable that Obamacare will be less a rallying point [i.e. after the ACA is a fait-accompli and Armageddon doesn't ensue], but it doesn't mean that these people are going to fade away from the movement, of which the anti-Obamacare movement is simply a part.
One can make the analogy with the birthers: when the long-form birth certificate came out within days of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the matter was put to rest for people who were actually concerned with whether it was true or not [i.e. that Obama had been born outside the USA]. It didn't put the matter to rest for people for whom the birth certificate in itself was an incidental detail - what they were really committed to was their dislike and fear and to some degree even a hatred of Obama and what he represents to them. Such people were never going to take a fresh view of Obama or suddenly become open-minded about him, having been chastened into re-evaluating their opinions and the sources upon which they based them. They were simply going to emphasize the birth-certificate issue a little less and move on to seek out another pretext for their hostility to the president.
So, I think that for the true believers, that is going to be the case with Obamacare.
But, I have actually begun with my second thought on these matters. My first thought was just to recap what I've been saying to myself and writing in my notes lately, namely that Obamacare is going to become a reality for more and more Americans, and starting October 1st the exchanges will come on-line, and on Jan 1st 2014 Obamacare will come into effect fully, and Americans will discover that it is not the end of the world.
Now, Republicans have been asserting for years that Obamacare creates "death panels"; that it's going to cause you to lose access to your doctor or otherwise limit your choice of doctor; it's going to cause premiums to go up; it's going to bankrupt the country; it's going to interpose the government between you and your doctor; it's going to deny certain procedures that your doctor would otherwise recommend; it will limit your choice of possible health plans…
So, they've been making these false assertions all along, the death panel one being the most sensationalistic - prominent and alarming. None of those things is going to happen. And so millions of Americans from coast to coast are going to learn that and are going to know from their own direct and personal experience that these things have not come to pass, and that they were worked into a frenzy of fear and anxiety and hostility by the leaders of their own party, by the leaders of the movement they support. They were convinced to fear Obamacare. They were convinced to march, to demonstrate, to protest at town halls. They were convinced to write checks and send them in. They were ginned up and whipped into a frenzy. They were made to commit themselves to the obstruction and repeal movement. And all of the claims that were made to bring this about, the basis for all their fears and the entire pretext for resisting Obamacare, will turn out to have been false. False.
Now, Americans are cynical about politics right now - these days - anyway. The parties are held in relatively low esteem - the GOP even lower than the Democratic party. Congress is held in low esteem. Conservatives are beleaguered… the true believers are fearful and in an angry, reactionary mode; the mainstream is demoralized. And here now we have a moment when the stark and vociferous claims, the almost-panicked claims, of the leaders of the Republican Party are going to be refuted by reality itself - a reality that Democrats will not have to promote, because people will be encountering it directly and personally through their encounters with the healthcare and insurance system over the coming year or so. The many claims of anti-Obamacare conservatives are going to be proved wrong - whether deluded or mendacious.
This represents an opportunity that Democrats should seize upon, not just to promote Obamacare and to get more buy-in and so forth, but also to demonstrate that this is not unusual - this is what Republicans have been doing for years. They've been doing it about the debt and deficits, they've been doing it about social policy - DOMA, DADT - they've been doing it about foreign affairs and terrorism. They try to scare you with death panels; they try to scare you with terrorism; they try to scare you with debt and deficits… And the reality is that they don't do anything about these things; they make the situation worse; they exaggerate fears to create distraction or to obtain support for an agenda that is not what it pretends to be.
This is potentially a moment when the Democrats, if they're organized (a BIG if!), can deploy a strategy of outreach to people who are coming to understand that they have been misled by Republicans they trusted. There is an opportunity now to be heard by people who have been consistently loyal to the GOP and haven't previously been open to persuasion by any alternative "creed". It is an opportunity to correct the record. I think this is going to be an unusual moment in which many people will be receptive to the argument that their movement and its leaders have misled and betrayed them. And have been doing so all along.
Obamacare will actually make this case in and of itself, simply by going into effect without entailing all the catastrophes that Republicans have promised. Democrats should allow it to make the case, but they should do more. Not by getting Democratic politicians to stand up in front of the crowd - or on tv - saying "we told you so", because that's a recipe for pissing people off.
The point is not to communicate from the point of view of Democrats but rather from the point of view of Republicans/Conservatives. For instance, if you were going to come up with an ad campaign, it shouldn't be some Democrat telling you how he's supported Obamacare all along and now you can see how he was right. The ad should feature someone saying: "I used to be a Republican because I believed what they told me - I believed in death panels. I went out and marched and protested; I went to town hall meetings and I challenged my elected representatives. I wrote checks and sent my hard-earned money to the GOP. I thought Obamacare was going to be the end of the world, but guess what? I now have affordable insurance, my family has insurance, we're not going bankrupt; my kid can get care even though we would have exceeded the life-time cap if it hadn't been for Obamacare. My wife has a pre-existing condition and couldn't get insurance before, but now she's covered, because of Obamacare. We all have not just healthcare coverage, but peace of mind and we can make ends meet."
Consider, for instance, this story about Butch Matthews, a committed Arkansas Republican who has embraced Obamacare. There must be thousands of similiar cases.
That's the correct approach. And then adapt it for other topics - e.g. the national debt, the social safety net…
This is a strong moment, because I think many Republicans are going to be receptive to the argument that their party is not worthy of their support, certainly not their enthusiastic support.
As I stated at the outset, a true believer is a true believer is a true believer is a true believer. There is nothing you can do to change his mind for the simple reason that his entire motivation is to not change his mind. There is nothing you can do to dislodge that faith if the person is committed not merely to that particular faith but to faith in itself - i.e. to remaining faithful. Now of course, there are many examples of ardent true believers becoming the ones who are the most disenchanted. But those tend to be exceptional instances. The main point is to recognize that although not every Republican is going to feel betrayed - far from it - many people who are less emotionally committed to the party, who may identify more with conservative values, but don't deeply identify with the party as an institution, and certainly many relatively moderate citizens who have tended to like the conservative message, are going to be increasingly receptive to arguments that the Republican party is unworthy of their support.
It's very important for Democrats to develop a communication approach that understands these developments and makes the most of them - that will be in the best interests of everyone. But it certainly won't work if Democrats crow about having been right all along.
Obamacare is going to demonstrate, better than any rhetoric, or any communications campaign, or any slogan, or any speech, or indeed any book, that the Republicans have not been telling the truth.
Every time a religious movement predicts the apocalypse and the apocalypse doesn't actually come to pass, there are nevertheless plenty of people within that movement who manage to come up with some sort of rationalization or pretext for remaining loyal to the creed. That is the psychology of the true believer. There's little one can do to counteract or circumvent it, because true believers are motivated not by a desire to seek and know the truth, but rather to establish and preserve a simple and clarifying set of beliefs. Their paramount psychological goal or need or purpose is not whatever the purported creed of the group is, but rather loyalty to the creed, whatever it happens to be - i.e. the point is to preserve the feelings of loyalty and identity with the group; the particular tenets of the creed are a means to this end. It's the faith itself, not the object of the faith - it's the having of the faith, the being faithful. And so such people will always remain loyal, because remaining loyal is in itself their goal.
Insofar as the anti-Obamacare cause is a subsidiary of the anti-Obama cause, and the anti-Liberal cause more generally, those people who are anti-Obama, anti-Liberal etc. are going to remain committed to those positions, they're going to remain committed to supporting the GOP and Conservatism. And it's probable that Obamacare will be less a rallying point [i.e. after the ACA is a fait-accompli and Armageddon doesn't ensue], but it doesn't mean that these people are going to fade away from the movement, of which the anti-Obamacare movement is simply a part.
One can make the analogy with the birthers: when the long-form birth certificate came out within days of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the matter was put to rest for people who were actually concerned with whether it was true or not [i.e. that Obama had been born outside the USA]. It didn't put the matter to rest for people for whom the birth certificate in itself was an incidental detail - what they were really committed to was their dislike and fear and to some degree even a hatred of Obama and what he represents to them. Such people were never going to take a fresh view of Obama or suddenly become open-minded about him, having been chastened into re-evaluating their opinions and the sources upon which they based them. They were simply going to emphasize the birth-certificate issue a little less and move on to seek out another pretext for their hostility to the president.
So, I think that for the true believers, that is going to be the case with Obamacare.
But, I have actually begun with my second thought on these matters. My first thought was just to recap what I've been saying to myself and writing in my notes lately, namely that Obamacare is going to become a reality for more and more Americans, and starting October 1st the exchanges will come on-line, and on Jan 1st 2014 Obamacare will come into effect fully, and Americans will discover that it is not the end of the world.
Now, Republicans have been asserting for years that Obamacare creates "death panels"; that it's going to cause you to lose access to your doctor or otherwise limit your choice of doctor; it's going to cause premiums to go up; it's going to bankrupt the country; it's going to interpose the government between you and your doctor; it's going to deny certain procedures that your doctor would otherwise recommend; it will limit your choice of possible health plans…
So, they've been making these false assertions all along, the death panel one being the most sensationalistic - prominent and alarming. None of those things is going to happen. And so millions of Americans from coast to coast are going to learn that and are going to know from their own direct and personal experience that these things have not come to pass, and that they were worked into a frenzy of fear and anxiety and hostility by the leaders of their own party, by the leaders of the movement they support. They were convinced to fear Obamacare. They were convinced to march, to demonstrate, to protest at town halls. They were convinced to write checks and send them in. They were ginned up and whipped into a frenzy. They were made to commit themselves to the obstruction and repeal movement. And all of the claims that were made to bring this about, the basis for all their fears and the entire pretext for resisting Obamacare, will turn out to have been false. False.
Now, Americans are cynical about politics right now - these days - anyway. The parties are held in relatively low esteem - the GOP even lower than the Democratic party. Congress is held in low esteem. Conservatives are beleaguered… the true believers are fearful and in an angry, reactionary mode; the mainstream is demoralized. And here now we have a moment when the stark and vociferous claims, the almost-panicked claims, of the leaders of the Republican Party are going to be refuted by reality itself - a reality that Democrats will not have to promote, because people will be encountering it directly and personally through their encounters with the healthcare and insurance system over the coming year or so. The many claims of anti-Obamacare conservatives are going to be proved wrong - whether deluded or mendacious.
This represents an opportunity that Democrats should seize upon, not just to promote Obamacare and to get more buy-in and so forth, but also to demonstrate that this is not unusual - this is what Republicans have been doing for years. They've been doing it about the debt and deficits, they've been doing it about social policy - DOMA, DADT - they've been doing it about foreign affairs and terrorism. They try to scare you with death panels; they try to scare you with terrorism; they try to scare you with debt and deficits… And the reality is that they don't do anything about these things; they make the situation worse; they exaggerate fears to create distraction or to obtain support for an agenda that is not what it pretends to be.
This is potentially a moment when the Democrats, if they're organized (a BIG if!), can deploy a strategy of outreach to people who are coming to understand that they have been misled by Republicans they trusted. There is an opportunity now to be heard by people who have been consistently loyal to the GOP and haven't previously been open to persuasion by any alternative "creed". It is an opportunity to correct the record. I think this is going to be an unusual moment in which many people will be receptive to the argument that their movement and its leaders have misled and betrayed them. And have been doing so all along.
Obamacare will actually make this case in and of itself, simply by going into effect without entailing all the catastrophes that Republicans have promised. Democrats should allow it to make the case, but they should do more. Not by getting Democratic politicians to stand up in front of the crowd - or on tv - saying "we told you so", because that's a recipe for pissing people off.
The point is not to communicate from the point of view of Democrats but rather from the point of view of Republicans/Conservatives. For instance, if you were going to come up with an ad campaign, it shouldn't be some Democrat telling you how he's supported Obamacare all along and now you can see how he was right. The ad should feature someone saying: "I used to be a Republican because I believed what they told me - I believed in death panels. I went out and marched and protested; I went to town hall meetings and I challenged my elected representatives. I wrote checks and sent my hard-earned money to the GOP. I thought Obamacare was going to be the end of the world, but guess what? I now have affordable insurance, my family has insurance, we're not going bankrupt; my kid can get care even though we would have exceeded the life-time cap if it hadn't been for Obamacare. My wife has a pre-existing condition and couldn't get insurance before, but now she's covered, because of Obamacare. We all have not just healthcare coverage, but peace of mind and we can make ends meet."
Consider, for instance, this story about Butch Matthews, a committed Arkansas Republican who has embraced Obamacare. There must be thousands of similiar cases.
That's the correct approach. And then adapt it for other topics - e.g. the national debt, the social safety net…
This is a strong moment, because I think many Republicans are going to be receptive to the argument that their party is not worthy of their support, certainly not their enthusiastic support.
As I stated at the outset, a true believer is a true believer is a true believer is a true believer. There is nothing you can do to change his mind for the simple reason that his entire motivation is to not change his mind. There is nothing you can do to dislodge that faith if the person is committed not merely to that particular faith but to faith in itself - i.e. to remaining faithful. Now of course, there are many examples of ardent true believers becoming the ones who are the most disenchanted. But those tend to be exceptional instances. The main point is to recognize that although not every Republican is going to feel betrayed - far from it - many people who are less emotionally committed to the party, who may identify more with conservative values, but don't deeply identify with the party as an institution, and certainly many relatively moderate citizens who have tended to like the conservative message, are going to be increasingly receptive to arguments that the Republican party is unworthy of their support.
It's very important for Democrats to develop a communication approach that understands these developments and makes the most of them - that will be in the best interests of everyone. But it certainly won't work if Democrats crow about having been right all along.
Obamacare is going to demonstrate, better than any rhetoric, or any communications campaign, or any slogan, or any speech, or indeed any book, that the Republicans have not been telling the truth.