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I heard a great program on This American Life on NPR this week about why the conservatives are winning the media game over the liberals... It came down to the
by dotBen 16y ago
I heard a great program on This American Life on NPR this week about why the conservatives are winning the media game over the liberals...
It came down to the fact that conservatives by their nature like order, hierarchy and organization and liberals tend not to. Liberals won't come together to discuss an agree to the same media talking points where as the conservatives love to -- and more importantly they'll all stick to them which amplifies the message. This is what is leading to the total pwnage of the lib's by the cons in mainstream media.
The issue for Prop 19 is that you have a very organized and disciplined conservative movement in the NO corner and a very sparse group of liberals who all have their own perspectives with no serious critical mass in the YES corner. Paul Buchheit may have given $100k to the YES campaign, but did that group officially represent the existing legal pot growers, smokers advocacy groups, etc? I don't believe it did - they couldn't organize themselves because there are no aligned interests there.
As a European, I consider myself a liberal by US politics if that is relevant. I've never smoked marijuana but I've found this campaign to be incredibly interesting as a barometer for current political landscape
(You can listen to the program at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/417/this-party-sucks http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/417/t... - see "Act II - Mr Hitt goes to Washington")
- patio11 16y agoRepublicans and conservatives make the same excuse when they lose. Trust me. "The liberals have better message discipline because they have the media and academia all saying with one unified voice that they want $ISSUE for these reasons, whereas we free-thinking conservatives..." It is a crappy argument when we make it, too. The conservative political establishment is much, much more fractured on the issue of drug legalization than you appear to believe they are. The most influential conservative opinion magazine in the country is pro-legalization and has been for, literally, decades now. It is quite contentious within the Republican Party. See also immigration.
- euroclydon 16y agoNational Review? WFB himself was, right?
- patio11 16y agoRight on both counts.
- jbooth 16y agoYeah, but conservatives really hate hippies. You sure that doesn't trump everything else when it comes to pot? Most conservatives I've talked to recently are extremely emotional/cultural on their reasons for being a conservative.
- tptacek 16y agoThey aren't dueling teenage street gangs, The Conservs and the Hippies. You've talked to a strange little subset of conservatives. I'm a liberal, and my next door neighbor is an extremely emotional/cultural liberal too.
- jbooth 16y agoMaybe hippies is a bad way to put it, but how to explain "Take OUR country back" without hippies and race? Not saying it's all conservatives, just a significant chunk. And, yeah, cultural liberals exist too but we don't have the anger level, you never see liberals get angry about the heartland the way conservatives are angry about "libs". EDIT to reply since I'm heading out the door: Yeah, signs at rallies, plus Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, several people I met while canvassing, every outspoken conservative in my hometown that I've heard from.. Yeah, SF contrarian-libertarians don't talk like that. But a significant subset of the conservative movement does. We'll see if it changes now that they don't feel so emasculated after taking the house.
- tptacek 16y agoMy conservative friends don't talk like that. You know what talks like that? Crazy signs at rallies. Consider whether that's where you're getting your facts from. I'm a midwesterner, by the way. And libertarians kind of drive me nuts. I'm talking about Republicans.
- Semiapies 16y agoAnd here in Texas, I hear talk like that all the time. Not from crazies in the street, but educated professionals. Yesterday was really the worst.
- cageface 16y agoIt came down to the fact that conservatives by their nature like order, hierarchy and organization and liberals tend not to. Brian Eno made exactly the same observation in his published diary. Liberal tendencies might prove adaptive in the longer term though, if they keep the left ahead of the right WRT social and demographic change.
- tptacek 16y agoWell, if David Bowie's collaborator on the Berlin albums believes it, that's definitely good enough for me!
- CWuestefeld 16y agoFor a group that are putatively so diverse in their opinions, I've found that when I hear their talking points on the various issues, they speakers seem quite consolidated and repetitive to me. Honestly, I think that this is just so much self-congratulations on the part of the Liberals.
- Semiapies 16y agoIt's one more variation on the "Their team is evil and cunning and my team is too dumb/cowardly/honorable/thoughtful to win" line that both teams Red and Blue use when they lose.