Clipping blog

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The Sun Is Out and The Shack is Alive! Posted: 07 Jan 2013 07:30 AM PST Did you notice anything new about The Shack? Like a theme different in a few ways?  And some new stuff all the way up at the top of the main page? And new sidebar widget thingies? And a whole lot of blank space where more widget thingies that will contain cool links and maybe a few short videos will go later? You did?! I’m so pleased you noticed! SuperMegaProducer Mike and I spent a couple hours Friday negotiating the switch to a new webhost that will give me a lot more bandwidth so that the next time Glenn Reynolds wants to Instalanche me, my blog will withstand the traffic onslaught like Lieutenant Dan strapped to the main mast. I believe the blog is a little bit quicker to load (though I do have to tweak things a bit more) and looks even better than it did Friday morning. Of course, I do have more work to do because I spent the time I would have spent on the design stuff figuring out why WordPress wouldn’t clue users into some known trouble spots in its import/export function. That might just be a post for another day, when I can think about it without bursting into a little fireball of user rage, though. But, in the meantime, The Shack is back and there’s even a new hotness for you to read. I’m a giver that way!

#LowInformationVoterThoughts: A Hashtag Game that Helps the Left Posted: 07 Jan 2013 06:30 AM PST The term “low-information voter” has been around politics for a couple decades. I believe I first heard it in the mid-1990s from Democrats who couldn’t figure out why voters would put Republicans in office when clearly (to them) Democratic economic policies were in their best interests. Thomas Frank wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas as a lengthy primal scream of frustration about the low-information voters who, despite Democrats’ best efforts, put George “The Chimpmaster” Bush and his evil Hali-bot Dick Cheney back in office. Mike Lofgren, who claimed to be a former Republican, wrote a diatribe for the left-wing website TruthOut in 2011 in which he described “tens of millions” of low-information voters “who hardly know which party controls which branch of government” as “fearful and angry” and responsible for “a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” whose “hazy confusion” makes them easy prey for a sinister Republican Party. George Lakoff, a guru of Democratic political science, recently gave perhaps the best definition for the term I’ve seen. The term is mainly used by liberals to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests and the best interests of the nation. It assumes they vote that way because they lack sufficient information about issues. The assumption being, of course, that if only they had the real facts, they would vote differently — for both their own best interests and those of the nation… The problem is that, as neutral as the term “low-information voters” may sound, it’s pejorative and used to express frustration with these voters, who (we’re told) act against their own best interests. Liberals tend to attribute the problem in large part to conscious Republican efforts at misinformation — say, on Fox News or talk radio — and in part to faulty information gleaned from friends, family, and random sources. Interestingly, I have yet to run across a liberal castigating low-information voters who happen to vote Democrat on the basis of information from liberal media, friends, or family. It’s a term that goes one way: left to right. That, however, has changed recently. Republicans now use the phrase in exactly the way Lakoff described, as an insult to people who, Republicans believe, would vote for their candidates if only they weren’t so darned stupid. Stupid. That seems a harsh label to slap on someone about whom you know nothing but their voting record, yet that’s exactly how a goodly number of folks on the right have labeled the almost 66 million people who voted for Barack Obama this past November. Witness the graphic I used at the top of this post, or some of the entries in this Twitchy article on the recent #LowInformationVoterThoughts Twitter hashtag game. To scores of right-wingers, low-information voters aren’t simply ignorant but greedy, lazy, shiftless, welfare-grubbing, ungrateful, and stupid. I admit, it’s easy to slip into that opinion. When you know a lot about a subject and you run into people who know a lot less than you, it’s easy to think you’re superior to them and they are, well, dumb. Of course, that’s exactly the wrong thing to think. People, as a rule, aren’t dumb. In fact, the average person is of average intelligence. That’s kind of what “average” means. When we on the right label 66 million average Americans as stupid, we’ve not only cranked the arrogance-o-meter all the way to 11, but we’ve also sowed the ground for a nice long stay in the political minority. Here’s why. When you assume someone is stupid, you also assume that person can not possibly be enlightened. You don’t treat them as humans who need a few more facts delivered in a compelling fashion but as sheep who need to be led or, worse, impediments who need to be forced into your way of thinking. I know that because the Democrats treated America as both sheep and impediments for about 20 years, until some bright people in the party decided the reason low-information voters weren’t voting for them wasn’t because they were drained of their will by the Fox News Hypnorays but because they weren’t selling their product well enough. They stopped condescending to the voters and started talking to them in direct and evocative ways. They rightly reasoned that people don’t always vote the way logic says they should and found ways to move voters with emotion into places where they’d be more willing to listen to the ideological pitch. Guess what, fellow conservatives? That’s exactly what we’re going to have to do, too. Sure, it feels great to rank on the lumpenproles who can’t wait to get an Obamaphone, but do you think any of them will listen to you after you’ve spent a couple months calling them morons? I wouldn’t. Heck, I’m tired of hearing it now and I’m a conservative already! There is absolutely no chance that mean little hashtag game will swing one voter to the Republican side in 2014. In fact, it probably drove a few people away. So, how about we try something a bit different? Instead of preening about our massive intelligences, we bend our ginormous conservative brains toward telling really good stories that will grip people’s hearts and bring them close enough that we can engage their minds. Maybe instead of dumping cash into political campaigns that always break our hearts, we drop 50 bucks in the top jar of that blogger you know who writes all those things you like or the podcaster who spends hours every week telling stories that could bring more voters over to our side. Let’s put some effort into doing what the left has done successfully for the past couple Presidential elections instead of turning bitter and cruel to people who would help us if only we bothered to talk to them in a way we’d want to be talked to ourselves.

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