• The West can safely supply more powerful military equipment to Ukraine …

• … if and only if they are careful about how they publicly message the donations.

Primary targets for such messaging are Russians other than Vladimir Putin, for Putin can’t start a nuclear war unless other Russians are willing to help.

Almost nobody else argues exactly this position. Many “doves” want to stop more or less at current levels of aid. Most “hawks” don’t acknowledge that we need to be careful about messaging our escalations. And neither side seems to have worked out which potential Russian escalators we should most worry about.

The fears and why they’re exaggerated

There actually are multiple kinds of dangerous escalation to worry about, via combinations of two main categories:

• Bottom up. NATO and Russian soldiers could stumble into direct combat with each other, and things could escalate from there.
• Top down. Either genuinely or pretextually in retaliation for some lesser Western escalation:

• • Putin could order the use of strategic or tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
  • Putin could order a strategic nuclear strike against the US (or Germany or whoever).
  • Putin could order a conventional-weapons attack against a NATO country (e.g., a salvo of missiles, or even a full-out invasion).

Most discussion is around the top-down scenarios. But the thing is – Putin has much less power to cause those kinds of problems than it might initially seem. Unless the escalation orders made sense to those whose agreement was needed, they would likely be disobeyed. So the challenge isn’t to keep Putin from escalating; rather, it’s to keep the Russian military from wanting to.

Asserting limits on Putin’s power may sound like an extreme claim, but I’m mainly just synthesizing a variety of well-known and typically well-accepted ideas. Nuke-focused ones include:

• Putin literally doesn’t have the power to launch strategic nuclear weapons without the consent of a colleague.
• The colleagues with the authority to consent are ones he seems to be on the outs with right now.
• Most people, no matter how craven otherwise, won’t start a nuclear war they don’t believe in, even at gunpoint.
• Deploying tactical nuclear weapons would be a major effort, visible to US intelligence all the way through the process.
• Armies can “slow walk” politicians’ orders if they want to badly enough.

More generally, Putin and the military have massive mutual disdain and mistrust.

• The Ukraine invasion has been a disaster in the early going, the military is obviously being scapegoated, and only some of the scapegoating is fair.
  • Putin didn’t even give his military a chance to plan properly.
  • Corruption at the top of the military makes it very hard for them to succeed.
  • So does the purging of competent senior officers.
• Putin signaled his lack of alignment with the military in 2016 by establishing Rosgvardiya, aka the National Guard, as a rival organization presumably more loyal to (and more favored by) him.
• Stories of low Russian military morale abound.

How to help Ukraine safely

So increased military aid to Ukraine should not trigger runaway escalation, provided it meets three criteria:

• It must be done carefully enough that it doesn’t start accidental escalatory conflict (e.g. Americans directly shooting Russians).
• It must be limited enough that nuclear escalation and the like would seem wildly disproportional to senior Russian military leaders.
• It must not cross any “red lines” of the kind that would trigger inevitable catastrophic escalation.

For both the “carefully” and “red lines” criteria, let’s go to a bit of game theory. To avoid catastrophic outcomes in a situation of military escalation, it helps to have agreements that certain formally possible “moves” are in fact taboo to play. These agreements are not necessarily explicitly negotiated, but are at least tacitly understood even so. For example, the two most obvious Russia/US “red line” taboos are:

• Don’t nuke each others’ cities.
• Don’t directly attack each others’ troops.

Prudence dictates that “red lines” that would be immediately catastrophic to break should be:

• Unambiguously clear.
• Widely understood among many people in each country.
• Quite stable over time.

And so they should be simple and obvious, like the two examples above. If an alleged “red line” is hard to assess, it probably isn’t a true red line at all.

That’s not to say that true red lines are the only taboos. Indeed, we can regard the sides as engaged in never-ending bargaining as to which actions are or aren’t allowed. And of course, sometimes in a bargaining situation you simply declare how one aspect of the disagreement will go.

To continue with that analogy: Dictating a new escalation non-taboo – such as “We’re giving MiGs to Ukraine and there’s nothing you can do to talk us out of it” – is roughly like introducing a firm, non-negotiable demand into a more conventional negotiation. The main tips for how to do that are:

• Negotiate from interests and/or principles rather than positions.
• Persuasively communicate commitment to the underlying interests or principles.
• (When this tactic is practical) Leave yourself no way to back down.

That’s where careful messaging comes in. I’d specifically suggest something like:

• As we’ve been shouting all along, we deplore the bombardment of Ukrainian cities. (Principle that we’re committed to.)
• Our citizens and allies demand we do more to stop it. (Hard to back down.)
• Thus, we’re supplying Ukraine with X, Y and Z systems. (Again, hard to back down; we’re asking for forgiveness, not permission.)
• We are forbidding Ukraine from using these systems outside Ukrainian borders. We’ll punish them with reduced support if they violate that non-trivially. (Respect Russia’s interests/principles and indicate great desire not to escalate.)

If communicating and living up to messaging like that isn’t enough to avert World War III, no other approach was going to stop it either.

Related links

• I reargued this case in a post on my new blog Implicit Games. Other posts there continue the discussion.

• Despite the unique awfulness of Donald Trump, in essence this would be a party-vs.-party election.
• Democrats should emphasize that democracy itself was at risk.
• Republicans would accuse Democrats of being crazy extremists, and …
• … Democrats would and should do the same about Republicans.

Many specifics, however, could not have been predicted, without foreknowledge of the events on which they were based. In particular:

• COVID-19, and Trump’s astonishing falsehoods about it, created a much stronger “extremist science denier(s)” argument than had seemed likely based on environmental issues alone. The successful centrality of “science” to election messaging was one of Democrats’ big positive election surprises.
• The COVID-19 fiasco fit very well into the healthcare and economic justice stories Democrats anyway wanted to tell.
• Republicans hit back hard, however, painting pro-lockdown (or just pro-mask) Democrats as the supposed true extremists.
• Racial justice protests, especially when they turned into riots, looked like extremism to many Republican voters. The widely misunderstood slogan “defund the police” supported such impressions.
• Trump’s and his Administration’s opposition to the protests looked like dictatorship and/or extremism to many Democratic voters. (This was especially true of the Lafayette Park debacle.)
• Supreme Court battles looked like extremism to Republican and Democratic partisans alike. Democrats also sensed an anti-democratic stench in how the Amy Coney Barrett nomination was rushed through, and the contrast between that and the blocking of Merrick Garland.
• Republicans cobbled together a fairly persuasive pitch of “No, they’re the authoritarians” from ingredients that included COVID rules (masks, lockdowns), culture-war gripes, and of course the socialism-ends-freedom trope that dates back at least to Ronald Reagan’s 1961 attack on “socialized medicine”.

Where Democratic messaging got messed up was around the economy.

• Trump claimed credit for the continuation of Obama’s economic boom, and in particular for its benefits finally reaching the lower-income segments of society.
• The COVID-caused economic calamity was politically two-edged; Republicans claimed that Democratic lockdowns made disruption worse than it needed to be.
• Health-care, often viewed as a largely economic issue, became a life-and-death one instead. Overall, that was good for Democrats. But it did sideline of their strongest economic pitches.
• Joe Biden’s low-volume campaign strategy had considerable overall merit. But he did little to push an economic vision different from that of the left-wingers he thumped in the primaries.
• Similarly, little effort was made to sell the (true!) story that huge tax cuts for the rich had only a small benefit to everybody else.
• Democrats always start in an economic messaging hole vs. Republicans, because:
• The Republican story is simpler.
• The Republican story puts or leaves tax money in people’s pockets.
• But the disparity in economic messaging success was disappointing, especially since economic facts favor the Democratic side.

The final point I’d like to highlight is that, at the presidential level, this was in significant part a competence-in-crisis election. Basically, if an executive is seen as mishandling a crisis, and an election follows soon thereafter, it’s likely curtains for the executive. (It’s a truism that the worst thing that can happen to a mayor’s reelection chances is a mishandled snowstorm; if the mayor doesn’t remove the snow fast enough, the residents soon remove the mayor.) So it was for Carter and the hostages. So it might have been for Bush had Hurricane Katrina hit in 2004 rather than 2005. And so it was for Trump once he was widely agreed to have botched the pandemic.

Americans of different policy preferences are united in realizing: Trump must go. His dishonesty, incompetence and meanness make him unfit to lead any country. His contempt for limits on his power make him especially unfit for America.

But ousting Trump is not enough; Republican policies and legislators must go too. It’s not just that Republicans have enabled Trump for too long, or that they echo some of his vices, such as science denial, voter suppression, or general corruption. Beyond all that, REPUBLICANS ARE BAD FOR THE ECONOMY. I know it’s common to assume otherwise – but any such assumption is 30+ years out of date.

The American economy has always been driven by CREATION – of companies, inventions, science, arts, transportation systems, business concepts, political concepts and more. Factors like geography helped too – we were blessed to avoid the worst destruction of two world wars – but that’s mainly in the past. What happens in our economy, for the most part, is whatever the people in it do.

And Democrats’ policies are best for bringing us and supporting creative, smart, hard-working, risk-taking people. That’s what one gets from immigration. That’s what one gets from investing in education and research. That’s what one gets from backstopping people’s health care so they’re not afraid to change jobs. It’s not what one gets from mindlessly slashing services.

I have worked closely with some of the world’s great entrepreneurs, including the founders of Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, and some of the great venture investors as well. I know many more in the next tiers down. None, so far as I can tell, would have done anything different if personal or income taxes had been at some other rate. And no policy that Joe Biden or even Elizabeth Warren has suggested would have done anything to slow those entrepreneurs down. (That’s less true of Bernie Sanders – but he lost the nomination, soundly, twice.)

I argued these points in more detail at http://www.monashreport.com/2020/10/15/democrats-are-much-better-for-the-economy-than-republicans-and-this-is-unlikely-to-soon-change/ and http://www.monashreport.com/2020/10/15/why-democrats-are-better-for-the-economy-than-republicans/ In particular, I explained why the central myth of Republican economics – that giving money to the rich and powerful “makes more capital available for productive uses” – simply isn’t true. And when that myth is stripped away, then obsessing about taxes becomes little more than a manifestation of personal greed.

In the 2020s, we’ll need a government that supports our workers, rebuilds our infrastructure, protects democracy … and regains our trust. The science-denying, economics-denying Republicans aren’t likely to lead that. Please vote a straight Democratic ticket this year. And please ask everybody you know to vote one too.

Thank you, and let’s rebuild our country’s greatness.

Best regards,

Curt Monash

As always, a HUGE fraction of the electorate remains undecided.

• Millions of people have already voted in Election 2020.
• Millions more haven’t and definitely won’t, due to physical or legal impediments.
• Around half of eligible voters haven’t voted yet, but clearly intend to and know who they’ll vote for.
• A small number are sure they’ll vote but don’t yet know who for.

But the rest – tens of millions of voters and tens of percent of the electorate – are undecided as to whether they will vote at all.

Election 2020 isn’t even close to being decided or over!!! Keep campaigning!! Keep campaigning as hard as you can!!!

One way is to spread the following message, and encourage other people to spread it further:

Democrats are better for the economy than Republicans, at the Presidential and Congressional levels alike. They’ve been better for 30+ years, they’re better now, and they’ll be better in the decade ahead.

I’ve posted two versions of the argument accordingly:

• Longer and more extensively reasoned.
• Shorter and easier to copy/paste.

Reasons to share this general-economy message include:

• It’s true.
• The race for the Senate is still very close, and this message fully applies there.
• Republicans are putting a lot of wood behind the “crazy scary socialist” arrow. This message counters that.
• If Republican boorishness, authoritarianism and reality denial aren’t enough to make somebody a firm Democratic voter, their issues probably include “pocketbook”. Those are the folks we need to reach.

Please adapt, spread, and encourage the further spread of whichever version of this message you choose. Obviously, time is of the essence … and very, very, very, very much is at stake. Thank you for your support. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

• Longer and more extensively reasoned. (This one)
• Shorter and easier to copy/paste.
  

Permission to copy either version is granted through November 3, 2020, provided that proper attribution and URL are included. Please share widely!!

Donald Trump and his supporters must be swept from office, for countless reasons, many of which have been highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic. In broadest terms, these include:

• Corruption, incompetence, and science denial.
• The most explicit governmental race-baiting in over 50 years.
• Many-fronts efforts to undermine the voting process itself.

Much in our country needs healing and repair.

Many Americans agree, and favor Democratic candidates, for their intent to govern with decency, empathy, and reliance upon established facts. And so Democrats expect success in the election now underway. Even so, one major Democrat/Republican comparison may still be worth spelling out.

In a nutshell, Democrats are much better and safer for the economy than Republicans, especially but not only in the growth industries that provide so much of our wealth, exports, and favorable career opportunities. Republican propaganda often claims the contrary. But the pro-Democratic view is supported by all of:

• Decades of history.
• Economic science.
• Basic business common sense.

Let’s drill down.

1. (History) For the past 30 years, Democrats have done better for the economy than Republicans. In particular:

• George H. W. Bush’s term in office ended in recession.
• The economy boomed under Bill Clinton.
• George W. Bush started his term with an ordinary recession …
• …. and ended with a huge one.
• The economy grew back steadily under Barack Obama.
• The Obama boom slowed during the first part of Donald’s Trump term.

And of course we’re in economic catastrophe now.

2. (Economics) This is all more than just coincidence or luck. Orthodox Republican economic predictions have been consistently wrong over those same three decades. In particular, and with only minor exceptions:

• Deficits haven’t led to inflation.
• Corporations haven’t reinvested tax windfalls in their businesses.
• Economic growth hasn’t “trickled down” to the rest of the population.

The biggest hole in Republican orthodoxy is this: Making more money available for investment – as tax cuts and the relaxation of regulations are said to do – doesn’t actually cause much investment spending. For example, the recent Republican corporate tax cuts went mainly to dividends, stock buybacks, and increased executive pay. Importantly, this point explains why the stock market is uncoupled from the actual economy. Increasing after-tax profits by allowing pollution or cutting corporate tax rates may be good for stock prices, but nobody EXCEPT fortunate stockholders and investors are likely to much benefit.

3. (More economics) And so it is likely that Democrats will be better for our future economy than Republicans would. For unlike Republican pledges, Democratic ones tend to actually come true. In particular:

• As of the past few decades, Democratic policies lead to healthier domestic demand than Republican ones, for macroeconomic reasons such as:
  • Republicans tend to put (or leave) money in richer hands than Democrats do.
  • Poorer folks spend more of their incrementally available money on consumption than rich ones do.
  • Republican policies that supposedly drive business investment don’t actually have that effect.
• If Republicans remain the party of isolationism and mutually destructive trade wars, Democratic policies will lead to healthier foreign demand than Republican ones as well.

4. (Common sense) Democrats’ advantage doesn’t just lie in simple macroeconomic realism. Rather:

• Democrats are much better than Republicans for high-growth businesses.
• Democratic policies lead to a more effective workforce than Republican ones do.

Key reasons include:

• Democrats invest more in education than Republicans do, especially now that Republicans are so anti-intellectual and anti-science.
• Democrats invest more in research than Republicans do, ditto.
• Democrats are much, much friendlier to immigration than Republicans currently are.

Support for these points includes:

• Much of America’s wealth, economic growth and export power stem from industries whose innovation we’ve led – electronics (across multiple generations), film/media (ditto), pharma/biotech and more.
• Most of those industries rely on educated workers, as do older industries too.
• Many of our top business creators have been immigrants.
• So have many of our less spectacular but still important engineers.

Immigrants are crucial to today’s leading tech companies, including founders of Google and eBay, Microsoft’s most important non-founder engineer, Oracle’s most important current engineer, Intel’s most famous CEO, and current CEOs at Microsoft, Oracle, and Alphabet/Google. And of course, immigrants are also critical to our least glamorous businesses, performing hard, low-paid work in areas such as farming, meat-packing and household services.

5. (Common sense, continued) Republicans make untrue claims that Democrats are committed to policies much more progressive or “socialist” than is really the case. But even if those claims WERE true, Democrats could still be economically superior to Republicans. After all, more generous policies around health care, child care, education, etc. imply:

• Workers and entrepreneurs likely have more risk tolerance and job portability.
• Service-sector workers likely have more discretionary income as well.

In theory, it is possible to be too far left for entrepreneurial growth and economic health. But such policies would be left even of current Western European norms, and vastly further left than anything the United States is at any risk of adopting.

About the author: For almost 40 years, Curt Monash has been an adviser to and observer of many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. He was voted by investors as the #1 stock analyst of the computer software and services industry. He has consulted to a large fraction of the world’s important technology companies, often at the CEO level. Before entering business, he was a research fellow in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His Twitter and Facebook usernames are CurtMonash, and his public email address is curtmonash@monash.com. His official bio is at http://www.monash.com/curtbio.html.

Related links:

• Trump is the biggest issue, but this was election was always going to be party-vs.-party at its core.
• It’s not just the past 30 years; Democratic presidents have outperforming Republicans overall since Truman, if not Hoover. The Los Angeles Times has a great article outlining the facts and possible explanations, based on analyses by economic scholars such as Alan Blinder.
• Immigrants crucial to the technology industry have included Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, the underrated Charles Simonyi, the similarly underrated Juan Loaiza, and many, many, many, many more.
• The relevant team at Trump’s alma mater Penn Wharton believes Biden’s economic plans are better than Trump’s.

• Longer and more extensively reasoned.
  
• Shorter and easier to copy/paste. (This one)
  

Permission to copy either version is granted through November 3, 2020, provided that proper attribution and URL are included. Please share widely!!

For 30 years, Republicans have been bad for the economy.

• George H. W. Bush’s term in office ended in recession.
• The economy boomed under Bill Clinton.
• George W. Bush started his term with an ordinary recession …
•  …. and ended with a huge one.
• The economy grew back steadily under Barack Obama.
• The Obama boom slowed during the first part of Donald’s Trump term.

And of course we’re in economic catastrophe now.

Not coincidentally, standard Republican claims have not held true.

• Deficits have not led to inflation.
• Corporations have not reinvested tax windfalls in their businesses.
• Economic growth has not “trickled down” to the rest of the population.
• Stock market gains have not been coupled to the rest of the economy.

Most fundamentally, Republicans wrongly claim that “making more money available for investment” does in fact cause significantly more investment. (This is how they justify tax cuts for corporations, tax cuts for rich people, removal of regulations, and the like.) But in reality, if that was ever true, it’s been false for decades. Giving corporations more money just increases their dividends, stock buybacks, and/or executive pay, much more than it does their productive business spending. Cutting corporate taxes or lowering regulatory compliance costs, while great for earnings and hence stock prices, does little for the overall economy.

So when Republicans let infrastructure crumble – because they fear that paying workers to fix it would “crowd out” private investment — they’re wrong. When Republicans suppress the wages of our poorest workers — who would surely spend most of that new income and thus stimulate the economy — they’re wrong. And when Republicans resist investing in the education, child care and health care that makes our workers more effective or freer to work, they’re even wronger yet.

That’s all horrid enough, but Trump-style Republicans add a terrible new error: They oppose immigration. Immigrants are our hardest workers at our worst jobs. Immigrants provide energy and leadership for our greatest entrepreneurial successes. And immigrants comprise many of the engineers and other skilled workers who help our hottest job creating businesses grow. Many of our most productive people are immigrants … and the rest are descended from immigrants of the past.

And what about that “socialist” buzzword Republicans have been slinging at Democrats since the 1930s? It was nonsense then. It was nonsense when Reagan said Medicare would end freedom. It is nonsense now. (Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination.) And it is nonsense looking ahead. Even today’s Western Europe is capitalist enough for solid economic health, and the US isn’t going nearly as far left as that.

A version of this post formatted for yet easier copy/pasting is in the comments below.

About the author: For almost 40 years, Curt Monash has been an adviser to and observer of many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. He was voted by investors as the #1 stock analyst of the computer software and services industry. He has consulted to a large fraction of the world’s important technology companies, often at the CEO level. Before entering business, he was a research fellow in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His Twitter and Facebook usernames are CurtMonash, and his public email address is curtmonash@monash.com. His official bio is at http://www.monash.com/curtbio.html.

Even so, I view the upcoming 2020 election as Democrats-vs.-Republicans at its core, rather than Trump-specific. Reasons for that viewpoint start: 

• Beating Trump amounts to beating Republicans. Trump has a lot of “I don’t like him, but he leads our side to victory” support. That “side” is Republicans.
• Any given ballot has many races on it. Trump will only be on one of the ballot lines. Turnout for any race on the ballot is turnout for all of them.
• Party control of Congress matters a lot, including in how it influences the judiciary.
• So, especially in a redistricting year, does party control of state legislatures and governorships.
• Republicans – Trump and others alike – have fully embraced anti-Democrat messaging.
• Finally, there’s a small chance that Trump – an overweight and bitterly unpopular 73-year old who soon will be impeached by the House – won’t be on the ballot at all.

To repeat: Turnout for any race on a ballot is turnout for all. It follows that:

• The presidential race should be contested with vigor in all 50 states, because somewhere in each state there will be a close race worth contesting.
• So should every race for Senator or statewide office, for the same reason.
• And so should every district race (Congressional or state legislature), if it is in a state with at least one close race for President, Senator, Governor or elections administrator (usually the Secretary of State).

i.e., almost every election in the whole country deserves major campaign effort.

Similarly, almost every voter is worth targeting with messaging efforts:

• If there’s some doubt as to whether they’ll bother voting at all, of course you want to try to persuade them. That applies both to ones on your side and ones on the other.
• Even if they’re such diehards that there’s no doubt they’ll vote, perhaps they can be persuaded to donate more (if they’re Democrats) or less (if they’re Republicans) political money than they otherwise might.

But of course, different voters are interested in different subjects, and respond best to different messaging styles. Consequently, many different messages are worth spreading. Yet for obvious reasons of focus and consistency, candidates can only emphasize a small fraction of those messages. So other vectors of message propagation are also important, such as focused messaging by issue-advocacy organizations, third-party messaging campaigns or direct citizen-to-citizen communication.

So how can we help? Once the Democratic nominees are set, there will be tons of campaigns to volunteer for or donate for. Until then, we can donate to organizations that are not tied to particular general election races. The first step, if you haven’t done it already, is to sign up with ActBlue, a kind of PayPal-for-Democrats. Signing up has two easy stages:

• Create an ActBlue account via the usual email/password/confirmation process.
• Sign up specifically for ActBlue Express, which is done via a simple name/address/etc. form.

Once you’re registered with and logged into ActBlue, almost any donation to a specific Democratic candidate or organization is super-easy.

Specific donee recommendations include:

• Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams’ organization fighting Republicans’ anti-turnout measures and other election shenanigans.
• The NDRC (National Democratic Redistricting Committee), Eric Holder’s PAC focusing on state elections most likely to affect 2020s redistricting.
• The DLCC (Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee), an organization focused on state legislature races.
• Forward Majority, a newer organization focused on state races, although it’s concerning that there’s no easy way to donate to them via ActBlue.

Unlike many advocacy groups built around particular issues, these organizations don’t seem to be intervening much in Democrat-vs.-Democrat primary campaigns. So donations to them will be spent primarily on winning the November election.

Also, Indivisible, while not originally focused on elections, contributed a lot to the Democrats’ 2018 successes around the issue of health insurance, seems to be getting more election-focused over time, and has been astute since the get-go.

Further, I urge you to discuss politics directly with fellow citizens – family, friends, coworkers, casual acquaintances, social media friends, social media strangers, anybody. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Hit them with impression after impression after impression, in whatever way you feel would be most effective or leaves you feeling the most comfortable. The important thing, in this time of crisis, is that you do SOMETHING.

And by the way – please drop any notion that word-of-mouth or social media political persuasion don’t matter. If you think people are set in their opinions and impossible to be persuaded of anything, how did they get that way??? Was it at birth, or from their parents? Did they one day accidentally hear Rush Limbaugh and get their ideas fixed for life? Probably not. More likely, they got ideas from authority figures and the media and also had those ideas reinforced by friends and acquaintances. General citizen-to-citizen communication matters a lot.

Communicate what, you may ask? The strongest message I have, as mentioned above and spelled out in another post, is that our democratic freedoms are at stake. If your intended audience isn’t likely to understand or acknowledge that danger, yet another post suggests hammering the theme of Republican extremism. The words “crazy” and “cruel” resonate too, and are often easier than “extreme” to work into conversation. Or if you want to focus on a particular type of issue you think will get good reception with a particular audience – the environment or guns or abortion or racism or whatever – that’s a great option as well.

• Democrats are allegedly crazy or otherwise deluded. Particular versions of this include but hardly are limited to:
  • “Out of touch”.
  • “Radical”.
  • “Socialist” (and socialism never works well).
  • Want to spend a lot of money on free stuff (and the money isn’t there).
  • “Libtards”.
  • “Triggered”.
  • Having a “meltdown”.
  • “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
  • “Russia hoax”.
  • “Ukraine hoax”.
  • Don’t know the difference between men and women.
• Democrats allegedly want to take away your freedoms, in areas such as:
  • Guns.
  • Choosing your doctor.
  • Socialism (and socialism always leads to dictatorship).
  • Saying “Merry Christmas”.
  • Shunning gays.
  • Eating meat.
  • Using plastic straws.
  • Driving gas-guzzling cars.

But you know what? Democrats use those same themes, and should use them even more. For example:

• Trump tweets many bonkers things each day. Republicans purport to believe most of them.
• In particular, Republicans are currently pushing wild conspiracy theories in connection with the various investigations of Trump wrongdoing.
• Republicans are now wild science deniers in many areas, most famously climate change and macroeconomics.
• Republicans favor all sorts of crazily extreme policies.
• Republicans want to limit all sorts of basic democratic rights.

Abortion is a particularly rich area for examples.

• Republicans keep introducing an anti-abortion bill so extreme that it mandates medically impossible procedures.
• “Fetal heartbeat” bills are based on scientific falsehoods.
• Forced-ultrasound laws, among their many other vices, can amount to state-mandated rape.

And if Wikipedia is to be believed, Republicans paid a significant political price in 2012 for medically nonsensical comments about the pregnancy implications of rape.

They’re crazy, and want to take away our freedoms. That’s what this election is all about.

• Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have communicated negativity about almost any government activity except law enforcement and military defense.
• Republicans relentlessly attack “libtards”, “feminazis”, the “lamestream media” and, above all, out-of-touch radical socialist secular America-hating Democrats who insist you eat tofu.

And the Trump era has taken this to a new level of screeching. The “fake news” press are “enemies of the people”. Patriotic bureaucrats are a “deep state” “swamp”. Impeachment is a freedom-destroying “coup”. Anybody who opposes Trump should be locked up for treason. Above all, Democrats are nuts and want to take your freedoms away.

Democrats can use negative messaging too. But they face obstacles, including:

• Republicans have done a devilishly effective job of making bogus “both sides do it” arguments, claiming Democrats are as bad as Republicans in lying, general corruption, or election fraud. (They even paint liberals’ support for the traditionally disadvantaged as being racism, sexism or religious bigotry in reverse.)
• Republicans, in line with their anti-government beliefs – and also in line with Trump’s l’etat c’est moi solipsism – don’t even try to govern well. But given the low opinion in which government is held, it’s hard to convince people Democrats would govern much better. That’s an obstacle to many kinds of policy messaging.
• If Democrats got nearly as nasty as Republicans, they would likely undermine the basic Democratic love-everybody brand.

I think that Democrats should tie more messaging to the concept of extremism, a label that has many, many proof points. For example:

• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against religious fundamentalists.
• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against people who dispute overwhelming scientific consensus.
• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against people who want to completely ban abortion.
• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against people who put children in cages and then refuse them flu vaccines.
• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against people who want to build a thousand-mile wall along a border that’s been peaceful for 170 years.
• “Extremism” is a natural charge to make against state officials who decline Medicaid expansion when Uncle Sam is donating 90% of the costs.

Indeed, given the loyalty-test campaigning that occurs in so many Republican primaries, a large fraction of the resulting candidates could simply be called “Trump-enabling extremists”.

Other than being true, what’s so promising about the “extremism” frame?

• It strikes at all Republicans, not just Trump.
• It’s strong against the “both sides do it” counter. Republicans have been seen as “extreme” longer than Democrats have. (Hence the famed 1964 Barry Goldwater quote “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”.)
• It’s useful in policy arguments. The extremism frame is strong when pointing out Republicans don’t even try to govern well, because it defangs the core rebuttal of “Why even try?”
• It sounds like a big deal (terrorists are commonly called extremists), …
• … yet it’s (optionally) not all that nasty, because charges of extremism don’t have to be personally accusatory.
  • “Extreme” can be a critique of actions, words or ideas rather than of people themselves.
  • Similarly, you can attack “extremists who xyz” without saying exactly who is or isn’t such an extremist.

And conveniently, the “extremism” frame is:

• Semantically flexible: You can say “extremist”, “extremism” or “extreme”.
• Synergistic with any other messaging that boils down to “These guys are crazy – or worse.”

Of course, all simple positioning or messaging strategies have drawbacks. For one thing, as I wrote in my post about slamming Republicans for their liking of dictators(hips) and their dislike of democracy:

The “extremism” frame … is a poor fit here – for when democracy itself is at risk, the good guys should be even more extreme than the bad.

Also, “extremist/extremist/extreme” could be more awkward to work into conversation than certain other perjoratives, such as “crazy”, “idiot”, “traitor”, or “f****** a******”

Where I think the “extremism” framing could shine is on social media, and in advertisements of all kinds. Particular formulations might include:

• “Extremist Republicans want to ban ALL abortions.”
  • Many of them actually say this, often in quite incendiary fashion, so there are loads of quotes as proof points.
  • There are also a lot of state bills passed to prove this is not an idle threat.
  • So this is a compelling message that could be repeated in many different forms.
• “97% of all climate scientists warn of man-made climate change. Extremist Republicans are in denial.” This sounds compelling and believable too.
• “Medicaid expansion would bring $X into our state to treat Y poor patients, saving Z lives per year. Extremists in [state capital] are refusing this gift, just to save $X/9 in rich people’s taxes.” Medicaid expansion has proved to be a great Democratic campaign issue.
• “Republicans want to build the second-longest wall in the world, on a border that’s been peaceful for 170 years. Extreme waste. Extreme stupidity.” For the right graphics, that could probably work as a caption.
• A picture of a cage full of kids could be captioned simply with “Extreme cruelty”. Ditto for stories of admirable Americans being ripped from their families and deported to countries where they don’t belong.
• Another phrase to try might be “extreme immigration hysteria”.
• Any sufficiently stupid Republican quote could get the tag: “Extreme nonsense”.

Yeah, this could work.

Related link

• Republicans are trying hard to paint Democrats as “extreme”