"I Know How to Beat Republicans": Interview With Former GOP Staffer Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren:

The Occupy Wall Street movement was studiously ignored until the police in New York City started using violence and now it's gone viral, so you need to seize the moment, not have too many mixed messages, because that is just not going to play with Joe Average. If you're underwater with your mortgage, you understand the Wall Street thing. That was the whole point of the GOP: "Our propaganda has to be simple and repetitive."

People who are not authoritarian by nature are not going to march to the beat of the same drummer, but it's tricky. It can't be identical in style to the GOP - which is now directly appealing to irrational impulses - so there is a natural tension between keeping the message simple and not insulting the intelligence of an educated person, as so much of the GOP's recent messaging does. MORE...

"Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult"

Mike Lofgren:

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists. How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. MORE...