Nicholas Kristof: How to Stand Up to Trump and Win

[babylonsister]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/opinion/how-to-stand-up-to-trump-and-win.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0

How to Stand Up to Trump and Win
Nicholas Kristof
APRIL 13, 2017


BOSTON — After President Trump’s election, a wave of furious opposition erupted. It was an emotional mix of denial and anger, the first two stages of grief, and it wasn’t very effective.

Yet increasingly that has matured into thoughtful efforts to channel the passion into a movement organized toward results. One example: the wave of phone calls to congressional offices that torpedoed the Republican “health care plan.”

Yes, Trump opponents lost the election and we have to recognize that elections have consequences. But if “resistance” has a lefty ring to it, it can also be framed as a patriotic campaign to protect America from someone who we think would damage it.

snip//

To students of resistance — patriotic resistance! — let me offer three lessons from my own experience reporting on pro-democracy movements over decades, from China to Egypt, Mongolia to Taiwan.

First, advocates are often university-educated elites who can come across as patronizing. So skip the lofty rhetoric and emphasize issues of pocketbooks and corruption. Centrist voters may not care whether Trump is riding roughshod over institutions, but they’ll care if he rips them off or costs them jobs.

Second, movements must always choose between purity and breadth — and usually they overdo the purity. It’s often possible to achieve more with a broader coalition, cooperating with people one partially disagrees with. I think it was a mistake, for example, for the Women’s March to disdain “pro-life” feminists.

Third, nothing deflates an authoritarian more than ridicule. When Serbian youths challenged the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, they put his picture on a barrel and rolled it down the street, allowing passers-by to whack it with a bat.

In recruiting for the Trump resistance, Stephen Colbert may be more successful than a handful of angry Democratic senators. Trump can survive denunciations, but I’m less sure that in the long run he can withstand mockery.

[Squinch]

1. Why is their first instruction always to embrace the jettisoning of women's rights?

Why do they always default to, "Aw, you don' really need that pro-choice stance, do you? It might be inconvenient!"

It's ridiculous, and it's also stupid. The SECOND the Democratic party embraces any anti-abortion stances, they will lose a huge percentage of their voters.


And PS. There is no such thing as a "pro-life feminist." There are feminists who would choose for themselves not to have an abortion. There are even feminists who think abortion is wrong. But the moment a person moves to prevent women from exercising their rights to manage their own uteruses, that person ceases to be a feminist.

[babylonsister]

2. I didn't read it that way; he suggests we

broaden our tent, be more inclusive. IMO.

[ProfessorPlum]

3. I read it the way Squinch did

pro-life is anti-woman.

[smirkymonkey]

4. I am completely on board with the mockery and ridicule.

Nobody wants to be on the side of a fool or a loser. We need to make him look as ridiculous as possible and never let up.