I've been reading some articles about the wingnuts and they have been dispensing some advice that I find to be very curious.
They recommend that wingnut activist engage in provocative actions and inflammatory rhetoric so as to make progressives lose their cool and, according to them, react with irrational anger.
Here are a couple of examples.
>The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the conservative elder personally went to a drugstore and bought little pink heart stickers, bandages and purple nail polish. At home, he made the "Purple Heart Band-Aids" that he later distributed in Madison Square Garden to mock John Kerry's war wounds. From Blackwell's perspective, the Kerry camp's outrage at the gag was a tactical disaster. Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe, Blackwell says, kept the story alive for days by "running around like a chicken with its head cut off." <
www.salon.com/news/feature/ 2005/05/25/blackwell/index_np.html
The next excerpt is about the right wing bake sales and how progressives play into the hands of the right by getting incensed.
>Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author who is credited with coining the term "politically correct," came up with another phrase "harpooning a liberal," which he describes in his book Letters to a Young Conservative.
"One way to be effective as a conservative," he writes, "is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most and then keep doing it."<
http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/021904/coverstory.htmlHere is what I don't understand. The right wing goes ballistic over trivial issues-and nonexistent issues like the "war on xmas"- all the time and they manage to galvanize their base by doing so. They manufacture controversies and make progressive actions rallying points for their counter-demonstrations. They get redfaced wingnuts frothing at the mouth and physically confronting people over their progressive stances. In short, they react with irrational anger on a daily basis, from wingnut organizations to the right wing media yakkers.
I guess what is confusing me is why irrational anger works to their advantage but not to ours, if Blackwell and Souza are to be believed.
The purple heart controversy is a case in point. Blackwell thinks it's funny when progressives reacted to the way the RNC denigrated the medal. But, I remember the right wingers were outraged when the "Wedding Crashers" website had cut out copies of the purple heart.
I know it's hypocritical and that double standards are at play here. But it seems like this double standard would only be effective if the right wing somehow decides what anger is legitimate and what anger deserves ridicule.
I don't think we're quite at that sorry point yet.