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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Wed Jan 18, 2017, 04:44 PM Jan 2017

Why progressives shouldnt despair over Trump

By Barton Swaim January 18 at 2:15 PM

Barton Swaim is the author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics" and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post.

Remember “wedge issues”? You still see the term from time to time, but its popularity has diminished since the 1980s and ’90s. That’s probably just as well; Metaphorical expressions like this one usually confuse more than they clarify, although it seems to have been replaced by the equally figurative and probably more confusing “dog whistle.”

A wedge issue, if you don’t go back that far, is a controversial topic used by one campaign to create dissension within an opposing campaign. If I sense that a significant number of my opponent’s voters disagree with him or her on some question, I will raise it in an attempt to get them to doubt their support.

The salient characteristic of a wedge issue, at least in the common usage by commentators and journalists a generation ago, is its substantive unimportance. The wedge issue was almost always a social or “cultural” issue: something about race, religion or sex. When a journalist referred to gay rights, say, as a “wedge issue,” the implication was usually that the candidate raising the issue didn’t really care about it. The issue didn’t affect voters’ lives in any direct or appreciable way, but the candidate forced it into the debate in a cynical attempt to disunite the other side’s constituency.

This is more or less the way Thomas Frank uses the term in his 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Frank’s argument, if I could oversimplify, is that Kansas voters naturally tend to the left on subjects such as education, taxes and health care, but that Republicans have learned to use cultural issues — school prayer, smut on the airwaves, abortion and so on — to fool Kansans into abandoning their own interests and voting GOP.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-progressives-shouldnt-despair-over-trump/2017/01/18/6c4948a2-dce0-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.02ac0471d12e&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

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Why progressives shouldnt despair over Trump (Original Post) DonViejo Jan 2017 OP
Much as I'd like to believe this thucythucy Jan 2017 #1

thucythucy

(7,983 posts)
1. Much as I'd like to believe this
Wed Jan 18, 2017, 05:32 PM
Jan 2017

ALL his cabinet picks have been abominable from any progressive point of view.

The CEO of Exxon as Secretary of State? A rabid anti-environmentalist as head of the EPA? Someone who wants to undermine public education as Secretary of Education?

I wonder if this writer isn't one of those folks who told us not to worry, Trump didn't stand a chance of a) winning the nomination and/or b) assuming office.

The alt-Right has and will benefit from any attempt to minimize the danger Trump poses.

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