BTRTN: The Importance of Preaching to the Choir

[reggieandlee]

Born To Run The Numbers on media bubbles, propaganda, and why it is now so important to "preach to the choir."

http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2020/05/btrtn-importance-of-preaching-to-choir.html

Excerpts: "Our reader called me out for insulting the very people whose minds, she presumed, I hoped to change.Or, she mused, did I simply not care about trying to influence Trump supporters? Was I just 'preaching to the choir?
"Increasingly, political campaigns are not focused on shifting the views of undecided voters in the center, but are all about getting as many like-minded people to the polls. Think of a church, where the candidate is the preacher, the choir is analogous to the volunteer campaign workers, and the people who show up regularly every week are the people who always vote. If you want more votes, do you try to convert atheists who have never set foot in your church? No. You go out into the community and try to persuade irregular church goers to attend more often... So there is an important task in making sure that the people on the front line... feel supported, renewed, inspired, informed, and recharged for battle. Because “battle” is exactly where we are.
"The battleground in this war is information. Every day, Trump and Fox partner in a relentless blitzkrieg of deceit, revisionist history, and character assassination. They are masters of the craft of propaganda...
"An analyst in the OSS, the predecessor to our current CIA, once wrote this about an adversary, many decades before Donald Trump emerged in our national consciousness:'His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it..."

[Girard442]

1. Excellent essay.

For those who ask, "but shouldn't we still be trying to attract the swing voters?" my reply is this:

Sure, if you can do it without driving your own supporters away. If you make a questionable compromise in the party platform that attracts 100 undecideds but causes 1000 lukewarm voters to stay away from the polls in disgust, what have you gained?

[The Magistrate]

2. Intensity, Sir, The Appearance Of Conviction, Is What Attracts 'Swing' Voters

Reasoned argument will never reach them. If the mush in the middle could make up their minds about anything through processes of reason, they would have done so long ago. They are emotional shuttlecocks, flitting back and forth between emotional poles. The side which seems to be the most convinced, the most certain, has a terrific fascination for them, because that sense of conviction strikes them as a winner's quality, and they want to be on the side that's winning....


"Americans love a winner! And hate a loser!"