Progressives have a high mountain to climb, but when we pull together our resources, we can do this.
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Do not expect the Democratic party, it's leadership, its elected officials, and party apparatchiks to be able to effectively respond to Trump on the project 2025 agenda. It will take more. It will take people who can see that this is war, not politics as usual. It will take people who can devise stories that can persuade people to see that Trump and his team of the destructors are bad for them.
This is a huge challenge that will require a coalition of people and organizations to go further than the think tanks that Democrats or the left currently have.
The right has many policy promotion and implementation engine organizations, like the ones involved in developing and implementing project 2025.
This will take a lot of money, and a lot of power, both hard and soft. So we will need billionaires helping us and we will need celebrities. And we have to be very careful to not allow the spineless, centrist neoliberals like those who run the Democratic party, to be a part of this.
It will take leaders and organizers, writers, promoters and the creation of a media structure. Again, the right has had this for decades. The left absolutely must have this. It will cost hundreds of millions to do this, but it will end up becoming self-sustaining and just like Murdoch's Fox Network.
The key idea of soft power is that it attracts. This movement must develop and create ideas, celebrations, rituals, cultural phenomenon, celebrities who attract people. It will take the best novelists, directors and screenwriters, applying themselves to create the stories, the movies, the series and characters.
There must be a visioning system, which includes a bottom-up way for anyone who wants to be involved to contribute.
I wrote about this over 20 years ago. Today I organized them in this series, Progressive Policy Engine Think Tanks.
Back then, there were hopes that the newly formed Center for Amewrican Progress would start the left with their own policy promotion engine. But it ended up being a project with Hillary Clinton Behind it and her campaign manager, John Podesta, years later, as the founding director.
The project I propose is big, complex, and daunting, but it is possible and it could be as significant for the US and the planet as the space program or modern medical research. A massively effective system such as this could save countless lives and make life better for everyone on the planet.
Update. Here is James Carville's suggestion for a plan for The Best Thing Democrats Can Do in the Moment.
" ...roll over and play dead."
His theory is that Trump and the Republicans will destroy themselves and that Trump's popularity will drop down to the low 40s or 30 percentiles. I'm sorry, but this is weak and spineless and short-sighted and no way to plan for victory.
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