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Let's say the Murder Is Okay party rolls into your town, organizes protests advocating for senseless murder, hangs up posters, writes long essays about why murder is okay, and otherwise directly and obviously advocates for murder. The extremists in the party genuinely do seem to think murder is okay, but can't fully act on their beliefs with laws as they currently are. The moderates think the extremists are just using figurative language and really mean that you should murder your flaws, or figuratively "murder" bad influences by kicking them out of your life.
Eventually a murder happens. The extremists in the Murder Party spend years hiding the murder and internally promoting the murderers, praising them for their actions. Finally the murder is discovered by people outside the Party, but surprisingly, everyone in the Party, including the "moderates", closes ranks around the murderers. Only people outside the Party seem to care at all. The extremists are still celebrating, and I have no idea what the Moderate party members are thinking, but they're going along with everything.
Yes, framing this as uncontroversially wrong is a strategic decision, but it's the wrong one. Really you're carrying water for the extremists of the Murder Is Okay party by framing this as a surprising outcome of their actions and policies, rather than an inevitable and intended one. This gives anti-Party members less ammo to attack the Party, and gives the Moderate party members a great excuse to keep their heads buried in the sand even while they continue to defend the Extremists. "This is not partisan; everyone knows murder is bad" is an outright lie, and one that benefits the extremist partisans who continue to support and advocate for murder, because the guys who gave them power are given a potent way to avoid any accountability.
In short, I think that this:
is very misguided. People need to know just how far the Overton Window has stretched to the left. The way to convince people that their side has gone too far is to show them that their side has gone too far, not to tell them that the extremists on their side aren't actually on their side and can safely be ignored.
The trick is, specifically, to cast this behavior as "nonpartisan" when it was obviously extremely partisan. Doing this allows the partisans who made this happen to be safely disavowed by the rest of the party in public, while privately they continue to be hired and given enormous amounts of power. It's an even more dishonest version of the motte and bailey. The motte is that obviously their actions were despicable and we can't condone that and they're getting fired immediately and this doesn't represent our party. The bailey is that we do condone that, they're getting promoted, but in public we'll have to act sad and have the government fine the government a few million dollars, and next time the people we put in place to do the same thing will be smarter and their actions harder to catch. @TracingWoodgrains, whether he wants to or not, is doing a masterful job of constructing the Motte for them.
If you disagree, please show me anywhere that any moderate or progressive criticizes the people who put these people in power, rather than sadly lamenting the unforeseeable and inevitable circumstances that inexplicably led to a coalition of extremists being given the reins of the government.
Those dastardly murderers.
I understand the frustration, but I'm not sure why people need to know this to change their mind. I suspect left-right framing is about the fastest way to not change minds, which is why so many people, even those adjacent dissidents like Freddie deBoer, always take the time to say their not-a-conservative mantras. That this is a requirement to have any sort of movement in a rightward direction for progressives may very well be a flaw of their own making, but I do not blame people for respecting the fact it is a reality.
It was predictable that we'd have racial interest groups engaging in racial spoils when we decided racial preferences were a good thing to institutionalize. I mean hey, if the price for increased diversity is every once in awhile some dirty union takes advantage and gets caught, that's a price worth paying. The fact that the Federal government is actively defending a lawsuit about it is unfortunate, but that's what lawyers do, ya know?
The not a problem to actually a good thing pipeline is a problem. Do you have any examples of more effective aggressive methods of moderating progressive beliefs in the past? Practically speaking, dissidents on the left don't keep reach, influence, or stay on the left. 'That's what a conservative would say' is a powerful antibody. If we go back in time 48 hours, rewrite TracingWoodgrains post for maximum effect how would you change it? Who would be the speaker? I'm not a person out there exists that can deliver what you want to happen.
Apologies this is all I have time to respond to at the moment.*
Chris Rufo and libs of tiktok had a fair amount of success.
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For the purposes of this discussion there are two groups of people:
Your claim seems to be that some people in group 2 can be fooled into condemning bad behavior if they're told it's not coming from the left. I don't think this is accurate--whether the issue is framed as partisan or nonpartisan, they will recognize it as partisan, and close ranks accordingly. This is already happening at the federal level and is why everyone involved is still employed. Those who don't close ranks are already part of group 1 and are willing to hear out your claims even if they are partisan claims.
So I don't think calling this stuff "nonpartisan" fools anyone in group 2. I do think it fools some people in group 1, who are eager to find any excuse not to be seen as partisan. "I don't have an issue with the left, just with opportunist extremists who say they're on the left," they'll say, conveniently ignoring those who deliberately put those "opportunist extremists" into power and are still enthusiastically supporting them now that their "opportunist extremism" has come out.
This means that framing the issue as "nonpartisan" does nothing to convince people in group two, but does give them a powerful defensive weapon to use against group one. Moderate progressives were the ones who put these "nonpartisans" into power. Calling the issue nonpartisan fundamentally distracts from that inconvenient truth. Parties must take responsibility for the power which they give to their extremists.
The point of the name is that the extremists are very forthcoming about their values, yet the moderates support them anyways.
The biggest example I can think of is the expulsion of NAMBLA from the ILGA in the 90's. As far as I can tell this happened due to external pressure from group 1, not because people told those in group 2 that expelling NAMBLA is "nonpartisan."
My central point is that the Left has always been advocating for this sort of thing. It shouldn't be surprising that this is what happens when they're given power. Drawing attention to their success stories, e.g. the situations where they've been able to enact their preferred policies, is inherently partisan. They want to do this and way more and the only reason they haven't is because even this is barely skirting the line of legality. "Maximum effect" defined by me would focus on the systems that put these extremists in power, and the fact is that those systems are nothing special, just the results of moderate amounts of progressivism. So "maximum effect" means being maximally partisan, and trying to paint people like Pete as consciously supporting this kind of policy.
Knowing what you know, does this paragraph sound honest to you?
I don't believe for a second that these people were put "between a rock and a hard place." This is what they wanted and they went way out of their way to get it. Framing them as innocent victims of circumstance is not a nonpartisan attempt to reach understanding with those on the left, it's a partisan attempt to cover for those on the left, and should be seen as such.
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Because it doesn't do any good to have people turn against one policy that's already been rescinded. They need to turn against the people pushing this stuff, and those people's general philosophies. Being mealy-mouthed about it makes that impossible.
In practice, as long as the "Murder is Okay" party has what amounts to a direct line into the hearts and minds of the Moderates, it really doesn't matter how you put it. You can't move them by argument, they're not responsive to argument, they're only responsive to the signals they get on the Murder is Okay line. But if they were responsive to argument, softening the argument to such an extent would make it worthless.
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