Taking the Fight to the Left Democrats don’t help minorities, they hurt them. Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260663/taking-fight-left-daniel-greenfield
Ten years ago, Front Page Magazine writer Danusha Goska went to heckle David Horowitz.
Then he said something about the minority cities of New Jersey that changed her whole way of thinking. “He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.”
“That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city,” she writes.
On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina echoed the case that David Horowitz has been making for decades.
Here is what is undeniable, women have been hurt under this administration policies, the extreme poverty rate among women is the highest ever record. The poverty rate among women, 16.1% is the highest in 20 years. Women have been harmed by this administration’s polices just as African Americans have, just as the poor have been.
“Progressive polices are bad for the people they have claimed to help. That is true of women as well as men,” she said.
This is the exact message that David Horowitz has been urging Republicans to embrace over the years by making the case that Democrats hurt the very people they claim to champion.
This is what he forcefully advocated in his book, “Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left.”
Year after year and election after election, the Democrats’ campaign themes are monotonously the same… Republicans wage wars on women, on minorities, and on the vulnerable. They defend the rich and don’t care about the poor. Their policies inflict pain on working families to benefit the wealthy few.
Then he noted that, “Year after year, the Democrats repeat these attacks, and year after year, Republicans fail to come up with effective responses.”
David Horowitz’s response to this litany of false charges is to turn them around on the Democrats. It’s this argument from Take No Prisoners that Fiorina has picked up on.
“Democrats present themselves as champions of the helpless and the vulnerable,” David Horowitz wrote.
“Expose their empty promises and hypocrisy. Subvert their message by focusing on their betrayal of the very people they pretend to support. In attacking Democrats as enemies of minorities and the poor,” he urged Republicans.
Last year, David Horowitz warned Republicans that campaigning on the high road again would be a disaster. “Who is going to listen to your story when your opponents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to portray you as a woman-hater, a racist, and a champion of the selfish rich?”
“It’s time for Republicans to stop being so polite. They need to fight fire with fire. They need to call out Democrats who are responsible for racial injustice in our inner cities and for the hopeless futures that face the children trapped there,” he urged.
In the first year of Obama’s reign, David Horowitz had written that, “Conservatives can also turn the left’s oppression myth around, and aim its guns at them. In fact, using the romance of the underdog against the left is the best way to neutralize their attack.”
“The way to do it is to recognize that the most powerful forces obstructing opportunity for poor and minority Americans, the most powerful forces oppressing them, are progressives, the Democratic Party, and their political creation—the welfare state.”
After two terms of Obama in which Republicans failed to seize the underdog narrative, it’s still not too late for them to understand this message before another two terms of progressive misery are upon us.
“Democrats present themselves as champions of the powerless, the American underdogs,” David Horowitz pointed out. “How many unemployed did Obama create among African Americans, Latinos, women?”
Thirty-five percent of Detroit’s citizens are on food stamps. Democrats destroy jobs and make people poor. Why wasn’t there a $300 million Republican campaign saying this? Why are Republicans so reluctant to name the victims of Democrat policies, particularly the victims among America’s minority communities and working classes?
That’s why Carly Fiorina naming and shaming the progressive misery among women and minorities in America is so important. Fiorina followed David Horowitz’s guidelines in turning the argument around.
But that’s only the first step.
In Take No Prisoners, David Horowitz laid out many of the ways that Democrats had oppressed the minorities whose welfare they claimed to care about and whose causes they claimed to champion.
He showed how the housing crisis had enriched leftist billionaires at the expense of minority homeowners who were sold homes they couldn’t afford. He laid out how the policies of the left keep minorities poor, how affirmative action holds them back in academic and professional life and how unions steal educational opportunities from their children.
“Progressive remedies,” he wrote, “have condemned millions of poor black and Hispanic children to lives of poverty and hopelessness and damaged the lives of countless others.”
In Take No Prisoners, David Horowitz urged Republicans to embrace moral outrage over these crimes if they want to win. Without moral outrage, these are mere statistics. And statistics bore even the victims of the policies they represent.
The Democrats have gotten this far by using personal narratives to fuel victim outrage. While the Republicans insist on being too sensible to be outraged, Democrats are shameless in exploiting the problems that they caused to stay in power with displays of phony outrage.
Republicans need to go beyond listing numbers. They must mobilize outrage.
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” is the infamous quote attributed to Stalin. Under Obama, a single victim is a tragedy, but nearly a hundred million people out of the job market is only a statistic.
It’s moral outrage that can make it more than that.
The dark horse candidates that have pulled ahead in both parties have done so by mobilizing moral outrage. Any candidate who hopes to win must take David Horowitz’s advice and not only turn the argument around, but also turn the outrage around and point it at the right targets.
Republicans have the most diverse field of presidential candidates in their history. This contrasts sharply with a Democratic field where the closest thing to a minority candidate is an old white Socialist who has less money than the other old white Socialist. But it will do them no good unless they make the argument that they are running because the Democratic Party’s policies hurt women, hurt black people, hurt Latinos and hurt all of America. It will do them no good unless they are outraged about all this.
“The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies that ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately,” David Horowitz wrote.
Ten years ago, David Horowitz helped change the politics of a woman who had been a leftist all her life by invoking these simple facts in a single forum. Imagine how many minds a Republican candidate could change by taking his “no prisoners” approach and making the case against the left to the entire country.
Comments are closed.
