yovargas wrote:elengil wrote:
It's not a Left vs Right thing, that's pretty much across the board, it's just the Right's version is "Hm, our message isn't resonating with voters, maybe we should shift our platform," they say "Hm, our message isn't resonating with voters, we need to stop people from voting if they aren't voting for us."
I'm not talking about simply disagreeing with a message. I'm talking about literally not understanding what the intended message is at all. Messaging from the right is usually pretty straightforward. Nobody misunderstands what is meant by "build the wall" or whatever.
I will give you that the Right can be brutally honest when it comes to their slogans - Make Libs Cry Again certainly did not need any explanations. Fuck your Feelings was pretty straightforward. Though I'm still waiting for an explanation of Make America Great Again - either when did we stop begin great, since any suggestion of such on the Left is immediately met with "if you don't like it, leave" - but more importantly, when we were last great, and great
for whom.
But at other times the Right can be just as squirrly and dishonest as they can be. We were constantly told we didn't understand Trump's messages. They're jokes, they're metaphors, that isn't what he meant, stop taking him so
literally- Mexico will pay for it? Where did that get lost in translation? How did we misunderstand that?
Not understanding a slogan may account for a small portion of it, but from my view it's willfully refusing to understand it. It's being told by Fox or OAN or Alex Jones that it means something entirely other than indented and then not allowing for anything to change your mind.
So no, I don't believe that the problem is that the Left comes up with such bad slogans that nobody on the Right is capable of understanding them - apparently I give the Right more credit for brains than that. It's that the Right chooses not to understand them and wants the Left to come up with something else. Instead of actually addressing the issue they want to quibble over the name. And I am given no reason to believe the Left finding a different slogan will improve the situation - the right will simply find something else about that slogan they don't like and will fight it over and over based on the name and never, ever address the issue.
After all, nobody seems to misunderstand SAVE THE WHALES as meaning fuck every other kind of wildlife. Or Breast Cancer Awareness means other cancers don't matter. There is bad messaging, and then there is willful misunderstanding.
[edited slightly]