Your job is to remind voters of that time a leftist teenager was rude to them. You are to keep up a steady drumbeat of reminders. By reminders I mean anecdotes: catchy little stories that rip open the traumatic wounds caused by that time a teenager was rude. Any time you go
off message, voters might start getting distracted by things like policy ideas, facts, and the question of whether Democratic Party politicians actually are rude leftist teenagers or not.
Resist the temptation to use facts. Instead, use juicy stories. And nothing else. Which would you rather watch, a well-plotted movie, or a documentary about statistics? Plus, use of scientific styles of communication legitimizes science. We want to people to forget that scientific studies, facts, stats, and political policy ever existed.
Politics is teenage clique-wars on a larger scale, fought with juicy stories you heard from a friend-of-a-friend.
Don't let them forget that!
Here a liberal notices what we knew all along - that without rude leftist teenagers, conservatism would have no educated leadership at all:
The Spectator: I fell in with bad company while I was on a story in Oslo last week:
American conservative journalists....they bore no resemblance to the European stereotype of the ignorant, right-wing yank. They were cosmopolitans who were at ease in Europe.
They were well read. Although they would hate the label, they were also crusading journalists, who had made the cause of the dissident opposition to Putin and Lukashenko their own. They had no time
for social conservatives, who wanted to police private morals — but, I told them, they had ended up in the same political camp with know-nothings who thought that dinosaurs roamed the Garden
of Eden and conspiracy theorists who thought that Barack Obama was a secret member of the Mau-Mau.
How could they stand to spend a minute in such company?
The viciousness of the American left drove intelligent men and women rightwards, they replied. They arrived at American campuses with standard left-wing beliefs. The illiberalism of allegedly
liberal academics so shocked them, they left as conservatives.
[...]
Witch-finders can be found everywhere on the political spectrum, although I admit that at present the infestation is worse on the left than the right. If you are ever tempted to indulge them, and
cannot grasp the principled arguments for free debate, remember that no one drives potential adherents away from your cause so efficiently as the ferret-faced heresy hunter.
Of course, as a liberal he fails to get it. If he had a clue, he would have said:
"no one drives potential adherents away from the liberal-tolerant cause so efficiently as liberal tolerance of the ferret-faced heresy hunter".
Liberals refuse to defend liberalism from its enemies, be they rude leftist teenagers, islamists, or Mitt Romney's health policy. Thus they are actually the LEAST liberal people around.
But don't talk about stuff like that. Just keep up the juicy anectodes. Rude. Leftist. Teenagers. Rude. Leftist. Teenagers. Rude. Leftist. Teenagers.