I can’t help but feel that your attitude could easily lead to a massive waste of human potential.
And the really shitty part is that there’s a lot of research out there showing that no really, this is the most effective method of shaping the intellectual landscape of any population.
But it also already happens in liberal circles. There is perhaps a less centralized, concerted effort to do so - but plenty of left-leaning groups employ similar tactics to create devotees.
It doesn’t make the ethical question harder, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that it’s a question being asked when we’re already part way into the answer.
I feel* like liberals would naturally be less effective at this form of manipulation, because
- More diversity = more conflicting opinions
- Reduced inclination towards authoritarianism = reduced willingness to intentionally impose / manipulate / coerce a worldview.
- Have you read those fundraiser emails??
- Basically liberals are cats. Woe betide they who would herd them.**
Joking – and half-joking – aside, the far-right has assaulted so many tenants of liberal ideology, one after the other, in an exhausting manner. The gas-lighting is overwhelming. Bots & trolls make it harder to distinguish good faith and establish trust, which is the classic human method of determining truth when lacking expertise. Protest is normalized. Each travesty is discarded as soon as the next, more dramatic, more urgent issue arises – and all of them are important and valid concerns.
We are human, we have lives, we have our own local struggles, don’t have the bandwidth for magnitude of 2 
/tt.
It’s not that the world was lacking travesty and tragedy before. But it’s harder to care (pragmatically) about other people when your own shit is collapsing.*** Isolationism is an understandable defense mechanism, but effectively enables the abuse.
* Obviously, my perspective is skewed by my general agreement with liberal principles, so I am less positioned to detect liberal manipulative bullshit.
** But also, over-moderation will always be the consensus seeking liberal’s Achilles heel.
*** And yet easier to ignore when your shit is good.
Well, I can engage your confirm bias to say that, yes, we are also measurably less effective at it - or perhaps it’s more that the liberal mindset is better at not blindly accepting information and is more prone to look for actual facts.
We’re still not good about it, but we are less bad at being blindly ignorant, yes.
Unfortunately, it works against us, I think, because there is power in numbers, and as you say, herding cats is way hard.
Buuuuuuuuuuut we can try. As much as I might loathe the concept of an echo chamber in principle, I am finding it useful in working towards consensus - which we will need to do if we’re actually going to peacefully halt these fucking Nazis.
Obama had, on top of policies I generally liked, very good messaging and branding. We know with good messaging and branding we can turn out numbers that the Nazis can’t. I think we can build a semi-organic consensus by constantly bringing diverse topics back to a handful of points (white supremacy is an example) and hammering on directly actionable solutions.
I’m getting deeper into the democratic campaign world and can confirm that we’re willing to use whatever psychology and social engineering we have to to get people to show up and vote our way. The stakes are too high to have ethics in this regard.
I disagree with that to some degree, but you know that already 
I call this political sausage making. We brought @jabrams007 to one of the training sessions and he did not approve. And that’s fine, cause he’s voting my way no matter what. 
But if you want things to change, get involved with your local democratic campaign. Donate your time and/or your money, we need as much as possible of both. If you don’t help make the democratic sausage, we’re gonna get force fed republican shit again.
That’s not quite accurate.
I had no problems with the way they’re using technology to canvass and identify potential voters and encourage them to vote.
What I had a problem with was the somewhat intentional way they encourage their volunteers to misrepresent themselves in order to gain this information.
How do you mean?
It’s been a few months, so I might get the exact details wrong, and I have no idea if this is a widespread tactic or just something the local VA group is encouraging, but basically the person leading the training sessions led a mock conversation between herself and a potential voter.
At first, she told the potential voter that she was there to conduct a “study” on voting habits, and implied that this was a non-partisan/apolitical study. As the conversation continued, she slowly shifted to encourage the potential voter to vote, and to specifically vote for Democratic candidates (something I wholeheartedly support).
That would be like me showing up on your doorstep claiming that I’m performing an unbiased study of people’s soft drink habits, only to then encourage you to drink more soft drinks, and then encourage you to specifically drink Coca Cola.
Maybe it was just that specific person leading the training session, but the whole conversation left me feeling slightly dirty and uncomfortable. The training leader was basically encouraging the volunteers to misrepresent the reason they were talking to the potential voter, claiming to be from an unbiased study about voting habits in general, but the purpose was really to encourage people to vote and vote for Democrats.
I don’t know if I was the only person to notice this shift, but when I pointed it out, the training leader pretty much admitted that this was exactly what she was doing.
Sounds about how I remember it. As I said, political sausage making. I’m not proud of all these strategies, but if we can’t get elected, we can’t govern.
Yeah, that’s a dirty tactic.
But we’re in the shit, somebody’s gotta shovel it.
Going high gets us child concentration camps.
But don’t stop holding us accountable either, because I am absolutely an authoritarian and tend towards jackbooted thuggery (and I’m actually good at being a jackbooted thug) if left unchecked. That’s the best way to keep the whole thing honest.
I honestly don’t think there’s a good answer here.
On the one hand, the situation is so bad that I’m almost willing to do whatever is necessary for “our” side to win and govern.
On the other hand, engaging in these types of strategies is a race to the bottom. Liberals and Progressives want to win elections because we disagree with what Republicans are doing. We think their laws and policies are amoral, unethical, and sometimes even evil. But in order to win, we have to do amoral and unethical things ourselves?
If we do win using these methods, what happens next? How do we put the genie back in the bottle? What will we do when Republicans resort to even more amoral and unethical tactics? Do we go lower as well? At what point does that make the entire government amoral and unethical because the ends, any ends, justify the means?
In 2013, Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader triggered the “nuclear” option of eliminating filibusters on judicial nominees by lowering the requirements from 60 votes to 50. While Liberals applauded this move at the time, in 2017, Mitch McConnel, the current Republican Senate Majority Leader, used that as an excuse to do the same thing for Supreme Court nominees. That’s how we got Neil Goresuch on the Supreme Court. Goresuch is going to be on the Court for the next 25-30 years.
Now, you can easily argue that McConnel would have done this anyway, regardless of what Reid did in 2013, and that McConnel took the even more drastic step of holding up Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, but my point is that the gradual erosion of norms and traditions, even when they benefit you in the short term, will harm you later on.
I know this is a terrible analogy, but if you’re playing a boardgame and the other player is cheating, if you cheat as well, what’s the point of playing the game? It ceases to be a game at all and just becomes a vehicle for cheating.
I realize that because of my personality, or because of my job as a lawyer, or maybe a combination of the two, I tend towards being more “lawful good” than others on here, but if we’re willing to do unethical things in order to govern ethically, how do we keep everything from getting even worse?
At some point, we have to say enough is enough and hold ourselves to some kind of standard. To go back to the boardgame analogy, we don’t have the luxury of telling that cheating player that we won’t play games with him or her anymore. For better or worse, we’re stuck with that player.
You’re not making me wanna play. As a yuppie, with dual Canadian, US citizenship, Vancouver or Toronto are starting to look real good.
I stay because this is my home. I’ve spent more than 2/3 of my life here and running is cowardly. I think I can do more good here than there anyway. I guess the question here is “what does doing good look like?”
The distinction I make is that we’re not talking about how we’re governing. We’re playing a game of who can get more people to show up. A game where almost anything goes and the winner takes all the marbles. I expect better from our politicians.
You can’t use unethical means to elect politicians and not expect that to bleed over into how the politicians actually govern. The Trump campaign, and now the Trump administration, is the perfect example of that.
Unfortunately, we have to play. We have no choice. We can’t get up from the table.
Can and will. 
I honestly hope you’re right. 