Cheap Seats 2021

The Prestige - 11/09

By Rich Trzupek
  Politics is all about creating illusions and thus the creators of those illusions exercise disproportionate power in our political system. They always have and always will. The PR and marketing magicians create alternate realities so convincing that one doubts even Penn and Teller could convincingly call them out.
  We should not attribute this behavior solely to once side or the other. It’s a universal problem endemic to representative forms of government. For the most part, we think we’re voting for candidates, but we usually don’t. Mostly, we vote for messages and for those people who employ messengers most skilled at touching the right nerve and/or heartstring. There are exceptions of course, but they are relatively rare.
  As you read this, the results of the 2022 mid-terms will have been revealed, or shortly will be. If those results flip Congress, the “red wave,” then there is no doubt that Democrats, their media allies and liberals of every stripe will double down on the idea that democracy itself is in peril. If these results don’t flip Congress, then there is no doubt that Republicans, the alternate media and conservatives/libertarians of every stripe will howl that the election was once again stolen. Let’s address those two points of view in the order with which they have been presented.
  The message that “democracy itself is at stake” that the left has been peddling with increasing hysteria is not just ignorant and stupid, it’s remarkably ignorant and stupid. And mind you, if you choose to believe that message, I don’t think that you are ignorant and stupid. Everyday citizens have better, and in most terms way more important, things to do like earning a living and raising their kids rather than tracking down the veracity of the latest political talking-point the PR department of this party or that has created.
  The message that “democracy itself is at stake” is rather a measure of the ignorance, stupidity and desperation of the liberal PR professionals who created it and force fed it to the Democrat party and legacy media. If you have ever set foot outside of the United States, you very quickly understand that representative government, in the form of our democratic republic, is the strongest and most deeply rooted institution that protects the right of the governed of any nation throughout the world. One cannot threaten the foundation of this democracy through the Jan. 6 protests any more than one could do so through the 2020 BLM and Antifa riots.
  Media types and PR professionals don’t employ that level of hyperbole unless they are absolutely terrified. Clearly, they are absolutely terrified. There’s a lot of data that says the Red Wave is coming, so they’re more than willing to go to Hysteria Level DEFCON 11 if that’s what it takes to win the next election.
  And have no doubt, my left-leaning friends, that I have and will always defend your right to attach yourself to any message created by any political party and/or PR professionals associated with that party. From my perspective, there’s a hell of a lot of difference between a well-intentioned everyday citizen attaching themselves to an intentionally emotional message designed to distort and the cynical and selfish PR professional who does the designing.
  Out on the right, where the sun is always shining and the air smells faintly of cinnamon, a whole lot of my conservative and libertarian friends are terrified that the left will steal enough elections to reduce the red wave to a pink ebb tide.
  This fear traces back to the 2020 presidential election of course. Was it stolen? Most likely methinks, but I can’t claim to actually KNOW any more than any of you can. I come from Chicago, where rigging elections is part of life. Political parties use whatever weapons are available to them to create votes, legitimate or illegitimate, alive or mortality challenged. The party in power always has an advantage when playing this game, but that just means the party out of power has to get better at truing the vote.
  If the red wave doesn’t happen, don’t despair my friends of the right. There are more than enough good, well-intentioned people in this country to figure it out in the long run. When Lincoln observed that you can’t fool all the people all of the time, he was making that precise point. We’ll figure it out. We always do – eventually.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com