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Yeah, feels like most of the left's strategy has been 'See what a horrible person he is!?', feeling absolutely positive that people will agree it's bad and will shun Trump.
Except a huge chunk of people seem to be completely happy with all of these horrible things, so the whole effort backfires.
The problem is that he really is a horrible person. So when you talk about him, it seems reasonable to point that out. So Harris can give a speech with 30 minutes of policy proposals and 5 minutes of pointing out his horribleness, and the media headline "Harris calls Trump Horrible" and the policy things are buried in the article.
If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.
So many on the left seem to think that deep down people are good, and that if they just knew all the horrible shit conservatives are saying and planning they wouldn't vote for them. There's just this near-total refusal to acknowledge that for a scarily large proportion of the population, that horrible shit is their reason for voting for conservatives, and not only will pointing it out not help, trying to educate them generally just won't work.
Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with "centrists," the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of "well, certainly the leopards won't eat my face, and I don't like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me." However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of "the human condition" and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don't know).
I'm a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I've noted that many "actual" leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit... well, let's say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about "woke" stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the "strong" dominate some "lesser" social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)
Exactly
No, I'm specifically talking about the multiple campaigns on the left going back to 2016 that heavily focused on awareness and education of Trump's many issues. The left consistently banks on the logic of 'if I just make people aware of this wrong, then they will vote/protest/demand change'. They think simply educating people will magically get them to agree and take appropriate action.
Instead of actual political maneuvers similar to what the right has been pulling for years, they think 'awareness' is the only real work they have to do. There have been multiple times the right has blatantly ignored procedures, laws, etc and the left routinely fails to do anything beyond making their voters aware that the right is being a bad guy. They don't attempt to hold them in contempt, they don't choose to proceed forward anyway, because 'tradition' says they shouldn't. They haven't responded with any of their own schemes to counter the right at all.
The right is doing every possible action they can get away with and the left is so scared of doing anything even slightly controversial that they don't even take the options available by the rules, but instead hold themselves to even higher standards than necessary.