, 6 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
"Did you see Mussolini's rally? While the media focused on some guy in the crowd screaming about shooting Jews, Mussolini stuck to what affects ordinary Italians the most, i.e. do the trains run on time?" Frank Luntz, normalizing the GOP's anti-democratic BS since 1992.
Luntz, of course, is one of the key architects of the Gingrich-era GOP's slash-and-burn rhetoric that turned Democrats into "enemies of the people." washingtonpost.com/opinions/newts…
It was the combination of the advent of Fox News in the mid-90s w/ the Gingrich GOP's embrace of apocalyptic, manichean rhetoric that broke American politics so fully that we could end up with a President Trump. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Of course Luntz will say "hey look, I'm just a pundit and a pollster reflecting what the American people *really* think. If you can't handle that truth then that's not my fault."
But the rhetoric he devised helped to BUILD that electorate. He didn't get paid a lot of money to invent effective language because shifting language has no impact on how people think and vote. He's an agent in the story, not a passive observer.
Luntz (1995): "The GOP should tell white Americans that an increasingly diverse Democratic party poses an existential threat to them. If they succeed, they'll support us forever."
Luntz (2019): "Look, I find Trump vulgar, but the American people just don't trust the Dems."
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