We on the Left keep bringing a research paper to a gun fight and then wonder why we lose.

What do you suggest?  I could always repost this ...

as I have elsewhere, but it's poorly received.

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

CNN - George Lakoff - How to fact-check Trump

keep to the Fen Causeway

I am just speculating here, but I also wonder if a problem that left ideas have is that right ideas are just simpler and more intuitive, though wrong.

People get what they deserve, so rich people must be good and poro people must be bad.

Foreigners are obviously different to us, and are probably up to no good.

Government can't spend more than it earns, just like the rest of us.

Those are all simple, and what a fantastic world it would be if there were any merit to them. But explaining why the intuitively obvious is wrong require a second mental step, and that little bit of extra effot is just too much for too many people.

Sure, life experience can disabuse you of some of these notions quickly enough, but the modern welfare state has done a pretty good job of sanding down the rough edges of life for a lot of people, so that even a fair number of those marginally above poverty can keep their pristine just-world innocence well into adulthood.

But what do I know. Nothing. That is what I know.

I think a major reason that Sanders had/has the effect he had was due to the way he communicated. I call it The Pinnacle and The Pit. Hold forth a vision of how things can and ought be, then contrast that strongly with how things are and do both in starkly emotional terms to which your target audience can relate. Effective communications, I suspect, depends on the intensity of that polarity.

This approach will work so long as you can connect emotionally with your target audience: different Pits for different people, the same Pinnacle for all. The Pit is where they live. The Pinnacle is where you want to take them.

Most live their lives in the Pit into which they were born. The better off they are, the less likely they will question the circumstances in which they find themselves. But material circumstances are just a part of the total. Being different, finding norms uncomfortable, etc. increase the likelihood of questioning the inevitability of one's circumstances.

But the key is to keep questioning. The first change one makes may not be to the best possible outcome. For many young men, the first change was from a traditional, religious upbringing to a sexy libertarianism, epitomized by early Playboy. A sexy centerfold sells a libertarian philosophy of commercialism from Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy column. Hefner operationalized the idea of young men being led around by their sex organs to sell a philosophy that many wealthy sponsors could support. Hopefully, this will only be their first stop. But too many remain there. Inspiring teachers and intelligent young women can help them move on.  
 

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

"America needs a responsible left": A Never Trump conservative's advice to liberals

"The most immediate cause, I think, was nominating Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee," French said. "I mean here's a person who is corrupt in so many ways, and so she could not take the moral high ground against Donald Trump. They were [two] of the most disliked, least trusted politicians in the entire United States of America."

[David] French, who lives in a Tennessee town and county that heavily voted for Trump, also offered free counsel to the Democratic Party.

"The first advice to the Democrats would be to nominate ethical candidates," he said. "The second piece of advice: don't demonize Trump supporters. There are reasons beyond racism, sexism, homophobia, and all of the other `isms' that they voted for Donald Trump. There are issues and concerns that they have that there's no rule written in stone that says the Democrats can't meet them in the middle and address some of those concerns. But if you continue the path of polarization... you cast them as somehow morally defective people. You're never going to bridge the gap."

Dems needed just a little Affective appeal. But Clinton "knew" how not to give it.

Liberals have been made to feel entitled to moral superiority because they are nicer to minorities, aka identity politics.
(Having been copiously lied to and massaged by propaganda to hate, whether Russia or Trump, or both.)
The Trump voters have been abundantly lied to and manipulated to hate Clinton and Obama, and the 'establishment', and the media, and Hollywood and the beltway.
So basically you're left with two groups of under- and misinformed groups programmed to hate whaling on each other, pots and kettles both so black by now it's impossible to tell which is which or whether they're just two sides of the same sad clusterfuck.
Integrity in mass media is now extinct, as is public trust in the institutions.
Both sides entrenched deep in the stupid, and digging in deeper as America's id comes home to roost in the form of the Tangerine Tantrum, spreading dissension and fomenting dissent like a bull in the genteel porcelain shop of politics-as-usual.
He wants bovver. The MIC needs another Moby Dick. Who will be the next lucky recipient of hegemonic largesse?
Will vacuous precocity, russophobic fearology and virtue posturing make it to the finish line first, or will Bannon's uber-racist bloody-minded belligerence to non-whites, and capacity to get Trump to throw as much sand in institutional gears as he can before he goes down in apricot flames.
Tune in for tomorrow's nuke-wieldingly thrilling episode!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

What If Trump And Hillary Swapped Genders? Reenactment Of Debates With Genders Switched 'Shocks' Liberal Audience

two self-described "liberal" professors joined forces to put on an "ethnodrama" based on key moments of the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, in which actors of the opposite sex played the roles of the two candidates, exactly mimicking their every move and intonation

[...] they "began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they'd each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump's aggression -- his tendency to interrupt and attack -- would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton's competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man,"