As a result, liberals and progressives today should not work to create left-wing counterparts to the well-worn right-wing conservative themes listed by Blow. Nevertheless, liberal and conservative politicians and commentators today need to understand that those well-worn conservative themes are designed to arouse political emotion, most notably fear and anger. Political emotion is necessary to move and motivate American voters to turn out and vote in elections in 2014 and 2016.
So if most mainstream, moderate white voters today, who still constitute a big block of American voters, are center-right, which kind of paranoid rhetoric is most likely to appeal to them -- right-wing conservative rhetoric, or left-wing liberal and progressive rhetoric? Or would it be possible for another kind of rhetoric to appeal to them -- other than either right-wing or left-wing paranoid rhetoric?
Conclusion
Oddly enough, I myself have written this essay about how liberals and progressives need to use political emotion more effectively without making much effort to use political emotion in the process of making my points. For the most part, I have written this essay as analysis, using the articles by Saletan and Edsall as points of departure for my own discussion of the issues involved in motivating voter turnout, with some supplementary points from Blow's article. In short, in this essay I myself am not trying to strengthen and improve voter turnout. Instead, I am looking forward to the elections of 2014 and 2016 and discussing the kinds of considerations that liberals and progressives need to work on to strengthen and improve voter turnout in these upcoming elections -- by appealing to mainstream, moderate voters to vote for the Democratic Party, instead of voting for the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, as I've said, those mainstream, moderate voters today tend to be center-right, not center-left. For this reason, left-wing paranoia is not as likely to appeal to many of them as right-wing paranoia may.
Richard Hofstadter has examined the right-wing paranoid-style rhetoric in his classic study THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS (1952).
In terms of American traditions of rhetoric, it strikes me that the American alternative to the paranoid-style rhetoric, right-wing or left-wing, has been examined by Sacvan Bercovitch in his classic study THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD (1978).
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