The left has a messaging problem.

They also have a policy problem—which is a bigger problem that makes messaging a lot harder—but that’s a far-away problem for a small group of powerful people (who may not even be motivated to fix it). So, why write about it?

Messaging, on the other hand, is a problem for everyone—from politicians to media members and every activist on social media—and the issue is: the left hasn’t acknowledged or adapted to the competition of today’s communication landscape.

Like it or not, gaining support for a political agenda is a sport with active conflict with your opponent. It’s not a civilized exchange of ideas; you don’t take turns performing unique routines or race while respecting each other’s lanes. It’s a messy, highly-interactive shitshow.

It’d be hard enough if it were civilized. Even in a controlled setting, an effective messaging strategy must:

Capture someone’s attention in one or two seconds
Convince them to care (and keep listening) in eight seconds
Guide them through your logic in thirty seconds
Foster trust in your credentials in one or two minutes
Persuade them not just to think or do what you want—but do it now

Now imagine you create a perfect plan to check all those boxes, only for some jackass to interrupt you every few seconds to sabotage your pitch. He pokes holes in your arguments, talks over you, twists your words, paints wild hypotheticals, or flat-out lies to counter your facts. He sews confusion and doubt at every step, trivializes your issues, and paints you as a con artist.

The first time this happens, you have every right to step back and say, what in hell just happened? You can feel indignant and complain about the fairness of his antics. But at some point, you have to realize: this is the game.

In our media environment, there will always be people waiting to pull some Judo moves to turn your talking points around on you. That’s a problem you have to reckon with. If you’re in a fight with a counter-puncher, and you just keep swinging wildly, that’s on you.

That’s where the left is today: swinging blindly and falling on their face.

The Left dishes out heavy-handed messages without a care for how they’ll land once their opponent spins them. It’s negligent, and it’s costing them. I won’t say it’s the reason Trump was re-elected—but it’s a reason.

I wrote half a blog about this at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement when the slogan “Defund the Police” was the Left’s leading headline and hashtag. It was an incredibly marketable phrase—easy to remember and deploy; quick to trend; and packing a powerful idea. When explored, it was a good message: stop rewarding violent and oppressive policing practices; reallocate funds towards crime prevention and community support instead.

It should have been a sellable idea. “Train more people to handle mental-health crises; reduce police shootouts; and de-escalate riots;” no one disagrees with those messages, but they’re not what a lot of people heard. Instead, they heard, “lay people off; reduce training; and send guys without vests to fight gangs.” The whole movement turned from improving communities to empowering criminals while flipping off millions of people who know and love “good cops.”

In the context of the game, the marketable slogan, Defund the Police, was a careless play. It was effortlessly flipped to give the Right a decade of crime-panic talking points. They still talk about it, saying, “violent crime took over liberal cities because they defunded the police,” even though not a single police department faced budget cuts and violent crime is statistically down. The counter—based on anecdotes of isolated crimes—became the prevailing story and continues to this day.

Another recurring example of careless messaging is increasingly explosive language, especially when used as accusations. Even if applied correctly, big, contentious labels do more harm than good.

Freely calling millions of people racist doesn’t work. Most of them don’t even know what racism means anymore. Most understand it as actively and deliberately harming or alienating someone because of their ethnicity. The Left argues it extends to willful ignorance of systemic racism, meaning: if you support police departments as they engage in racial profiling, then you’re racist. You don’t have to personally commit hate crimes, ignoring the problem makes you complicit and therefore guilty.

Now, I personally agree with the Left’s definition, so I have to admit I am, in many ways, racist. I’m also sexist, elitist, ageist, ethnocentric, and a dozen other “ists.” But since I understand the context of each label, I’m not too defensive about it. I know I’m not perfect; I’m not aware of all my blind spots or how I enable some injustices. I also know I’m a decent guy, though, and I’m fine to just learn and adjust as I go.

It takes time to understand layers of arguments and assumptions that build into a modern understanding of racism, though. Most people don’t know even what “systemic racism” means as a starting point; they don’t know how racial profiling is still practiced; they didn’t study the history of redlining; and they assume most people are unbiased and hire solely “merit.”

And most people aren’t going to invest the time you need to get them up to speed—even without interference from the Right. So, they stick with their definition and are understandably shocked by how liberally the Left applies it. When the Right then gets involved and says “a racist witch hunt is happening,” it makes a lot more sense than whatever the heck the Left is trying to say.

The Left’s messaging is so bad, their policies barely matter anymore.

After too many mis-managed campaigns and years of coming across as rightous and out of touch, the Right has taken over as the everyman party, even though average people would choose the Left’s political track record and proposed policies in a blind taste-test every single time.

The Right became the guardian of the working class—despite busting unions and giving tax breaks to billionaires and corporations. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; they have never presented a policy to help lower- and middle-class people get ahead. They still practice trickle-down economics, showering the tippy-top of industries with tax breaks and subsidies (with a false promise it’ll filter down to workers)—then turn around and suppress wage increases. Even in this most recent election: Trump promised tariffs that will increase the cost of everyday goods without putting a dollar in everyday people’s pockets; meanwhile Kamala promised to chase price-gouging and provide subsidies for small businesses and home buyers. Despite his bad policies, Trump was still seen as more worker-friendly because he successfully focused the conversation on the Left wasting taxpayer dollars on immigrants and focusing too much on trans people to help anyone else.

(For the record: illegal immigrants pay way more in taxes than they receive in social programs, and Democrats didn’t campaign at all for trans rights.)

The Right also became the bastion of free speech and expression—despite campaigning for puritanical art censorship for decades. These are the people who thought rock & roll was demonic, taking drugs (outside of alcohol) was delinquent, and sex shouldn’t be mentioned outside a man and woman’s bedroom.

They’re currently burning books, yet they’ve still managed to paint the Left as the “censorship party” because Dr Seus’ own children pulled one of their dad’s books. The Right boycotted a 90-minute movie because gay cartoons kissed once; but the Left’s suppression of homophobic Tweets is the lasting story of intolerance. Elon Musk just tweeted (and this is verbatim): “There will be consequences for those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes. The Hammer of Justice is coming;” in the same week six conservative podcasters were found guilty of receiving millions of dollars from Russian investors while saying things like “Ukraine is the enemy of the world.” (No comment from Elon on that, by the way.)

So many things are fully backwards. It’s a testament to how well the Right plays this game and the Left has no answers. They almost did something with the “Republicans are weird” messaging—finally (and accurately) pointing out how Right-wingers are the ones obsessed with trans people. (Just look at social media post-counts and ad dollars spent on the topic; conservatives care more about trans issues than trans people.)

The Left could have kept pushing that line—every time a conservative mentioned “trans athletes harming women in sports,” they could have said, “why are we even talking about this instead of getting more girls involved in sports—and more women paid to play? Do you really think a genitals-check for high-school athletes is a normal thing to prioritize?” The Left was right there—lining up the Judo-flip to reclaim a big right-wing talking point, but instead of driving the point home, they dropped the message and let the Right return to their stories about brainwashing kids into the LGBT-cult.

The Left has no push back. They’ve let words like socialism, identity politics, and wokeness become so poisonous that even good policies turn people off. Instead of fighting to recapture narratives, they’ve bailed on platforms that would engage voters. Democrats stopped pushing for student-debt relief; they underplayed Tim Walz’ free lunches for schoolchildren; they never sought positive police reform; they wouldn’t even touch humanitarian aid for Palestine.

They’re so afraid of seeming too liberal that they steer to the center. Meanwhile, because their messaging is so bad, they get painted as too liberal anyway, and they lose supporters on every side!

To be fair to the Left: the messaging war is lopsided.

The Right complains about “the wokeness of mainstream media,” but they’re really the wolf in sheep’s clothes here. While a lot of mainstream art is liberal, and some legacy media (with declining reach) lean slightly left, Right-wingers dominate the news. They run a way more robust and sophisticated political propaganda machine with bigger platforms and more funding. Fox News on its own captures over 60% of America’s TV news audience (compared with MSNBC’s 20%), and there are five billionaire-backed conservative influencers, YouTube channels, and podcasters for every one progressive.

To fully weaponize their scale, the Right also coordinates their messaging impeccably. Their TV hosts run the exact same talking as their politicians—repeating them often and loud enough to either sway narratives or muddle them so thoroughly that no one knows what’s true anymore. They’ll tell the same (made up) stories about litter boxes in classrooms, migrants eating pets, or Ivermectin working miracles—and because so many people are telling them, their audience believes them. Combining this with the “fake leftist news” line, the Right has successfully sold themselves as freedom fighters who stand up to corrupt institutions while, of course, they are the institution.

It feels like the game’s already over—that’s how far ahead the Right is. Their spin and disinformation are so overpowered that they don’t even need policies. Trump can bust unions, give tax breaks to billionaires, and veto border-security deals, then just spend a hundred-million dollars on ads saying “Kamala is for they/them; I’m for you” and win the popular vote.

What does that ad even mean? What trans-rights activism did Kamala get so distracted by? And what’s Trump going to do instead? He’ll implement Don’t Say Gay policies in schools, then what? An uptick in teen suicide attempts will lower the cost of rent? He’ll kick out a few million migrants to free up dollar-an-hour labour jobs for American workers?

Trump’s trans ad was both hollow nonsense and the perfect punchline to cap off a decade of meticulous, relentless storytelling. It was that final poke you give someone after you’ve so thoroughly dizzied them that a strong breeze would have knocked them over.

If the Right was playing chess, I don’t even know what the Left was up to—fingerpainting, maybe?

After crashing out, I do still have hope.

While the Right’s messaging engine is monstrously over-powered, they’ll always be handicapped by something the Left isn’t: they’re objectively wrong and lying through their teeth—and that’s going to get harder to hide.

With Trump taking office, Pierre Pollieve sure to follow in Canada, and more conservative parties winning around the world, the Right is…about to do some things. I can’t downplay how bad those things will be. Social programs will be cut; upstanding citizens will get kicked out of their homes; women and children will lose life-saving medical care; environmental protections will be repealed; public education will get gutted; polio might come back; the world’s richest man will triple his net worth; hell, some US states are even talking about lower age-of-consent laws. If any that sounds ridiculous, you luckily don’t know much about Trump’s cabinet appointees.

There’s no silver lining to any of that; it’s going to suck and the only question is: how bad? But while it sucks, a window will open for the Left to get back into the messaging game.

It’ll be a narrow gap to thread, and make it work the Left will have to change their tone, tactics, and coordination.

To start: the Left has to lose the righteous tone.

The Left must think less about what is right and more about what sounds good. Being correct doesn’t matter if the truth is complicated, unappealing, or you sound like an ass when saying it. All through COVID, we learned how little truth mattered. A doctor can talk all they like about aerosol droplets and what slows the spread of germs; then one person says, “then why can we smell farts through jeans” and the doctor loses.

So, first lesson: dumb things down. Plenty of science communicators are great at this, they just need to get into the right spaces to dismantle dumb-guy logic from the Right. I guarantee: if the right person had gotten to Joe Rogan three years ago and shown him how to evaluate pseudo-scientific studies, he and his audience would never have been swept down a rabbit hole of anti-vax conspiracies that inevitably led to a Trump endorsement.

Second lesson: dial back the rhetoric. Just…don’t call people Nazis; it doesn’t land. It doesn’t matter if parts of Trump’s mass-deportation plan sound like the early chapters of Mein Kampf. It doesn’t matter if legacy Americans is code for white people, and “putting them first” is white-supremacy by definition. It doesn’t matter if you can draw parallels: comparing Trump to Hitler is counter-productive. One committed some of the worst crimes in human history; the horrific details of which are all people think of when you bring him up. No one cares if there are a dozen other similarities; unless someone kills millions of people, they’re not Hitler. Insisting they are will aways sound hyperbolic, and the counter-punch accusation of hysteria will hurt more in the end.

Third (and hardest) lesson: be the better party. I don’t mean the righteous one; host the kind of party people want an invitation to; and get better at marketing it.

There’s a reason I don’t listen to dentists: I don’t like them. I don’t care if they’re trying to help; they sound judgy and my knee-jerk is reaction is: F- you and everything you stand for. When I say, “I don’t floss much” and they respond, “ohhh noooo” through their little dentist mask, a wall goes up in my brain. There’s just something in the way they talk that makes me resent them. I’m a pretty healthy guy, but because I don’t do the one thing dentists prioritize, I’m a dumb, lazy failure? I don’t want to hear that. I think that’s unfair and untrue. So you know what? I think you’re full of shit, Mr. Dentist.

That’s how everyday people react to the woke police. They hear judgment and condemnation, get defensive, and tune out any good, rational, helpful messages. Add to that: the Right does everything it possibly can to cement a bias against the Left—and it’s so easy for them. Like if someone told me all dentists are conmen who invent cavities to make an extra buck: I’d believe it in a heartbeat because I want it to be true.

People want to dismiss the Left. The Left says uncomfortable things and asks people to change. People don’t like that. So, when a socialist—who preaches hard truths about the failures of capitalism—buys a million-dollar house, it’s easy to call him a hypocrite and ignore his message. It doesn’t matter if he shares profits with employees and pays his taxes—his message makes people feel guilty about their pursuit of wealth, so they’ll take any excuse to dismiss him.

It's a tall order to shift biases and become an inherently likeable party, but the Left can’t afford to be seen as morally superior, out-of-touch, or overly demanding. They can’t be abrasive or give into the temptation of smacking sense into people—regardless of how justified it is.

Instead, they have to be infuriatingly patient in the face of willful ignorance, irrational resistance, and occasional tantrums—all while staying light and positive. They have to be aspirational while avoiding alienating people at all costs. If you’re ultra progressive and fully-woke, you have to act like a super-jacked and super-supportive guy who lives at the gym. You like going there, right? You think everyone should get into fitness? Then welcome them; be generous with your fist bumps and head-nods; give a pointer if it feels welcome. If instead you scoff at people walking on a treadmill or grill them for using a machine the wrong way, you make the gym feel hostile. Even if people know they should go, they don’t want to run into you, so they stay home and say “the gym sucks.”

The Left’s party needs to be fun. It needs clear and confident about achieving its goals that it can afford to be playful. It needs to believe it’s right so firmly that it never feels defensive. It should act like it’s already the winning party; progress is inevitable, the only question is how long it’ll take. When answering critics, the response isn’t, “how stupid are you that you don’t want to join us!?” It’s, “You don’t see it yet? Ah well that’s a shame. We’ll do our thing in here and will just leave the door open for when you change your mind.”

That’s easier said than done when the people you’re waiting on throw bricks through your windows. It’s hard to be empathetic when someone endangers millions of your party guests by stripping them of vital healthcare like Planned Parenthood. Natural reactions might be, “How could you?” followed by, “You’re either evil or an idiot,” and then maybe, “You’re dead to me.” But where does that (justified) anger get anyone? People won’t be shamed through the door when the guys across the street provide a shame-free haven and free beer. Unfortunately, the hard path is the only productive one.

I go back to Joe Rogan again for this; the guy was a hair away from declaring as a liberal socialist five years ago—but then he spread the wrong opinions during the pandemic, the Left turned on him, and he really turned on the Left. His podcast might have caused thousands of preventable COVID deaths, so he certainly earned the hate that followed. But while it felt good to yell at him, that choice drove him into the arms of conservatives who said, “You’re so smart and so right; those people who hate you are crazy; by the way, would you believe they’re also trying to turn our kids gay?”

The Left made Joe want to believe his new friends on the Right, so he did believe them. Then the further Right he wandered, the angrier the Left became, and the more vindicated he felt.

You can’t turn back the clock on Joe’s heel-turn by being nice, but the Right-wing pipeline that turned him from Bernie Bro to MAGA Fan can be beaten with the right strategy.

It’s time for deliberate tactics.

The Left needs to write and follow three messaging playbooks to keep up with the Right:

Offence: promote ideas on making things better
Defence: dismantle criticisms of those ideas
Counters: change the angle of conversations

Offence should be easy. The Left promotes policies that benefit the majority of people. They’re the party of taking from the (insanely) rich and giving to the comparative poor—which is over 90% of the population.

In theory: they fight for equal opportunities to lead dignified and productive lives. They represent the classic dream where all people—regardless of class, race, gender, or religion—have a fair shot to thrive. They just don’t quite back that up with obvious wins and are awful at communicating their plans.

To change things, they need to go further left, especially on economics.

Corporations across every industry collude to fix prices, price gouge, and screw over customers—expose them.
Workers’ productivity has skyrocketed over twenty years while their purchasing power has plummeted—pay them.
Low-income neighbourhoods lack schools programs that keep kids out of trouble—engage them.

Hammer these types of talking points every time the camera rolls—and for God’s sake, sound excited about it.

We want new families to have homes of their own with a bed for each kid, working AC in the summer, and a little nook to do homework. And if they don’t get breakfast before running out the door, we want lunch to be waiting at school.

How will we pay for it? Well, I think Elon over there can repay us all after we kept Tesla afloat for a decade. Plus, we’re making a ten-year bet that those kids’ success will be worth every penny—especially when they’re fixing computers instead of swiping cars.

Tell a simple, positive story, and make the Right bend backwards to explain why feeding kids is actually a bad idea. The more deliberate your offence, the easier your defence will be.

When defending: the Left cannot let the Right’s decade-old propaganda engine pave over good, true messages with tired scare-tactics. They’re going to say “Feeding kids is socialism,” and “Gay books in libraries is Marxism,” because there’s nothing else they can say. Those cannot be trump cards (pardon the pun) that get them out of indefensible positions.

“Tax the rich? You mean steal from our hardest-working people?”

You can’t win any conversation where your opponent controls the language.

The Left must dig in. Anytime the Right uses one of their favourite “___ is bad” catchphrases, make them explain themselves, then make them look stupid. Be firm almost to the point of being unbearable (you still have to be the better party), and make it clear: you’re not the grammar police; they’re just spewing nonsense. They assume their audience dumb and doesn’t care what socialism actually means. They may as well be dangling keys in front of clapping children when saying things like “the Marxist trans agenda.” What they’re doing is offensive to everyone listening; call them out.

Then, counter cheap shots and recenter the conversation with stronger footing.

Today, the Right is so good at dictating where battles occur. They’ll throw a jab at one progressive idea and turn it into the focal point for a multi-year political debate.

Why are people still talking about trans athletes in sports?

Because: that conversation serves the Right a lot more than a discussion about medical debt. Their anti-trans messaging is battle-tested; they have longstanding biases on their side; and the Left’s position on the topic helps less than 1 in 300 people. If this one topic is all anyone talks about, the Left’s priorities seem out of whack—of course the Right wants it to be a focal point.

So, they bait the Left over, and over, and over—and the Left can’t keep giving them exactly what they want. This isn’t to say the Left should abandon the fight for trans acceptance, but when a response is warranted, it can’t be a blind swing that leaves you exposed.

An example of this just happened in the States. Sarah McBride, the first transgender congresswoman, took office last month, and Nancy Mace, a conservative colleague, immediately proposed a rule preventing her from using the women’s washrooms. It was a personal attack intended to derail Sarah’s first week in office.

And it was bait. Nancy said, “I shouldn’t be forced to deal with a man invading my private space,” hoping to relitigate Sarah’s identity and stir up a circus to make Sarah’s very presence a distraction. She wanted to then use the push-back to play the victim. If Sarah had pushed back personally, Nancy’s story would have been:

“This man wants to sit in a stall beside me while I’m at my most vulnerable! He wants permission to defecate three feet from me! He probably wants to expose himself to me!”

At that point, Sarah wouldn’t be fighting for her right to simply exist, she’d have to fend off gross accusations and violent threats. It wouldn’t matter that Nancy’s the bully; inviting that conversation gives her exactly what she wants.

The Right has operated like this long enough; it’s up to the Left to adapt.

And this time, they did. In response to the ban, Sarah sighed and said, “I’m here to represent my constituents, not fight other bathrooms.” She knew it was bait, and despite having every right to confront the targeted attack head-on, she opted not to fight on her opponent’s terms.

Sarah took criticism for conceding and “normalizing” bathroom bans, but no ground has actually been lost. The ban was going to happen regardless of what she said. It’s not something Congress votes on; the Republicans in charge set whatever rules they want. Sarah wasn’t going to win that fight no matter how much noise she made. So, while it sucked, this wasn’t something Sarah needs to confront head-on. Now, even though she took herself out of it, the story is still ongoing—except Nancy doesn’t look much like a victim.

With her reaction, Sarah changed the narrative to: “Look how petty and narrow-focused this person is.” Nancy exposed how over-committed she is to the cause. She’s still leaning into her role as a vulnerable woman—except she doesn’t have a villain to scapegoat. Instead of going head-to-head with a visible “threat to her safety and privacy,” Nancy is fighting ghosts; tweeting a hundred times a day and tearing down trans-rights murals that I guarantee she put up herself. She looks unhinged in a fight she already won.

So, now you’re the bathroom cop, Nancy; good job. Have fun making this issue—which doesn’t help a single person in your Carolina district—your entire personality.

Meanwhile, you know what Sarah is doing? Whatever she wants. She’s not handcuffed to her Twitter account. She’s not deflecting an endless barrage of sexual predation accusations (though, of course, there are still some). She gets to live her life, do her job, and fight for her rights as a trans woman on her terms—against an oppressor who becomes less relatable and empathetic every day.

Refusing to take the bait is not the same as rolling over. Frame that play for when the Right rolls out mass distraction campaigns in the coming years.

As I said before: the Right is about to do wildly unpopular things, and they’ll try getting away with it by picking fights where they feel strongest. Each of these is an opportunity to call them out for both their intolerance and incompetence.

· If they need proof for someone to use a woman’s washroom, note that it’s weird and will expose women who aren’t “feminine” enough to harassment. Call out the bigotry in implying trans people commit more sexual assault; then ask where their passion is for protecting people from known sexual predators—like Trump himself, supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh, or half of Trump’s cabinet picks (like RKF, Elon Musk, and Pete Hegseth).

· If they’re bent out of shape about a black pilot, ask why they just assumed they weren’t the objective best candidate without checking their resumé; ask if they’re concerned about Yale alumni bribing the school to accept another generation of nepo-babies; ask how many candidates Trump interviewed before deciding his kids were the most qualified people for some of the most important jobs in the country. Ask: “is DEI only bad when applied to black people?”

We could review more strategies for days, but just by playing a little smarter with some attention to the game, the Left can reframe the entire political discussion to reveal the Right’s tired, sleight-of-hand playbook and expose their widely unpopular policies. Pull the focus to the battles you choose, and it will be obvious: the Right fights for billionaires, a status quo that further divides the haves from have-nots, and regressive ideologies that restrict peoples’ freedom.

Choosing those battles does not mean leaving people behind. There are enough people on the Left and enough bandwidth on the internet to gain ground on multiple fronts. It’s just a question of strategy: where should resources be allocated; how aggressively should an idea be pushed; where is it wise to bend then counter? They’re not impossible questions to answer, but who answers them brings up another issue.

To shift the momentum, the Left has to act like a team.

The Right is a monolith. The Left is…scattered.

I’m not sure if the Right has a think tank drafting talking points for all their media channels at once, or if they’re just exceptional at yes-and’ing each other’s content in a seamless chain of rehashed rhetoric. Maybe Fox’s evening panel makes their point on Monday night, local news & podcasters run with it on Tuesday, then politicians take their cues into official discussions on Wednesday.

Whatever their process: they’re unnervingly in sync, and their followers—who already consume more political content than their Left-leaning counterparts—learn through repetition then spread the same message even further. Their top-down media strategy ensures identical sentiments are echoed everywhere, allowing them to push through a story (true or imagined) by sheer force. It also gives their audience the illusion of diverse opinions—Candace Owens is a black woman, after all—converging on the same conclusions. If seven different roads all lead to the same place, it must be the correct destination, right?

The Left has no illusion of a think tank. The big news sources don’t follow the same script; independent media outlets go in wildly different directions; and everyday people take more cues from friends than orders from politicians. It’s more grassroots, organic, and independent; less herd-like—despite the Right’s obsession over the word “sheep.” This makes the Left nimble and able to divide their focus but makes it harder to combat a relentless barrage.

It also creates the feeling on the Left that each cause is being fought alone—often against fellow Lefties. Someone advocating for trans rights will run into a friend concerned about fairness in sports, and, despite aligning on every other political and social issue, they’re now fighting too.

The right never does that. They don’t have a Bill Maher equivalent who endlessly complains about the “radicals” on their side. Even when people in their party walk around with white hoods and tiki torches, the Right ignores them instead of engaging. When Trump promises to round up and deport twenty million illegal immigrants, and Fox says they’re all rapists and criminals, conservative voters who’s parents are illegal immigrants just shrug and say, “they’re not talking about us.”

Even when they disagree about life & death issues, the Right doesn’t fight their own. They don’t waste a minute talking about their differences; instead they focus on what they have in common. If pressed, they’ll just say, “Ohh, nah I don’t agree with that guy’s ideas about segregation, but he’s here to make our country great again, same as me!”

They all hold this nostalgic idea of a better world from 1970’s TV shows: Dad punches a clock with his work buddies then returns to a suburban home for dinner with his wife and two kids. Even if conservatives disagree on the how of it, they fight together for the same dream: simpler times, when hard work got you a nice life no one even knew the Middle East existed. With a dream that clear and potent, it’s easy to hold opposing views without getting confused about who’s on which side. All roads point Right.

The Left needs their own North Star.

The Left needs one big ideal to unify isolated battles for freedom of expression, proactive harm reduction, and equal rights to work and grow. They need something that binds a college-campus social activist and a blue-collar union rep—a shared dream worth ignoring disagreements for.

My vote is a future where things are just…fair.. I’d campaign on a true meritocracy, where everyone plays by the same rules—correcting a rigged game that gets less fair every year. I’d advocate for fair rewards for the contributions people make to society, and a fair shot at a good education, regardless of where someone’s parents went to school.

I might write another thousand words about that vision—and change the specifics a dozen times by the end—but fairness is my cornerstone idea of the day. No matter the fine points, a new banner needs to be raised because the current Right-Wing-Bad slogan isn’t cutting it.

Picture a Stop the Bad Guys event, where attendees are asked, “Why do you think the Right is bad?” For one thing, the vibes will be terrible. A bunch of frustrated people will talk about problems instead of solutions, and no one will leave excited or optimistic. Plus, everyone in the room will disagree on those problems and their differences will drive them apart. I might say, “The Right is bad because they let landlords and corporations drive up rent and housing costs,” and if you own a rental property, you’ll feel attacked. Meanwhile, if you think opponents of green initiatives are going to ruin the planet, you might not like that I showed up in my gas-eating Bronco. It won’t matter that I agree with your premise; if you’re in find-enemies mode and I’m not enough of an ally, I might end up on your shit-list by the time we leave.

Now picture an event where you ask, “How could we make society more fair?” Here we’re inviting hopeful answers, and while people may disagree on some ideas, they’ll be met with curiosity instead of defensiveness (or at the very worst, they’ll just be dismissed). If I say, “everyone who works a full-time job should be able to buy a home,” the guy beside me (who owns two homes) has no reason to defend himself. We might eventually discuss how he’s contributing to rising costs, but we’ll at least start off on the same page. Even if he doesn’t think home ownership is a pressing issue, he’ll understand the premise of fairly rewarding hard work with a home. And even if he disagrees with the premise, where’s his incentive to fight me on it? Why would he die on that hill or let it drive us apart? Nothing I said struck a nerve. He knows my heart’s in the right place and we both just want a fairer society; why would we dwell on it? We wouldn’t. We’d remember it as a small blip in a night full of shared ideals—one that was actually thought-provoking and reaffirmed the breadth and diversity of our cause.

A clear and universally-popular rallying point would also make it much harder for the Right to impose their own narrative about the Left’s priorities. They swayed millions of people this year by saying, “the Left is too focused on trans issues to care about the price of groceries,” and it only worked because no one knew what Kamala Harris was focused on. If you don’t define your own principles, you’re blank canvas for someone to define them for you.

Fragmentation on the Left also shifts more responsibility to individuals.

The Right is like an army deployed by strong-armed generals. Foot-soldiers don’t have to think; they can just repeat talking points and they win with sheer volume.

The Left has no central leadership (and probably wouldn’t listen to it blindly anyway). Each pocket of the party—and every individual person—is responsible for their own actions. They decide for themselves which ideas to push, where they communicate, and what language they use, which means they have to think and act more deliberately.

If someone on the Left wants to get involved, they have to understand the nature of the game they’re playing in ways the Right doesn’t. It’s not as simple as reposting a flag or dropping a hashtag to say “I also support this.” You can’t blindly shoot towards an opposition who invents collateral damage and says you’re out of control.

Instead, before engaging, everyone on the Left needs to ask:

Who do I want to see this message?
What do I want them to think or do in response?
What will the Right’s (unfair or uncharitable) response be?
How can I turn that response into a win?

To answer those questions, it would also help to learn more about who they’re up against. The Right does it. I guarantee that conservatives see more Left messaging than liberals do (albeit clipped out of context). The Right builds entire campaigns in reaction to what they see from the Left, and it’s time the Left learned some lessons—predicting the Right’s rhetoric, dismantling faulty logic, exposing blatant lies, and exploiting how unpopular their true motives are.

There are plenty of resources for that (who aren’t me):

Crooked Media hosts an array of podcasts with varying degrees levels of progressive values (ranging from liberal-party-loyalist to open socialist);
YouTube channels like The Minority Report and live-streamers like Hasan Piker combat their Right-wing counterparts head-on;
The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight do a fine job covering the Right’s antics with in-studio laugh breaks;
And plenty of comedians—including Bill Burr and Stavros Halkias—may surprise you with how “woke” their views are.

Why does it have to be this hard?

I just wrote six-thousand words on messaging strategy for the Left and an important question remains: why is this so complicated? Why do progressive people need to be so strategic and disciplined while the Right gets away with shouting slurs? It seems…imbalanced.

In so many ways: the game just isn’t fair. The Left fights uphill battles because they fight for change. They fight to change the rules of society that no longer work, and to challenge & evolve our definition of “normal” human behaviour. They have to dismantle longstanding assumptions and communicate foreign ideas, constantly pushing people further out of their comfort zone. It’s why so many people age out of the Left; every generation hits a sticking point where the new changes seem too crazy. They don’t understand the new music, and they don’t like the new progressive ideas. People get tired and comfortable, and they don’t want to change any more.

The Right doesn’t ask anything of their base. They’re more than happy to keep things as they are. They’d like to move backwards on some things, but when the systems currently in place still favour their core supporters (and, more importantly, their donors), the status quo is still a win. They don’t have to challenge anyone to think or act differently; they reassure people that their safe and simple worldview is correct.

The Right tells people what they want to hear: you’re right; don’t change. The Left asks people to work on embracing something new. They have to sell an imagined, alien future, and ask people to trust they know how to get there. The Right just says, “let’s find our way back to that camp you liked as a kid.”

Unfortunately for the Left: memories are clearer than dreams; and nostalgia is easier to sell than hope.

So, the Left has to accept the game as it is, and if they want to win, they just have to play better. It’s not fair or easy, but it is pretty simple.

I believe it’s possible. Maybe I’ve just gotten lost in my sci-fi stories, but I can picture a world where Left ideals—fostering fairer and freer societies—become so popular that it’s the Right who shifts policies to stay relevant. I imagine both parties inch-worming towards more and more progressive policies as they sacrifice the demands of a few billionaires to connect with millions of everyday people.

And while I still believe only better policies can solidify that shift, better messaging will get the wheels turning—and it’s something we (not the mixed-motived party leaders) can do something about.