Policy vs. Protest
The political Right and Left have taken vastly different approaches to influencing the American electorate. The Right has built out an extensive public policy apparatus designed to appeal to voters intellectually, while the Left has developed a protest network employing fear and outrage to prey on voter emotions.
William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review along with the founding of the Heritage Foundation and other conservative and Libertarian “think tanks” secured their footing during the Reagan Administration. The ideas industry has continued to grow with the advent of such organizations as the America First Policy Institute, which gives intellectual heft to the Trump Administration, and the rapidly growing Advancing American Freedom policy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.
The Right has also found media success. Rush Limbaugh, the father of conservative talk radio, virtually reinvented the medium and blazed the path for the current class of talk radio hosts. The Left tried – and failed – to emulate conservative success on radio. And while the Left continues to dominate the legacy news media, conservatives have found greater success on cable with Fox News and Newsmax outcompeting their Leftwing counterparts.
Newspapers, traditionally the bastion of biased Leftwing reporting, are in decline. While there are significant economic reasons driving the demise of print media the fact is the legacy media offended a considerable segment of their potential customer base causing conservatives readers to seek news elsewhere.
The Left, handcuffed by failed socialist policies and having lost its media edge also lost its appeal to voters. Donald Trump rolled to an Electoral vote and popular vote majority in the 2024 elections. The GOP also secured a U.S. Senate majority and a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives – which would have been substantially larger had Democrats not eaten the GOP’s lunch in the congressional district gerrymandering wars.
Add in a constitutionalist majority on the Supreme Court of the United States and the Left holds none of the levers of power. They are offering voters no policy prescriptions or ideas on how to better govern the country, so they have settled into resistance mode.
What the Left has done successfully is build out a protest-industrial complex. They are able on a moment’s notice to turn out crowds of paid agitators and radicalized activists into the streets where the legacy news media dutifully reports on the “spontaneous” public reaction.
The protest-industrial complex had its heyday in the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. They then mobilized, shutting down college campuses and blocking streets over Israel’s efforts to evict Hamas from Gaza. President Donald Trump did them the dis-service of negotiating an historic peace treaty that ended the hostilities.
The protest-industrial complex suddenly found itself without a cause. Then, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in the act of attempting to run over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with her car. Suddenly the Left had a new cause. Minneapolis, with a far-Left mayor in a state governed by the hapless Tim Waltz was fertile ground for a resurgence.
On the day nurse/activist Alex Pretti was shot and killed amidst a scrum scuffle with ICE agents the protest-industrial complex was in high gear. A network of encrypted messages had activated what Vice President J.D. Vance described as “a level of engineered chaos unique to Minneapolis.”
This network had been tracking the movement of ICE agents, who were attempting to apprehend and arrest a felonious illegal alien, and directed protesters to the site. Thus did they lure Alex Pretti to his death. Which of course added fuel to the outrage machine.
The protest-industrial complex is not limited to Minnesota. They have ginned up protests across the nation. There is big money to be made by the businesses which organize these protests the participants of which appear to be largely comprised of older, mostly white, and mostly female liberals sad to have missed out on the anti-war protests of the 1960s.
The Right has the ideas and policy prescriptions that will indeed bring a new “golden age” to America. But ideas do not motivate voters. The challenge for the Right is to put emotion behind policy. They need to excite voters.
The Left has turned to protest because the policies they are advocating have been rejected by the American electorate. Unless they stop turning the nation’s cities into battlegrounds, and develop real policy alternatives, they will again pay the price at the polls.
(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal and American Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.)
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