MAGA infighting erupts over immigration visas: ‘It's the collision of
greed and hatred’
11:30
Of course, crime rates haven’t fallen uniformly in all places or in all
categories. And somehow, all the guns in the United States haven’t
made Americans safer than residents in most peer countries. But in
the aggregate, it seems that the pandemic-era crime spike has
reversed.
That’s good news for all of us — except for Trump, who would prefer
Americans live in a state of constant anxiety and fear. He has gotten
great mileage out of convincing his most ardent supporters
(especially those in rural areas and small towns) that cities are
terrifyingly violent, driven to chaos by Democratic mismanagement.
So perhaps it’s time Democrats started making more noise about
the places that have succeeded in reducing crime — not just to
cheer, but to get people talking about which policies worked and
how we might prevent future increases in crime rates.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a topic Democrats generally like talking
about. They know that most Americans usually say crime is rising
even when it’s falling (or at least that’s what they tell pollsters). And
Democrats are always afraid of being called “soft on crime,” even
when their policies succeed.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a topic Democrats generally like talking
about.
The first step to getting over their own fear is to understand that
Trump doesn’t have magical powers of persuasion. His message will
never change; he’ll always say that in American cities, “you can’t
walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get
mugged. You get raped.” But he makes ludicrous claims on many
issues, and most people don’t believe them reflexively. Even many
of his own supporters think he exaggerates for effect.
Dominance of the media landscape doesn’t equal persuasive
powers. Ronald Reagan’s mastery of the medium of television was
so striking that media scholars wrote books about how he
transformed presidential communication. Yet his deft use of the
dominant medium of the day didn’t translate into endless political
success.
Reagan was re-elected handily, but many of his policy initiatives
failed, and he was, in fact, not all that popular compared with other
presidents before and after. His average approval rating was higher
than Gerald Ford’s, Richard Nixon’s or Harry Truman’s but lower
than Lyndon B. Johnson’s, John F. Kennedy’s, Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s, George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s.
Propaganda has its limits, even in the hands of a skilled performer
like Reagan. Yet many people, including many reporters, mistakenly
assumed that since Reagan was so at ease on screen and his team
so proficient at creating photo-ops, the public must have been
convinced of what he was saying.
There’s a temptation to
