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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian, Part 3 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-26

This is the third diary in a series about how we can use social science to save our democracy.

Today's installment is called, “It’s the Corruption, Stupid!" It's about how to help people organize the barrage of news stories coming at us into one big story about Trump & Musk's corruption.

Scaffolding and Master Frames

Ben Rhodes wrote in After the Fall that Alexei Navalny built an effective resistance against Putin by focusing on corruption. In education, we call the strategy I am about to outline scaffolding. The goal is to help your students create a larger structure in their head that they can plug the smaller details into. That helps them understand and remember what they learned more easily.

As an example, in her book on Tea Party Republicans, Arlie Hochschild wrote the liberals see the world as the "1% vs. the 99%" whereas conservatives see the world as divided between "makers and takers" (the lazy poor who receive government aid instead of working and everyone else who works and pays their taxes). That's scaffolding. It's a shorthand way to understand American politics that you can plug other ideas into, like Republicans attempting to kill Medicaid in the near future.

Here's one professor's attempt to categorize everything going on. That's helpful to understand all of it, but I think we can focus on an even simpler story to get people behind us.

As AOC said in her recent Instagram Live video, don't think of what is happening as a million different little stories. Think of them as all part of one or two big stories. Then they make sense. The big story is corruption.

In social science, we would call this a master frame. Framing is how you help people understand the messy reality of the world. A master frame is a big overarching frame that encompasses other smaller frames. If I'm an environmentalist with a master frame that humans disrupt nature's balance, then it's really easy for you to communicate to me why I should oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When you describe it to me as pristine nature about to be polluted, it will resonate because it fits my master frame.

What fits into the corruption master frame? Buckle up. What follows looks like many stories but within the corruption master frame, they are all, in fact, one big story:

Straight Up Grift

Screwing Regular Americans to Fund Tax Cuts for Billionaires and Corporations

I've started to see things from progressive sources saying my taxes will go up while millionaires' and billionaires' go down. AOC said in her Instagram Live she thinks Elon's passion for cost cutting is related to his desire for a tax cut for himself.

Here's the messaging (share this and stuff like it on social media).

Trump Letting Off Corrupt Officials

Trump pardons disgraced former Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich - Blagojevich is a Democrat who got busted in 2008 for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. Trump commuted his sentence last time he was in office. Now he pardoned him. This just pisses me off so much. I was so happy to see his ass in prison. Why is the only thing Trump is bipartisan about allowing corruption?

DOJ orders corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams be dismissed

Removing Government Oversight

"The Foreign Agents Registration Act is a decades-old law that has ensnared Trump associates in recent years, from Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, and Gen. Mike Flynn, the first national security adviser in Trump’s first term, to Russian operatives who allegedly funded pro-Trump media figures during the recent presidential election. The Foreign Influence Task Force is an outgrowth of the response by the FBI and US intelligence agencies to 2016 election interference by Russia, which worked to boost Trump’s first election victory."

Elon Musk Takes a Chainsaw to Anybody Who Ever Tried to Regulate Him

This infographic says it all (so share it on social media).

Musk Profits From the Government He Now Controls

Musk has serious conflicts of interest. His corporations receive billions in government subsidies and contracts. Is he cutting them? No.

All of the above stories tell one big story: corruption. And I am sure there are more. Here are some helpful social media posts to share.

Help people understand the big story - the master frame - of corruption so they can understand how the little stories fit in: Trump is allowing corporate criminals and corrupt public officials to go unpunished while they screw us. The rich are trying to give themselves a tax cut at our expense. Musk is profiting handsomely from a government while cutting funds to others so he can get a tax break. He's firing people and even dismantling an entire agency- illegally - just because they had the chutzpah to investigate him.

These were just the corruption stories I could think of off the top of my head. Let me know what I missing in the comments.

Continue reading part 4 on manipulating Trump’s weaknesses.

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