The Disenfranchisement Strategy

One of the most insidious rhetorical strategies is to disenfranchise your opponent.    This can occur in many ways, but logically, they boil down to the "no true Scotsman" falacy:  believing such a thing renders you unworthy to participate.

At the moment, a series of mass shootings has elevated the topic of gun control in the public consciousness.  The gun lobby, predictably, says that after such a shooting is not the time to have such a discussion and we shouldn't let our emotions overcome the supposedly reasoned position they want us to take.  These shootings have become so commonplace that by that logic, there will never be a time to discuss this.  Of course, that's exactly what they want.  Their goal is to disenfranchise everyone who disagrees with them.

The "voter fraud" meme became a popular strategy for the Republican party in 2004, when they first started losing a few elections.  Here in Washington State, Dino Rossi attempted to prove that illegal voters in Democrat leaning districts had boosted their results.  When the courts did a careful examination, nearly all of the "illegal" registrations proved to be a misunderstanding on the part of those claiming voter fraud.  In fact, election fraud is quite an old problem, and the Republicans have been very guilty of it.  This came to a particular head in November 2000.  Using a technique called "caging", legitimate voters with recent address changes in districts tending to vote Democratic were sent a letter.  The addresses included soldiers recently called to duty, college students, and others who would likely be living at a temporary address.  The subject of the letter contained harmless Republican politicing, but the trick was on the envelope itself, which said "Do Not Forward".  Letters returned to sender would be used to generate a list, which was sent to a cooperative voter registration officer to remove those names from the list of registered voters.  At least 40,000 such names were removed from Florida polls shortly before the election of 2000.  The official (not recounted) result from this election was Bush winning by 537 votes.  When attempts to recount the ballots that were cast were made, Republican troublemakers disrupted the recount effort, culminated in the Republican-dominated supreme court determining that it was impossible to complete a recount in the time available.  In the election of 2004, evidence for hundreds of thousands of miscounted or bogus votes in Ohio, Florida and other swing states--more than enough to change the result and consistent with the surprising difference between exit poll results and the final tally.

In 2012, many states had efforts to disenfranchise voters by requiring them to have some piece of ID that would be difficult to obtain if they were poor--generally called "voter suppression laws".  The courts overturned most of these, but several Republican operatives openly admitted that the strategy was disenfranchisement of voters likely to vote Democratic.

William F Buckley was a master of techniques that would confuse or quiet his opponent.  The simplest and most frequently used was to shout louder--Bill O'Reilly and a number of others frequently use this technique today.  But another was to say something that would leave his opponent confused or startled, during which time Buckley would prattle on about his own position, leaving the quieted opponent looking helpless and foolish.  During a panel discussion after the TV nuclear winter movie "The Day After", Buckley said "But don't you think [the movie] is tendentious?"  It was obvious that nobody else on the panel knew what the word meant, but didn't want to admit it.  (I had to look it up.  Tendentious means "intending to promote a particular point of view, especially a controversial one")   The correct response was "yes, of course it is, that's the whole point of the movie."

The Republicans strategy in the late 90s and early '00s was to create a "Permanent Republican Majority", to make sure they'd preserve power even if they couldn't win it legitimately. In quite a few states, they've gerrymandered congressional districts to the point that even though there were a clear majority of Democratic votes, the states sent a Republican congressional delegation.  They've been very good at winning the elections that counted for redistricting: 2000, 2010, by hook or by crook, and have used those wins to retain power against fairly severe defeats.

The current US Senate filibuster is another illustration: if the majority can't muster 60%, the minority can block any measure or nomination, simply by saying so.