These are, indeed, the times that try men’s souls.  You want to listen to, respect, accommodate, brainstorm and work with your fellow Americans, but the feeling does not seem to be mutual.  You may have:

• Told them gracious things like “Democrats are good at identifying problems, but Republicans are better at coming up with creative solutions to them” only to be told that, no, Democrats aren’t even good at identifying problems.
• Pointed out the thousands of times the supposedly hopelessly “biased” fact checkers have called out Democrats and liberals, only to be told this proves nothing, because the left should have been called out for all those things, whereas everything the right has said is actually true.
• Shown them proof after proof that Trump and Putin stole the 2016 election, only for them to tell you, in the end, that “anything was justified to keep that b**** out of the White House.“
• Knocked down lie after lie they’ve heard and are repeating about the 2020 election, only to be compelled to conclude that for them, in the end, the real fraud is that their candidate lost and yours won.
• Called out instance after instance in which they are violating the democratic principles upon which our country is founded and heading us straight down the path to the authoritarianism we were literally born as a nation to fight, only to come to the reluctant conclusion that democracy actually means nothing to them, and a dictator is actually A-OK, as long as He is carrying out his primary responsibility, “owning the libs.“

Does this sound like we’ve been there?  We have, many times.

But forget them for a moment.

More importantly, there are many, many more on our side, or nobody’s side at all, yet, who need to get their adrenaline, mojo, faith, hope, and courage back in order to be their best American selves.  In a crisis such as the one we’re in, the existential choice–whether man or microbe–is fight or flight.  And according to a survey conducted shortly after the Russians invaded Ukraine, only one side is really ready to fight–and it’s not ours.  Even the Democrats’ most brilliant, visionary, and optimistic strategists¹–the Ben Wiklers, Simon Rosenbergs, and Stacey Abrams’ of our ecosystem–constantly emphasize that we have “a lot of work to do” to get to the land where promises can be kept.

In all cases, whether they’re being contrary–or just apathetic and cynical, the folks who have been disappointing you are your–and our–friends, family, colleagues, and, most importantly in this context, our fellow Americans.  So we can’t give up on them, not unless we want to end up under the thumb of the Russian-Chinese axis and the rest of Autocrats, Inc.  And just outvoting them by conventional means is how we ended up where we are now; years and years of gridlock neither our country or planet can afford.

We can’t just beat Trumpism, we have to annihilate it.

Fortunately, there’s a long proven socio-political methodology for softening up and redirecting both individual and whole classes of hard cases.  Applied to individuals, it’s called “good cop, bad cop;” applied to groups, societies, and nations it’s been known since the 1800’s as “carrot and stick,” or “operant conditioning” to be more scientific and authoritative about it.

And we believe we have come up with the “perfect”² medium to apply it–stickers–and the “perfect” engine to realize it–a community-based campaign, community-based at every level and step of the way.

What? Why?

Why stickers?  We answer that question here.

Why community-based? Well, not because it’s a buzzword. As a buzzword, even in politics, it’s well past its expiration date, mainly because a lot of people who don’t know much about online community-building have tried it and, predictably, failed.  We aren’t among them. In fact, as online community-builders, we have few equals,³ we know many of the best, and will be looking to get them to join us.

No, the reasons aren’t fashionable; they’re timeless:

• None of us are as smart as all of us; as long as we leave our egos at the limits of that shining city, anything we want to do can be done better by a community
• A community makes its members not just “stakeholders,” but owners, and when you own something, you take care of it, and do it better
• At its best, new media combines and synthesizes the best qualities of the two key elements of a campaign–the “air war” and the “ground game.” A community-based campaign of the type we’re launching takes this one step further, by continuously weaving our online and offline worlds together.

Using stickers as the vehicle enhances every one of these benefits–and more. Many of the stickers will have QR codes, for example, that allow citizens to jump from the physical world to the online; once there, they’ll be exposed to more stickers they can take from online back into the physical, or better yet, they’ll help us create new, better stickers to deploy.

What Else We Mean By Community-Based (For Starters)

More generally, we’ll allow and empower vetted supporters to:

• Choose their favorite designs & slogans from a (very) wide range of options—not be limited by what the local campaign office has available, allowing them to participate in ways much closer to their personal ideal
• Download, print, modify, and distribute all collateral themselves
• Send us files of their own stickers or sticker concepts they’d like to see executed and added to the fray/array
• Share learnings with others/with us and provide mutual support. We’ll also share download stats and other feedback with campaigns interested in printing and distributing these vehicles themselves to help our comrades in arms to decide which ones are potentially most worth mass production
• All QR codes will lead to Google Docs, not Web pages, allowing supporters to propose additions and changes via Docs’ comment functionality
• Overall, in general, at every level and step, this will be a much better coordinated effort than anything of this nature that the MAGAs have attempted

We say this is only “for starters” because we haven’t heard yet from you about what community-based should mean in this initiative–and that’s a vital part of what “community-based” means too.  Bottom line: we want to create so many (different) stickers that they constitute a running dialog with the electorate–and overwhelm the MAGAs limited creative resources to respond.

How “Carrot And Stick” Philosophy Will Be Applied

As we’ve suggested, tactically and structurally, the campaign is/will be based on the evergreen principles of “carrot and stick” persuasion, with the sticker collection built in three dimensions, each with its own purpose:

• Carrots – Will promote comity, unity, the shared interests of middle & working class Americans on both sides of the divide, our interdependence (rather than the cult of individualism), and the shared values (including tolerance for difference) that made this country what it is, if only to reduce rage as a motivator for our adversaries, and because, on November 6th, we have to move forward together or not at all.
• Stems – Will attack Trump and the GOP based on data, primary source evidence, logic, common sense, and humor. These stickers will be the most likely to include QR codes and associated content for support, for which, wherever possible, we’ll use conservative sources and/or those widely considered neutral to make our case.
• Sticks – Will attack Trump’s character and, in some cases, challenge that of his supporters, utilizing many of the same psyop tactics they’ve deployed against us, and, in particular, working to mitigate Tim Snyder’s greatest fear, that the Right believes it enjoys a monopoly on force.  Overall, the goal of this group of stickers will be to intimidate and demoralize our opponents while stiffening the spine and resolve of our supporters.

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, always under construction,  as we synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit) by leaving us a comment below.

¹ Three qualities that are inseparable in this day and age. In particular, pessimism and cynicism profiteth us nothing. To be clear, as the drumbeat of these three leaders makes clear, optimism does not mean Pollyanna “faith” that everything will work out–as we all know, there is no faith without doubt. For us, optimism means what Rebecca Solnit says it means: the acceptance of uncertainty and the certainty that you can change it. Optimism is always active, never passive. (/span)

² We aren’t big fans of the P-word that’s thrown around so ubiquitously these days, as if declaring it so for millions of tiny acts will add up to Kennedyesque waves to scrub the evil stalking the land.  So if/when we use it at all, it’s always in quotes–though we do believe this campaign comes unusually close to stripping those quote marks away.

³ Our bona fides–a few of them, anyway–include:

* We literally wrote the book on community-building at online community pioneer AOL (our talks on the subject were included in training manuals for all incoming producers), and for many other organizations as well, including the US Department of Education.

* Collectively, the groups and companies whose offerings we’ve helped design, build, and manage have won more than thirty Webbys (the new media Oscars) and counting.

* We organized more than twenty thousand educators to develop the first online homework help service, assisting more than a million students/week (along the way, we created the first community-generated database for FAQ purposes–just one of our many community-building innovations)

* At the macro level, we’ve organized online coalitions of as many as a thousand+ organizations, each of whom did more than just add their name to a “participating organizations” list, in some cases groups recruited specifically because they ought to be talking with each other–and weren’t.

* We were the first (2002) to coin, define, research, and explicate the phenomena of viral velocity, online influence, and online influencers, and we’ve continued to lead in the analysis of these users over the course of the years since, all while applying our body of research findings in a variety of ways (e.g. to develop games with NPS’s in the 80s and 90s.^2a)

^3a A product’s NPS is defined by the percentage of users of a product who say they would recommend it to a friend minus the percentage who say they would not. An NPS of 30 is considered good, 50 is considered beyond excellent.