We settled this in the '90s: "awareness-raising", actions to increase your favorability with the general public, to recruit with...
We settled this in the ‘90s: “awareness-raising”, actions to increase your favorability with the general public, to recruit with the goal of your sizable following moving parties to co-opt your issue for electoral gain
Unmentioned is that this was effectively a way for the Democratic Party in particular to rebuild their brand and recruit a new base for the post-80 era of two-party competition in an environment of low voter loyalty, and there is no mechanism specified for groups and issues so captured to press their priority in the party
@yuyurana said: I don’t know how serious this answer is. However, here seems to be an obvious flaw there, where people have been working on raising awareness about climate change for decades now and we’re rapidly running out of time.
I live in Portland. To the extent that “if activists can’t move their lefty-favored issues no matter how hard they politely ask you just gotsta let them go wild” had any account – and it did – it was drained in 2020, and any further checks written against it will bounce.
As Matt Yglesias keeps pointing out, this whole line of thought has the logic of the situation exactly backwards.
Everyone is aware of climate change. People just don’t want to make sacrifices to deal with it. (You get poll results like “Climate change is important, but I’m not willing to pay an extra $100/year in taxes to deal with it”.) Causing people more hassle over the topic doesn’t help!
Protest and awareness-raising is a tactic designed to mobilize a mass of people, who agree with you but aren’t engaged, against elites or an entrenched minority who are resisting. That’s the exact opposite of our situation: elites think this is a very serious problem and keep trying to solve it, only to fail because people hate the solutions. Multiple Republican presidential candidates have been to the left of the median voter on this issue, and possibly to the left of the median Democratic voter!
What we actually need is awareness-lowering campaigns. Make climate policy low-salience and don’t point out when legislation is working on the issue so that elites can solve it in peace without their plans being derailed by actual voters. (The Inflation Reduction Act, which is possibly the largest climate bill the US has ever passed, is a good first step here.)
I do not speak up to say awareness-raising is an effective approach, but rather that it is the legitimate approach. OP asked after the appropriate tactics.