A lot of the time when I point out that some right-wing policy is proven to not achieve the thing it purports to have as a goal, people rightly point out that the real goal is the negative outcomes that do happen.
Which is correct!
But this is often framed as me approaching the right wing naively by the respondent.
That's not the case at all. I know they're evil. The goal is to demonstrate that they're lying by exposing the way the rhetoric fails to line up with reality.
This has to be ongoing work because someone new has their political awakening every day. Every day, someone needs to learn that the right wing position is wrong on all levels, not just the obvious ones.
there will be people out there who still think the war on drugs (as the absolute first thing that comes to mind) is a legitimate social cause against an antisocial blight on society. if you come out the gate with (the very true statement) that it's actually been a deliberate campaign to target minorities and other undesirable groups to the ruling class, you're going to sound like a clueless conspiracy nut
whereas if you come with a very defensible, statistically supported point of "it doesn't work and has never worked" you can open the door to the follow up question of "why did the government do it in the first place, and (in many cases) why are they still doing it?"
This, exactly.
The play is to:
Demonstrate that the policy doesn't work
Demonstrate that the people enforcing the policy have everything they need to know it doesn't work
Provide the context of what the policy achieves in the absence of its "intended" outcome.
Remind people that the purpose of a system is what it does.
Then, instead of being a non-sequitur claim you're just pulling out of thin air, the conclusion is the most reasonable way to assemble the provided puzzle pieces.
I don't think it's a coincidence either that the loss of the first few steps of that process - explain that it doesn't work, then explain why they do it anyway - correlates with an increase in conspiratorial thinking on the left. You only need to look for secret explanations when what they say doesn't match with what they're doing; when they're just saying "we're doing this because it makes you mad," there's no deeper analysis required.
