Whatever your message, the fact that you're not accredited by them -- or, in the unlikely case that you manage to raise a significant fuss with some unusual trick, that you're condemned by them -- automatically makes you so low-status, and the presumption that you're a crackpot or some malevolent extremist so strong, that it's effectively impossible to get a fair hearing outside of a tiny contrarian clique.
How then do you explain the social change that has occurred? For example, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States started out very low status, and the elites who opposed it often invoked the rhetoric of crackpot and extremist. Yet it eventually won, in part by being so confrontational that it couldn't be ignore, but not so confrontational that it could be suppressed.
That's a bad example, if I remember US history right the civil rights movement was mostly supported by academics and the intellectual elite. It also had at the very least the sympathy of non-Southern newspapers. Or in other words, opinions among say professors and influential newspaper editors in the 1960s was probably closer to majority opinion on the subject in 1970s and even 1980s, than the majority opinion of their time. I think that's actually the relevant group to watch, since this is an analysis of the role of opinion makers.
This is actually true ...
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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