I don’t get many opportunities to say it, but I’m a big fan of empirical rhetoric. What that means is that instead of trying to convince people that I’m right using an overarching theory, such as framing or center-shifting, I aim to just apply current thinking well. Some parts are already well-known (for example, when talking about abortion, always say “woman” and not “mother”), but occasionally there’s a refreshing idea.
While I’m not saying that Bora’s point about the -ism frame, in which you tag an opposing view with the suffix -ism to make it look dogmatic (“evolutionism”), is anything new, it does illustrate how you can play with connotations. When I took a class in military history two years ago, the professor who functioned as the TA talked about American attitudes with respect to the Cold War, “In the US, the only acceptable -ism is Americanism.”
The most effective liberal American rhetoric is indeed based on observations like this one. Obviously, just tagging the religious right’s ideology as “Dominionism” isn’t enough. To use the argument that Dominionism is a pernicious ideology correctly, you need to not just call it an -ism, but also portray it as one, preferably with good comparisons to previous ideologies that produced lies.
The main problem with liberal rhetoric is actually not the marketing, or the theory. It’s that religion has a privileged position in society, whence it’s difficult to make people sneer at its excesses the way the right, center, and moderate left have gotten people to laugh at the radical left. It’s possible to make a Judean People’s Front joke about religion, but it’ll be less effective.
Splitters.