This election has me questioning analysis like this, where it seems to hinge on a sort of fair or rational sense of who ran a better campaign. I think if there weren't widespread misinformation we...
Exemplary
This election has me questioning analysis like this, where it seems to hinge on a sort of fair or rational sense of who ran a better campaign. I think if there weren't widespread misinformation we could apply this sort of logic, but it's very clear that misinformation about Trump is so strong that half of our country remains not just uncritical but openly supportive of him, even in light of Presidential misdeeds that far exceed any sins committed by the Biden campaign.
Go on Breitbart and one of the trending topics is "Cheat-by-Mail" alongside "Democrat City Unrest" and "China Virus". This is not a fringe site. Alexa puts it at #51 in the US, just behind MSN, Spotify, and Home Depot.
I think a modern truth that election analysis would do well to catch up with is that we simply can't assume people are acting in good faith or with proper information. We can't assume that Biden running a better campaign will necessarily produce better outcomes, because Trump ran a patently terrible COVID response and he's beloved for it. Watch the video of the crowd at his rally chanting "Fire Fauci". The most chilling part of the video isn't the chant: it's Trump telling his supporters news about COVID is going to go away after November 4th. He had it himself and he's still pretending it's some sort of political hoax to make him look bad. And they believe him and love him for it.
Trump's vote count has prompted a lot of American soul-searching on the left, and I think our mistake is to assume that there's any sort of fair play on the field right now. That's done. It's over. Misinformation is mainstream now, and Trump's widespread support is its outcome. His pandemic handling alone should have sunk him, but because there's a gigantic distortion field around him, his awful actions don't face their natural consequences because they can't even be seen for what they are in the first place.
People did a lot of hand-wringing about Clinton in the 2016 election after she lost, noting all of the things she could have done better, and while there certainly were things she could have done better and she wasn't the most inspiring candidate, let's not pretend like she wasn't also the subject of a misinformation character assassination on a scale which we had never seen before. Meanwhile, in 2020, there are a non-negligible number of people who believe Biden's a socialist -- a right-wing falsehood which much of the left could only wish were close to true. A coworker today said they didn't vote for Biden because they think he's probably a pedophile. This is someone I work with, and they're openly spouting conspiracy theories.
Elections always get framed as these highly strategic undertakings which make them sound like chess -- where only certain moves are fair and you have to outwit your opponent within the confines of play. This election wasn't like that. 2016 wasn't like that. There are no rules of play. Just make up whatever you want, and you'll find it's way easier to win when you're allowed to flip the board and dump piles of shit on your opponent then point out to everyone watching how bad they smell. Meanwhile, just lie about winning the game yourself. People will believe you.
American politics isn't a tactical game on a chessboard but a clumsy grudge match on a landfill of garbage information. Some of Trump's support comes from his genuine believers who know he's awful and love him because of that, but I honestly believe that a lot of it comes from people who are so embedded in the landfill and used to its landscape that they have no idea it's garbage. I don't believe the support we saw for Trump has much to do with Biden at all, because I believe that we'd be immersed in smelly shit no matter who got the nomination. Breitbart and the like haven't spent years demonizing Democrats and turning the term into a slur only to suddenly start earnestly and fairly consider the policy differences between Biden, Bernie, and Buttigieg. The garbage trucks are ready to dump no matter who's there because they don't need to rely on truth or fairness.
I do think articles like this are valuable, as there is something to be considered for the ways Biden is a weaker candidate and could have reached interested voters better, but I think that's a focus of minor utility -- and one that misses a much larger one. I think we have to stop thinking of voters as people who make principled decisions based on proper information. That ship has sailed and is now swirling in that giant ocean garbage patch of our making.
As someone who lives in a red state, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that this is absolutely true, and I think any discussion about Trump supporters/voters that doesn't emphasize it is...
Exemplary
Some of Trump's support comes from his genuine believers who know he's awful and love him because of that, but I honestly believe that a lot of it comes from people who are so embedded in the landfill and used to its landscape that they have no idea it's garbage.
As someone who lives in a red state, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that this is absolutely true, and I think any discussion about Trump supporters/voters that doesn't emphasize it is totally missing the bigger picture.
Every single one of my family members that support Trump the most, what are their typical media consumption habits? Fox News, OANN, History Channel, and Facebook. The more they consume it, the more Trumpy they are.
They're not at all bad people, truly... they've just been fed so many lies that they don't know which way is up anymore. On top of that, the disinformation has been so insidious and specifically targeted, any attempt to point them in the right direction, if anything, makes things worse. They've lost any and all trust in anything that runs counter to the right-wing narrative that's been blasted into their face holes for, not just the past few years, but the past few decades, and getting just one person out of that hole is a monumental undertaking. It's not as simple as enlightening them with a few articles or statistics. And as much I hate to admit it, it's also not as simple as "censoring" the misinformation because the people who are vulnerable to it don't trust the ones in a position to do the censoring.
Other than those sorts of Trump supporters, there's many that are just largely more uninformed than misinformed. People who follow politics closely vastly overestimate how much political goings-on are common knowledge. Tons of people hate politics, and they actively avoid it all because, well, it fucking sucks, even at the best of times. These days, staying fully politically informed requires practically constant updating, and that's before you even get into validating information, which is not easy, for anyone. Things are so polarized now, it's so emotionally exhausting, no matter what side you're on. Many people just can't handle it or don't want to subject themselves to the torture, and frankly, I can't blame them.
Many of those sorts of people support or vote Trump merely because he's not a standard establishment politician. They're not reading up about Trump's constant stream of scandals. They're not watching his speeches. They probably didn't watch the impeachment hearings. They don't see Trump or any of his ilk for what they really are. They're probably seeing a headline or meme here and there and listening to what their friends or family are saying, but they're not reading fact checks. Often, any contrary information they're exposed to gets dismissed as partisan exaggeration. On the other hand, in my experience, many of them like candidates like Bernie because he's also seen as an outsider.
That all being said, the Democratic party has its own fucking problems, and the "lesser of two evils" argument, however substantiated in this context, isn't even remotely persuasive.
All in all, Trump is a symptom of EXTREMELY deep, mountainous problems that would takes ages to remedy, even if all the bad actors went away. I find the notion that we just need the right candidate or a few legislative actions here or there absolutely naive.
Well, it's not specifically a Trump thing, but I think it fits a pattern that goes hand-in-hand with Trumpism. A&E is another network in the same vein. There's a lot of "folksy" reality TV shows,...
Well, it's not specifically a Trump thing, but I think it fits a pattern that goes hand-in-hand with Trumpism. A&E is another network in the same vein. There's a lot of "folksy" reality TV shows, like Swamp People, Mountain Men, Pawn Stars, Duck Dynasty. They're not bad in and of themselves, but they definitely draw in a lot of rural, right-wing, Christian, and adult male viewers.
And then there's all the conspiracy theory and pseudoscience programs (Ancient Aliens, Unidentified, The UnXplained, fake moon landing "documentaries", all sorts of ghost and psychic shows) that present - let's call it anti-intellectual garbage - as credible non-fiction. It's normalizing and proliferating a serious distrust in science, a shared, objective reality, and government. If you've been persuaded that NASA faked the moon landings or the government is covering up ET contact, it's not really a huge leap to believing COVID is a manufactured bio-weapon or Bill Gates will try to implant trackers in people with a vaccine or whatever.
I've seen it first-hand in my dad and my uncle. They're not dumb people, but they watch these shows and are utterly convinced by them. My dad is currently working towards a doctorate while working a full-time job at almost 60 years old, but he genuinely believes in ghosts and psychics. My uncle self-taught himself computer science in the 80s and started a very successful business, but one hour long show about how the moon landing was fake is all it took for him to slip down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Neither of them are rabid, flag waving Trump supporters or anything... they'll admit that he's an asshole... but they rarely believe any of the bad press about him and will wave-off any of it that they can't deny is real.
I totally forgot about this. Now that I'm pressed I can recall the introduction of those reality shows that drew in the demographic that you mentioned, but I guess I never actually watched enough...
And then there's all the conspiracy theory and pseudoscience programs (Ancient Aliens, Unidentified, The UnXplained, fake moon landing "documentaries", all sorts of ghost and psychic shows) that present - let's call it anti-intellectual garbage - as credible non-fiction.
I totally forgot about this. Now that I'm pressed I can recall the introduction of those reality shows that drew in the demographic that you mentioned, but I guess I never actually watched enough of History Channel for the proliferation of ahistorical or downright misleading content to really register with me. I still thought of it as pretty much nonstop WW2/Civil War documentaries. Everything you and @spctrvl say makes sense.
Granted, my knowledge of the history channel is dated, but unless it's changed substantially for the better, it's absolutely steeped in the kinds of conspiratorial psuedo-christian mysticism that...
Granted, my knowledge of the history channel is dated, but unless it's changed substantially for the better, it's absolutely steeped in the kinds of conspiratorial psuedo-christian mysticism that comprise a lot of the intellectual bedrock of the Trump movement, paired with a healthy dose of military fetishism. I dunno that I personally would include them in the same breath as the likes of Fox or OANN, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.
I agree, but then what is the right strategy? My only vision of a solution is some kind of bizarre omnipotent autocratic cleanup of the landscape ... literally delete the existence of Fox,...
Misinformation is mainstream now, and Trump's widespread support is its outcome.
I agree, but then what is the right strategy?
My only vision of a solution is some kind of bizarre omnipotent autocratic cleanup of the landscape ... literally delete the existence of Fox, Breitbart, Facebook, etc, and then spend a generation forcefully re-educating people about meaning of the word "fact“ ... and that's obviously just ridiculous.
But any kind of "realistic" solution seems doomed to failure, until the next US civil war begins for real.
Yeah, I'm convinced that nothing short of an effort on the scale of denazification in DE post-WWII will excise this mess from the American political landscape. And there's zero chance either an...
Yeah, I'm convinced that nothing short of an effort on the scale of denazification in DE post-WWII will excise this mess from the American political landscape. And there's zero chance either an internal or external force has the power or will to literally force Trump supporters to open their eyes and lay the responsibility at their feet.
Yet another way the ghosts of incomplete Reconstruction are coming back to bite us in the ass 150 years later.
Whether they're right or not, leftists like Robinson are already out and saying they need to take hold of the narrative and shape it to the left's advantage. "Bernie would have been better" is...
Whether they're right or not, leftists like Robinson are already out and saying they need to take hold of the narrative and shape it to the left's advantage.
"Bernie would have been better" is their useful fiction, and the truth is unknowable so is doesn't really matter if it's true.
Virgil Texas and Brianna Joy Gray are other leftists doing the same thing as Robinson. Leftists will go after the Biden administration hard because they're clearly weak enough both ideologically and with the voters.
You're right that everybody is now fighting over an increasingly disoriented and agitated public. My pet argument on this is the Neil Postman was more right in Amusing Ourselves To Death than he every would have had the temerity to suggest. The American public is now just misinformed and undereducated, they're rudderless and unfocused.
Could you clarify what you mean by this? I stand quite strongly by this post I made before. To paraphrase my paraphrase of a video: Leftists are told they must support the center or everyone will...
Leftists will go after the Biden administration hard because they're clearly weak enough both ideologically and with the voters.
To paraphrase my paraphrase of a video: Leftists are told they must support the center or everyone will lose to the right. Then they are told to not push the center towards the left after winning, because the center won and is thus more popular.
So yea, the left needs to shape the narrative and push our agenda hard. Because it's the only chance we have, because our policies are dismissed out of the gate by the established powers. Damn near every one of Bernie's policies have well over 50% support of the political spectrum at large, at least when they don't see the reported price tag. Which honestly...they shouldn't care about because at least for GND and M4A those costs are still lower than ignoring climate change and propping up our existing failed healthcare system.
If the right is accusing the liberals of being socialists anyway, they might as well show what real socialism looks like instead of bland liberalism. Perhaps socialism wouldn't be so frowned upon once people see what it is supposed to be.
Edit: And I really want to emphasize: Bernie isn't even that far left. He's just not right-wing. And that's quite telling of American politics at large.
I don't have time to give a better elaboration, but he's something. Neoliberalism is just a totally bankrupt ideology at the elite level, and is really bad as an ideology to sell to your voters....
I don't have time to give a better elaboration, but he's something.
weak enough ... ideologically
Neoliberalism is just a totally bankrupt ideology at the elite level, and is really bad as an ideology to sell to your voters. Obama was huge not because technocratic Neoliberalism is great, but because of his special political characteristics.
The Democratic party's current mix of beliefs and commitments renders them pretty incoherent as a communicating vehicle. You can have people like Corey Booker who wants to speak to a deep involvement with love and equality, but his political commitments still involve corporate neoliberalism so he comes across as terribly insincere and compromised, even though he has damn good personal ethics.
The fact that establishment Dems have only just got on board a $15 minimum wage and that federally the minimum is still like $7.50 is just embarrassing and a big reason Dems have little ideological legitimacy as a workers party.
weak ... with the voters
Weak in the sense that they can win the popular vote but not win enough votes to get anywhere near a governing position. Given the state of the house and senate post-election, this is pretty undeniable. Without a governing majority, you're mostly pointless in the face of the challenges the public faces now and in the coming decades. Like you touch on, someone like Bernie can step on that weak spot hard.
Thanks, I think I was somewhat confused by your wording (the "they're" threw me off). That triggered my 'well what is the Left supposed to do?' reflex. Agreed, the common problem is that both...
Thanks, I think I was somewhat confused by your wording (the "they're" threw me off). That triggered my 'well what is the Left supposed to do?' reflex.
Agreed, the common problem is that both major parties in the USA are the neoliberal party. One is certainly more oppressive than the other, but seeing any alternative is a breath of fresh air and utterly terrifying to the neoliberals.
Ohh right. Yep the "they're" could have referred to leftists. It definitely referred to Democrats. I certainly think leftists are strong ideologically. Dunno about strength with voters though, but...
Ohh right. Yep the "they're" could have referred to leftists.
It definitely referred to Democrats. I certainly think leftists are strong ideologically. Dunno about strength with voters though, but hopefully we can find out.
You act as if the russia investigation and the impeachment were a waste of time as if they would have never worked, but you are forgetting that we are talking about laws and justice. These are...
You act as if the russia investigation and the impeachment were a waste of time as if they would have never worked, but you are forgetting that we are talking about laws and justice. These are things a government should be doing fundamentally. The fact that the Russia investigation didn't go anywhere was not because Trump didn't do anything wrong, but because the head of the justice department is a corrupt sycophant who refused to charge the president for his crimes. And in regards to the impeachment, Trump had broken far more laws than he was impeached for. The fact that he remained in office was simply because Republicans are so morally bankrupt that they will not enact justice when it would harm their hold on power.
The thing about American politics that you will not hear many people adknowledging is that the republican party is a thinly veiled nazi-lite party. This year they literally threw out their party platform and just said "we want trump". The reality is that they are only in it for the power. That means that the Democratic party is (effectively) the only place where the Democratic practices that our country is founded on can actually work. That means there is going to be a lot of disagreement. If you don't agree me, just look at the Clinton presidency, where we voted in a conservative candidate.
The plain fact of the matter is that the people in these seats matter. You didn't see how much of a problem trump was because the Republicans also had power over the house, so no even vaguely progressive laws could be passed. If it were a majority democrat congress you would be damned sure that he would veto every bill that was vaguely important.
The fundamental problem is that if we want real change in this country, there is an overwhelmingly uphill battle because half of the country supports what is essentially a fascist party who will block progress at every point, even if it is something you would think they would agree with, simply because they don't like the fact that it wasn't actually introduced by them and they have to be the only ones in power.
Biden calling his campaign a battle for the soul of America isn't a freaking joke.
I feel like both of you are right and these points aren't mutually exclusive. Sorry if I misunderstood your intent or meaning and you didn't mean it as if they were. Were the things you discussed...
I feel like both of you are right and these points aren't mutually exclusive. Sorry if I misunderstood your intent or meaning and you didn't mean it as if they were.
Were the things you discussed important? Yeah, for sure. But that doesn't negate the reason why voters chose Trump. The Republican party can be corrupt as hell and the Democrats can have needed to do unpopular things because they are fundamentally the right thing to do. But yeah, there are a lot of people who haven't been marketed big change by politicians and seen little to nothing in their life change or improve, and now they are sick of the lies. My dad is an example of this, but far from the only one I know. I texted my dad yesterday expressing how tired I was of needing to hope Democrats win an election so that my friends and family are safer, and his response was:
Doesn't really matter. The politicans only job when they take office is to figure out how to pretend to cater to everyone so they can keep their cushy gig at our expense.
But yeah. I just feel like both of you are right and neither is mutually exclusive, and I based on how I read arp242's message I see why you responded the way you did.
Well, yes, I didn't mean to say that what they were saying was wrong, just that it was idealistic and didn't account for the actual political climate, and that made it unrealistic. I mean, just...
Well, yes, I didn't mean to say that what they were saying was wrong, just that it was idealistic and didn't account for the actual political climate, and that made it unrealistic.
I mean, just look at the ACA; it was largely passed by Democrats, but it was based on a Republican plan. And there was so much pushback from Republicans after that that they have managed to tear it up so much that it's done for. And if it's only progress you're looking for, regardless of which direction it goes, Republicans still have fucked that up - They've had nearly eight years to come up with a plan but still have yet to announce even the most basic framework.
It's easy to blame leaders for not being able to accomplish everything they said they would do, but it's not helpful to blame them when the reason they weren't able to do it was because the people who were supposed to help them are carrying axes to chop down everything they're trying to build.
There's a reason why I said Nazi-lite, and not Nazi full-stop. While, sure, they aren't looking to kill anyone now, they are still a fascist party that is attempting to consolidate power in this...
There's a reason why I said Nazi-lite, and not Nazi full-stop. While, sure, they aren't looking to kill anyone now, they are still a fascist party that is attempting to consolidate power in this country by any means necessary. And if you have not heard GOP representatives talking about groups of people as subhuman, you simply haven't been listening closely enough. Why do you think that they are constantly complaining about needing to be "politically correct"? That's because they think the problem is that they can't talk about how they think some people are subhuman instead of it being the fact that they think that's true.
That being said, I can understand why you might be sensitive to me using the term Nazi. Although I don't think that fascist is quite strong enough a word, I'm fine with using it instead for now.
I honestly cannot say why you would think that the majority of the GOP secretly hate Trump. Any single one of them could have voted to impeach him. They still had Pence, so they would have still been in power. But no: none of them did.
but what are you going to do? call your own leader a crazy person? that was never really an option
That's exactly what you should do.
That's the first step. The second is to make attempts to stop them from doing what you know isn't right.
Any organization needs to have the ability to stand up to corrupt leaders. Even in the US military - every single branch - they are trained to reject orders when they are unjust. The fact that nobody was willing to stand up to Trump is just another mark on the checklist of fascism indicators for the Republican party.
I would point out the Nazi party didn't exactly do all of the horrid things right out of the gate...only after they fully assume power did things get real bad, fast. If the Republican party as we...
I would point out the Nazi party didn't exactly do all of the horrid things right out of the gate...only after they fully assume power did things get real bad, fast.
And let's not forget: a functional democracy needs a strong and powerful opposition
If the Republican party as we know it went poof into thin air...the progressives would immediately splinter off from the rest of the Democrats, leaving the Democrat party at roughly the same policy level of mid 90's Republicans.
The incredible divesiveness in this nation is fuelled by the party that actively stokes the racist fires and whose underlying philosophy is 'the world is fine as it is, we shouldn't change anything that would disrupt the power structures.'
I meant that as more of a rhetorical commentary on power voids. There won't be a power void if the Republicans are pushed out of power. It will be filled by other competing politics that currently...
I meant that as more of a rhetorical commentary on power voids. There won't be a power void if the Republicans are pushed out of power. It will be filled by other competing politics that currently unify behind the Democrats for lack of better options.
The Republican party is the Trump party. The Tea party was incorporated long ago (see Paul Ryan). Don't worry, unless things change drastically, the next Republican president will be just as bad as Trump, just more eloquent about it.
The real answer is to reform to eliminate FPTP voting, to enable the formation of new parties.
I agree that misinformation is not the sole source of Trump's support -- I don't think there's any single factor that can account for the actions of ~70 million people. I also think calling it...
I agree that misinformation is not the sole source of Trump's support -- I don't think there's any single factor that can account for the actions of ~70 million people. I also think calling it "misinformation" as I did is a little more limiting than I'm intending to convey, and I didn't really do a good job of that in my post. I think it's not just fabrication but also stuff like spin, priming, selective reporting, and disproportionate weighting. It's entirely possible to have genuine information that's conveyed in such a partisan way that it approaches outright misinformation without ever being false.
And I get where you're coming from -- I honestly do -- and I have similar criticisms of Biden and his campaign myself. I just can't separate myself from the idea that much of these criticisms hinge on a cause and effect that I'm questioning the very basis of. Trump outright mishandled a national emergency -- his COVID response was a protracted country-wide car crash that culminated in him acquiring the very virus he spent months downplaying. It was the world's most on-the-nose morality play in recent memory, and it follows and is obvious that we should have seen him lose supporters.
None of this makes sense, and it's why I think a lot of the direct cause-and-effect reasoning we see in post-hoc analysis isn't particularly useful. We talk about things Biden could have done better and argue that it would have helped him, and that feels like it makes sense, but what if sense isn't even in play right now? After all, Trump handled a national crisis terribly and it seems to have helped him?
And that's really what I was trying to get at with my comment: why? What's driving that absurdity? Trump turned the coronavirus -- an indiscriminate enemy of humanity whose effects are felt and known across the globe -- into a partisan, American culture war. He let millions of Americans stand in a known harm's way, and allowed hundreds of thousands of deaths under his passive and dismissive watch. Furthermore, he lied every step of the way and had to be hospitalized for it himself. And yet his numbers went up. There is something bigger here than just a candidate's likability or outsider status or ground game or whatever else we can pinpoint as a good or a bad move. We're operating in a place where outcomes don't follow premises like they're supposed to.
I think you're getting at basically what I was trying to say in this comment the other day. I find this model of thinking seems to make the most sense. Trump is the result of these "alternative...
I think you're getting at basically what I was trying to say in this comment the other day.
I find this model of thinking seems to make the most sense. Trump is the result of these "alternative facts" media sources. And no, it's not just news agencies that are part of the problem - there's a huge media machine that is dedicated to sewing fear and manipulating people. Remember when Trump announced he was running for president and not even the republican party wanted him to win? I believe the reason why is that they never realized that a person like that might come forward. The thing about Trump is that the reason why he is so good at creating and manipulating reactionaries is because he himself is a reactionary created by this media machine.
The problem is not that the outcome doesn't follow the premise, but rather that the paradigm dictating what the premise actually is has changed.
The biggest problem I have right now is seeing a way to fix this. I do not see a way to dismantle the media machine - at least within the framework of law. We can't fix this through education - the people are smart, just unwillling to think. Social pressure was at least slowing them down, but with Trump throwing social order out the window, it's essentially useless now. This is a complex problem and there may simply be no solutions.
The sad thing is that I can very easily see us becoming the new Nazi Germany, and the only way we can be stopped is a world war where we get taken over and the victors spend a lot of time deprogramming everyone.
Sorry, I'm coming across way more argumentative than I'm meaning to. Fraught time and topic. I don't actually disagree with you either. We Democrats have lots to learn and lots of work to do.
Sorry, I'm coming across way more argumentative than I'm meaning to. Fraught time and topic. I don't actually disagree with you either. We Democrats have lots to learn and lots of work to do.
Or maybe the US is just half-full of shit-heads? I mean, I want to think that Americans are generally good people, or that they're just misinformed, or <insert any excuse here> but look at the...
Or maybe the US is just half-full of shit-heads? I mean, I want to think that Americans are generally good people, or that they're just misinformed, or <insert any excuse here> but look at the monster half of them voted to re-elect. 'Yes, four more years of that please.'
If they identify more with Trump than Biden, wow is all I can say.
There was a piece here not that long ago about how it isn't possible to be a good person and vote for Trump without wild amounts of ignorance. I'd like to believe that that ignorance is the main...
There was a piece here not that long ago about how it isn't possible to be a good person and vote for Trump without wild amounts of ignorance. I'd like to believe that that ignorance is the main reason for most of these people to vote for Trump, and for most of these people the ignorance isn't their fault.
The sheer weight of the disinformation and propaganda that Breitbart and Murdoch are putting out is responsible for the slide further and further into this dystopian nightmare where so many people vote for things that are directly harmful for them or are not actually in line with their interests. I don't think this is an age related thing either; I know people of a variety of age groups and education levels who lack that capacity to make a decision about what is real and what isn't.
I think "ignorance" isn't strong enough here. People in the grip of an ideology actively resist new information that contradicts their worldview. Whether or not they are a "good person" is...
I think "ignorance" isn't strong enough here. People in the grip of an ideology actively resist new information that contradicts their worldview.
Whether or not they are a "good person" is situational though, because people compartmentalize. As an atheist I've had a lot of experience with this. You can't write off all religious folks even if they have some nutty beliefs and sometimes that has consequences. The way I think about it is that just about everyone is a little crazy sometimes, but you can still have a good relationship.
When dealing with people one at a time, how someone votes is the least important thing about them because voting is a numbers game and it's unlikely to matter. Though of course it matters a lot in the aggregate. That's the paradox. Tiny actions add up.
I saw a tweet a couple of days ago that I think sums up this attitude really well (and it's far more common than you'd hope):
I saw a tweet a couple of days ago that I think sums up this attitude really well (and it's far more common than you'd hope):
My takeaway is that a large number of people HATE the cultural left (not the econ left) and are willing to put up with almost anything, including incompetence, chaos, corruption and bad policy, to signal their views loud and clear.
I'd argue how someone votes is the culmination of what one stands for. It shows how one thinks (or doesn't think) about the world, whether they are (willfully) ignorant, care about others, how...
how someone votes is the least important thing about them because voting is a numbers game and it's unlikely to matter
I'd argue how someone votes is the culmination of what one stands for. It shows how one thinks (or doesn't think) about the world, whether they are (willfully) ignorant, care about others, how they are influenced by misinformation, or have a critical eye on what people say and do.
It can actually tell you a lot about someone. That's what makes it interesting to discuss, yet a lot of people dislike discussing it.
It tells you something in a nation that’s so divided politically. However, perhaps less than politically-engaged people think. It seems like there are lots of good reasons to dislike politics.
It tells you something in a nation that’s so divided politically. However, perhaps less than politically-engaged people think.
It seems like there are lots of good reasons to dislike politics.
I don't want articles like this buried in the election megathreads. The megathreads should be limited to the counting, who's winning, the actual election status. This article is analysis of the...
I don't want articles like this buried in the election megathreads.
The megathreads should be limited to the counting, who's winning, the actual election status. This article is analysis of the state of politics in the US, based on the results of the election.
I'm not exactly impreseed with this specific article (spoiler: it's a "we shoulda had Bernie" piece), but we definitely do need articles like this, in their own threads, to consider where we go from here.
This election has me questioning analysis like this, where it seems to hinge on a sort of fair or rational sense of who ran a better campaign. I think if there weren't widespread misinformation we could apply this sort of logic, but it's very clear that misinformation about Trump is so strong that half of our country remains not just uncritical but openly supportive of him, even in light of Presidential misdeeds that far exceed any sins committed by the Biden campaign.
Go on Breitbart and one of the trending topics is "Cheat-by-Mail" alongside "Democrat City Unrest" and "China Virus". This is not a fringe site. Alexa puts it at #51 in the US, just behind MSN, Spotify, and Home Depot.
I think a modern truth that election analysis would do well to catch up with is that we simply can't assume people are acting in good faith or with proper information. We can't assume that Biden running a better campaign will necessarily produce better outcomes, because Trump ran a patently terrible COVID response and he's beloved for it. Watch the video of the crowd at his rally chanting "Fire Fauci". The most chilling part of the video isn't the chant: it's Trump telling his supporters news about COVID is going to go away after November 4th. He had it himself and he's still pretending it's some sort of political hoax to make him look bad. And they believe him and love him for it.
Trump's vote count has prompted a lot of American soul-searching on the left, and I think our mistake is to assume that there's any sort of fair play on the field right now. That's done. It's over. Misinformation is mainstream now, and Trump's widespread support is its outcome. His pandemic handling alone should have sunk him, but because there's a gigantic distortion field around him, his awful actions don't face their natural consequences because they can't even be seen for what they are in the first place.
People did a lot of hand-wringing about Clinton in the 2016 election after she lost, noting all of the things she could have done better, and while there certainly were things she could have done better and she wasn't the most inspiring candidate, let's not pretend like she wasn't also the subject of a misinformation character assassination on a scale which we had never seen before. Meanwhile, in 2020, there are a non-negligible number of people who believe Biden's a socialist -- a right-wing falsehood which much of the left could only wish were close to true. A coworker today said they didn't vote for Biden because they think he's probably a pedophile. This is someone I work with, and they're openly spouting conspiracy theories.
Elections always get framed as these highly strategic undertakings which make them sound like chess -- where only certain moves are fair and you have to outwit your opponent within the confines of play. This election wasn't like that. 2016 wasn't like that. There are no rules of play. Just make up whatever you want, and you'll find it's way easier to win when you're allowed to flip the board and dump piles of shit on your opponent then point out to everyone watching how bad they smell. Meanwhile, just lie about winning the game yourself. People will believe you.
American politics isn't a tactical game on a chessboard but a clumsy grudge match on a landfill of garbage information. Some of Trump's support comes from his genuine believers who know he's awful and love him because of that, but I honestly believe that a lot of it comes from people who are so embedded in the landfill and used to its landscape that they have no idea it's garbage. I don't believe the support we saw for Trump has much to do with Biden at all, because I believe that we'd be immersed in smelly shit no matter who got the nomination. Breitbart and the like haven't spent years demonizing Democrats and turning the term into a slur only to suddenly start earnestly and fairly consider the policy differences between Biden, Bernie, and Buttigieg. The garbage trucks are ready to dump no matter who's there because they don't need to rely on truth or fairness.
I do think articles like this are valuable, as there is something to be considered for the ways Biden is a weaker candidate and could have reached interested voters better, but I think that's a focus of minor utility -- and one that misses a much larger one. I think we have to stop thinking of voters as people who make principled decisions based on proper information. That ship has sailed and is now swirling in that giant ocean garbage patch of our making.
As someone who lives in a red state, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that this is absolutely true, and I think any discussion about Trump supporters/voters that doesn't emphasize it is totally missing the bigger picture.
Every single one of my family members that support Trump the most, what are their typical media consumption habits? Fox News, OANN, History Channel, and Facebook. The more they consume it, the more Trumpy they are.
They're not at all bad people, truly... they've just been fed so many lies that they don't know which way is up anymore. On top of that, the disinformation has been so insidious and specifically targeted, any attempt to point them in the right direction, if anything, makes things worse. They've lost any and all trust in anything that runs counter to the right-wing narrative that's been blasted into their face holes for, not just the past few years, but the past few decades, and getting just one person out of that hole is a monumental undertaking. It's not as simple as enlightening them with a few articles or statistics. And as much I hate to admit it, it's also not as simple as "censoring" the misinformation because the people who are vulnerable to it don't trust the ones in a position to do the censoring.
Other than those sorts of Trump supporters, there's many that are just largely more uninformed than misinformed. People who follow politics closely vastly overestimate how much political goings-on are common knowledge. Tons of people hate politics, and they actively avoid it all because, well, it fucking sucks, even at the best of times. These days, staying fully politically informed requires practically constant updating, and that's before you even get into validating information, which is not easy, for anyone. Things are so polarized now, it's so emotionally exhausting, no matter what side you're on. Many people just can't handle it or don't want to subject themselves to the torture, and frankly, I can't blame them.
Many of those sorts of people support or vote Trump merely because he's not a standard establishment politician. They're not reading up about Trump's constant stream of scandals. They're not watching his speeches. They probably didn't watch the impeachment hearings. They don't see Trump or any of his ilk for what they really are. They're probably seeing a headline or meme here and there and listening to what their friends or family are saying, but they're not reading fact checks. Often, any contrary information they're exposed to gets dismissed as partisan exaggeration. On the other hand, in my experience, many of them like candidates like Bernie because he's also seen as an outsider.
That all being said, the Democratic party has its own fucking problems, and the "lesser of two evils" argument, however substantiated in this context, isn't even remotely persuasive.
All in all, Trump is a symptom of EXTREMELY deep, mountainous problems that would takes ages to remedy, even if all the bad actors went away. I find the notion that we just need the right candidate or a few legislative actions here or there absolutely naive.
Hmm. I think I pretty much understand the others, but what role do you think History Channel plays in the Trumpist mindset?
Well, it's not specifically a Trump thing, but I think it fits a pattern that goes hand-in-hand with Trumpism. A&E is another network in the same vein. There's a lot of "folksy" reality TV shows, like Swamp People, Mountain Men, Pawn Stars, Duck Dynasty. They're not bad in and of themselves, but they definitely draw in a lot of rural, right-wing, Christian, and adult male viewers.
And then there's all the conspiracy theory and pseudoscience programs (Ancient Aliens, Unidentified, The UnXplained, fake moon landing "documentaries", all sorts of ghost and psychic shows) that present - let's call it anti-intellectual garbage - as credible non-fiction. It's normalizing and proliferating a serious distrust in science, a shared, objective reality, and government. If you've been persuaded that NASA faked the moon landings or the government is covering up ET contact, it's not really a huge leap to believing COVID is a manufactured bio-weapon or Bill Gates will try to implant trackers in people with a vaccine or whatever.
I've seen it first-hand in my dad and my uncle. They're not dumb people, but they watch these shows and are utterly convinced by them. My dad is currently working towards a doctorate while working a full-time job at almost 60 years old, but he genuinely believes in ghosts and psychics. My uncle self-taught himself computer science in the 80s and started a very successful business, but one hour long show about how the moon landing was fake is all it took for him to slip down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Neither of them are rabid, flag waving Trump supporters or anything... they'll admit that he's an asshole... but they rarely believe any of the bad press about him and will wave-off any of it that they can't deny is real.
List of History Channel programs
List of A&E programs
I totally forgot about this. Now that I'm pressed I can recall the introduction of those reality shows that drew in the demographic that you mentioned, but I guess I never actually watched enough of History Channel for the proliferation of ahistorical or downright misleading content to really register with me. I still thought of it as pretty much nonstop WW2/Civil War documentaries. Everything you and @spctrvl say makes sense.
Granted, my knowledge of the history channel is dated, but unless it's changed substantially for the better, it's absolutely steeped in the kinds of conspiratorial psuedo-christian mysticism that comprise a lot of the intellectual bedrock of the Trump movement, paired with a healthy dose of military fetishism. I dunno that I personally would include them in the same breath as the likes of Fox or OANN, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.
I agree, but then what is the right strategy?
My only vision of a solution is some kind of bizarre omnipotent autocratic cleanup of the landscape ... literally delete the existence of Fox, Breitbart, Facebook, etc, and then spend a generation forcefully re-educating people about meaning of the word "fact“ ... and that's obviously just ridiculous.
But any kind of "realistic" solution seems doomed to failure, until the next US civil war begins for real.
Yeah, I'm convinced that nothing short of an effort on the scale of denazification in DE post-WWII will excise this mess from the American political landscape. And there's zero chance either an internal or external force has the power or will to literally force Trump supporters to open their eyes and lay the responsibility at their feet.
Yet another way the ghosts of incomplete Reconstruction are coming back to bite us in the ass 150 years later.
Whether they're right or not, leftists like Robinson are already out and saying they need to take hold of the narrative and shape it to the left's advantage.
"Bernie would have been better" is their useful fiction, and the truth is unknowable so is doesn't really matter if it's true.
Virgil Texas and Brianna Joy Gray are other leftists doing the same thing as Robinson. Leftists will go after the Biden administration hard because they're clearly weak enough both ideologically and with the voters.
You're right that everybody is now fighting over an increasingly disoriented and agitated public. My pet argument on this is the Neil Postman was more right in Amusing Ourselves To Death than he every would have had the temerity to suggest. The American public is now just misinformed and undereducated, they're rudderless and unfocused.
Could you clarify what you mean by this? I stand quite strongly by this post I made before.
To paraphrase my paraphrase of a video: Leftists are told they must support the center or everyone will lose to the right. Then they are told to not push the center towards the left after winning, because the center won and is thus more popular.
So yea, the left needs to shape the narrative and push our agenda hard. Because it's the only chance we have, because our policies are dismissed out of the gate by the established powers. Damn near every one of Bernie's policies have well over 50% support of the political spectrum at large, at least when they don't see the reported price tag. Which honestly...they shouldn't care about because at least for GND and M4A those costs are still lower than ignoring climate change and propping up our existing failed healthcare system.
If the right is accusing the liberals of being socialists anyway, they might as well show what real socialism looks like instead of bland liberalism. Perhaps socialism wouldn't be so frowned upon once people see what it is supposed to be.
Edit: And I really want to emphasize: Bernie isn't even that far left. He's just not right-wing. And that's quite telling of American politics at large.
I don't have time to give a better elaboration, but he's something.
Neoliberalism is just a totally bankrupt ideology at the elite level, and is really bad as an ideology to sell to your voters. Obama was huge not because technocratic Neoliberalism is great, but because of his special political characteristics.
The Democratic party's current mix of beliefs and commitments renders them pretty incoherent as a communicating vehicle. You can have people like Corey Booker who wants to speak to a deep involvement with love and equality, but his political commitments still involve corporate neoliberalism so he comes across as terribly insincere and compromised, even though he has damn good personal ethics.
The fact that establishment Dems have only just got on board a $15 minimum wage and that federally the minimum is still like $7.50 is just embarrassing and a big reason Dems have little ideological legitimacy as a workers party.
Weak in the sense that they can win the popular vote but not win enough votes to get anywhere near a governing position. Given the state of the house and senate post-election, this is pretty undeniable. Without a governing majority, you're mostly pointless in the face of the challenges the public faces now and in the coming decades. Like you touch on, someone like Bernie can step on that weak spot hard.
Thanks, I think I was somewhat confused by your wording (the "they're" threw me off). That triggered my 'well what is the Left supposed to do?' reflex.
Agreed, the common problem is that both major parties in the USA are the neoliberal party. One is certainly more oppressive than the other, but seeing any alternative is a breath of fresh air and utterly terrifying to the neoliberals.
Ohh right. Yep the "they're" could have referred to leftists.
It definitely referred to Democrats. I certainly think leftists are strong ideologically. Dunno about strength with voters though, but hopefully we can find out.
You act as if the russia investigation and the impeachment were a waste of time as if they would have never worked, but you are forgetting that we are talking about laws and justice. These are things a government should be doing fundamentally. The fact that the Russia investigation didn't go anywhere was not because Trump didn't do anything wrong, but because the head of the justice department is a corrupt sycophant who refused to charge the president for his crimes. And in regards to the impeachment, Trump had broken far more laws than he was impeached for. The fact that he remained in office was simply because Republicans are so morally bankrupt that they will not enact justice when it would harm their hold on power.
The thing about American politics that you will not hear many people adknowledging is that the republican party is a thinly veiled nazi-lite party. This year they literally threw out their party platform and just said "we want trump". The reality is that they are only in it for the power. That means that the Democratic party is (effectively) the only place where the Democratic practices that our country is founded on can actually work. That means there is going to be a lot of disagreement. If you don't agree me, just look at the Clinton presidency, where we voted in a conservative candidate.
The plain fact of the matter is that the people in these seats matter. You didn't see how much of a problem trump was because the Republicans also had power over the house, so no even vaguely progressive laws could be passed. If it were a majority democrat congress you would be damned sure that he would veto every bill that was vaguely important.
The fundamental problem is that if we want real change in this country, there is an overwhelmingly uphill battle because half of the country supports what is essentially a fascist party who will block progress at every point, even if it is something you would think they would agree with, simply because they don't like the fact that it wasn't actually introduced by them and they have to be the only ones in power.
Biden calling his campaign a battle for the soul of America isn't a freaking joke.
I feel like both of you are right and these points aren't mutually exclusive. Sorry if I misunderstood your intent or meaning and you didn't mean it as if they were.
Were the things you discussed important? Yeah, for sure. But that doesn't negate the reason why voters chose Trump. The Republican party can be corrupt as hell and the Democrats can have needed to do unpopular things because they are fundamentally the right thing to do. But yeah, there are a lot of people who haven't been marketed big change by politicians and seen little to nothing in their life change or improve, and now they are sick of the lies. My dad is an example of this, but far from the only one I know. I texted my dad yesterday expressing how tired I was of needing to hope Democrats win an election so that my friends and family are safer, and his response was:
But yeah. I just feel like both of you are right and neither is mutually exclusive, and I based on how I read arp242's message I see why you responded the way you did.
Well, yes, I didn't mean to say that what they were saying was wrong, just that it was idealistic and didn't account for the actual political climate, and that made it unrealistic.
I mean, just look at the ACA; it was largely passed by Democrats, but it was based on a Republican plan. And there was so much pushback from Republicans after that that they have managed to tear it up so much that it's done for. And if it's only progress you're looking for, regardless of which direction it goes, Republicans still have fucked that up - They've had nearly eight years to come up with a plan but still have yet to announce even the most basic framework.
It's easy to blame leaders for not being able to accomplish everything they said they would do, but it's not helpful to blame them when the reason they weren't able to do it was because the people who were supposed to help them are carrying axes to chop down everything they're trying to build.
There's a reason why I said Nazi-lite, and not Nazi full-stop. While, sure, they aren't looking to kill anyone now, they are still a fascist party that is attempting to consolidate power in this country by any means necessary. And if you have not heard GOP representatives talking about groups of people as subhuman, you simply haven't been listening closely enough. Why do you think that they are constantly complaining about needing to be "politically correct"? That's because they think the problem is that they can't talk about how they think some people are subhuman instead of it being the fact that they think that's true.
That being said, I can understand why you might be sensitive to me using the term Nazi. Although I don't think that fascist is quite strong enough a word, I'm fine with using it instead for now.
I honestly cannot say why you would think that the majority of the GOP secretly hate Trump. Any single one of them could have voted to impeach him. They still had Pence, so they would have still been in power. But no: none of them did.
That's exactly what you should do.
That's the first step. The second is to make attempts to stop them from doing what you know isn't right.
Any organization needs to have the ability to stand up to corrupt leaders. Even in the US military - every single branch - they are trained to reject orders when they are unjust. The fact that nobody was willing to stand up to Trump is just another mark on the checklist of fascism indicators for the Republican party.
I would point out the Nazi party didn't exactly do all of the horrid things right out of the gate...only after they fully assume power did things get real bad, fast.
If the Republican party as we know it went poof into thin air...the progressives would immediately splinter off from the rest of the Democrats, leaving the Democrat party at roughly the same policy level of mid 90's Republicans.
The incredible divesiveness in this nation is fuelled by the party that actively stokes the racist fires and whose underlying philosophy is 'the world is fine as it is, we shouldn't change anything that would disrupt the power structures.'
I meant that as more of a rhetorical commentary on power voids. There won't be a power void if the Republicans are pushed out of power. It will be filled by other competing politics that currently unify behind the Democrats for lack of better options.
The Republican party is the Trump party. The Tea party was incorporated long ago (see Paul Ryan). Don't worry, unless things change drastically, the next Republican president will be just as bad as Trump, just more eloquent about it.
The real answer is to reform to eliminate FPTP voting, to enable the formation of new parties.
Two words: Voter referendums. The powers that be are unlikely to reliquish power voluntarily.
I agree that misinformation is not the sole source of Trump's support -- I don't think there's any single factor that can account for the actions of ~70 million people. I also think calling it "misinformation" as I did is a little more limiting than I'm intending to convey, and I didn't really do a good job of that in my post. I think it's not just fabrication but also stuff like spin, priming, selective reporting, and disproportionate weighting. It's entirely possible to have genuine information that's conveyed in such a partisan way that it approaches outright misinformation without ever being false.
And I get where you're coming from -- I honestly do -- and I have similar criticisms of Biden and his campaign myself. I just can't separate myself from the idea that much of these criticisms hinge on a cause and effect that I'm questioning the very basis of. Trump outright mishandled a national emergency -- his COVID response was a protracted country-wide car crash that culminated in him acquiring the very virus he spent months downplaying. It was the world's most on-the-nose morality play in recent memory, and it follows and is obvious that we should have seen him lose supporters.
But he didn't. In fact, we now know it was the opposite: Trump gained voters in many of the places hardest hit by COVID. Right as we were setting record numbers for new COVID cases daily, 20% of the country reported that it's completely/mostly under control. In the height of a national emergency one in five Americans doesn't even believe that there is one.
None of this makes sense, and it's why I think a lot of the direct cause-and-effect reasoning we see in post-hoc analysis isn't particularly useful. We talk about things Biden could have done better and argue that it would have helped him, and that feels like it makes sense, but what if sense isn't even in play right now? After all, Trump handled a national crisis terribly and it seems to have helped him?
And that's really what I was trying to get at with my comment: why? What's driving that absurdity? Trump turned the coronavirus -- an indiscriminate enemy of humanity whose effects are felt and known across the globe -- into a partisan, American culture war. He let millions of Americans stand in a known harm's way, and allowed hundreds of thousands of deaths under his passive and dismissive watch. Furthermore, he lied every step of the way and had to be hospitalized for it himself. And yet his numbers went up. There is something bigger here than just a candidate's likability or outsider status or ground game or whatever else we can pinpoint as a good or a bad move. We're operating in a place where outcomes don't follow premises like they're supposed to.
I think you're getting at basically what I was trying to say in this comment the other day.
I find this model of thinking seems to make the most sense. Trump is the result of these "alternative facts" media sources. And no, it's not just news agencies that are part of the problem - there's a huge media machine that is dedicated to sewing fear and manipulating people. Remember when Trump announced he was running for president and not even the republican party wanted him to win? I believe the reason why is that they never realized that a person like that might come forward. The thing about Trump is that the reason why he is so good at creating and manipulating reactionaries is because he himself is a reactionary created by this media machine.
The problem is not that the outcome doesn't follow the premise, but rather that the paradigm dictating what the premise actually is has changed.
The biggest problem I have right now is seeing a way to fix this. I do not see a way to dismantle the media machine - at least within the framework of law. We can't fix this through education - the people are smart, just unwillling to think. Social pressure was at least slowing them down, but with Trump throwing social order out the window, it's essentially useless now. This is a complex problem and there may simply be no solutions.
The sad thing is that I can very easily see us becoming the new Nazi Germany, and the only way we can be stopped is a world war where we get taken over and the victors spend a lot of time deprogramming everyone.
Sorry, I'm coming across way more argumentative than I'm meaning to. Fraught time and topic. I don't actually disagree with you either. We Democrats have lots to learn and lots of work to do.
Or maybe the US is just half-full of shit-heads? I mean, I want to think that Americans are generally good people, or that they're just misinformed, or <insert any excuse here> but look at the monster half of them voted to re-elect. 'Yes, four more years of that please.'
If they identify more with Trump than Biden, wow is all I can say.
There was a piece here not that long ago about how it isn't possible to be a good person and vote for Trump without wild amounts of ignorance. I'd like to believe that that ignorance is the main reason for most of these people to vote for Trump, and for most of these people the ignorance isn't their fault.
The sheer weight of the disinformation and propaganda that Breitbart and Murdoch are putting out is responsible for the slide further and further into this dystopian nightmare where so many people vote for things that are directly harmful for them or are not actually in line with their interests. I don't think this is an age related thing either; I know people of a variety of age groups and education levels who lack that capacity to make a decision about what is real and what isn't.
I think "ignorance" isn't strong enough here. People in the grip of an ideology actively resist new information that contradicts their worldview.
Whether or not they are a "good person" is situational though, because people compartmentalize. As an atheist I've had a lot of experience with this. You can't write off all religious folks even if they have some nutty beliefs and sometimes that has consequences. The way I think about it is that just about everyone is a little crazy sometimes, but you can still have a good relationship.
When dealing with people one at a time, how someone votes is the least important thing about them because voting is a numbers game and it's unlikely to matter. Though of course it matters a lot in the aggregate. That's the paradox. Tiny actions add up.
I saw a tweet a couple of days ago that I think sums up this attitude really well (and it's far more common than you'd hope):
"SJWs" basically gets at what's being referred to there.
It seems like many people hate activism when it's a cause they don't care about, and admire it when it's a cause they believe in.
I'd argue how someone votes is the culmination of what one stands for. It shows how one thinks (or doesn't think) about the world, whether they are (willfully) ignorant, care about others, how they are influenced by misinformation, or have a critical eye on what people say and do.
It can actually tell you a lot about someone. That's what makes it interesting to discuss, yet a lot of people dislike discussing it.
It tells you something in a nation that’s so divided politically. However, perhaps less than politically-engaged people think.
It seems like there are lots of good reasons to dislike politics.
I don't want articles like this buried in the election megathreads.
The megathreads should be limited to the counting, who's winning, the actual election status. This article is analysis of the state of politics in the US, based on the results of the election.
I'm not exactly impreseed with this specific article (spoiler: it's a "we shoulda had Bernie" piece), but we definitely do need articles like this, in their own threads, to consider where we go from here.
This should probably go in one of the election megathreads - I suggest this one.
I appreciated that it wasn't; I would have missed it otherwise.