For those few who can be swayed by semantics, it should be a constant in the vocabulary of Democrats that today’s Republican Party is the party of radical extremism. Their standard-bearer has said he’d terminate the Constitution. And worse. (Invade sovereign nations to acquire territory, anyone?)
Of course the six-trillion-dollar question is how to reach the voters, only a small fraction of whom pay attention to news. The OP has offered one concrete suggestion:
Many studies show that local news sources tend to be seen as more trustworthy than national ones, so this is certainly a good idea. It does seem unlikely that this could save us from the coming near-authoritarian state, at least in the short run. (Picture Putin allowing local news sources to arise and communicate with Russians—then ask yourself who Donald is likely to model himself on, now that he has the Congress, the oligarchs, the military, and SCOTUS at his disposal.)
FoxNews et al have the stranglehold on the right that they have because they flatter their audience in a way that no lefty source is going to be willing to do. Lefty sources are not going to tell their viewers that they are The Only Righteous Ones, the Only Real Americans, and that they Should Rule Over All Those Inferiors. They just aren’t.
So it’s tough to see how a lefty source, no matter how well-financed it might be, could counter the visceral appeal of the right’s messaging.
Yes, I would bet that the kind of discussion we’re having here not only won’t be allowed in just a matter of weeks, but that it’s basically irrelevant.
But it’s human nature to believe that something we do or say could make a difference, so I guess we’ll go right on discussing these things up until the Internet is closed down (“temporarily as part of the martial law process, which is absolutely necessary to keep us all safe” etc.).
Are Dems actually the conservative ones given the RW’s wackiness?
How do Dems defeat RW propaganda?
ISTM we’re mostly running here on #1 and if the OP poster wants a serious duscussion of #2, they need a new OP post as a linked thread with a better title & content to steer a discussion on that very different topic.
YMMV of course, and offered in a spirit of helping, not bitching.
It seems like the first question has been addressed in a couple of different ways (that no, the Democratic party is not more ‘conservative’ in the traditional sense of the term, and that the term has become kind of meaningless in regard to the GOP) but I take your point that discussion on the second question is well off-track from the original question (although the o.p. seems to be fine discussing it). I’ve more or less said my piece on the issue, and it has made me even more gloomy than I was when I woke up in the morning, so I’m going to step back from the discussion and hope that someone finds a way to convince me I’m totally wrong about it.
Back in the day racists and low info voters were a lot bigger part of the Democratic coalition. That’s what got the FDR and LBJ majorities. And honestly probably a bigger share of the people here today would have been Republicans. But the Dems won all the same, didn’t they.
I think the Democratic Party is trying too hard to appeal to reason and to be this sort of kumbaya party of everything. It gets them taken for granted. Let’s take a chance on the wild idea this Republican has, maybe it’s nuts but if it is the Democrats will clean it up. It’s not working.
That’s one take. A different take is “We want politicians in both parties who belive in the Constitution and rule of law. Support the people who actually did that. Try to win over the conservatives that actually have integrity, i.e. the “never Trumpers”, by having one of them explain why they should vote against the party candidate, who will nonetheless have more palatable policies overall for them.”
Yes, it’s complicated, and maybe campaigning on the same stage was a bit too much of “Hey all you Progressives, Liz Cheney likes my politics.”
I’m not sad Liz Cheney is out. I’m just sad that the rest of the GOP can’t even measure up to her."
Well, it’s gotten bad. But there are maaaaaany differences from Weimar. I don’t think we’re talking about a Third Reich situation, although I do see parallels with some of today’s bad actors in Hungary or Russia. It’s bad enough, so that I have a sinking feeling myself.
I do think we’ll re-take the house in 2026, and if so, that will give me hope that a resistance can still exist in the US.
I don’t think the government will shut down this message board or others like it. I do think media & speech will be under attack, but not in the way you’re envisioning.
Fair enough. I could’ve delineated better here. The two topics are related though. Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the ways that Republicans falsely market themselves, and how the Dems can’t overcome our own communication & marketing problems. But OK. You make a good point. I am more than happy though to discuss either 1 or 2…
If that’s your standard for what “boat-rocking” means, then the U.S. has only rocked the boat four times since the founding: the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the New Deal and (as you mention) the Great Society. By that standard, the U.S. has a governmental and social system that is positively allergic to rocking the boat.
And if you look at each of those instances, they appear at times when the previous order has had a catastrophic failure, either economically or morally, and there is a small window where lasting reform is possible. In the event, there is often also a backlash - while the Constitution and New Deal are substantially still with us, the Reconstruction era was succeeded by the Gilded Age and Jim Crow, and while the Great Society reforms helped remake those in many ways, they eviscerated the historical base of the Democratic party.
Massachusetts Mitt Romney’s, actually. I can’t think of any other way that bill gets over the finish line. And the last 15 years, while far from Edenic, have been a hell of a lot better than the pre-2008 status quo.
I’m not sure you can call any part of the U.S. that has an NPR translator station, 5Mbps DSL or satellite internet a “news desert”.
“Information bubble”, perhaps, but not “news desert.” Too many people in this country simply don’t want to hear the truth - about our problems, and definitely about what it will take to solve them. Yes, Democrats included.
It didn’t work in 2002 or 2004 either, so I’m baffled as to why Democrats who have been around long enough to have fallen for it then are still falling for it now.
I’d add several others from the Cold War era, even though they were accomplished by Republicans. Eisenhower appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice, along with the various decisions subsequently made by the Warren court like Brown vs. Board of Education. To go along with that there was Eisenhower nationalizing the National Guard and forcing school integration / enforcing Brown vs. Board of Education at the barrel of a gun. Eisenhower getting the interstate system built was also a major accomplishment compared to things like the Inflation Reduction Act and Obamacare. Nixon, who I think of as an illiberal progressive, also did a lot, especially for the environment. To this day Nixon has done more for the environment than any other POTUS did, and at the rate things are going it’s likely Nixon will end up going down as the most environmentally friendly POTUS in US history. Then there was progress made by various SCOTUS rulings (and IMHO the vast majority of our progress since Nixon left office was by SCOTUS decision), even as recently as 2015 in the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage.
And again, rocking the boat goes both ways. I could list many of the bad “rocking the boat” events and presidents (Andrew Jackson and his treatment of Native Americans as exemplified by the Trail of Tears would likely be at the top of the list), but I don’t really want to get into the bad stuff.
I think that may be the first solid suggestion I’ve seen in all of these threads. (Not that I’ve made any myself; I don’t know what the fuck to do.)
Quite a lot of areas don’t have any genuine local news left; and quite a lot of people would read it if they had it. Which team beat who and pics of both sides. What church is holding a fundraiser for what car accident victim. Who’s in the school shows and what the schedule is. What new business is opening in town. Who died or was born last week and who all their relatives are. What happened at the town board meeting. Who’s been arrested for what. Who got married. What grocery store carries local eggs. When strawberry season opens. What politician voted which way on X bill and how this is likely to actually affect jobs locally.
Fund some reporters. When the paper itself is dead, start one, in print and online. Expensive? Sure. So was that damn convention, which didn’t work.
Seems to me the GOP can’t get any legislation through because they’re nothing but political amateurs and provocateurs. Are there any old style, quasi-respectable Republicans in office anymore, now that Mitt’s gone?
Yup, the Founders in their wisdom designed our nation to make it really hard to accomplish, well, anything. Two separate houses plus the President, all independently elected, means that it’s very rare for all to be controlled by the same party, and even when they are, there’s still the courts to contend with. Which is why pretty much everywhere else in the world is surpassing us.
So, a “news desert” is anywhere that newspapers have either closed shop or have been shrunk to the point of being irrelevant. It’s happened all over America, especially in rural areas. People without local news end up just ingesting social media & Faux.
Dems might have a chance here to help these areas with a problem that they have, and it might give us a chance to more directly speak to these areas of the population that are currently walled off from us in some respect.
Are you saying that a local newspaper will stop this behavior? I live in a small county with one local weekly paper. That paper covers city and county commission meetings, local businesses opening and closing, high school sports, and other stories of local interest. There’s little to no coverage of national or even statewide news.
Dems should start local newspapers in these areas? Not sure how practical that idea is, or how much influence they would have, even if they were able to build up a subscriber base.
Yeah. And in a lot of places what used to be local radio stations and/or papers have been bought by multistate operations, which lay off all the local reporters and don’t bother covering actual local news.
Even the places that still do have a genuine local newspaper may have poor coverage, because that paper’s down to one reporter. We used to routinely have a reporter from the local news show up at planning board meetings when I first joined the board. Now they don’t show up even when we’ve got a major commotion going on about something. I said something to them once – yup, only one reporter, hasn’t got time.
Nobody but your local paper is going to cover the things you listed. Be glad you’ve still got them, a lot of people don’t.
But if they could be gotten to report on the facts of how the state and local politicians are actually affecting the local news – and to factcheck when they’re lying about it – that sort of thing can make a difference.
The electorate in this country includes reactionary racists, passive racists, and all sorts of low-information voters with non-expert ideas on governance. Changing this reality either involves educating them, or somehow disenfranchising them. A party of democracy can’t disenfranchise voters, and educating voters is hard even when they want to be educated. So by process of elimination, all that leaves is peeling them off by either compromising on less odious ideas, or bribing them somehow with jobs and public works. Neither of these is a great look.
Republicans get a pass too often. We act like they’re an immovable force of nature that has to be endured, like fires or hurricanes, so we tiptoe around and figure out how to bypass them, rather than confronting the head-on reality that they’re greedy freaks who can be persuaded, bullied, coerced, and manipulated.
I don’t really know what the answer is here. Matt Yglesias wrote about the “hack gap”, where Republicans have a lot more shameless hacks shilling for them than Dems do. I think there’s something to it. Nobody wants to think their political faction needs the help of hacky journalists who traffic in deception and logical fallacy, but by God it’s surely enough working for Republicans.
Maybe it’s time for Dems to stop trying to sell themselves on correctness, and just get down and wrestle with the pig no matter how muddy it gets. Someone’s got to do that, otherwise the pig wins by default.
Like the standard-bearer Sinclair, the multi-state companies you mention are all right-wing. (Since the right-wing champions big corporations it follows that when a big corporation buys a news network, it mandates a right-wing slant to the news.)
A practical application of the ‘left should subsidize local news’ idea would probably necessitate a multi-state entity, too. Just without the right-wing slant.
Like I said, expensive. But what the party apparatus has been doing has also been expensive; and doesn’t appear to be working.
We need some way to break through the Disinformation Barrier. Because unless we can, it’s not going to matter a damn what we say on this side of it; the people we need to hear it aren’t hearing it.