Why doesn’t Republican lying turn people off even more?
Maybe a lot of people don’t realize they’re being lied to.
Yeah, their government moved right in recent years. Not good.
…it has always been a numbers game. There are MORE people who aren’t “lizard-brain”. Its about getting them out to vote.
For decades the marginalised have pulled through and saved the arses of the Democrats. They’ve had to fight to even get to vote. This year I hardly heard anything about voter suppression. My guess would be that this year it would have been the worst It’s ever been. But it’s been so normalised, so accepted, that “it’s just the way it is now.”
There was no focus on down-ballot. The senate and house races were seemingly forgotten about. The Democrats practically insulted many of their base in the swing states. They ignored most of the polling that suggested that most Democrats wanted to end the war in Gaza.
The Democrats simply forgot that this was an election. They didn’t know how to campaign.
The people at the grassroots, the people who would be picking people up and driving them to the ballot box, the activists, the ones with the ground game in marginalised communities, they got smashed up under Biden. I mean literally smashed. The Black Lives Matters protests were smashed by the cops during the 2021 under Biden. And then Biden turned around and gave them more money. Students and people protesting Gaza have been smashed by the cops. And pro-Palestinian voices silenced. There was an entire movement, that IMHO were instrumental at helping at the margins which are so important in US elections, that was basically given the finger by both the Biden and the Harris campaign.
What I argued a few months ago, and what I still think is correct, is that is wasn’t enough to campaign on “I’m not Trump.” That you have to give people something to vote for. I look at your laundry list of the “the lies the right spreads about the left.”
And then I think about this:
- Biden gave the police billions more in funding. In 2023 the police killed more people than any time in their history.
- The Biden administration enthusiastically supports and is funding what many consider a genocide.
- Bidens immigration plan “capitulates to the Right’s racist agenda.”
- Democrat strongholds waged a war on the unhoused
- Bidens handling of Covid was a disaster.
I don’t want this to turn into a debate on how accurate what I’ve written here is. It isn’t about that. I’ll concede that in a discussion about narrative, that what I listed is a narrative, and that people here will disagree.
But when you are talking about propaganda and messaging and perception and narrative, there exist a large group of people, that have faithfully voted for and supported the Democrats all of their lives, along with a group of progressive young people where this might have been their first opportunity to vote, and the Democrats gave them nothing to vote for.
“A vote for the Democrats mean we will continues to smash up your protests, the police will continue to kill even more people next year, we will continue to fund and support what you consider a genocidal campaign.”
Thats how some people saw it. And many of the people that saw it that way are the very activist types that could have made a difference at the margins.
So part of the Dems problem was a propaganda problem of a different type. They believed their own spin. They couldn’t possibly be the bad guys. That’s the thing I think a lot of people have to grapple with. You can’t be instantly defensive. You can’t shut down any conversation where the Dems are not cast in the most positive light. Because if you steadfastly refuse to listen, and if you shout down any dissent, they aren’t going to continue arguing with you. Voting in America is hard enough as it is. They’ve fought hard for you in every election. I’m not surprised at all that this time many of them decided to stay home.
…it needs to be understood that this is a global, loosely connected movement. The NACT coalition have broadly adopted the Conservative strategy from the UK. And in the UK, the Labour Party have largely continued the Conservative Party platform. Austerity. Anti-trans. Decimating the public service. “Free speech” in the guise of shutting down the media.
In New Zealand they bought in the “Ministry of Regulation” overseen by David “Arnold Rimmer” Seymour. Under Trump Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.” It’s all the same. The plan is to smash the global public service infrastructure. Push it all into the hands of the billionaire class. Everything from Cop Cities to the surveillance state, AI, social media, I know it sounds conspirational, but they have been openly talking about this for years. It ceases to become a conspiracy when they are openly saying “yeah, thats what we are doing.”
Our resistance here will be lead by Māori.
We are a day into a national hīkoi that is making its way to Parliament.
Considering how obvious the lies were, they must have been pretty damn stupid, then.
I think the real problem the Dems have is that people are terrified of the future. Between climate change and demographic change people will take refuge in comfortable lies over unpleasant truths.
Hence Trump.
Nope. The problem is that the right has normalized outright lying, slander and intimidation. They have said, “The truth doesn’t matter as long as we win!” and have put themselves forward as living examples.
I believe it comes down to this: the Republicans don’t actually believe in proselytizing, they’re not trying to “convert” anyone. Their attitude is that the right-thinking people will flock to their banner and those who aren’t are to be ignored. The Republicans don’t give two hoots what you think about anything– what they care about is what you do, namely how you vote. Their approach is the pragmatic approach of advertisers who view the consumer as a black box as far as their thought processes go, the advertisers care solely about the final outcome: actual sales. Their wish to understand the thought processes of their “customers” is limited to gauging what sales approaches will or will not work; but the inherent undercurrent is that marketing is to appeal to whatever prejudices are already there to worked upon.
I’m reminded of a line from the novel by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants depicting a Max Headroom/Robocop-style dystopia of corporatism gone mad. The protagonist is observing some low-level workers, serfs in everything but name, and notes the following:
I was shocked repeatedly to hear advertising referred to as “that crap”. I was at first puzzled and then gratified to see it sink in and take effect anyway.
The Republicans usually at most believe in a sort of generic conservatism with the idea that most of the changes wrought by liberal progressivism were mistakes which ought to be undone. The Fundie evangelical wing of the Republicans, the people who actually want to institute a Rule of the Saints, are more or less used as foot soldiers, a block of reliable votes but carefully marginalized from actually trying to impose a radical agenda.
In sharp contrast the Democrats are True Believers, and want to convert those who haven’t seen the Light yet into the faithful. They don’t worry about outcomes because they’re confident that will simply fall into place once the work of proselytizing is done– good thoughts will lead to good deeds. The very mildest form of this paradigm is believing that all that is needed is for the voters to be shown the facts, and then surely anyone of intelligence and good will then will agree with the Democratic platform. It’s usually cast as simply getting people to see objective reality, but the goal is still ultimately to win hearts and minds to the cause.
One can see a sort of mutant, cancerous version of this mindset in totalitarian Marxist movements which devote enormous efforts to the most shrill and strident efforts at propaganda and “reeducation”; with the totalitarian part being their readiness to imprison, torture and kill the “counter-revolutionary traitors”.
…there are stories I’ve heard from people who left the ultra-religious conservative churches, where the anti-abortion message was hammered daily, and the solution was to “win the supreme court, vote Republican.” Proselytizing happens everywhere. They spent over 200 million on anti-trans advertisements and propaganda this campaign. There has been a clear and open strategy of converting people and they’ve been doing it for decades. That’s how they won the house, the senate, the supreme court and the presidency.
And yet I don’t think any of it actually converted anyone who wasn’t predisposed to believing it already. The Republicans don’t proselytize conservatism much beyond the conviction that conservatism would be the default mindset if people were placed in a conservative social environment. What they were doing was selling a product: The Republican Party, which promised like an Tylenol commercial to relieve conservatives of their social aches and pains. ETA: do you know of any examples from personal experience of liberal or middle-of-the-road people who actually turned conservative due to Republican propaganda?
My father was very middle of the road for nearly my entire life. Then in the past year or two he has swung pretty hard right. He doesn’t watch Republican propaganda, but my mom does, and indirectly has infected him.
My 28 year old cousin living in NY. She visited the Texas border and got convinced about the republican pov wrt immigration and voted Trump this election
…Anecdote, evidence, etc etc. I’ve seen people turn. The reason why Republicans have taken control over the media and the social media sphere is for one simple reason, to take control of the messaging. To shift the narrative. To proselytize. They do it because it works.
We’ve got Democrats jumping on the anti-trans bandwagon. Tougher on immigration and the borders. Pandering too much to the “woke.” That’s part of the importance of proselytizing, it shifts the conversation. So now both the Republicans and Democrats are more closely aligned.
This isn’t in “sharp contrast.”
It’s the same thing. The thing is the Republicans are better at it. I’m harshly critical of the Democrats when they do it, and I’ve said my piece here in this thread. But the Republicans do it as well, and they are masters at it.
Yes. A guy who was, for a number of years, a good friend of mine, and politically moderate to indifferent, became an angry raving Trump fan (and conspiracy theorist) over the past five years, due to a constant intake of various right-wing media sources. He is now, among other things, absolutely convinced that Democrats want to allow pre-teens to have sex-change operations, even against their parents’ will.
Harris raised over a billion dollars, and significantly more than Trump. You can buy a truly enormous amount of advertising/messaging for this kind of money.
My mother. For most of her life, she was fairly apolitical beyond a “They’re all liars and crooks” attitude towards politicians in general. Growing up, I can’t recall a single time she said anything bad about Latinos, Blacks, or even gay people. Like many other people, I watched my mother fall down the Fox News rabbit hole over the last decade or so. She’s an angry, scared woman who lives in a world of shadowy conspiracy theories. It’s strained our relationship because I no longer respect her opinion about anything. She’s not a toxic, abusive person, but I can’t talk to her about anything serious.
That’s certainly true of the people at the top. However most of the Trumpers I know personally have raised denial to an art form. On some level, they know they are being lied to, but they want to believe the lies, because the future they see coming (If they look past the lies) is so scary and uncertain.
Uncertainty tends to lead to conservatism, and great uncertainty leads to a reactionary turn of mind.
I don’t know how to reach that type, but I am inclined to think that mere truth isn’t going work.
I do wonder how much of that is due to the fact that there’s a well known tendency for older people to turn conservative, probably due to factors related to aging. And older people really have seen changes sweeping enough that if people thirty or forty years ago could have been shown today’s American society it would have astonished them.
That’s a myth, actually. Older conservatives were generally conservative their whole life.