“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”
― Alexandre Koyré
Rupert Murdoch has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
I do know why they vote as they do: they’ve fallen completely under the thrall of a profitable and skillful propaganda system that is filling them full of the nonsense @by-tor just explained. And until the false propaganda firehose is taken out of their one ear, there is nothing I or anyone else of any political persuasion could say into their other ear that won’t bounce off their brain. And there’s nothing coming out of their mouth for me to listen to that isn’t just them repeating their daily dose of completely false anti-American anti-civilization anti-human propaganda.
They have real grievances that deserve to be really addressed. As does every other segment of society. But those poor Trump / RW propaganda victims can’t even correctly identify the trees of their actual grievances under the flood of propaganda lava that is burning and burying all in its path.
Your impression should take place of the word oppression… any oppressed people need to blame their parents. Point blank. Centuries have taught so many so fucking little. Trump or not… health care doesn’t stipulate policy on moral judge of attitudes. Lmao… just like the sheep these past fights we herd the mass again. Women have disappeared from the high horse. You pause life so that we see your pretty faces and give you what you want just to turn around and vote for a publicly known and avid masoginist prick. Hilary may suck at controlling the man … but she’s more loyal and respectful than some ass hole living off his grand dads street hustle a century ago … I hope those women drain him and hang em out to dry. Then I think I’m gonna stop beating myself up for being gay. You straight folk are the most messed up race on the face of this planet. I’m saying a prayer for y’all now
Sure. Fox News exists. A lot of people currently live in an alternate reality. It is bad. But again, was this a one-time, irreversible phenomenon starting in 2016? A lot of them voted for Barack Obama.
Usually I rhetorically wonder whether Democrats enjoy losing elections. Sometimes I actually wonder whether they do. These people exist. They vote. If they’re all subhuman scum and there’s nothing different that could be done in practical terms that would result in them taking different political actions, then OK, that’s bleak but that’s your opinion. It seems clear to me that there are things that could be done, but that’s my opinion.
Again, the topic here is not about winning elections. It’s about constantly bring lectured about examining the lives and feelings of people who are oppressing mr and the people around me. They never ask to listen to us. They only want to vent their hateful, ignorant lies. Stop telling me I need to hear that shit over and over and over.
I do not assert they are “subhuman scum”. Thank you for imagining things I did not write.
I assert they are generally decent citizens falling for a very professional very seductive propaganda effort aimed by unknown malefactors at destroying the USA. They aren’t scum; they’re victims. The equivalent of the “useful idiots” of the 1930s Comintern.
I am not for a moment suggesting the Democratic party has done an excellent job of operating in the circumstances.
But overall these days it seems a bit like the being the Captain of the Bismarck. You are outnumbered and outgunned at every turn and even if fought perfectly, the odds of your success are very very low. Even the weather (constitutional arrangements favoring small rural states and rural regions of larger states) is against you.
The D party also does not control the behavior of the citizenry. Had none of the BLM protests happened the vote would have been different, and most probably more Biden-ward.
To be sure, the R party doesn’t control the behavior of the citizenry either. But, given the RW propaganda machine that a) does strongly drive behavior, and b) can amplify the helpful or ignore the unhelpful parts of whatever behavior does occur, they are better able to profit from it.
Late add:
Note that although there is overlap between the R party and the RW propaganda machine, IMO the machine is more driving the party than vice versa.
But that subject is inherently about winning elections. Or, I mean, not losing them. That’s the underlying point. Pete Buttigieg (whose dumb tweet is the impetus for the article that was the impetus for this thread) was tweeting about “reaching out to people,” but he’s Pete Buttigieg. He’s a politician. It’s a political message, like “when they go low” and all that other garbage.
Nobody actually cares if you personally listen to some guy’s dumb opinion in some specific personal sense. It’s always about elections. I was reminded over and over again, here and elsewhere, that fealty to Joe Biden was the only course of action for a reasonable person this year, because we had to steer away from the abyss. “Listening” to Trump voters, in a political sense, is steering away from the abyss.
In 2016, after Trump won, there were all these think pieces in the press where the reporter would go to “the heartland” to talk to Trump voters. Usually, they’d go to the local diner and describe the town as hardscrabble and be sure to mention the boarded up Main Street. Essentially, the residents were presented as noble and bowed, but not defeated and the article made excuses for their voting for Trump as an act of desperation. Jon Stewart stuck up for them in interviews.
Now, after they voted for him again after four years of Trump failures, can we just admit that they are racist morons?
Nobody is advocating that the Democratic Party should not take a realpolitik approach, to do a far better and far more ruthless job to understand what is necessary to sell itself to potential voters, to do whatever needs to be done to win elections. But this is not about reconciliation, the whole game here is that we simply need to win. Sure, we must certainly listen to non-diehard Trump voters - but not in any profound send of understanding their worldview, solely to understand in practical terms what kind of things they want to hear in order to stop voting for Trump or anyone like him.
We certainly don’t need to “listen” to Trump voters as though they have anything coherent or worthwhile to say, as though if we just took a moment to understand their grievances, to see things from their perfectly reasonable perspective, some middle ground is possible. Trump voters are indoctrinated members of a reality-denying cult. The process cannot be one of reasoned debate, the process of coming back from a situation where 70 million people voted for Trump requires deprogramming people from a cult. And at this point, many of these people are not reachable by facts and reasoned argument. In a free society, these people cannot simply be extracted and removed from the effects of the cult’s machinery of lies and indoctrination. The only way the indoctrination will weaken is if the cult starts to fade from power. There is strong positive feedback loop here. The only way to bring these people back to reality is for us to win, and keep winning.
Oh, I’m listening to them. Enough of them are dangerous and enough of them are armed. I’m listening to them to prepare myself for the danger they pose. I certainly hope the responsible portions of our government (the FBI, for instance) are also listening for the same reason. We are, after all, talking about people who have been talking about beginning a second civil war because that conman they love lost.
Some are just ignorant. Some are one issue voters, that gun control or abortion or whatever is so fucking important that nothing else matters. Most have been brainwashed. Other pinch their noses and vote GOP, even tho they dont like trump.
But they all condone racism, even if not actually racist.
Let me make this clear- if you vote GOP, you now condone racism, and condone voter suppression and election stealing.
If there are so clearly “things that could be done,” name one.
But yeah - they’ve been listened to. Center-to-left wing journalists have spent (at least) the past 12 years doing story after story after story of short interviews, long form pieces, embedding themselves in the midst of Republican enclaves, talking to people, reporting using their own words, reporting using the reporters observations. There are books that make the NYT Bestseller lists. There are documentaries and based-on-true reporting stories on the streaming services.
They’ve been heard.
They haven’t been agreed with because a great deal of what’s being said is counter-factual and a not-insignificant amount of what’s said is morally repugnant. But to be clear, we know exactly why they vote the way they do. Still - the left keeps showing up at the table because consensus, community, and compromise are part of our values. And we will try to address those portions of their grievances that are based in reality and not-antithetical to the common good. (to quote the article from the OP: “I want them to have health insurance, decent-paying jobs and security for their family.”)
