It’s probably worth your while taking up that argument with somebody who actually made that argument.
But that person isn’t me.
OTOH, when you look – again – at those who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by the Democrats …
There’s value in understanding who clings tightly to outright fabrications, why they are susceptible to clinging to them, and where they encountered them initially and/or where they are powerfully reinforced.
I’d also like to suggest – tagging @kenobi_65 just for grins – that nobody ever wants to admit that they’re influenced by advertising, propaganda, or marketing. And yet the annual advertising expenditures in the US are around $350-400BN.
Why, then?
I’m just going to graciously skip over your equating my view of the actual contemporary US misinformation data with the actions of the Third Reich, but please don’t make the mistake of assuming that I didn’t notice. I did
ETA: here’s a link to the (11pp PDF) Fairleigh Dickinson study that I referenced above:
You shouldn’t have less factual knowledge by watching a given network than you would have if you watched nothing at all. We should all be able to agree on at least that, I would think.
The Democrats don’t need any Trump voters. What they need are Democrat voters. If Biden’s 2020 majorities had shown up in 2024, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
All the analysis I’ve been reading suggests a misattribution of blame. Roe died under Biden, so Biden gets blamed, not Trump, the guy who architected it (or at least held the golden shovel at the ribbon-cutting). Inflation happened under Biden, even though it was mainly a pandemic complication that Biden actually rescued.
That kind of self-interest has always been a feature of US government, and always will be, and is getting harder and harder to offset as people are not only increasingly ignorant of news and civics, but are being actively and willfully deceived by a right-wing media cartel that reaches right into their pockets with the personalized misinformation that they most want to hear.
I honestly don’t know how to counter that. The pure amoral game-theoretic approach would be to do what Republicans do, just absolutely wreck the economy and torpedo civil rights and find a way to blame the other party. That’s not a good idea. There are no good ideas.
Sadly, I agree with the cynical/pessimistic part of your post, though I’m not through spitballing.
The votes are fungible. IMHO, they need whichever voters they can get that are genuinely incremental. They need more voters, and can ill afford to be overly particular.
Speaking of marketing and advertising, one long-term trend I’ve noticed is that people on the left tend to believe in the extreme power of propaganda and they bitterly rue how effective capitalist marketing seems to be; see for example how The Simpsons consistantly depicts middle class America as rubes being bought off by shallow consumerism, with the hucksters about the only people with any shrewdness or intelligence. And yet somehow leftist propaganda seems to be mostly ineffective; it varies between idealist pleas, preaching to the choir, or in the pathological extreme of communist regimes having to resort to shooting anyone who dares disagree.
I’m left with the impression that the Left suffers from envy; that given their faith in and devotion to the power of proselytizing, they can’t understand why their opponents seem so much more successful at it than they are.
Well, if we go for faith, one has to remember that lately a lot of the ones falling for the current right wing propaganda, do declare things like the sermon on the mount to be woke and bad…
It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
I think dems need to take a very long approach to getting what they want akin to what the republicans started back in the 70s. Slow and steady wins the race. It’d be a multi-level approach. Things you can do now and things that will take 30 years to bear fruit and everything in-between.
For the long term, education needs to be massively improved. Students held to higher standards. A much stronger focus on history and philosophy. That’ll take a generation or two to get through. Start now.
Advertising (and advertising-like objects) work best when the audience feels that the message, and the advertiser, appear to understand them, what’s important to them, and what they want. If the viewer can feel like “they actually get me,” and that the message is consistent with their concerns, needs, and general attitudes, it’s far more effective.
In the case of political advertising and propaganda, it’s the same thing. An ad about scary illegals, $8 eggs, or Democrats wanting to make your kids transgender won’t resonate with you, and won’t drive you to act, unless you were already predisposed to be receptive to that message, and that message was consistent with what you already were worried about, or thought to be true.
That’s not going to be easy for the Democrats to do when they’ve invested decades of explaining away the enduring lag in African-American students’ test scores as due to the lingering effects of racism and disadvantage. Attempting to say “sorry, but they were given the same tests that white, Asian and Hispanic students managed to pass” will only raise howls of outrage.
I have to agree with the sentiment abovethread that this isn’t an education or information issue. We are living in the most information-shared, educated society of all time, yet our politics are much worse today than they were in the 1980s-1990s. If education were the solution, Trump wouldn’t have gotten even 1% of the vote.
It’s an issue of bias. No amount of education can penetrate bias if someone is willfully biased. My parents are extremely educated with lots of degrees, yet are as stubborn as concrete, utterly un-swayable in their views no matter how irrational.
You can never defeat this sort of thing from the outside; indeed, it’s like the ancient Rome-era tactic of using two walls of wood with soil filled in between - the more an outside foe assails that wall with a battering ram, the stronger and more compact such a defense becomes. You can only beat it from the inside. You have to extremely subtly infiltrate it from within.
It reminds me of an apocryphal study that showed that caffeinated coffee ‘gave drinkers more energy,’ but only if it was caffeinated and they were told that it was caffeinated.
If they were given regular, but told it was decaf … no effect.
Similarly, decaf had no effect no matter what they were told.
To your point about efficacy being premised on predisposition to believe, you know better than I the amount of demographic and psychographic – often down to the street address level – these organizations have to work with.
I presume they work backward from their target audience to the message that’s been optimized to produce the desired result.
It’s a bit the way that Las Vegas uses extensive psychological data in their design:
Is not easy either for the explanations given by the right wing.
The three most common “conservative” explanations for the black-white gap-genes, the culture of poverty, and single motherhood-are also hard to reconcile with the available evidence. There is no direct genetic evidence for or against the theory that the black-white gap is innate, because we have not yet identified the genes that affect skills like reading, math, and abstract reasoning. Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin.
As usual: I notice is people demanding solutions that are clear, simple, and wrong…
Things are more complicated, as well as the solutions, that many times are dismissed by the ones that dislike public education in the US.
Policies that reduce the black-white gap will not, of course, be politically popular if they improve black children’s test scores at white children’s expense. Both school desegregation and eliminating academically selective classes at desegregated schools have aroused strong white resistance because of the perceived cost to white children. But these policies would not do blacks much good even if whites were willing to adopt them. The most promising school-related strategies for reducing the black-white test score gap seem to involve changes like reducing class size, setting minimum standards of academic competency for teachers, and raising teachers’ expectations for low-performing students. All these changes would benefit both blacks and whites, but all appear to be especially beneficial for blacks.
An experiment carried out by the state of Tennessee during 1985-89 found, for example, that cutting class size in the early grades raised both black and white children’s test scores and that these gains were sustained even after children moved on to larger classes. The experiment also found that gains were much larger for blacks than for whites. Historical evidence also seems to support the hypothesis that the black-white test score gap falls when class size falls. When low birth rates reduced school enrollment in the 1970s, the teacher-pupil ratio rose and classes shrank. Independent analyses by Ronald Ferguson and David Grissmer suggest that this change in class size was followed by a marked decline in the black-white test score gap.
I would never argue that bias isn’t strongly at play. I would, however, posit that children who are raised as critical thinkers, who learn such things as Logic, Debate, and Statistics relatively young, and who grow up in a household where – rather than indoctrinating them into any particular worldview – they’re taught an appropriate amount of skepticism and how/when to ask good, probing questions can become the very best kind of citizens.
Public education was never historically viewed as “liberal indoctrination.” I would argue that college educations, similarly, weren’t viewed that way, and aren’t viewed that way by the rest of the world.
Projection and politics. That’s all that is.
What can stifle critical thinking? Things like the dogma of so much organized religion, which – at its worst – teaches uncritical acceptance of the implausible and rejection of that for which substantial evidence exists.
It indoctrinates pliable little automatons.
It has to start young … before intellectual and cognitive bad habits are formed.
The whole nature vs. nurture debate. In anything having to do with human personality, I’m extremely skeptical that anything short of reducing the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is going to produce a crop of improved people.
As the experiment carried out by the state of Tennessee and other studies showed, there are less reasons to be skeptical.
I still remember how a millionaire in Florida showed what could be done, a lot depended in helping black family stability and education of the parents too. Of course solutions like that are way scary for many wealthy right wingers.
A stronger focus on history and philosophy and political science and economics would be in order. I have a well educated MAGA acquaintance and her grasp of history is really bad. When I tell her we have seen this sort of thing before and it never ends well she just assumes I am making it up or fudging something.
That’s pretty hard when the ruling party is actively committed to compromising public education. If you have any ideas on how to improving education as a weak minority political party, I’m all ears.
I get it is not easy. I’d suggest start with private schools. Reps want to do voucher programs for schooling…fine. Liberals should take advantage of that and make their own schools using the vouchers republicans want. It’s a start. I do not mean to suggest this is an easy or fast solution.
You understand that vouchers for private schools don’t pay for the whole tuition, right? Unless you’re teaching Christian Nationalism and white supremacy, most of your applicants will be po’ folk. Not to mention special needs kids who are displaced now that the Department of Education got the axe.
