Gotta start somewhere. Can’t make all the things happen in one go. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It will be a slog.
Also, re-start Schoolhouse Rock 
I’ll come back in a hundred years to check on how you’re doing.
That’s the sad part. At this point I am almost positive I (57) will not live to see a better world. But the work still needs to start ASAP.
I would suggest a Vulcan mind meld. But better hurry. The Borg is more likely.
I would disagree. I think that treating voters as interchangeable numbers is in significant measure part of how they ended up with a watered-down message that neither turned out likely Dems, nor peeled off any gettable Trumpers.
I’ll admit that this is a hard problem to solve, because throwing Democrat red-meat to the wobbly center isn’t the move. It’s a hard line to walk between “both sides are the same” and “Dems are trading the economy for DEI stuff” when right-wing media is working as hard as they can to paint the mildest, most uncontroversial identity politics as DEI.
Honestly if you look at the last 50 years of electoral politics, the only common thread to Dem wins is backlash against Republicans driving the economy into the ground, and the common thread to Dem losses is backlash against perceived creep of identity politics. Draw your own conclusions, it’s too depressing for me to think about.
The general position of Republicans (prior to Trump) is that it’s destructive to infantilize the general public. The more that you protect them from bad choices, the more that they fail to learn, and the worst that they become because there’s never any repercussions to anything they do.
But, there is only so far that you can kick the can down the road on that.
I’m not excited by the idea but there’s something to be said for letting people get what they voted for.
My problem is I have to suffer for what others voted for. That has always been the case and we deal with it but this time is so, so much worse.
Actually, I’ll rescind what I said.
The reality is that Trump’s impact on the US is liable to be inflation and stupidity. I’m not looking forward to it but it’s of limited importance.
His impact on the Palestinians, Gazans, Kurds, Taiwanese, Ukrainians, etc. is liable to be deadly.
They didn’t get a vote. They didn’t choose Trump.
Meh, that was never a sincere position. That was always just a paper-thin rationalization for why government regulation shouldn’t exist. You can’t protect anyone from anything ever, so why bother.
It’s undeniably true that as society becomes further removed from certain electrical sockets, the more tempted they are to stick forks in it. They don’t remember the pain or the trauma.
Nobody should prefer that nor celebrate it. But apparently it’s the only thing that works, and we’re about to head down that road.
But everyone needs to understand - this is not enough. We’re now in an unprecedented media environment where people can stick forks in the electrical socket, get badly hurt, and be persuaded by right-wing media that this is the fault of the people who child-proofed those same sockets, because they were last seen in the area.
The “how” of teaching matters at least as much as the “what.” The Brazilian radical educator Paulo Freire noted that
“As one might expect, authoritarianism will at times cause children and students to adopt rebellious positions, defiant of any limit, discipline, or authority. But it will also lead to apathy, excessive obedience, uncritical conformity, lack of resistance against authoritarian discourse, self-abnegation, and fear of freedom.”
I humbly suggest part of the success of the right over the last 50 years reflects the fact that education systems in Canada and the US are, in the main, hierarchical and authoritarian, and always have been. Training in logic and statistics will only result in logical, statistically aware fascists if education is not based on the student and a radical vision of anti-authoritarianism.
This, so much this.
In general, I’d think of it like processed food and weight loss. As we gain the techniques to measure and improve our ability to target base human desires, it becomes very difficult for anyone to avoid a cycle of making bad choices. You basically turn everything in life into its own little form of cocaine.
It remains to be seen whether the inability to deal with this, in the case of food, could be solved in the next generation through better education and the experience of seeing their elders doing it wrong. But the current evidence would say that the only answer for many is Ozempic.
I don’t know that you can find an equivalent cure for poor information intake but, maybe, we’ll do something drastic and ban the Internet or something. (Anti-addiction medicines might prove to be useful for low quality information bias.)
The only idea that I’ve had, before, was that we elect a second top level position in the US, a person that leads a group that evaluates and rates the quality of news sources. Then, those sources are given bonus money from taxes equivalent to their grade.
But, you would need a much better voting system than first past the post.
It’s as good as I’ve thought, while still staying in the spirit of the First Amendment. But it would still basically be a gamble that with better information and a slight shift in market forces, the next generation would be able to handle things better.
I would agree with you on this point to a degree.
There are so many subjects on which it’s, IMHO, invaluable to get input from The People In The Room. On this one …
The fundamental principle of all propaganda was the repetition of effective arguments; but those arguments must not be too refined – there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not to the intellect. Truth was unimportant, and entirely subordinate to the tactics and psychology, but convenient lies (“poetic truth”, as he once called them) must always be made credible.
–Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, WWII German Propaganda Minister
I think the notion that a classical education helps to inoculate one against the malign influence of propaganda and demagoguery has some merit.
Can your approach be a part of that framework? Sure. But I even think that airing the film, “The Wave–” – the story of the 1967 Third Wave Experriment could be instructive and powerful (in a cool, meta sort of way).
Not allowing the whitewashing of history should go a fair way toward imbuing a “radical vision of anti-authoritarianism.”
I’ve also repeatedly referenced the Stanford Prison Experiment as an instructive and cautionary tale about the dark side of humanity, still readily accessible, given the right circumstances and the wrong people.
He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.
–John Maxwell
The US, overwhelmingly, attacks every problem at the level of supply. Is that generally easier than targeting demand? Maybe. But it always ends up as (the most profitable) band-aid fix.
AS we seek to marginalize and neutralize the Americans who would be king, so should we play the long game and reduce the demand for their Stygian demagoguery … to whatever extent we can.
You can try to create a general environment where there is not so much hate.
But masses of people…young men, Latinos, wannabe libertarians, incels, Joe Rogan fans…are not interested in politics. The president is just a guy that seems to lead the country but what he does is not all that clear. Something vaguely like West Wing. So these people have to make some bond with the presidential candidate on some weak evidence. Trump dancing to YMCA, AOC and her cheerful leading of progressive ideas. Left, right…not a big deal. They relate to the candidate the same as to an entertainer.
I disagree. We need more hate. Low propensity voters are not motivated by calm reason. We need to find a way to whip them into a blind rage so they will vote the way we want them to.
Would you rather be right, or would you rather win elections?
The problem is that there is not going to be anything productive out of congress if hate is all they have. I can hate MAGA folks all I like. Voters can feel the same. But the people we vote for need to have better people skills than I, for example. I want them to deal with the white males, all the other aggressive groups. Not me. Even those people can be bribed with some benfit they do not have now. The beer drinking motor cycle club member in his 60s may need that cheap Joe Biden insulin. “Vance (2028) will take your insulin away” will work in the next election.
I’m just going by what works. Kamala had a billion dollars and a forward looking message about sound policies and good governance. It failed.
Future candidates will need to have some kind of inherent charisma that gets people talking about them. Harris was very accomplished and would have done a great job, but her personality was not electric enough to get people engaged with her personally at a high enough level. Take the SDMB as an example. There are probably 100000x more mentions of Trump than Harris. Certainly 99.9999% of those mentions about Trump are negative, but regardless, we are talking a lot more about Trump than Harris, or even any other Democratic politician. The kind of controversy and discussions that Bernie Sanders creates is what’s needed from a future Democratic presidential candidate.
Controversy in my candidates is certainly what I hope for in the people leading the nation, after we get a better, smarter electorate!
I’d say it’s even worse than that. Most people are aware, for example, that eating a triple bacon cheeseburger and blooming onion for lunch everyday isn’t healthy. Even most people who do eat that stuff on a regular basis know it’s not good for them, and many will get to a point where they’ll at least try to moderate their dietary habits.
People who feast on Fox News and talk radio, on the other hand, see no problem with their media diet. In fact, they believe they’re the ones who are getting the “good stuff” and are in the know, and that those who get their news from more traditional mainstream sources (the New York Times, AP, CNN, etc.) are the deluded ones.