U.S. Politics, November 2022: “I don’t know, you hear the same things I do”

Remember there's also a fuck-ton of voters, whether they will admit it or not, vote for the people they like/could have a beer with, as opposed to issues. tribalism has shrunk the influence of that group of people significantly, but they're still there. and the shit that turns them on/off seems arbitrary.

That Demings ad made me want to jump off a skyscraper.

i kinda liked c hayes take last week where he was "save our right to throw the bums out." sometimes you go with what you have left. but it's still pretty critical imo.

― i'm right back on my shit (Hunt3r), Tuesday, November 8, 2022 11:55 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is actually a great argument

And they elected an extremely unlikable non-drinker for president, so go figure. xxp

We need better salespeople for some of these ideas - brash, charismatic, daring, but acting in the spirit of altruistism. That seems to be what so many people instinctively respond to.

True, and I would also suggest we start asking more loudly why candidates like this have massive uphill battles trying to get thru the state party bureaucracy or challenging the establishment candidate.

I mean we know why, not totally sure asking about it more loudly will change anything. The people in the DNC establishment are all lining their fucking pockets.

Thanos just needs to snap

(BTW, Neanderthal, I don't wish to sound dismissive re: foghorns; I respect your passion and love your energy.)

Fetterman in Pennsylvania is a close election. Fetterman in Missouri would be 20 points down.

I totally get the frustration with milquetoastiness and the affection for brashness in service of honestly held principles, but. That unicorn Democrat who campaigns full-throatedly for all the things that "we" (broadly speaking) like? That candidate will definitely absolutely lose, bigly, in large swaths of the nation.

Without changing the structural obstacles, they will not get power. And without getting power, they will not be able to change the structural obstacles. Fantasies of storming the barricades with pitchforks abound. But if there were a way for them to look harmless, fly under the radar, sneakily get power, and THEN change things, I would be for that as well.

xp

I’d say a Fetterman-style populist absolutely could win in South Carolina. Public opinion in SC like many ruralish states is closer to Fetterman than the GOP on economic issues. Hate to say but one of the last big name populists before Bernie got big was *gulp* John Edwards, from NC. The Carolinas basically might as well be one state in terms of demographics (although it’s changing as the SC coast becomes more like Florida, etc).

Idk imo we have a vision of the America we ("we" as progressives, abolitionists, and so on) but we also have an ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS public education & culture change project to prove to people who don't think of themselves as progressives, abolitionists, or what have you, that our project also benefits/liberates them.

We should all be training in change management imo.

So much this. The issue isn’t so much a lack of vision as lack of an effective voice. The consensus vision on the left seems simple — we have plenty of functional social democracies to emulate. But we are operating in an absolutely hostile media environment. It’s as if this discussion is taking place in a nation without highly targeted ads on social media, or where the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled that campaign spending is protected as “free speech”.

I’ve mentioned before how I felt like there was a real smear campaign against both Bernie and Warren in the primaries. Now in Georgia I’m seeing constant ads on YouTube attacking Warnock — I’ve seen ads accusing HIM of abusing his wife, when there are multiple examples of credible stories of Walker being unstable and abusive. Just the standard reactionary victim blaming writ large through this toxic media environment we’ve let fester.

The pollution of disinformation can be just as toxic as the environmental pollution, and now we’re suffering from the failure to regulate the cancerous externalities of the information revolution.

Wish I could figure out a way to say that without sounding like such an enviro-geek.

The people in the DNC establishment are all lining their fucking pockets.

Yeah but they're a symptom more than a cause — one of bad aftereffects of the Bernie campaigns was this obsession on the left with the DNC. The DNC has never been very powerful or important, it's a misconception of their role to think otherwise. Any party has apparatchiks, if the party changes the apparatchiks either adapt or find themselves out on the street, but they're not the people to focus on.

The Kings County Democratic County Committee (lol terrible name) is by some measures the largest Democratic club in the country but can they be bothered to hold a phone bank or a single canvas for a beleaguered Democratic state governor facing a serious threat from a lunatic? CAN THEY FUCK. They've put zero resources into supporting any Dems this cycle on the state or local level. The reformer/insurgent lower level people are organizing canvases and doorknocking campaigns on their own with no funding!!

Weirdly (for East Tennessee) our local county Dem party is kind of on fire. They have a young, super energetic chairman who has a whole cadre of young volunteers and data crunchers, and they've been smart about recruiting candidates and door-knocking etc., at least for the small number of legitimately competitive districts we have around here. It's quite a contrast to our local Republican Party, which is a total shitshow run by an inexperienced doofus nobody in the party likes. They're coasting on having a mostly Republican county, of course, so they win elections even though their party apparatus is a shambles.

But anyway, just the level of energy the local Dems have is a big change from 10 years ago, shows it really matters if you get good leadership at the local level.

That's awesome. What great news!

We have that too but the party bosses have been shutting the door in their/our faces for over a decade while they molder in obscurity (and spend all the money in secret). We're working on it though.

Hmm..

There is not a strong relationship between inflation or employment & midterm election outcomeshttps://t.co/oKbJeheFVw pic.twitter.com/QHzzTzpoWC

— Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) November 8, 2022

extremely naive question: what determines party direction in a way that matters to most eligible voters? (if not the national committees then ... ???)

xp actual numbers don’t matter, it’s about the inflation/employment/crime vibes

Do the actual numbers matter for people who encounter them as not averaged in relevant indices?

One thing I wonder is how easy it is to influence people in an age where politics spread by meme.

Pre-social media, pre-"excessive ad content" search engines, confirmation bias and fake news were still a major problem, but there seemed to be more of a willingness to work out positions for oneself and there wasn't an overwhelming amount of competing noise, at least not the level of today.

I knew a lot of people, friend and family, who professed to be Democrats/liberals but would say things to me like "Rob, we can't force gay marriage on people, I support civil unions", or "I hate racism, but I don't support the Affirmative Action quota system", "violent protests make you as bad as the thing you protest", or would whine about PC culture.

Some of these people were this way through, like, 2016, and now have done a 180, and some of it may have been a byproduct of getting older and experience, but others seemed to shift as post-Trump liberal social media meme-storming took off.

I'm not here to do stupid purity testing or insinuate people are "real" or "fake" leftists, or suggest I myself haven't changed at all over the years, but it is interesting to see the divide between the politically-minded friends who share their own thought-out ideas and the people whose feeds are literally wall to wall political memes with no additional comment, half the memes partially or completely false.

Independent voters get influenced by that shit too, and those meme addicts rarely even dive into the topics beyond the meme.

Picking up a book on hold at the library where I volunteered last Saturday, I got interviewed by Telemundo. As I waited my turn the reporter interviewed a young Venezuelan woman with two boys who said in Spanish she had voted for every Republican on the ticket. Why? "Gas is too high, I spend $100 more at the store every week, this Biden has done nothing in two years." She didn't mention socialism or crime.

When my turn came I spoke in car crash Spanish about why I had voted Dem down the line, in part b/c of the infrastructure bill and how our party still believes in democracy, not election deniers.

I post this only because -- more anecdata -- here are the reasons among others for why people vote GOP.

Tax cuts should fix everything right up.

When most in this country are living paycheck to paycheck, that does tend to kind of be the only thing that matters to them

It's really their only "solution." It's like the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Windex.

xp actual numbers don’t matter, it’s about the inflation/employment/crime vibes

― papal hotwife (milo z), Tuesday, November 8, 2022 2:16 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Everything is about vibes, and probably always has been to some extent. Right now, nearly everyone is feeling bad vibes about politics and the state of the country in general, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, so a lot of people are simply looking for something to believe in. Someone who will give them a good feeling, whether that's high-minded hope, irresistible enthusiasm, or righteous indignation. It's not enough to promise voters that you'll achieve certain policy goals, or to recite a list of accomplishments, if the overall message and presentation doesn't inspire people to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves.

Yeah but how does anyone get any inspiration from venal toads like, say, Ron Johnson? He'd never get elected for anything if there wasn't a -R after his name on the ballot.

Right? Or a loathsome specimen like Ted Cruz. Who gets fired up to vote for him?

I mean, their voters may not be overcome with emotion for the candidates themselves, but for a lot of them, casting a vote for the Republican on the ballot means voting for their values and sticking it to the other side. I guess what I'm talking about, though, is how to break through the noise and appeal to voters who either aren't paying much attention or are ambivalent/indifferent.

xps based on the (very few) R voters I have experienced first-hand in WI: they believe the claptrap about Johnson's business skills and expertise with money, as well as love the fact that Ds hate his guts, because they hate liberals in return

Right? Or a loathsome specimen like Ted Cruz. Who gets fired up to vote for him?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, November 8, 2022 4:10 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Anti-abortion people.

also they are scared of the sOcIaLiSt BlAcK mAn FrOm MiLwAuKeE xp

I couldn't begin to tell you how many mailers, door hangers, etc I have received with ominously-photoshopped, high-contrast greyscale images of Barnes alongside dire warnings of how he would bring crime from the cities to the peaceful small towns of WI

Was he one of the candidates whose skin got artificially darkened in opposition ads?

same with "Evers did nothing while Kenosha burned" messages—and I live in Kenosha, have heard directly from city officials and the (retiring R) sheriff that the governor gave them everything they asked for… that doesn't matter, the lie has been set

xp dunno but it would not surprise me one bit

this seems like good news?

BREAKING: talking w/ the Chair of the Wisconsin Dem Party @benwikler, who confirms youth turnout in Wisconsin is *360%* HIGHER than in 2018. If you're in Wisconsin, remember that there is same-day voter registration. Get out there & cast your ballot. 7 hours left. Let's win this.

— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 8, 2022

xp yeah, one of many

https://www.thebulwark.com/attack-ads-are-darkening-the-skin-tone-of-black-candidates/

every single Packer game so far there's been this attack ad against Barnes that says he wants to "cut the prison population in half" and every time I see it I say "that's a little extreme, the regular death penalty is enough"

love the fact that Ds hate his guts, because they hate liberals in return

Politics has been cynically called the systematic organization of hatreds.

I don't think that's so for everyone everywhere. But it certainly seems like "he has the same enemies as me" is a pretty good predictor of voting patterns.

Further, "would like to have a beer with" is often just a nicer way of saying "he has the same enemies as me."

In my hate-reading of various aoshq and donald.win and q stuff, there is loads of "I don't really have a politics except hating libs" greeted by "that's enough, fren."

Cruz skates in Texas because he has the strength of the Texas GOP behind him, which is what his voters are really voting for--he could be anyone.

He's a fitting avatar to a lot of exurban nebbish cowboys who take F-250s to their office building.

It really doesn't matter which lump of misshapen, swearing clay that someone hastily slaps a fake beard on, as long as there's an (R) after the name, it'll win.

meant sweating, but probably swearing too

Yeah but how does anyone get any inspiration from venal toads like, say, Ron Johnson? He'd never get elected for anything if there wasn't a -R after his name on the ballot.

Owning the libs, sticking it to those cultural elites who made a RAPPER one of the heroic agents on your favorite CBS military crime drama.

Yeah I think one of the organizational and vision-coherence problems for the left is that it's much less driven by anger, fear and resentment than the right. I know, Tucker Carlson's head would probably explode at that — I hope — but it's hilarious to me how so much right-wing rhetoric is dependent on painting Dems/liberals as these wild-eyed hateful maniacs. If only! Not that there isn't real anger on the left, at injustices and inequities, but it's more structural than personal. Where the anger on the right is all personal, all ad hominem, hating individual people. That's what Libs of Tiktok is all about, naming and shaming specific people. I listened to a local podcast today (for work purposes) where two right-wing lunatics were frothing about young adult books in school libraries with trans characters. The male co-host kept repeating that any person "exposing children to this pornography" should be "thrown out of a helicopter." He said that about 12 times, savoring the phrase more each time.

Where especially among middle-class and affluent liberals I think there's a real hesitance to personalize the fights, to see the other side as evil, there's an assumption that there's some reasonable way to work things out. And to distance themselves from anyone on the left they perceive as too angry. There's an anger gap, basically. And that's probably inevitable given the basic difference in right and left worldviews, the left worldview is inherently more inclusive as a primary value. But, like the man says, anger is an energy. If you don't have that to fire people up, you need something else.

the old Alex Cockburn story

Which brings me briefly to Ed Miliband, now chosen to be the leader of the British Labor Party. The last time I saw Eddie he was an intern at the Nation in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Round the corner from the Nation when it was on Fifth and 13th st in Manhattan was Zinno’s restaurant and amid a pleasant lunch with JoAnWypijewski, my own intern Richie McKerrow and Eddie, I asked the future leader what I asked all interns as a matter of form, “Eddie, is your hate pure?”

The man who first asked me that question was the late Jim Goode, editor of Penthouse. Like Playboy, Penthouse would pay good money for long articles about the corruption of America, thus giving the pointyheads an excuse to thumb through the pinups. Goode, tall and cadaverous, was gay, clad in black leather as he crouched on the floor of his office, gazing morosely at hundreds of photos of bare-breasted women. As I entered with some screed about corporate and political evil, he snarl, “Alex, is your hate pure?” “Yes, Jim, my hate is pure.”

It was a good way of assaying interns. The feisty ones would respond excitedly, “Yes, my hate is pure.” I put the question to Eddie Miliband. He gaped at me in shock like Gussie Fink-Nottle watching one of his newts vanish down the plug hole in his bath. “I…I… don’t hate anyone, Alex,” he stammered. It’s all you need to know.

Owning the libs, sticking it to those cultural elites who made a RAPPER one of the heroic agents on your favorite CBS military crime drama.

It will probably never happen but I am still holding out hope for a crossover episode in which NCIS:LA's LL Cool J meets L&O:SVU's Ice-T.

Bonus points if their suspect somehow ends up being played by Ice Cube

Where especially among middle-class and affluent liberals I think there's a real hesitance to personalize the fights, to see the other side as evil, there's an assumption that there's some reasonable way to work things out. And to distance themselves from anyone on the left they perceive as too angry. There's an anger gap, basically. And that's probably inevitable given the basic difference in right and left worldviews, the left worldview is inherently more inclusive as a primary value. But, like the man says, anger is an energy. If you don't have that to fire people up, you need something else.

OTM! The anger gap reminds me of how some liberals found Michael Moore's work distasteful for being too much like "propaganda" in its presentation, i.e., appealing to people's emotions/anger rather than calmly, bloodlessly presenting the facts. It's less present now, but candidates like Gore seemed to believe that firing people up was taking the low road.

(this is worse than a cigar in a waiting room)

where's the tax returns?

good afternoon!

hope you're doing well, alfred :)

Thanks, qualmsey, likewise. I've tried. Please come back regularly.