We’re gonna just continue to blame the Dems while ignoring that a massive online propaganda campaign brainwashed enough morons into voting again for a convicted felon who tried to steal the last election, and already had a dogshit first term? Even if you “fix” the dems, the propaganda will still paint whoever is representing them as worse than the fascist puppets on the other side, and the masses of dimwits will swallow it while thinking they’re enlightened centrists.
Propaganda doesn’t work if people are happy with their current situation.
BS, there were polls showing the massive disparity between how people responded to “how would you rate the current economy?” and “how would you rate your own financial situation?”, about 70% had said their own situation was good or very good yet a similar amount said that the countries situation was either bad or very bad. Absolutely brainwashed
Do you have links to these polls, please? I would be interested in knowing how they were carried out.
Here, I should’ve included them in the previous comment.
- https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good
- https://fortune.com/2024/05/30/economy-personal-finance-consumer-confidence-inflation-unemployment-jobs/
- https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances
This was also quite telling:
–Thanks for the links! I’m having trouble finding the exact questions asked, but when I look at the graph on this article: https://www.axios.com/2024/06/03/americans-finances-us-economy-outlook-divide
It says on the legend “Own finances (doing at least OK)” and “National economy (good or excellent)”. This is subjective, of course, but the bar for “OK” seems a lot lower than “good”. If someone asks how I’m doing and if things are going bad but I don’t want to burden them with my concerns, my go-to is “OK” or “fine” but never “good”. Simply feeling like I’ll get by is enough for “OK” but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m optimistic. This would explain the entire world locking down but personal feelings of finance remaining pretty steady except for a bump UP after massive financial stimulus before a dip back down as greedflation gobbled that all up and then some.
As for misinformed views, those will be influenced by whoever is in power. Assuming the economy remains steady (which is a shaky assumption given many factors), I’m sure the same poll done again would have strong democrat and republican supporters swap their sentiments even though the underlying didn’t change.
As for misinformed views, those will be influenced by whoever is in power.
The point is that Dems generally have more accurate assessments of what’s actually going on. Republicans are notoriously conspiratorial and misinformed and only getting worse. Even with republicans in power, you won’t see such misaligned views from the left.
There can be more than one lesson to learn from an election cycle. We need to learn all of the lessons. Accelerationism was a problem this election cycle. The right-wing information sphere continues to be a problem in the US.
The Democrats are not blameless either. Democratic consultants ran the Harris campaign into the ground and they are refusing to learn the lessons. As one of the two viable political parties, the Democrats are still our most useful tool out of those two political parties, but we have to recognize that they are neoliberals. edit: clarification
If the electorate consisted of 9 people who were doing fine, and one person that wasn’t, we would have 9 no votes and one person that voted to destroy the system that allowed the 9 to be doing fine.
Sadly this is true, but that’s the price for not participating in democracy
As an outsider it seemed more like they had an image problem than an issue with their concrete policies. Obviously it could be both but I got a sense people believed the dems were out of touch.
That is because the democrats have abandoned.the working class and use guilt and loyalty to effectively fool the middle class into policies favoring the wealthy.
Neither party is responsive to the working class because hourly wages are too low vs prices to allow for significant political donations.
So until actrue 3rd party catches the working class and moves american politics leftward, its just fewer and fewer with more and more.
Hence, keep people stupid so they dont figure it out.
There were plenty of problems with the concrete policies on offer.
‘most lethal military’, tough on crime, secure the border… it was ridiculous to see how far right the supposed left went in search of votes. Harris’s platform looked more like Trump’s from 2016 than it did Hilary’s.
“Look! Dick Cheney likes us!”
A cracked brick wall is more visible than a sinking foundation.
Nice metaphor
Democrats:
It goes beyond just that. I think a Democratic presidential candidate could do well addressing elitist thinking in general. I think they could do quite well with a pledge not to appoint anyone to their cabinet or to a court that graduated from an Ivy League school. One of the reasons we keep seeing the same shitty approaches is that both parties recruit heavily from the same handful of schools. This they’re recruited from the same social circles. I would suggest that candidates just flat out state that they’ll be filling all their major spots with people who got their education at state schools.
So we’re discriminating against possibly qualified personnel because they graduated from an Ivy League school (like JD Vance).
But not against the billionaires and millionaires trump is appointing?
Yes. Because social context and group think matter. The Democratic Party is indeed stuck in a coastal elite mindset. When I say school, it’s not even specifically about the kind of instruction the schools teach. It’s more about the social networks that have developed around these elite institutions. It encouragesc group think and narrow minded approaches. It’s why every Dem policy proposal is the same collection of wonkish tax credits. It’s why nationalizing the banks wasn’t one the table during the 2008 recession. It’s why they don’t know how to reach regular people. They just don’t know how to think any differently. Hell, look up the figures on federal judge nominations by law school attendance. It’s insane how much narrow minded we allow our institutions to be simply by primarily recruiting from a handful of elite schools and their alumni networks.
So we should dismiss people like Lina Khan because you want to virtue signal to “moderates” and “leftist” that Dems aren’t elitist?
It’s breathtaking how badly you missed the point here.
Next time there should be a populist movement to write in a progressive candidate. Why couldn’t a populist candidate overrun the DNC like Trump did with the RNC?
Because Trump does represent a lot of the policies that Republican party support. Christian nationalism, low taxes for the rich, white supremacy.
It was apparent when the Alaskan governor ran for VP. (I forgot her name.) It consolidated behind Trump because he was a buffoon who could be manipulated to get their main aims to be fulfilled.
None in the DNC would want anyone other than a establishment candidate to be theirs. This was true when Hillary was nominated, when Biden was nominated and also when Harris was nominated.
Biden would have lost too if not for the previous 4 years of Trump. With Harris promising to continue putting finger in her ears and walking the same path which might have given respite if people could have let it continue 4-8 years. But who knows if they would have lived to see those days.
It would be relatively easy to take over the DNC (and the state and local parties), but very few people outside the establishment know how politics within the party works
My state didnt even have spot where I could write someone in.
Because it’s hard for actually intelligent people to worship a moron.
Edit: actually you’re right… we could have had Bernie.
Whenever a populist candidate pops up, the dnc does everything it can to crush them.
Perhaps what is needed is a “progressive caucus pre-primary.” Have a party within a party. The progressives hold an unofficial primary in 2027 between anyone who wants to run under the banner. They hold debates, have some way of getting people to vote, etc. The progressive caucus holds debates and selects a single candidate to endorse. Then, going into the actual primary, the progressive voting base is entirely united around one candidate from the beginning. That candidate would also have a hell of a lot of momentum going into the primary as they would already have one wing of the party entirely behind them.
Shit that’s not a bad idea
They shouldn’t have existed ever. Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. My spelling may be off.
This is BS. People saying Kamala was too liberal, or too centrist, she was riding too much on Biden achievements or not enough etc etc.
The real reason for this is that majority of people no longer get their news from MSM, they get their news from social media which are hevily slanted for trump. Not only GOP understands how influential those are, but they are helped with foreign entities who are free to use these media as well.
This also isn’t just happening to US but also to Europe.
The fucking solution is to get your family off of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc. it is a cancer and essentially hacks their brain.
You might think that social media is great, because everyone can have a voice. This might be true for sites like Lemmy, but in other places what you post is irrelevant, because their algorithm controls what others see. It is very clever, because they can hide behind freedom of speech to not restrict the sites, while essentially still having full control of what it is shown and zero consequences.
With AI they don’t even need people anymore they can generate content themselves and say it is a real user.
Why do you think companies involved in social media are also heavily invested with generative AI?
There’s been a right wing media since the 1970’s, Xitter has always been an also ran social media site and while Facebook is the largest social media site it’s long past it’s heyday and is filled primarily with bots and boomers.
You’re getting everything backwards. The only reason why Democrats won in the past 50 years is because they have been riding on the their past actual progressive achievements like Social Security, Medicare, Good Stamps, The Civil Rights Act, etc.
Now that they’re done nothing but take turns with the GOP destroying those government safety nets there’s no goddamn reason for voters to vote for Democrats.
Oh and the whole reason why the right has a strangle hold on media is because of Democratic deregulation of media and telecommunications.
Yeah! People need to go back to trusting good ol cable news! They’ve never steered us wrong
The fucking solution is to get your family off of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc. it is a cancer and essentially hacks their brain.
What you’re implying here is that people aren’t smart enough to navigate social media intelligently, without being duped by propaganda and group think, yet you are.
Protecting dumb people by hiding them from social media, is a bad fix for a symptom of other major problems. Fixing symptoms like this is never a good solution.
What we need is education massively overhauled, to the point it would be unrecognizable to what we have today. People should have the critical thinking skills and educational background to laugh there ass off and shrug off
right wingpropaganda, and never let it take hold.This is a much bigger problem, and we’re losing significantly, but it’s what should be discussed instead of just hiding social media from people.
The social media sites are known to collect vast information about us. The explanation is that it is meant for targeted ads, but the same information can be also used to know which buttons to press.
You scroll between funny videos and once in a while you get something that maybe will anger you, or maybe scare and in any way impact what you will do.
Just taking a recent example. To pro Palestinian people they received messages that Harris is bad for Palestine and we can show her and protest by not voting.
Meanwhile the same social media was telling pro Israeli people that they should not vote for Harris, because she is pro Palestine.
This is how they are getting desired outcome. And unlike MSM they can fine tune the message to specific category of people.
Follow up question: how would this hypothetical educational reform even work? I fully understand that education funding in the US is very much at risk with darth cheeto coming back, but say you managed to creat this curiculum. How would it be different from what we currently have, and do you see a path of reaching it from our current system? (Would it require starting small with charter schools or is it something we could realisticly change with a large bill + funding)
Not trying to be a bother bear, but you proposed a solution so I want to see where the collective would take it.
Honest answer: I have absolutely no idea. I didn’t propose a solution per se, other than “change it drastically”. And more than just critical thinking skills.
The most important thing is we need a society where the people in power and decision making actually desire this. Our power structures don’t want this, as we all know. Keeping us dumb and uninformed, makes us easier to manipulate and control, and do the low paying jobs nobody really wants. Without this we can’t even think about major change. Our purpose to “produce and consume” is the foundation for the billionaires wealth.
I don’t have any answer on how to teach critical thinking specifically, we need smart people (altruistic, not power seeking or other agendas) to help architect this. All I know is anyone leaving k-12 should graduate with very good critical thinking skills as well as be scientifically literate, reading/writing, other necessities… Our current public education system just seems like an indoctrination to show up to a building 5 days a week to do boring monotonous tasks. My friends and I hated school, and having friends at a young age only made it bearable. Ironically, I and many people love to learn many different topics. I had to learn about this outside of school, how does that make sense? And I’m talking STEM related stuff! Things that are valuable to the capitalism machine!
How about we also emphasize finding individuals’ passions and natural skills, and helping them pursue them earlier, in addition to necessities.
I’d love to see some pretty drastic and crazy structural changes as well: imaging removing time as the fixed variable for learning. If you want to learn calculus, you’re going to learn the entire curriculum. Instead of getting a B “learning” 80% of the material on the test, you aren’t done until you master all of it. You get an A if you do it in 6 weeks. B if 10 weeks, etc. If you still haven’t mastered it in a year, you probably should come to the conclusion you’re not going to be a mathematician and choose something else… I love this idea but recognize how difficult it would be, how would it even work? This fixed time deadline nonsense is a capitalism thing. I hate it.
None of this matters though unless we get control. We need control first before even thinking about implementation and change.
Being influenced / tricked / conned has surprisingly little to do with being ‘smart’ or ‘educated’. Smart people can still be tricked.
A way to manipulate people is to give them plausible (mis)information. What counts as ‘plausible’ depends on a person’s education and interests; but there is always an area of vulnerability at the edges of a person’s understanding. That’s why there are so many different layers to misinformation campaigns. They are targeting different groups of people. And it is highly dangerous to start believing you can see through them all - because in reality, you only see through the ones that don’t target you.
One of the propaganda powers of algorithmically controlled social media is that it is if a user gives up enough of their person info, it makes it possible to automatically target that person with misinformation that is specially suited to their interests, circles of trust, and level of understanding.
… anyway, my point is that although education is always good; it doesn’t defeat propaganda outright.
Most people in the US do not have the requisite media understanding to navigate social media, or even media, for that matter, without being duped.
This is evident in the growth of the flat earth movement, and other literally idiotic movements.
Section 230 protection also needs to be removed. Let civil cases take care of misinformation and such. Currently content aggregators take no liability in what they choose to show in the their feed. Between sorting chronologically and machine learning, there is a line to be drawn.
I was initially strongly in defense of it, but it now benefits corporations and almost no private users (as it originally was intended). So removing it probably would be a net benefit. Or maybe make it only applicable to private people and non profit.
”and shrug off
right wingpropaganda" FTFYYeah fair enough.
“Nothing will fundamentally change” + “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”
Two killer statements.
To be fair Biden’s “nothing will fundamentally change” is a lot better with context. “There’s not a thing that comes to mind” is fucking inexcusable though.
To be fair Biden’s “nothing will fundamentally change” is a lot better with context.
To be fair, it became clear over the course of 4 years that it was correct at face value.
Simpson’s Skinner meme, “no, it’s the voters that are wrong”
Both can be true.
But only one lets the party keep ignoring the voters and moving to the right. So that’s the one the party will go with.
Everyone is in agreement: the takeaway for Democrats this election is to adopt my specific political views and eliminate any positions that I personally dislike.
I mean, I think were more arguing there’s clearly not a huge difference between the two parties and we need farther left representation instead of chasing centrist votes. I thought that was pretty clear.
Hahaha, good one. I’m sure that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
The message to Democrats is clear: (insert your agenda here)
Boring
The message is that they did absolutely nothing wrong and are in fact incapable of doing anything wrong. They cannot fail, only be failed by the stupid voters.
Based on the assumption that it was some economic issue, that lost them the votes, this article is pretty good.
You’re right, what about all those educated working class liberals who want to willingly vote against their own self interests?
The Democrats need to work harder to attract those people
Democrats: “Understood. We must try harder to win over the center-right.”
“center right”:
Honestly, we should have seen it coming with all the “nostalgia” for the Good Old Days of GWB.
Clinton is the last era before the shit hit the fan.
Enron, 9.11, the mideast war series, 2008, etc.
This was literally what the Harris campaign walked away saying.
And here I am nostalgic for the good ol days of Obama.
I do miss when my tax dollars got spent to keep American corporate greed from crashing the global economy, again, and merely continuing the neo-Crusades instead of escalating them.
That was a nice almost decade.
I’ve been called center right but I wouldn’t describe myself so. I’m right and left. It balances in the center but most centrist positions are corporatist and authoritative, and I hate both. Man did this election ever suck. I’m always stoked for the primaries and hoping to get a free thinker in the mix but this year we didn’t even get primaries.
It certainly is possible to manipulate people into becoming socialists, as it has historically been done several times in many places. But to think that the current american people at this point in time are friendly to far leftist ideals is 100% absurd.
If this is done without aforementioned manipulation, dumping neoliberal ideals will mean that Democrats will not be enjoying higher than 30% election results.
But Americans actually do like more socialist policies. There is a reason why Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare is known as the third rail of politics.
Removed by mod
Aren’t they more like at 45% popularity currently?
No. Trump only gets like 30%. And they got less than that in this run
