"Their echo chamber doubles as this country’s largest media networks."

November 9, 2024 11:30 AM

Liberals, provably out of touch with America, must change their media diet (slSplinter)
posted by box (182 comments total)

starting with "splinter.com"
posted by slater at 11:37 AM on November 9 [15 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News? I don't understand this person's argument -- the "must change their media diet" part. Yes, the Dems fumbled bad on economic issues, and that's a fault of what liberals watch?
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:42 AM on November 9 [13 favorites]

This is dumb. America is out of touch with reality. People believe inflation is up when it’s down. That crime is rampant when it’s at the lowest point in years. It’s true that mainstream media is less relevant but liberals reading it is not the problem.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:49 AM on November 9 [114 favorites]

I'm not convinced one political coalition is meaningfully more siloed than the other. Social media has everybody segmented up pretty tight and I'll grant that's a serious problem with managing a shared society, so I read this headline and the above-the-fold bit of the article and impulsively go to thinking, "Huh, what if they're right? I do know a lot of people who were blindsided and hurt by the election outcome. Maybe we all need to ways to broaden our perspective."

It occurs to me that if you wrote this article in 2020 or 2022 telling conservatives they were out of touch with America, their immediate response would be, "Fuck off."

So what, I need to give ground on understanding how the world actually works, but Fox News viewers don't? I have to suffer through a bunch of sensationalist bullshit about migrant criminals and climate change hoaxes to understand... what? Where does that get anybody? "Crime is down in my city but folks in the suburbs think its up so I guess we'd better lock up a bunch more people to keep their votes?" Like I'm not sure what's being proposed here.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:52 AM on November 9 [81 favorites]

The voters who drove this election supposedly overwhelming voted red due to economic anxieties. Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative. Now this article wants us to chuck the media that gave us economic reality (basically that we handled the post covid inflation better than most of the world and that Biden's progressive policies were subtle but solid in creating a sustainable path to lower inflation and stronger labor markets) in order to what...understand why we lost the election to an under-educated majority?
No thanks.
I'm not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle, other than to hope that the next two years are so patently awful that the same phenomena happens in reverse and the left wins back the legislative branch, driven by economic anxiety over actual bad policy and a collapsing economy and labor market. But of course no matter what happens, it will all be blamed on Biden and the magas will happily suffer just to continue to own the libs. Truly the dumbest timeline.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:02 PM on November 9 [55 favorites]

Okay, but those [economic] anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative

And you know what WOULD have been nice? Heavy and repeated communication from Biden, from Wednesday January 20th 2020 onward, in sixth grade-level plain language, about WHY egg prices are high or WHY supermarkets are raising prices 10% yearly. Not "Bidenomics", whatever the hell that was. Not Harris rambling about small businesspeople getting loans. Where the hell is James Carville when you need him?

So the DNC doesn't have a 24/7 Insoc telescreen megaphone like Fox? Then use some of that media-savvy-harper-reed mojo and find a way to hack the interwebs and get the correct news into TikTok and Instagram and whateverelsethefuck will work.

Sorry to rant, but if there's no way to shut off Fox News and the DNC can't herd the goats to find a workaround, then what are we talking about?
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:17 PM on November 9 [53 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.
posted by lucidium at 12:19 PM on November 9 [90 favorites]

I think the author did a poor job of expressing his point, but what I took away from it is that Democrats only talk about the things that concern them because they don't have any visibility into the things that concern people that aren't dyed in the wool Democrats.
I've actually been thinking for a few days that the fact that I don't have any social media and I run with an ad blocker means that I'm completely unaware of the type of b******* that most of the rest of the company is stewing in.
That doesn't mean that I need to start watching Fox News and believing the crap they're selling, but it does explain why I'm so incapable of understanding why anybody would vote for Trump--I don't know the messages that they're getting.
Yeah I know the most absurd examples (the kind that get mocked on liberal news sites and YouTube clips ), but the more garden variety misinformation that people are getting about things like the border and the economy and immigration and so forth I'm completely unaware of. I think that ignorance extends to most informed Democrats and probably also to most of the Democratic campaigns. I have a suspicion that the messages that were going out by the campaigns weren't speaking to the things people cared about because we were all (rightfully) afraid of creeping fascism that we fought against it instead of trying to win over the average uninformed voter as to how the democratic platform was actually great.
posted by Ickster at 12:20 PM on November 9 [22 favorites]

A shorter version of what I just wrote:

Because we don't understand the propaganda put out by the right we do a s***** job of counter propaganda.

Because we are generally intelligent and educated we tend to think that the stupidity and ignorance of the rest of the electorate is an unsolvable problem, but we don't have to educate if we can be more effective with propaganda. That might sound cynical but it's the only way forward.
posted by Ickster at 12:24 PM on November 9 [52 favorites]

I know I've said this in other threads, but I've recently come across The Tangle newsletter and podcast and it's great for this.
posted by coffeecat at 12:26 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

I spend all my time with working class brown and Black people who either voted for trump, considered it, or didn’t vote at all, and I have no substantial complaint with what this guy’s saying. In the months before the election, my deep blue friends kept posting this “wages are up; inflation’s down” bullshit on facebook. Nobody I know got a raise or had a prospect of a better job or cheaper groceries, so at some point, I imagine you get tired of being gaslit.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:31 PM on November 9 [41 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. For everything to get cheaper, that would require deflation which is its own kind of economic catastrophe.

We will never go back to 2019 prices, full stop.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:36 PM on November 9 [41 favorites]

>“wages are up; inflation’s down” bullshit

Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private

Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food
posted by torokunai at 12:38 PM on November 9 [13 favorites]

> I imagine you get tired of being gaslit.

Boy do I have some bad news for you!
posted by torokunai at 12:40 PM on November 9 [13 favorites]

(Sorry for posting repeatedly; still working this out in my own head.)

The point of the article is that we need to know the kind of information being fed to other people so we can counter it. What the piece missed is that simply spouting facts obviously doesn't fucking work (citation: November 5), so we need to learn propaganda and use it.

Posting links to the CPI and bitching that other people don't get it is like putting chess pieces down against an opponent who already set up checkers and then bitching that they aren't playing the game correctly.
posted by Ickster at 12:42 PM on November 9 [27 favorites]

It's not my job to dumb things down like that
posted by torokunai at 12:44 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

It's not my job to dumb things down like that

Well then I guess Dark Helmet was right. Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
posted by Ickster at 12:47 PM on November 9 [19 favorites]

We already tried fighting Russian-supplied disinformation on immigration, etc. with Russian-supplied disinformation on Gaza, etc.

Disinformation packaged and made palatable to one or the other side is still garbage information.

The problem was letting a terrorist state pick and promote some of the candidates, as well as guide our larger media options towards disinformation (including even from the paper of record), but it will require major introspection to get to a point where serious solutions will be considered and implemented.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:52 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

The thinkpieces claiming they've figured out how the democrats went wrong with the election are ... a lot of thinkpieces. This was a profound moral failure of the American people and it seems like everyone is dancing around that
posted by treepour at 12:52 PM on November 9 [79 favorites]

This sort of take is on point when you have a Nixon-McGovern style blowout. Last week’s election was determined by a handful of electoral college votes and when all the counting is done, it may show that the out of touch Democrats got the most votes!
posted by notyou at 12:55 PM on November 9 [15 favorites]

Disinformation packaged and made palatable to one or the other side is still garbage information.

Propaganda doesn't have to be misinformation.
posted by Ickster at 12:55 PM on November 9 [11 favorites]

Because we don't understand the propaganda put out by the right we do a s***** job of counter propaganda.

Our counter attempts are often sneering, which doesn't typically work. Knowing what the propaganda is doesn't help much if our only method for trying to change people's minds or behavior is through argument and derision. Honestly, though I don't know if I see that changing. I couldn't get people to stuff the attitude for five minutes in a mental health setting when it was their actual job, I don't think expecting random average citizens to be able to emotion regulate in the way this kind of deprogramming needs is likely to pan out. See, I'm not even doing it right now!
posted by brook horse at 12:55 PM on November 9 [21 favorites]

Note to self: Stop lecturing, start pandering.Got it. ;-)
posted by zaixfeep at 12:57 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

Hoover stomped Al Smith 444-87 (only the Deep South stuck with the Democrats) then it all flew apart in '29.

Reagan stomped Carter in 1980 thanks to the boomers flooding into the workforce in the 1970s, causing all kinds of inflation in housing and goods etc. Plus the twin oil market dislocations didn't help matters either. At any rate Clinton and the Dems retook power in 1992, only to lose it in the Gingrich revolution that gave us Graham-Leach-Bliley, laying the seeds of continued deregulation under Boosh that resulted in the GFC.

The people again turned to the Dems again, putting Pelosi in charge of the House in 2007 and Obama in the WH in 2009. Alas, that position in power was revoked in 2010 in the Tea Party revolts.

I'll skip current history since things are going to fall as they fall. It's going to be great to be a millionaire in this country this decade, even better to be a billionaire. Hope you got yours.
posted by torokunai at 12:57 PM on November 9 [10 favorites]

This was a profound moral failure of the American people and it seems like everyone is dancing around that.

It absolutely was for the type of dipshit fascist who went to Trump rallies, but there's still a surprisingly large number of people who voted based on vibes who are going to be pretty fucking surprised by what they voted for.

I'm not saying Democrats are to blame for those people being ignorant and lazy, but Democrats did a worse job of getting those people on their side than the fascists did.
posted by Ickster at 12:58 PM on November 9 [28 favorites]

when all the counting is done, it may show that the of touch Democrats got the most votes!

There's a vote gap of 4 million with 95% of the votes counted. Let's not kid ourselves, Trump won the popular vote.

But yes, it's tiny margins. Something like 26% of US adults voted for Harris, and 28% for Trump. The rest voted for neither.
posted by biogeo at 1:03 PM on November 9 [15 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper.

Also decimate actually means to destroy of ten percent of a thing.

If the people who vote equate "inflation" with "higher prices," you either have to educate them, or just accept that the meaning of the word has changed and use it the way the voters use it. I got a small raise last year. My spending power is down. I am technically poorer than I was before the raise. Don't fucking quibble with me about the meaning of inflation.

Harris and the democratic party went out of its way to talk about:

- border security
- gun ownership
- fracking
- police support
- American Imperialism
- genocide okay if it's Israel doing it

and I have to believe that was in part because every one of those news networks listed to the left of Fox kept saying inflation was down.

Liberals are out of touch with human beings. The left DOES need media representation. It does. not. have it. Look at that first graph. Starting at zero, you go 6 points to the left, and you get the New Yorker and Slate. Now go 6 points to the right of zero. You get Brietbart, Sean Hannity. Do these two sides seem balanced to you? I would argue that the publications on the "far left" of that graph are pretty centrist. And meanwhile it doesn't even list ONN or Tucker Carlson, which we know are fairly popular, because the centrist publications listed cover them.

Nazis used to be bad guys, and now they're just kind of accepted as one more shitty thing in this country. People will vote for a convicted felon child molester rapist, nbd, but you know what's the dirtiest thing you can call someone in this country? The word that both the left and the right eschew? Socialist.

So yah, there's nobody countering the right, because there's no widespread news media on the left.
posted by nushustu at 1:08 PM on November 9 [52 favorites]

The voters who drove this election supposedly overwhelming voted red due to economic anxieties. Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative.

Most of the Rs voted red because that’s the group they identify as and they’ve voted that way consistently for years. Economic issues are one of their preferred explanations but every election most of them voted that way for the same guys no matter how the economy is doing or who’s running it, more consistent with things like racism. Trump’s turnout dropped slightly but most of the narratives about this are misleading because the thing which drove point shifts wasn’t huge numbers of people changing sides but one side not showing up at a much higher rate. That is likely driven by economic concerns but it’s getting less attention because it’s people who didn’t show up and most reporters are looking at the exit poll data.
posted by adamsc at 1:08 PM on November 9 [9 favorites]

This article just described my boomer parents.
posted by iamck at 1:12 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

2016: TFG 62.9 Million vs. Clinton 65.8 Million
2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

TFG's numbers barely changed since the last election. He's likely maxed out his appeal. Those are the devoted R's who are going to vote R no matter what.

The Dems, on the other hand, lost 11 million voters. They didn't jump to the Republicans, so the argument that there's a big shift right in Americans, or that support for trans people cost the Dems votes from socially conservative minorities, is probably mostly bogus. The majority of those 11 million probably thought, "well, Trump obviously blows, but what the fuck have the Dems done for me these last four years? I can't afford my rent, etc. etc." And then the other 60 million potential voters couldn't be bothered because neither seemed to give a shit.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:18 PM on November 9 [40 favorites]

Socialism:

Old and busted: "The government takes your hard-earned money and gives it to lazy undeserving welfare types. Bastards!"

New hotness: "Y'know that rich Scrooge a-hole that owns your company and makes you work weekends and holidays for no pay? We're gonna tax the crap outta him and cut you a regular check from it. And NLRB will ensure he doesn't retaliate. How's that work for ya Skippy?"

Night and day.
posted by zaixfeep at 1:21 PM on November 9 [23 favorites]

Also decimate actually means to destroy of ten percent of a thing.

Actually it doesn't. Unless you're from the 16th century,

Don't fucking quibble with me about the meaning of inflation.

I wasn't quibbling with you at all, but I guess now we are quibbling. It is true that the public as a whole doesn't really understand what inflation is beyond "prices get higher." So the use of the talking point "inflation is down" is not gaslighting, it is merely ineffective and potentially counterproductive. It's hard to argue against the fact that the Dem messaging didn't get through as intended.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:22 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

Decimate is like marinate, just with powers of ten.
posted by zaixfeep at 1:24 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

The Dems, on the other hand, lost 11 million voters.

This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone, rather than for someone. That's disheartening and exhausting. I am not one bit surprised that people didn't turn out.
posted by nushustu at 1:25 PM on November 9 [21 favorites]

Liberals are indeed so, so out of touch. Liberals think voters still care about other people. That people are basically good. That they will work together to solve problems.

They think they can persuade Texans on abortion: “Women are dying!” You’re speaking to dead eyes and rictus smiles. When that Texan’s sister or daughter dies in childbirth, they’ll shrug. “Your body, my choice!” is all they’ll get in response.

They think they can persuade voters on rule of law: Surely this! For every transgression, each more egregious than the next. The killers sharpening their knives aren’t concerned about rule of law, and they hate you.

Governance, democracy, accountability, preparation, sustainability. They’ll make funny memes while they tear these apart. Propaganda has trumped reason and a huge chunk of the populace has gone totally fucking mad.

So yeah, the lib’s media diet is totally at fault.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:26 PM on November 9 [44 favorites]

I wasn't quibbling with you at all, but I guess now we are quibbling.

Nono grumpybear69 I apologize. I didn't mean you specifically. I meant this is what the news tells us and meanwhile I'm more broke so STFU news media.
posted by nushustu at 1:27 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

This New Republic article [paywalled] comes to a similar conclusion: this was a triumph of the Conservative media ecosystem. Conservative media is a well funded and ever growing ecosystem deliberately designed over the past 30 years to deliver the same propaganda messages to the public from as many different outlets as possible. At the same time, the Liberal media ecosystem, of which we are familiar, is struggling to survive financially.
posted by otherchaz at 1:28 PM on November 9 [10 favorites]

Dem messaging didn't get through as intended.

Not enough. However, in the swing states where Harris has a permanent comms (propaganda?) team, the Dem defections were only about 1/4 of the rest of the US.

Fighting Fox and X is probably more important than policy at this point.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:29 PM on November 9 [21 favorites]

Ground News attempts to sort the news by political leaning
posted by otherchaz at 1:32 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

The article notes that liberals believe in the NYT not just because it lines up with their beliefs, but that is seen as somehow authoritative, inasmuch as it is, after all, mainstream media. Point taken: we all know that Salon, Truthdig, Truthout etc. are lefty, and Rumble, Breitbart, Fox etc. are conservative. But even if liberals know that there is bias everywhere and that most media people are liberals themselves, I think that liberal news consumers feel, deep down, as if the Paper of Record really is truthier than more obviously biased news sources.
posted by kozad at 1:34 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

From the makers of Schoolhouse Rock, announcing NEW DEAL ROCK!
Democratic policy proposals and results, tailored to third grade reading levels and attention spans.

"Taxing the Rich, It's a Dandy Pitch"
"Clean Air and Streams, Make Ameica Gleam"
"Border Order, Let's Make the Line Shorter"
"Put Monopoly Man Back in the Can"
"The Flying Geriatrics and their Amazing Social Safety Net"

(gimme a C, a bouncy C...)
posted by zaixfeep at 1:38 PM on November 9 [9 favorites]

How partisan liberals generally perceive democracy, as a celebration of American institutions most people hate and a once every two-year effort to “save the country” from Republicans, is not at all how most of the rest of America sees it.

Well, okay boss, why don't you tell me how the rest of America sees it? As many others have pointed out, this article sucks even if it has a nugget of truth. It's true both that college-educated liberals like me have a completely different perspective than people who get their news from fucking Tik Tok, and also that there's a huge Russian/Republican propaganda meatgrinder hurling the most obvious bullshit at people who have every reason to believe the Dems are going to put college-educated people like me way up the priority list from them.

If I get to choose how the Dems respond to this, it's publicly set fire to anyone who worked on Clinton's or Harris' campaigns and exile them permanently from any position of discursive authority, then cancel all the media buys and put together a volunteer network of propaganda generators. The truth gets lost in a thousand lies, or whatever the expression is.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:39 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

According to a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, conservatives have been building out their media ecosystem since the 1970s

Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

George Lakoff:

There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

posted by otherchaz at 1:52 PM on November 9 [33 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.
posted by lucidium
Dear lord, Toonces the Driving Cat... is MAGA! I mean, Victoria Jackson was in the car... How did I miss that all these years?
posted by zaixfeep at 1:53 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

The point at which I became aware of how out of touch Metafilter-types, left-ish types, were was the August 7 couchfucker thread. Shitposting for the choir. I closed tab and started preparing myself emotionally for a Republican victory on election day. 24/7 propaganda about immigrants doing crime is far more effective than some vague bad vibes. Fox News is cocaine for retirees and Facebook is their fentanyl.

This article is itself delusional—almost no one reads the NYT. They glance at the headlines and do Connections. It’s a cooking and games app.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:54 PM on November 9 [12 favorites]

2016: TFG 62.9 Million vs. Clinton 65.8 Million
2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

Democratic states were in the middle of pandemic lockdowns. Ballots showed up in the mail, so people filled them out, because there wasn't much else to do.
posted by otherchaz at 2:01 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.

So, thought I've been musing on for a bit:

I worked closely with people with clinical levels of paranoia and/or psychotic delusions in my hospital job. You actually don't need to know what their version of reality looks like to be able to talk to and connect with them. I was particularly good at getting extremely paranoid people to sign paperwork (their least favorite thing). I also was dubbed "the only real person" on the unit by patients who thought they were living in a simulation and that everyone in the hospital was a robot or actor, which is still among the highest honors I've ever been bestowed.

The thing is, the techniques I used to get through to them were the same techniques I used on individuals who were completely attached to reality but misinformed. Like, it's a pretty basic formula, honestly. Listen, find something to validate, then say "yeah, I totally get that; and then when--" and slip in a counterfact or reality check as if you're agreeing even if it's totally contradictory to what they're telling you. It's genuinely shocking how well this works; you can basically see the moment where it slips past people's mental defenses and they're starting to agree back before they realize wait, hang on... but at that point you're talking again, and they don't have time to think about it more or go back and reject it.

I used this a lot on staff who were convinced patients were just being manipulative assholes. "He's just playing games with me, he knows who I am, he was just trying to embarrass me by pretending we were meeting for the first time!" "Oh yeah, so frustrating to have the same conversation again. And the fact that his brain is literally not encoding memories at all right now and making him forget stuff over and over makes it so much harder!" (You do have to practice sounding very genuine and not sarcastic.)

The important part is not trying to find a sense of logic to counter like a game where if you slot in the right information the correct behavior comes out. I never spent time arguing anything wasn't true, I just dropped facts in places that emotionally vibed and let the subconscious take it from there. And it worked really damn well, regardless of whether the person was attached to reality or not. (Uhhh, this makes me sound a little like a brainwashing cult leader, doesn't it? Fuck, is this how Trump's gish-gallop works?)

Now this isn't a universal solution. There was some portion of staff that would literally, genuinely, not talk to me at all. One of the most popular nurses took one look at my butch dyke genderqueer self and Matrix dodged for the entire year to avoid even ever saying hello to me and pressured her friends to do the same. An occasional patient would respond to "hi" with "shut the fuck up" and walk away. So obviously I couldn't get through to those people. But people who were willing to talk to me at all I could do something with.

As this applies to politics, I think there's a portion we will never reach, but I think there's a good chunk that we can still shift. There were a lot of staff on my unit who weren't fundamentally bad people but absorbed the daily toxic messages from other staff members who believed genuinely cruel things about our patients. Including anti-trans sentiments. I saw pretty drastic shifts in behavior in those people over a year--did they ever get 100% where I wanted them to be? Fuck, no. But it was movement, and in fact in several people it moved to the point where they were taking advocacy actions for trans patients completely unprompted. Not because they considered themselves trans advocates, but because "it just made sense." There are a lot of people that are mired in a social soup of garbage messaging, and I think it can be easy to underestimate how powerful a force that is and how disconnected it can be from people's actual values.

Luckily, if you do it enough, people start to realize their social environment fucking sucks and seek out better spaces. I don't have to do this much at all any more with my mother in law, who left evangelical churches and returned to her local Native community and gets almost none of this toxic messaging anymore. But none of that involved keeping up with evangelical messaging or knowing how to debate facts about the Bible with her. It just involved a lot of emotional validation packaged with talking about my own reality as if it didn't contradict hers. Even--or rather especially--if it obviously massively did.

I dunno, maybe this doesn't make any sense. But that's my two cents on whether we need to be brushing up on the latest rightwing misinfo. (I do think we need to seek out more information about perspectives different from our own, but a newspaper isn't the place to get that, anyway.)
posted by brook horse at 2:19 PM on November 9 [160 favorites]

My primary supplier of media is just YouTube on my AppleTV. 99.999% of the political stuff was generic "Biden economy sucks" stuff being pushed in front of me. I'd pop over onto my laptop to refute what I could in the comments but I knew I was a) just boosting the channel's engagement and b) pissing in the wind of disinformation.

There are things that are going to get broken in the next 4 years that aren't going to be rebuilt in my lifetime. New Deal (SSA, unions), Great Society (Medicaid/Medicare), 1970s Environmentalism, "ObamaCare" as we know it . . . all on the chopping block because we 'can't afford it'.

The good news is that the GOP didn't have to steal it this year, it was gladly handed to them by the swing voters of WI, MI, and PA.

I would say pass the popcorn but I hope to cut back my ingestion of media to like how it was 30 years ago when I was living in Tokyo with no TV, no to not-much internet, and news was very far far away from me, except when eg. Gingrich shut down the airports over budget fights one year.
posted by torokunai at 2:23 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

we need to know the kind of information being fed to other people so we can counter it.

If "we" means "Democrats in government/leadership positions", not "us non-Republican average citizens", then I'm on board with "we" getting more of an education in Fox News et al. A revised Democratic messaging needs to come from those who wish to govern, not through heated arguments over dinner or the internet.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:23 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

Also...

Metafilter: You do have to practice sounding very genuine and not sarcastic
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:24 PM on November 9 [21 favorites]

A to a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, conservatives have been building out their media ecosystem since the 1970s

Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

The glaringly obvious answer is that those with enough money to build entire media ecosystems were funding the conservative version, since that is the one that aligns with their interests.
posted by eviemath at 2:29 PM on November 9 [19 favorites]

So, thought I've been musing on for a bit:
posted by brook horse
Whole comment flagged as Fantastic.

Also:
(Uhhh, this makes me sound a little like a brainwashing cult leader, doesn't it?
TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. ;-)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:30 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM

VOULL NE XATA VOK, MARA LOHK?
posted by brook horse at 2:45 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

Propaganda has trumped reason and a huge chunk of the populace has gone totally fucking mad.

In a country founded on chattel slavery and genocide, it’s pretty fucking clear that a large percentage of us were never decent or sane to begin with.
posted by ryanshepard at 2:52 PM on November 9 [28 favorites]

OWA. TAGUU. SYAM.

Say it quickly a few times...
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:53 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

That was an excellent post, brooke horse. Thanks for sharing it.

I think in order for us to have any hope of moving forward, we need to accept that people are like this. Historically, this is true. I think labels like ‘indecent’ or ‘insane’ might be true, but I don’t think they serve us. I also believe people are, on the whole, much more malleable and manipulable than we think them to be. Whatever the case, getting angry or despairing at the brainworms of people who are rabidly antivax, racist, MAGA, whatever — it won’t change anything. People have always, always been that way, and we need to figure out what to do with that reality.
posted by caitcadieux at 2:59 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

What the Republicans and corporations have been doing since Gingrich is burning down the house and covering the ashes in bullshit. The reason there’s no left / dem version of this is that a lot of us believe that spreading misinformation is morally wrong. I mean I double fact check before a post on Facebook. I don’t want a left Fox News, nor do I want an American Castro and Che Guevara murdering a bunch of people.

Also I talked about personal responsibility and free will in the big thread but I really don’t think being a poor person in a tough place excuses voting for Trump. Are they not men? “Or women” (Monty Python voice). And for white men in general, I hope your gas costs $20 a gallon and your wife leaves you for an immigrant lesbian. I’ve been warning people literally since the first MTV reality show that they were going to get stupider. And they have. Who the fuck thinks Joe Rogan is a smart guy? My kids are grown and I’ve told them that if they ever vote Republican, I’m disinheriting them. I think everyone else should too.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:13 PM on November 9 [12 favorites]

MetaFillter: We need to accept that people are like this.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:14 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

What I mean by that is that they do exist and by all accounts they aren’t going to change. It doesn’t mean we need to be cool with it (I sure as hell am not). But wrapping things up with “I don’t need to dumb things down for stupid people!” doesn’t solve the problem.

Honestly your comment is such a bad take on what I posted I’m a little astonished, zaixfeep.
posted by caitcadieux at 3:18 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

I feel we also need to consider a further conundrum (as always I may be wrong). If I'm an elected Dem official, and I carry out my mandate -- affordable health care, strong social safety net, good-paying jobs etc. -- my constituents will eventually find themselves healthy, secure and prosperous. But if my typical voters become healthy, secure and prosperous, they are going to want to protect what they have, so many will start voting Republican. So my best path seems to be to never quite deliver what I promise, otherwise I'm out of a job after the next election.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:31 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

Splinter: The Truth Hurts

Y'all, this entire blog is just an epic troll. You can tell from the subtitle. Stop wasting your time on it.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:41 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

caitcadieux, my comment was intended as a humorous/ironic comment on our own community here -- a gentle ribbing -- and I felt your sentence would be a fit for the long-running customary MetaFilter: {parody slogan} meme. Apologies. Ding me if you wish for being crass, but not for insulting you.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:41 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

Y'all, this entire blog is just an epic troll. You can tell from the subtitle. Stop wasting your time on it.
posted by AlSweigart

Good call. We really shouldn't expect more than that from a rat who bosses around a bunch of cute turtles.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:45 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Oh, got it, zaixfeep. Thanks for clarifying — my apologies for reading such a negative tone into it.
posted by caitcadieux at 4:09 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

>This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone, rather than for someone. That's disheartening and exhausting. I am not one bit surprised that people didn't turn out.

Yes, but the someone wants to burn your house down. "Nobody made me feel inspired or motivated to get out and vote FOR someone, instead of merely AGAINST the guy who wants to burn my house down and make me eat a plate of shit every day." Seriously?

I suspect four years of the greater evil will make everybody more enthusiastic for the lesser evil. I also suspect by then it'll be too late.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:27 PM on November 9 [24 favorites]

I'm not going to read this, because I'm avoiding most of these "where the Democrats went wrong" exercises in finger-pointing. They ran too far to the left!, say the centrists. They ran too far to the right!, say the leftists. They talked too much about trans kids! They didn't talk enough about Gaza! In every case, people are projecting their preconceived opinions onto the election results, without much data to back them up.

I think the answer is not particularly ideological. It's close to an iron law of electoral politics that voters tend to punish incumbent parties when they are having a tough time economically. A lot of people still feel strained by the effects of inflation in the last few years. The Dems were the incumbent party, in the White House, anyway, and their suffering at the ballot box as a result is pretty unsurprising.

The same thing is happening all over the world, and it really doesn't seem to be about ideology. Consider that in the last year or so, incumbent conservative governments in Poland and the UK have been replaced by more left-leaning ones, while center-left coalitions in France and the Netherlands have been replaced by more right-leaning ones.

Derek Thompson notes that:

For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share

...and the chart he provides shows that the Democrats lost less vote share than almost any other incumbent party ... which suggests that they made the best of a bad situation.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns Money amplifies this:

[T]he shift [to the Republicans] was notably less pronounced in the contested battleground states, which is the opposite of what you would expect if Harris ran a poor campaign. There is no such thing as a flawless campaign but Harris had much higher net approval ratings than Biden, correctly identified the most competitive states, improved Democratic margins there, and was notably more competitive than other incumbent parties have done since COVID inflation (or than Trudeau is looking).

So: Dem leaders, and Dem voters, shouldn't beat themselves up too much about this loss. It's a disaster for the country in all kinds of ways, but there's probably little or nothing that they could have done differently to get a better result.

This may be a hard thing for a lot of people to accept. People want to believe that someone is in charge and will solve their problems -- or if they don't solve them, that they should have been able to. We all tend to look to our politicians like surrogate parents -- people who we can rely on, or at least people who we can blame for failing us if things don't turn out the way we want. But sometimes, voters just make poor choices, and shit just happens. And we just have to live with the results for a while.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:18 PM on November 9 [57 favorites]

^ unless a deadly novel virus sweeps through and wipes out ~300,000 people here the first year
posted by torokunai at 6:37 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

For what it’s worth, I voted for Obama in his first term. In every other election in my long lifetime I voted against the Republican by voting for a Democrat. I doubt my perfect candidate would please enough people to get elected. And nobody checks as many boxes as the “hell no” boxes of the other side.
posted by zenzenobia at 6:51 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

Not every liberal signed on to be a cult de-programmer well-versed in whatever misinformation is trending. Some of us just want to get the actual news.
posted by lemonshush at 6:57 PM on November 9 [15 favorites]

I'm with Greg_Ace. People who work in news or politics probably do need to figure out how to connect with the hypothetical Good Americans who accidentally voted for a fascist and convince them to not do that again. That would be a good thing to do! I wish them luck.

I am a private citizen with a boring job that, by design, doesn't involve talking to people much. I do not owe Trump voters the benefit of the doubt, or my scarce and precious free time. They have made my life harder and my free time scarcer. If I had infinite free time to read the news, a small amount of what poisoned the Trump voters might be useful? But I am already tired.
posted by mersen at 7:26 PM on November 9 [15 favorites]

It feels like the author is more concerned that people aren’t in the echo chamber he wants them to be in.

I do think the whole echo chamber thing is overblown in this way. I think those who use it are more upset when their article/tweet/post/blog is rejected by someone. Then it’s all “you disagree with me, therefore you must be in some kind of echo chamber.”

I think the larger problem is information overload and meme-ification of news. We live in big complex systems and people fall into a sort of paralysis when trying to understand what’s going on. So memes and sound bites fill the void which are also easily exploited to spread propaganda. I do think the so-called “main stream media” has eaten its own tail on that front - lack of differentiation between opinion and news, defunding journalists and in-depth reporting, etc. Google and Facebook eating up online advertising hasn’t helped either, resulting in click-bait headlines.

I don’t know what the answer is to our media quandary, but I don’t think it’s what the author is proposing… if he’s really proposing anything at all.
posted by eekernohan at 7:33 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

I live in a pretty red state and the whole premise of this article is bonkers from my point of view. The right's media arm is impossible to avoid, it's lliterally everywhere

Anyway it's a bit pointless to worry about what the Democrats should or should not have done or should be doing now. Electoral politics isn't a vehicle to combat authoritarian governments
posted by lescour at 9:11 PM on November 9 [10 favorites]

Sheesh. Fox News has the largest viewership of any news org in the U.S., and they happily tell lies about their preferred candidates, and have done so for years. You can't counter the entire Land of Make-Believe they've built since before Obama came along with logic or truth because people have their own logic, their own truth. They are fully on board with being gaslighted- look how many people who voted for Trump counter with "oh he doesn't mean the things he says" or "he's not actually going to do those things he said". The same folks will also tell you that China is going to pay a lot of money in tariffs, and that immigrants are eating cats- because Trump said so. You can't persuade people that have grown up in this system of misinformation with logic or truth- they refuse to take in anything that makes them slightly uncomfortable, and they've been told they don't have to, but instead they have the right to shut up or shut down anyone that does so. I don't know how you fix such a visceral aversion to learning anything that may shift one's world view, but this article certainly isn't the answer.

The "weird" campaign was probably the most effective tactic because it was 100% vibes, and some fool political posturer working for the dems shut it down.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:17 PM on November 9 [13 favorites]

Mod note: One removed and commenter given a day off. It's all over the guidelines and policies as well as many, many mod notes, and even below the comment window as a reminder: Do not attack other members. Just share and explain your own thoughts and views if they are different, don't curse at someone for making an observation of their own on the situation under discussion.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:13 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News?

I mean, the two indie journalism outlets mentioned in the very first graf, Zeteo and Drop Site News, are on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Fox News—they're both leftist outlets. They're clear about their political orientation, and they do great reporting.

But you're never going to understand the thesis of the argument until you understand that "liberalism", in the 21st century and especially in the US, is a center-right ideology. I get that that fact upsets a lot of people, including on MetaFilter, but liberals are not on the left.
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:36 PM on November 9 [26 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. For everything to get cheaper, that would require deflation which is its own kind of economic catastrophe.

We will never go back to 2019 prices, full stop.

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted. They wanted lower prices. Telling people they can't have what they want lost her the election.

Would deflation have been as bad as another trump term? To billionaires and their pet economists maybe. To regular people almost certainly not.
posted by zymil at 2:02 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Gonna read the thread now but my first thought was, "not out of touch with decency, at least."
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:50 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

I'm so sick of people always pushing "tHe EconOmY, stupid!" every presidential election. The only time I'm aware of the economy deciding an election was the FDR landslide of 1932. I guess its explicatory attractiveness lies in having nice things like numbers and theories. All the other elections since have been victims of war fears or cultural externalities "He has nice hair and teeth! Hippies on drugs killing people! Black criminals walking free! He played saxophone on Leno!, etc." This election was won and lost by women. And crazy people. I will admit, however, that the next election could very well be concerned with our economy.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:51 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted.

I heard her talking about lower prices multiple times, and its not like I hung on her every word, so it's not as simple as that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:51 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

They are fully on board with being gaslighted- look how many people who voted for Trump counter with "oh he doesn't mean the things he says" or "he's not actually going to do those things he said".

I have seen both of them ad nauseum in the same social media comment threads. Reality is optional, now. I don't think Democrats could change that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

(Oh, and also, "he never said that" and "that video/sound bite is fake")
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election

I believe someone else was president at the time. Vance did this very well, too. Implied that everything that happened under Biden was Harris's plan/idea. VPs in general have very little power, and what they do have depends on their working relationship with the president.

And simply talking about price controls wouldn't have helped. A recent study showed that voters preferred Harris's policies to Trump's if they were not told who proposed them.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:46 AM on November 10 [11 favorites]

Seconding the New Republic article chaznet linked to, Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? (which wasn't paywalled for me).
posted by Rash at 6:07 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

zymil said: Would deflation have been as bad as another trump term? To billionaires and their pet economists maybe. To regular people almost certainly not.


Rapid deflation is, in fact, pretty bad for working people, historically. Businesses typically respond by reducing their costs through layoffs, wage cuts, and production cuts.

And if you currently owe money, deflation makes this worse: the money you owe is now "more money" in real terms. Loan debt hits you worse. Credit card debt hits you worse.

Banks pull back on lending, too, since deflation means you lose money when you loan it out instead of sitting on it. Or they push for a big jump in interest rates to compensate for the effects of deflation. Either way -- and sometimes both ways! -- existing debt costs debtors more during a deflationary period, and the opportunity to get a loan to buy a home or a car becomes more limited.

The wealthy typically respond to inflation by cutting back on spending and investing. It promotes wealth hoarding, and makes simply saving up a lot of money into a reliable reliable source of passive income, since the value of each dollar increases on its own by definition.

Farmers and small businesspeople also get screwed by rapid deflation. The things they produce and sell drop in price.

In the U.S., the depression of 1839-1843 and the Panic of 1893 (which had negative effects lasting until 1897) were deflationary in nature, and the robber barons did just fine. It was the workers and the folks with savings accounts who got screwed, along with smaller banks that lacked the cash reserves to survive bank runs.

The Great Depression was a deflationary spiral, and that's part of why it lasted so long and hit so hard. Money got scarce, producers of goods cut back, people lost their jobs, so purchasing power decreased further, so production declined further....

Part of why a steady, low level of inflation is the usual goal in an economy is that deflation is generally Very Bad Indeed for most people, and is worse if you have less money or if you have debts than it is if you have more money.
posted by kewb at 6:10 AM on November 10 [13 favorites]

In reference to what the article is actually saying, I think what we're seeing in terms of neoliberals and neoconservatives living in two different media bubbles is the effect of modern Americans self-selecting their news sources entirely in a way that was, if not impossible, at least unworkable and would have required a great deal of effort as recently as twenty years ago.

At least since the mainstream adoption of network TV, Americans generally had a few widely agreed-upon news media sources. There were obviously newspapers, magazines and talk radio shows that espoused deeply slanted political perspectives on the world, and/or provided deeper dives on certain topics, much as we have today. But more importantly, you also had generalized news sources that most people agreed were accurate (no one thought that Walter Cronkite was gaslighting them) that provided a baseline of shared information that the average, non-crazy person believed to be the truth. (One lasting legacy of this, unfortunately, is the guileless boomer that believes everything they see on Fox News or read on Facebook, because how could they say that if it wasn't true??)

We don't have this anymore, but what that doesn't mean is that we do have a shared awareness that our individual perspective on the world isn't necessarily shared by our neighbor. We do not, I think it is safe to say, generally understand that our take on reality is straight up not necessarily the take of the person standing next to us. If I think, "Trump is a nazi!" my neighbor, who voted for Trump, may not be thinking, "Fuck yeah, nazis kick ass, bitch!!!" He may be thinking, "This gaucherie I voted for is an abomination, but ultimately he will allow our once proud nation to...retvrn," or he may be thinking, "Shit, man, I just want to be able to order a pizza and not sweat where that $20 is coming from," or he may be thinking, "At last the pizza pedos will go back to Soros Island, where they belong!" or he may be thinking, "Hitler! Aw yeah!" or he may be thinking something else altogether, something I could only understand if I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast, a thing I will never do but which millions of people are doing at this very second.

It is literally impossible for any human being -- regardless of their motivation, political persuasion, or massive bank of free time -- to absorb every news (and "news") source in an effort to understand his, her or their fellow humans. It can't be done. But it may be important to understand that these competing news (and "news") sources are out there, and that just because we find them distasteful, that doesn't mean people aren't listening to them.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:18 AM on November 10 [10 favorites]

Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative

We need a term for this, liberalsplaining? Like the economy sucks for a lot of people and inflation has been higher than it has been in like what, 35 years? My high grocery bill is driven by right wing media?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:29 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

People’s brains are pickled by billionaire-owned social media like TikTok, YouTube, and the Meta platforms (Instagram, Facebook), which take contextless clips from podcasts and livestreams and warp the truth.

We need to secure political power to break up Google and Facebook, with candidates with the political will to so. Otherwise we’re just moving the deck chairs.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:29 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

Oh! I forgot, the most important part about those shared, widely agreed-upon news sources was their accessibility. Network TV news? It was free. Everyone in America had a TV. A newspaper? Not entirely free, but very cheap, and available everywhere. The more individuated the news source, generally, the more you had to seek it out, the more you had to pay for it. A person who bought a newspaper and read deeply enough to hit the editorials would encounter both barrels of that outlet's bias, but most readers probably read the front page and skipped directly to the sports or the comics or the crossword puzzle.

Without this agreed-upon baseline of reality, you will have a world where everyone has their own facts.

How do we re-establish a kind of baseline consensus reality?

I don't know.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:30 AM on November 10 [8 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted. They wanted lower prices. Telling people they can't have what they want lost her the election.

1. Harris is not the president and can't institute anything! Has nobody watched Veep?
2. Even if somehow she could magically wave a wand and institute price controls across the entire economy, lowering the prices of all goods and services, that may (but probably wouldn't) have won her the election, at the cost of massively screwing over the economy.

So, yeah, maybe Harris should have lied a bunch about things she was going to do that she could then not follow up on, because that's what voters want - to be lied to, told what they want to hear, no matter how unreasonable or untenable.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:59 AM on November 10 [8 favorites]

> inflation has been higher than it has been in like what, 35 years

had been higher.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A6Ih

What caused it? The story of 2021 was that inflation was transitory as we transitioned from literal shutdowns. Was it? What tools did the Administration have to fight it? Why did all the money go to the wealthy?

Again, a very large bite of post-COVID inflation was rents, we're talking rent rises of hundreds per month for everyone. How is the Federal government empowered to fight that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/rent-average-by-county-change-rising-falling/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/states-rank-private-equity-influence-housing-health-care-jobs-pensions-rcna146818

Inflation, along with immigrants raping and killing people, and transsexual people playing in girls or boys sports were great kitchen table issue to run on of course. MMT proponents say inflation can be fought with tax rises, but since the 1994 Gingrich takeover they are entirely off the table now.
posted by torokunai at 7:05 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

The cause is irrelevant. What matters is how voters assign responsibility. And when the economy sucks they blame the person at the top. Denying the economy sucks is foolish
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:09 AM on November 10 [6 favorites]

> Denying the economy sucks is foolish

The Biden admin and Dem majorities passed the Inflation Reduction Act so it was of course on their radar.

Did things suck? Wages are up 25% since 2020. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but that's not how the economy works.

What policy mistakes were committed in 2021-22? Should we have just let the system crash a la 1929-33?

I own my own home (and enjoy Prop 13 protections on tax rises for that matter) and my wages are up way more than the hit I see at my weekly visit to Trader Joes.

Trudeau stuck his foot into this same shit pie last year.

I get it that it's politicking 101 but annoying in that negative campaigning is so much more powerful than honest campaigning.

Employment-wise, things have never been better:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

Maybe we'll finally get that recession the GOP has been hoping for since 2021.
posted by torokunai at 7:22 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

> For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share

fwiw, ireland called a snap election friday and goes to the polls in a few weeks with another harris leading an incumbent party/coalition, which is riding high on a "cost-of-living package" + Housing for All & infrastructure. helping the campaign?

Week starting November 4th

This week, starting November 4th, will see four cost of living supports made. These include the €400 Working Family Payment, the €400 Disability Support Grant and the €300 lump sum payment for households in receipt of the Fuel Allowance.

The first of two Double Child Benefit Payments will also be made this week.

Week starting November 11th

During the week beginning November 11, a €400 lump Carer's Support Payment will be issued to carers. There will also be a €200 Living Alone Allowance paid to widows, widowers and other single-person households.

Week starting November 25th

Meanwhile, a €100 lump sum for people in receipt of the Child Support Grant, formerly known as ‘Qualified Child’, will be paid on the week beginning November 25th.

Week starting December 2nd

The second once-off double payment of Child Benefit for each child will be paid on December 3rd.

The Christmas Bonus Double Payment will be paid on the week commencing December 2nd.

funding the bounty for ireland's citizens? a record tax haul from multinational corporations you probably know (which are in ireland to evade taxes to begin with, granted! but also, loopholes have since shrunk if not closed entirely).

guess what? improving people's living standards materially gets them to vote for you!

also, while not a "developed country," it's worth mentioning mexico just went through its own historic realignment the other way -- led by (phd energy engineer) claudia sheinbaum -- with her socialist morena* coalition winning reelection by huge margins. that doesn't mean all is bread and roses. brutal cartel killings are a direct challenge and AMLO's constitutional overreach threatens mexico's judicial independence -- and democracy. but i do think it pushes back against the notion that incumbent parties all lost this year and were somehow helpless to do anything about it. which, if that is how people perceive things, maybe do stuff to change their perceptions?

---
*Ideology:
Anti-neoliberalism
Progressivism
Socialism of the 21st century
Left-wing nationalism
Left-wing populism
Latin American integration
posted by kliuless at 7:42 AM on November 10 [19 favorites]

Did things suck? Wages are up 25% since 2020.

There are these parallel worlds.

People in industries where there's good job growth and where people can change jobs *relatively* easily are doing fine. People in private-sector union jobs are mostly doing okay as new contracts come up, like the folks in the UAW, but are probably hurting until it's time for that new contract.

Retired people are objectively probably doing okayish since their income is a mix of stuff that's tied to the inflation rate and investments.

But there are also a lot of people like me -- people who work for state governments where you're in a world of 2-4% colas, people (also like me) in industries where they can't realistically switch jobs without uprooting your whole life and moving across the country, people in lines of work where they're still very disposable. I made more in 2000 than I do now, and the only reason I didn't make more in 1998 was that I was still in grad school.

It will be a cold day in hell before I vote republican. But honestly the "everything is actually great, you idiot" messaging kinda pisses me off. Shit sucks. I used to just go wegmans and buy shit and not really pay attention to the total. Now I gotta plan out buy this at wegmans and the other thing at walmart and aldi is good for this and remember to get this shit at bjs and I fucking hate it. Yeah great tvs are still cheap. I don't need a tv.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:05 AM on November 10 [40 favorites]

Not to mention buying a house.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:18 AM on November 10 [8 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News? I don't understand this person's argument -- the "must change their media diet" part.

In my house, we watch the news every morning. We start out with Al-Jazeera, then move to DW, then move to American News with the express intent of seeing what the rest of America is being fed. We don’t watch it to learn truth, we watch it to learn what propaganda our neighbors are being exposed to. And it makes us really, really good at talking to our neighbors about politics and of predicting the outcomes of elections. Both of us predicted Trump would win, we just thought we were being overly pessimistic/paranoid. It turned out we weren’t.

Changing media diet doesn’t mean believing all media - just widening your exposure.
posted by corb at 8:27 AM on November 10 [10 favorites]

This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone

I was in southwestern France last year, some of that time in rural areas away from the mainstream. At one of the smalltown hotels that I checked into, the owner struck up a conversation with me...and spent a good 20 minutes in a polemic about what a horrible person Macron was.

The thing is, after all that talk, I could never figure out if he was criticizing Macron from the left or from the right.

The French decided that they hated Sarkozy, and the UMP/Republicains got hollowed out. Then they got Hollande and the traditional Socialists, everybody decided they hated Hollande, and the Socialists have shrunk to minor party status.

Now everybody hates Macron (justifiably on some issues, in my opinion). Le Pen and the far right are still...barely...considered to be indigestible. Mélenchon and the left don't have enough support to take over.

They've gone beyond the U.S. two-party system, they've had at least five choices, and decided against all of them. So everybody hates everything, nobody has a path forward.

In the U.S., I've heard a lot of bullshit from TV pundits this week. One of the only legit pronouncements I heard was a guy saying "people are sitting around unhappy, and the ones who did vote went out to vote against something, without really thinking about it".

And, that there was a good chance that the pendulum would swing back and gripey, low-info voters would vote against Republicans in the midterms--again--as yet another protest vote.

At that point, Democrats might take back Congress, barely and weakly, and declare a big mandate for change, and accomplish nothing. Maybe staunch a bit of the bleeding from the wounds of the 2025-2026 cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Someday that cycle runs out, but it's still not clear what happens when entropy kicks in and that pendulum stops. In the meantime, we get disorder and the slow collapse of society.
posted by gimonca at 8:35 AM on November 10 [9 favorites]

This discussion is so unreal to me.

Biden inherited a situation similar to if not worse than what was handed to Obama in 2009.

Also similarly, Pelosi had been returned to power as leader of the House two years prior and the Dems had a razor-thin majority in the Senate coming into office in the crisis year.

2009 saw ARRA etc, and 2021 saw ARP, and also the Fed expand its balance sheet (i.e. MMT):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A7R3 shows the bulk of Fed intervention came in 2020, with a topping of continued bond buying, mostly in mortgage bonds to lower rates to generational lows:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A7TQ i.e. high 3s to high 2s.

Of course, lowering rates won't actually make housing less unaffordable, since that's impossible short of literal decimation of the population. Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

Anyhoo, back to the unreality of it. . . then in 2022 IRA and the infrastructure bill was passed and the electorate in its infinite wisdom gave control of the House back to the GOP and that was it as far as the Biden admin was concerned, like how Obama's 8 year admin was shut down in 2010.

The Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" vs the "sucky" status quo is the choice we had last week, and enough suckers have bought into it (or stood aside). The Second American Revolution is indeed coming, and it will be bloodless I guess, depending on further events.
posted by torokunai at 8:46 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Maybe I missed it but what were the biden administrations attempts to expand the housing supply?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:16 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

From my situation--Midwestern urban, middle class, settled but not wealthy--I've been facing two challenges as I countdown to retirement:

1. Homeowners insurance. This is becoming the largest item in my household budget. It's way higher than property taxes. Climate change is a factor here, both paying for people in Florida, and paying for local damage due to hailstorms. Republicans will do jack shit to help anyone on this issue, and if we deport a big chunk of our home construction and repair workforce, prices will spike for construction jobs, and homeowner's insurance will get pushed even higher.

2. Cost of health care. I'd like to go on Obamacare for a fairly short period before hitting age 65, but sheesh, it's expensive. I have to pay full price out of pocket and hope I get something back in a tax refund later. At my age, I can't just "wing it" and do without. And if it's this daunting to me, I can image how much harder it is for people with fewer resources to fall back on, not to mention for people who live in states where Republican regimes have hobbled it even further. And Republicans want to roll back the clock twenty years to an even worse scenario, where people lose the meagre protections and access they have today.

This isn't to discount many other very real issues that people face, these are just two of the ones that are in my immediate future.

There are very real problems in the economy--student loan debt is not going away, and the cost of education is another burden for a lot of people in the future. Transportation is a problem on many, many levels, where so many Americans are trapped in a life where they're forced to buy, fuel, and insure an increasingly expensive vehicle just to get food or keep a job. Here, too, solutions are complicated and need long-term work that will survive back and forth swings in the political climate. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, we have day-to-day conversations on the "economy" that are dominated by people who have plenty of money, but complain that they have to pay 50 cents more for a box of Hot Pockets. We're stuck having to please the sort of entitled, comfortable people who argue with the waitstaff over accepting a 10% coupon at the budget buffet. Republicans connect with that "anger" for short-term benefit, and the rest of the world crumbles around us due to the real problems that are never addressed.
posted by gimonca at 9:19 AM on November 10 [13 favorites]

It is true that the ACA marketplace is expensive, but maybe nobody remembers that before the ACA, health insurance providers could just straight-up deny you coverage for any reason they wanted. So it was a choice between "cheapish healthcare that only certain people can get" and "more expensive healthcare available to everyone." And maybe, hopefully, at some point, we will go a Medicare For All route where everyone gets healthcare for cheap, which will of course will have all of the downsides that we see in Canada and the UK. There is no perfect solution. But at least making it law that insurers can't just say 'NOPE" to whoever they please was a huge step forward.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:23 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, we have day-to-day conversations on the "economy" that are dominated by people who have plenty of money, but complain that they have to pay 50 cents more for a box of Hot Pockets. We're stuck having to please the sort of entitled, comfortable people who argue with the waitstaff over accepting a 10% coupon at the budget buffet. Republicans connect with that "anger" for short-term benefit, and the rest of the world crumbles around us due to the real problems that are never addressed.

In this election republicans did much better with non college degree people making under 100k than dems. I think this is the exact opposite
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:28 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

>the biden administrations attempts to expand the housing supply?

Since when is the Federal government in the "housing supply" business? Sounds like that would be "Washington Politicians Shoving black people High Density Housing Down Our Throats".

Nobody wants to live on BLM land. I suppose the Feds could privatize military bases like El Toro, but the locals there voted to make that surplus acreage a nice park, natch.
posted by torokunai at 9:34 AM on November 10

> if we deport a big chunk of our home construction and repair workforce

yeah I caught that too. I can understand the attraction to Trumpism for legal laborers though. Being militantly against illegal immigration is a big political football to push, since illegal immigrants can't vote.

>I'd like to go on Obamacare for a fairly short period before hitting age 65, but sheesh, it's expensive

? The PPACA subsidies were part of my retirement plan this decade to bridge me to age 65.

With $45K of retirement income, I can get a Silver plan at age 59 for $230/mo after $650/mo ACA subsidy.

I don't have any hopes that ACA subsidy will still be around in 2 years tho, so I've got to make other plans now. Thanks PA!
posted by torokunai at 9:42 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

Kamala Harris spending the closing stretch shoving the John Kelly interview about Trump’s fascist impulses in everyone’s faces is more proof of how mainstream media narratives totally warp Democrats’ conception of America.

Just gonna use this as an excuse to post two columns responding to the election that I liked, shouting out their existence to everyone.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo“How Good or Bad a Campaign Did Harris Run?”

Tom Scocca at Defector: “Last Time Was Lucky”

The media is I think not responding to the moment, but the media has also done its darnedest to care about Biden’s age and inflation instead of DJT’s evil. The “media” is unequal to the challenge of describing Fox News as it is because Fox News is the media. And the Dems have, alas facilitated this a bit by not really getting into the fascism thing until much too late.

Anyhoo, the solution to all of this is obviously not to adopt Jacob Weindling’s positions but instead to adopt mine.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:45 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

Since when is the Federal government in the "housing supply" business?

I don’t know if this is a joke or not, but the housing market is probably the market that is the most intertwined with federal policy
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:48 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

I have to pay full price out of pocket and hope I get something back in a tax refund later.
It is true that the ACA marketplace is expensive

So, looking at current rules, it seems like people making more than 400% of the federal poverty level no longer qualify for a subsidy, so around ~60k for a single person. But you can also qualify for a subsidy if your benchmark plan costs more than 8.5% of your income.

For me, the ACA is opposite of expensive; it drops my insurance premium from nearly a thousand dollars to less than my electric bill. It's not the system I'd have chosen if I'd been given a magic wand (god no), but it has made a huge difference for many people, including me. If the ACA goes, I simply will not have health care.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:49 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

The point wasn't the the ACA is bad, it's miles above where we were before. The point is that it doesn't solve the problem of health care costs for everyone. I always expected that it would take us further towards a better system (like, you know, so many other countries in the world have), not that it would be an end in itself. People are still burdened by health care costs, even with the ACA.

And Republicans come in with the "we will fix it" message, when if you examine what Republicans want to do, they want to get rid of the ACA entirely with no replacement.

People voted for "change", and they're going to get change, and it will be the opposite of the change they want and need.
posted by gimonca at 10:11 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

>but the housing market is probably the market that is the most intertwined with federal policy

Feel free to add detail on your point here, I'll start you off:

“Most intertwined” is a reach I would feel uncomfortable making but, like, HUD is right there.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:15 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Here in "Commifornia", ACA has provided the framework for universal healthcare for people who are in the poverty levels. You're not going to find a personal doctor or therapist that takes MediCal but the walk-in clinics and hospitals now have MediCal to bill to when they see you.

That's my understanding at least. Clinton tried to touch this pole in 1993 and, yeah.
posted by torokunai at 10:20 AM on November 10

> HUD is right there

In 2023, $30B for Section 8 vouchers (the definition of neoliberalist policy), $3B for community development grants ($10 per capita goes farther than you think!)

People complain about high rents, but what about the poor landlords. Why aren't people happy for them making so much more money now??
posted by torokunai at 10:27 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I think people are upset about high rents and high housing prices, and people are also upset that the Biden admin hasn’t done much to address those issues.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:45 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

And Republicans come in with the "we will fix it" message, when if you examine what Republicans want to do, they want to get rid of the ACA entirely with no replacement.

Yes, this is my fear.

But my slim hope is that since median wage is only around ~37k, destroying the ACA will be too unpopular for them to do all at once. That would immedately increase the cost of health insurance by hundreds or thousands of dollars for millions of people, in a way that is easily tied to specific policy positions. Those who only get a small benefit, or no benefit, and wouldn't notice much of a difference are making well above median. Instead, I suspect that they'll get rid of the ACA over time by weakening it piece by piece - but that still might give me a little more time to hopefully get any catastrophic health events out of the way before I age into dying in a ditch.

When the ACA passed my biggest fear was that it would take some of the energy out of efforts to push for better. And I think it did. But I also don't think we would have gotten anything better than it anyway, we're too fucked as a society, either too venal and hateful on one hand, or too gutless on the other. Alternate worlds, yadda yadda.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:51 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

But there are also a lot of people like me -- people who work for state governments where you're in a world of 2-4% colas, people (also like me) in industries where they can't realistically switch jobs without uprooting your whole life and moving across the country, people in lines of work where they're still very disposable. I made more in 2000 than I do now, and the only reason I didn't make more in 1998 was that I was still in grad school.

Hey it could be worse! I'm a federal employee, so not only are my pay raises WAY below inflation (usually 1-2% with a "generous" 4% last year), I now get to deal with the very real risk of unemployment, losing my career and finances (because who hires a 40-something who hasn't worked in the private sector in 15 years) AND is probably one of the first in line for the eventual roundup or firing squad! Yay me!

It will be a cold day in hell before I vote republican. But honestly the "everything is actually great, you idiot" messaging kinda pisses me off.

Kind of? It makes me absolutely furious, it's borderline gaslighting. Protip: If you are starting to sound like a policy wonk and are lecturing down to people like a know-it-all academic vs actually listening to them then you just might be part of the problem. I have seen this all over MeFi (as well as Reddit and other forums) - they just do not get it.

Sadly a large number of college-educated Democrats I know in real life fall down the same hole. They are the intelligentsia and the educated elite after all, they must know what's best! Anyone who disagrees with them or has a different, less privileged life experience must be a soft-brained rube! It's definitely not what got us into this mess but it is really not helping. And as someone who grew up working class, it pisses me off to no end. Classism isn't just for those on the right.
posted by photo guy at 11:07 AM on November 10 [12 favorites]

So do you think people are 1) not upset about high rents and housing prices and/or not upset/not placing blame on the Biden administration
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:08 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

> HUD is right there

In 2023, $30B for Section 8 vouchers (the definition of neoliberalist policy), $3B for community development grants ($10 per capita goes farther than you think!)

Those are some numbers! I don’t have the savvy to interpret them, but they sound nice. I was more responding to the question of how much influence the administration has over housing. I don’t really know - but there’s a three-letter agency with the job, so it can deffo do something. And it sounds like it has been! Is it enough? I have no idea.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:14 AM on November 10

Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

This is well-put, succinct, and illustrates why we must stop allowing the necessities of life to be dictated by markets.
posted by mittens at 11:42 AM on November 10 [10 favorites]

Why, yes, let us change our diet to include healthy portions of rich people. We’re sure to not go hungry roasting entitled white guys.
posted by varion at 12:04 PM on November 10 [3 favorites]

Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

National. Rent. Control. National. Rent. Stabilization.
posted by corb at 12:27 PM on November 10 [12 favorites]

> So my best path seems to be to never quite deliver what I promise, otherwise I'm out of a job after the next election.

...

> Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.


Hmmm. Hmmm. Is this how the donkey feels, never getting closer to the carrot?
posted by Rat Spatula at 1:25 PM on November 10 [3 favorites]

2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

This is a really interesting comparison because it basically says that Trump hasn't moved much in 4 years. Broadly, I think that Trump didn't do much differently this time around than he ever has in the past. The part of the electorate that loves Trump hasn't gone anywhere. Despite all the ads attempting to model the idea of a past Trump voter who was now swapping to Harris, I think that was all some weird Dem fever dream. A tiny minority.

One problem is that Democratic messaging as the administration in power over the past 4 years hasn't been very good at breaking through to anyone who isn't a wonk. And people simply do not care to parse the definition of inflation when their grocery bill is insane. They do not care to parse what the differences are between Harris and Biden, or the powers (or lack thereof) of the VP. 11 million people decided she wasn't giving them enough reason to come out for her and they didn't. The unending barrage of ads (I live in MI, I know from whence I speak) did nothing except reduce turnout, because it made everybody exhausted with the whole affair, well before November.
posted by axiom at 1:41 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Another take that I think dovetails with the earlier ones I liked, from Brian Beutler.: “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem” (The dovetailing is perhaps unsurprising since Beutler is a Talking Points Memo alum)

[T]hose who truly believe there’s a set of commitments that would make Democrats more politically bulletproof should lay it out: What agenda is pro-worker enough that culture-war, divide-and conquer politics stop being effective? What specific agenda, or specific set of accomplishments, would make these voters cock their heads and say, Oh I get it now! Because it isn’t full employment. It isn’t trillions of dollars in health-care benefits, unprecedented support for unions and their pensions, major infrastructure investments, or any number of high-impact pro-worker and consumer rules and enforcement actions.

posted by Going To Maine at 2:43 PM on November 10 [6 favorites]

To my fellow TL;DRers, from what I can tell Beutler's suggestion is that some kind of liberal Joe Rogan has to appear, someone who can relate to or inspire young dudes in their gooncaves to set down their dicks and/or video game controllers and/or drug paraphernalia long enough to hear the good news about...I don't know, the center left, I suppose. His concern is that dudes like that won't listen to dorks like him, but I kind of call on bullshit on that and I'll tell you why in two words: Jordan Peterson. There is literally no bigger nerd on earth, a man who would die if he ate a vegetable, a man with a voice like Kermit the Frog, just a guy who is like some kind of gothic Frasier Crane, and those dudes listen to him. So I don't think what we need is a hulking liberal, although if that were what we needed, Dave Bautista is literally sitting right there, so.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:14 PM on November 10 [10 favorites]

Conservative media targets people who want to be reassured they have a good bead on things and are in synch with the pack. Air America Radio failed because its typical listeners don't feel their beliefs need reinforcement, or they are certain they 'know better' than some celebrity or pundit in a studio somewhere. (I doubt rich/intellectual conservatives listen to or value non-business news conservative media.)

MeFi is a perfect example -- here we all are saying "Here's how I'm right" to each other, over and over. If we can reach any consensus on this topic before it auto-closes, I'll reconsider my lack of hope in the efficacy of a supportive media/propaganda system to counterpoint Fox et al.
posted by zaixfeep at 4:20 PM on November 10

National. Rent. Control. National. Rent. Stabilization.
Won't help anything if we don't have enough housing in places where people want to live, and will make things worse if it causes no one to be willing to build housing.

Housing is such a huge problem, and we absolutely need a lot of work to fix it. At the federal level, state level, and local level, starting with making it easier (and ideally, cheaper!) to build where there is demand. Kamala had some vague indications that she would start to address it, and I sorely hope we can see progress here. Given that most blue states are doing a dreadful job here, maybe we will see progress here, although I'm not holding my breath.
posted by ch1x0r at 4:48 PM on November 10 [2 favorites]

what I can tell Beutler's suggestion is that some kind of liberal Joe Rogan has to appear, someone who can relate to or inspire young dudes in their gooncaves to set down their dicks and/or video game controllers and/or drug paraphernalia long enough to hear the good news

“Liberal Joe Rogan” feels like a very specific, charged term and image. Perhaps the more relevant bit is:

We need fewer people like me who say things like “stipulating that…” or “contingent on…” and more local validators willing to tell their peers, “fuck these lying dweebs who think you’re stupid…”

… and he continues later on with notes about needing someone to more consistently drill Rogan, Dave Portnoy, et al. for taking voters for chumps. It’s not that the person shouldn’t be a nerd, a la Peterson, it’s that they need to call the Republican Party and its supporters out for making trash arguments. Air America was a fiasco and the Pod certainly didn’t Save America, but when Alex Jones went out there and told people there was an Info War, he still wasn’t wrong, he was just wrong about the direction in which it was waged. The need to drill conservative commentators has given rise to a number of liberal, left commentators on YouTube and podcasts that are all happy to shout. But the mainstream field has sort of been ceded to FOX, and that huge gap is telling. It seems like what we need (or at least, one thing we need) is a large media organ that consistently holds conservative media to account and won’t allow it to create false economic crises, and that has a memory a smidgen longer than a month ago: a force that exists to say these people are bad and liars and that is significantly larger and more robust than Media Matters.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:12 PM on November 10 [2 favorites]

If we can reach any consensus on this topic before it auto-closes

$2000 checks every month, paid for by a wealth tax; one scapegoat every month gets the guillotine.
posted by mittens at 5:39 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Don't disagree mittens, but neither of those things are going to happen.

I'm too old to be the liberal Joe Rogen, and not nearly jacked enough.
But yes, we need someone more popular than me to call out all this shit, and make sure our sons understand how fucked up this all is.

Don't think any of my sons have fallen into this horrible mindset, and hope they never will. They seem like good people. If they do, I will tell them how disappointed I am with them.

The "your body, my choice" shit is enraging me currrently. Just so wrong. But, at least 4 more years at least of this shit. Let's all try to be the helpers and, help...
posted by Windopaene at 6:19 PM on November 10

Alternatively, from what I read about preventing radicalization of young men in the first place, we need lots of average people who just happen to have a connection by being dads, uncles, older brothers, mentors, cousins, the friends of older siblings, coaches, teachers, etc. to be consistently involved in young men’s lives and help guide them to better outcomes.
posted by eviemath at 7:26 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

A friend posted about the “your body my choice” meme on social media (calling it out, not supporting it!”, and dude friends of my friend were jumping in the comments doing everything possible to distance themselves from it - which, sure, it’s super gross and not something I’d want to be in any way associated with either. But one went so far as to say that the guys posting that meme weren’t really men (in the same way people disavow Christian nationalists as Christians, or other religious fundamentalists), and got various supporting replies to that comment. Or some other men of my acquaintance a while back were talking about how their is not the least bit difficult to avoid sexually assaulting people - also true, but the way they were discussing the issue made it clear that they didn’t really understand the continuity of patriarchal attitudes along which sexual assault was an extreme. The rabbit holes that lead lots of younger white men (in particular) toward this sort of authoritarianism work because there is enough of a cultural starting point of mainstream sexism and racism and homophobia and xenophobia that is fully mainstream that there is a slope along which to slide. It’s a high enough friction slope that plenty of folks have no trouble avoiding that slide, as well. But part of what we need is to each of us acknowledge and work on our own internalized issues - which we all have because we all grew up in a culture that is still steeped in hierarchies and oppression. Bush’s kindler gentler conservativism was still based on the same underlying prejudices and hierarchical world view as Christian nationalism, just instantiated to a noticeably different extent. No center-left Joe Rogan is going to be successful without a more fundamental underlying cultural shift. But the good news is that each of us can contribute to some extent to that cultural shift right now and in our own lives - we don’t need to wait for celebrities or politicians or rich folks to lead us in that.
posted by eviemath at 7:40 PM on November 10 [3 favorites]

Trump’s turnout dropped slightly but most of the narratives about this are misleading because the thing which drove point shifts wasn’t huge numbers of people changing sides but one side not showing up at a much higher rate.
posted by adamsc

2016: TFG 62.9 Million vs. Clinton 65.8 Million
2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

The Dems, on the other hand, lost 11 million voters.
posted by Saxon Kane

Whatever the explanation and best response turn out to be, this is one of the two core facts upon which they must be based. The other fact being that 40% of the electorate didn't turn out at all, for anybody.

–––––

They didn't jump to the Republicans, so the argument that there's a big shift right in Americans, or that support for trans people cost the Dems votes from socially conservative minorities, is probably mostly bogus.
posted by Saxon Kane

I think this is correct.

–––––

>A to a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, conservatives have been building out their media ecosystem since the 1970s

>Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

The glaringly obvious answer is that those with enough money to build entire media ecosystems were funding the conservative version, since that is the one that aligns with their interests.
posted by eviemath

Going up against the capital class will always be a low budget production.
posted by Pouteria at 8:01 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

The now-president-elect, according to that NBC survey, posted his biggest margin of 53-27% among voters who don’t follow any news. Trump’s win was a triumph of the ill-informed.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:38 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Liberal Joe Rogan already exists, it's Hasan Piker. Nobody else is reaching young men in large enough numbers.

He's been kept at arms length by the democratic party because they want his viewers but he won't toe the line on Gaza or economic policy.
posted by zymil at 8:46 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

“Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. For everything to get cheaper, that would require deflation which is its own kind of economic catastrophe.

We will never go back to 2019 prices, full stop.”

You understood what I meant when I said inflation, because you were able to respond with the corrected definition of inflation. But that wasn’t what was needed. What was needed was to acknowledge the *meaning* of my comment in good faith and respond to the *meaning* of it.

This is what it means to meet people where they are -- to acknowledge that people aren’t always using the dictionary definition of a word, but they are using it in a way that is commonly understood and agreed upon. That’s your cue to understand the problem -- not that I don’t understand economic vocabulary, but that the groceries are too damn expensive. Your job is not to lecture ppl about the correct meaning of the word inflation. YOUR JOB IS TO TELL PPL WHAT YOU’RE GONNA DO ABOUT THE PRICE OF GROCERIES.

This is what’s meant by meeting ppl where they are. When you don’t do it, you lose elections. That was the point of the article.
posted by toodleydoodley at 10:05 PM on November 10 [11 favorites]

The glaringly obvious answer is that those with enough money to build entire media ecosystems were funding the conservative version, since that is the one that aligns with their interests.

This isn’t quite the issue.

I have worked by nonprofits funded by progressive foundations. And the thing is, you have to do SO MUCH WORK for that money. SO MUCH WORK showing how every dollar is connected to exactly the thing that was in the grant, and that you’re meeting the metrics you said you would. A fourth of the work of the org goes into proving your work to your funders.

Conservative funders just give a sack of money and say “go to town, we will come back in a few years and see if you’re succeeding or not.”

It’s not about the size of the money, it’s about the way the money has to be used.
posted by corb at 10:27 PM on November 10 [8 favorites]

corb: do you have any insight into why the two approaches are so different?
posted by techSupp0rt at 5:53 AM on November 11

I think it actually comes from a good impulse that has perverse outcomes. Progressive/liberal funders want in many ways to be *fair*. They don’t want people or organizations to get funding just because they have access, or charismatic leaders, or a good media moment. And so they think the fairest way to give out the money is to establish objective standards that can be independently evaluated, not just for the initial gift but after the first year or so of giving are up, to make sure people aren’t improperly coasting off a good plan. And since they’re giving out the money on the basis of the plan, they tend to restrict the donations to make sure the plan is followed.

Conservative funders tend to fund more on a firm handshake and a promise. “I like the cut of his/her jib.” And there are problems with that: they tend to fund people who already have structural advantages towards access, and they fall prey to charismatic grifters more than progressive funders. But there are also advantages: when their faith is justified, there are less things stopping that person or org.
posted by corb at 8:19 AM on November 11 [9 favorites]

You understood what I meant when I said inflation, because you were able to respond with the corrected definition of inflation. But that wasn’t what was needed. What was needed was to acknowledge the *meaning* of my comment in good faith and respond to the *meaning* of it.

First, groceries increased from the completely affordable 10% of the median household's yearly expenditure to 11.4% at the highest, so IMO the cost of groceries is a total canard if that's what this election was about.

Also, if your answer is 'fixing prices' for a sector that has a profit margin of 3%, you deserve to lose elections.

However, lowering prices of some items (like popular grocery items) doesn't imply or require deflation. You can lower it via lowering transportation costs, fixed employment costs, insurance costs, electricity costs, and all the other things that cut into the margins of grocery pricing.

Think fuel prices. They are extremely variable across the US, and regularly go down. Nobody screams 'deflation!!!' when fuel prices fall.

Republicans can bring up eating cats and some city officials being bizarrely mean to a stupid pet squirrel and shine national attention on them. If Democrats can't highlight abortion deaths (if that's going to be their big issue) and positive decreases in inflation, and legit income increases on the lower end of the economic spectrum (something Biden delivered) then that's on them, not on the general populace for not reading Fed Reports.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:19 AM on November 11 [3 favorites]

Also love to keep sounding this alarm, but do to stupid local housing policies in strong Democratic states coupled with growth-focused housing policies pushing people to safe Republican states like Texas and Florida, Democrats are going to have to pander harder and harder to an increasing number of fickle swing states (some of which used to be safe Democratic).

I'll see if I can find the stat, but Obama had to win far fewer swing states than Biden or Harris did, and it's about to get worse in 2030. Democratic states better come up with a quick plan to grow their populations by at least 3-5million people in the next 5 years, or the census is going to burn them.

Or figure out how to win in Florida and Texas. LOL.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:24 AM on November 11 [4 favorites]

First, groceries increased from the completely affordable 10% of the median household's yearly expenditure to 11.4% at the highest, so IMO the cost of groceries is a total canard if that's what this election was about.

This is simply denying the reality that the increase in grocery prices has been 1) very large an 2) eroded the purchasing power of a lot of people.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:48 AM on November 11 [11 favorites]

corb: that looks similar to startup funding – throw money at a hundred different companies, most of them will fail, but the ones that succeed pay off really well. Are the progressive donors really happy with the outcomes of their current approach? Do they not seek better ROI? Like you said, the throw-money-at-it will bring out the grifters, but the payoffs seem to be spectacular. Why not consider changing it up? Sorry, I don't know anyone else in this space, and I am curious about this. (Don't want to derail thread. Maybe I ought to memail you instead?)
posted by techSupp0rt at 8:49 AM on November 11 [2 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election

How exactly could the vice president do that?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:37 AM on November 11

First, groceries increased from the completely affordable 10% of the median household's yearly expenditure to 11.4% at the highest

Citation? I'm not doubting the veracity, I'm wondering about the time period. This article cites a 25.8% increase in food inflation since 2020 (their source is ultimately the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics). Anecdotally, I definitely noticed this, had at least a couple conversations about it, and would wager I'm not alone.
posted by axiom at 10:47 AM on November 11 [2 favorites]

Both statistics can be true, what is likely happening is that food prices increase so people buy less/buy cheaper stuff
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:00 AM on November 11 [5 favorites]

groceries increased from the completely affordable 10% of the median household's yearly expenditure to 11.4% at the highest

This makes sense if you consider Trump's base makes below the median household income.
posted by mittens at 11:07 AM on November 11 [1 favorite]

Also, that Yahoo Finance article is itself written to make inflation look higher:

During the last federal election on Nov. 3, 2020, food inflation was running at just 3.9% annually. Fast forward to March 2024, and the latest data shows food prices have risen a whopping 25.8% since then.

They are leading the reader to compare 3.9% to 25.8%, but 3.9% annual inflation over that period would mean an increase of roughly 14%. Obviously 26% is a lot more than 14%, but it's not six times more. This is what people are complaining about when they talk about the media hyping up inflation; it's these little apples-to-oranges comparisons that are passed off without comment.
posted by egregious theorem at 11:11 AM on November 11 [4 favorites]

I was writing a longer comment about this, but it also matters which prices are going up even if your overall grocery bill isn’t because you don’t magically get more money. Meat, eggs, milk, cheese, and fresh produce are all going up radically. Beef is almost twice what it was in 2017, or a 100% increase; milk, eggs, produce, and cheese aren’t far behind. When those get expensive people can afford to eat them less. I used to regularly stock salad all the time casually; now I have to think about it. When I have people over to eat I have to think about what I can afford to make them cheaply; before I didn’t use to have to think about this stuff. When I made food I used to make large portions and have leftovers; now I make smaller portions and am often still hungry after dinner is over.

For whatever reason, carbs don’t do well with my metabolism; but now I can’t afford not to eat carbs as a main portion of my food, because they’re cheaper. So now I’m hungry all the time and still gaining weight. And I’m sad and angry about grocery prices.
posted by corb at 11:16 AM on November 11 [4 favorites]

This makes sense if you consider Trump's base makes below the median household income.

That is an incorrect assertion.
posted by eviemath at 11:27 AM on November 11 [6 favorites]

See also: the income breakdown from the 2016 election. It’s a little too early to have the requisite data for a similar comparison from this election, but the Pew results linked in my first comment do give party affiliation by income, where it is clear that income is positively correlated to voting Republican, except for a specific subset of upper income college graduates who make up perhaps a disproportionate number of public commentators, but whose actual numbers relative to the overall US population aren’t large enough to counter the overall trends to shift the median income comparison that much.
posted by eviemath at 11:33 AM on November 11 [5 favorites]

That is an incorrect assertion.

Thanks, eviemath, I was going by WaPo's exit polling of the swing states, but could see where Pew's findings would be different.
posted by mittens at 12:19 PM on November 11

The cute little chart might accurately represent the audience of the New York Times, but it doesn't accurately represent the position of the New York Times. The Times was all over Joe Biden's cognitive decline, but was silent about Trump's increasingly insane ramblings over the course of the election after Biden dropped out.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:41 PM on November 11 [1 favorite]

I’m a poor, invisibly disabled Canadian. I predicted DJT’s nomination in 2016 and his win 48 hours before the election. I was terrified. In 2020, it looked to me like Biden was already fairly diminished, but when I tried to watch a DJT rally…meh. I wasn’t thrilled with him being voted out, but mostly because I wanted to see Rachel Maddow cry on TV. This year, I felt the election was over as soon as the garbage truck press conference was, but actually called it at 8:39 PM EST on the 5th.

The next day, I was surprised to find myself weeping tears of joy.

There’s some Scandinavian country where they’ve taken to a radical practice with people who present as psychotic: they listen to them. Two-thirds of the patients who are listened to, without anyone in the room claiming any authority over what constitutes consensus reality, never wind up on antipsychotics. Remembering my own psychosis, it may be fair to characterize that symptom as the language of the traumatized and unheard.

I believe brook horse’s insightful comment has been flagged as fantastic because it feels good to compare MAGA to the mentally ill, not because a single person is going to try what they outlines. I have been on the receiving end of exactly the sort of disdain brook horse describes in their co-workers, in the same context, and I’ve been subject to the same whenever my lefty friends discover their positions aren’t always as persuasive as they imagine.

So, my MeMail is open. Prove to me you actually are the smarter, more compassionate ones. Find out why I feel the way I do without the word salad, the personal attacks and put-downs, changing the subject, strawmanning, telling me it’s too complicated to explain and I’m too dumb to get it, tweaking analogies instead of using them to make points, or reading my mind and telling me what I actually secretly think.

If you’re feeling trapped in despair and rage, I have no desire to exacerbate that for you. My Youtube feed is full of people dunking on Democrat TikTok meltdowns, and I’ve not only had my fill, I’m concerned there’s some kind of mass mental illness taking hold. The actual bright spot for me is listening to a NYT podcast post-mortem, saying things today that Joe Rogan has been saying for well over a year. I hold America and her citizenry to be blessings to the world, I’d like to see you getting along better, and I’m here to help you learn how you might make that happen. But you should also know what you’re up against.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 9:50 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

what exactly about donald trump being the most powerful person in the world makes you happy?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:00 AM on November 12

Find out why I feel the way I do

what's stopping you from telling us here?

as far as what we're up against - yes, we have many people with many viewpoints practicing all sorts of bullshit - i go to edge's start page or yahoo and it's just so obvious many are grinding their gears and coming up with headlines that sound as terrible as possible, just to get clicks - the key is to keep people confused and outraged

there are even people here who try to do that at times

there seems to be less communication going on all the time
posted by pyramid termite at 12:21 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I believe brook horse’s insightful comment has been flagged as fantastic because it feels good to compare MAGA to the mentally ill, not because a single person is going to try what they outline

I wish more people would spend time in evangelical settings--not because those are particularly healthy places to be!--but they illustrate what mindset people typically need to be in, to make big changes in their belief systems. I mean, it's usually stress and trauma, right? It's never, "I need to be saved, but I'm on a pretty even keel emotionally!" It's always tears and shame and the desire to be free of a crushing weight. And even then the 'big change' is translated and filtered through their existing beliefs.

The purpose of the political firehose is not to convince anyone rationally; it's so that all that pressure will be there when you're in a time of stress, ready to make a break with your prior way of thinking.

It would be easier to talk about politics were we not engaged in a desperate campaign to destroy empathy, to disconnect from material reality and our common humanity. It does something bad to your head, to swallow too much poison about whether certain groups deserve arrest, deportation, bombing, starvation. The only way to sustain that lack of empathy is to employ tools like disdain, and let's be sure not to see only one side sneering here.

But I don't know how to really talk about this stuff. One of the most charitable, kind relatives I have, was convinced that Democrats were killing babies, an affront to God. There was not going to be any getting through to her, and in fact she died with that belief intact. The fact that she and I had happy, warm conversations was not going to budge her one inch, and never provided any sort of 'in' to maybe move her opinion a bit. I don't know what she would have become in recent years, when so many people have added a heaping helping of conspiracy theory to their thinking. Possibly the conversations would not have remained so warm.

I'm not even sure we should ever expect to change anyone's mind, outlook, opinion. I'm not sure my goal in life is supposed to be political evangelism. Why should I try to convert someone to my fairly ill-defined socialism, when 99 times out of 100, all that'll do is stress the two of us out?

I think all we can do is try to be good. Not 'good' as in 'a good and shining example that causes people to change their minds about politics' but just...y'know. Good. Someone who causes less stress to others. Someone who helps, a little. Someone who doesn't allow their empathy to be truncated because it might help a politician's ascent.
posted by mittens at 12:23 PM on November 12 [6 favorites]

I spent 8 months in an evangelical setting, and it didn’t really take, especially when it seemed to me they were twisting The Gospels to justify their disdain for homosexuality, not to mention praying for the rise of George W. Bush, a president I still feel was much worse than DJT, no matter how many jellybeans he hands out.

I don’t think empathy is always the highest good. Salt is good, but it doesn’t make maximum salt the best way to go.

I didn’t want to argue in the thread because I thought someone might sincerely tap into their curiosity and try to have a conversation without claiming any authority over consensus reality, as discussed, and I’d expect a more public engagement to become a dogpile --but perhaps anything else is impossible when it comes to something like this, at this time. I’ve already been called deluded, which reflects a misunderstanding of the assignment.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 1:15 PM on November 12

I was planning to MeMail you, Paddle to the Sea, but I'm sitting on hold tied up in an argument with my health insurance in an endless loop of "we approved your prior authorization but we aren't contracted with the only pharmacy that provides this med so you can't actually get this med." But if you'd like to go ahead and explain w/o me sending a coherent intro first my inbox is open!
posted by brook horse at 1:20 PM on November 12

I wanted to see Rachel Maddow cry on TV.

What the ever-loving fuck?
posted by grubi at 1:26 PM on November 12 [4 favorites]

I was walking around Salinas CA's toniest nabe on Saturday and a guy had a toy hauler open with a Trump/Vance flag mounted inside with the "Fuck Your Feelings" subtext. He smiled and asked how I was and I said "Great!".

^{I was not 'great!'}
posted by torokunai at 1:51 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I’m a poor, invisibly disabled Canadian.

I'm poor and disabled, too. It hasn't made me embrace a fascist movement.

It hasn't made you embrace one, either. This was your choice.

The fact your primary concern when watching the 2020 election wasn't the welfare of any of the people suffering under the Republican government, but was getting to watch people you hate suffer, says everything about why compassionate listening isn't going to change your mind.

If you want a reason to leave far right movements behind, then look at the people they harm. If you continue to choose gratification of your sense of grievance and vindictiveness over their well being, then congratulations, you're right where you belong.

I'll pray for you.
posted by pattern juggler at 2:11 PM on November 12 [5 favorites]

So the thing is: the people who voted for Trump love it when liberals and leftists show vulnerability. They want us to suffer, and they want to see it. They want to use your relationships with them to maintain power over you and access to your suffering.

The easiest way to prevent this, on a personal level, continues to be to opt out and shun them. Don't go to Thanksgiving or Xmas if there are going to be right-wingers there. Don't maintain relationships with the right-wingers in your life. If you have minor children, especially do not allow these people access to them.

This isn't an easy thing to do, in a lot of circumstances, but fundamentally we all need to stop allowing authoritarian abusers (and every right-winger is an authoritarian abuser, by temperament; that's what conservatism is) to be in our lives.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:19 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Wow that American debunk site is . . . certainly something.

What an extraordinarily unpleasant set of motivations.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:20 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I didn’t claim that poverty or disability was the reason for anything. - Strawman, mind-reading

I specifically said I was not enjoying the displays of vulnerability, the TikTok meltdowns. — Mind-reading, assigning motivations.


Note: Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the issues, topics, and facts at hand—not at other members of the site.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 2:28 PM on November 12

i mean, you wanted to see people cry
posted by sagc at 2:28 PM on November 12 [7 favorites]

MSNBC is in the business of elder abuse, and made talking to my mother very unpleasant during her last coherent years. She got caught up in the ‘Big If True’ frenzy. I begged her to stop talking about the man, and she just became obsessed, and angry that I wasn’t. I realize many of you likely have a similar story to tell about Fox News. Adam Schiff said he’d seen very credible evidence for the Russia thing, which I thought was totally plausible at first. Why hasn’t he presented it to the public? Why’d they keep voting for his military budget and let him appoint judges the whole time they went in on this?
posted by Paddle to Sea at 2:37 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

Plenty of trans kids are crying, a win win for the Trumpists.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:03 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Apropos of everything: pregnant Texas teen dies of sepsis after doctors refuse to abort miscarried fetus.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:10 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

a Trump/Vance flag mounted inside with the "Fuck Your Feelings"
My counterpoint to the Trumpist: "Fuck your fascist fishbelly white arse."
(The Aristocrats!)
posted by zaixfeep at 4:09 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

what exactly about donald trump being the most powerful person in the world makes you happy?

It's not Peter Thiel. For now...
posted by zaixfeep at 4:12 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I didn’t want to argue in the thread because I thought someone might sincerely tap into their curiosity and try to have a conversation without claiming any authority over consensus reality, as discussed, and I’d expect a more public engagement to become a dogpile --but perhaps anything else is impossible when it comes to something like this, at this time. I’ve already been called deluded, which reflects a misunderstanding of the assignment.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 1:15 PM on November 12

It seems to me people on this thread have been remarkably restrained in responding to your comments.
posted by bluesky43 at 4:13 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

If anyone believes that american debunk site over the testimony given by GOP *eyewitnesses* during the Jan 6 House hearings, and the full text of the Mueller report, I don't know what else to say.
posted by zaixfeep at 4:46 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

So I went to the original ProPublica article: While they were not certain from looking at the records provided that Crain’s death could have been prevented, they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.

OK they got some experts to look at a condensed version of her medical records, and they couldn’t say for sure that her death was due to Ken Paxton’s law.

There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability. In another scenario, if the infection had gone too far, ending the pregnancy might have been necessary to save Crain.

The same experts couldn’t say for sure if she needed to deliver or end the pregnancy.

The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Fails and Crain believed abortion was morally wrong. The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn’t care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions.

I imagine there are many such women in Texas in particular, and perhaps this story will reach them and they will demand a more expanded definition of ‘life-threatening’ in such scenarios or get motivated to boot out Ken Paxton, if any of what happened can actually be traced to his law other than by hypotheticals. It’s almost the kind of horrific case that changed the law in Ireland, of all places. Texans don’t get a chance to kick him out until 2027, but even worse, the citizens of Texas get to make up their own minds about Ken Paxton and the draconian law many of them may not have seen the second-order effects of. And, like a little over half your country, abortion may not turn out to be their top issue.

What was Harris supposed to do about this state of affairs? Side-eye Paxton for the next three years? Demand a mass influx of liberals and Democrats move to Texas to turn it blue? She could perhaps get in a time machine, travel back to 2008 and vote for the Presidential Candidate who promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act on day one. Hang on, no need, that was Barack Obama. Did the Republicans stop him somehow when he had the trifecta? Or was it his own side? Is this issue just too useful to let go, given that it’s always going to be a hot-button wedge issue?

I know, I’m just supposed to be morally outraged as a sign of how superior I am. Or I’m supposed to wait till I’m ready to cry about it and hit record on TikTok. Or I’m just supposed to stomp my feet that Trump gave his base what no one else could and then got the most diverse Republican electorate in history to fall for his fascist plot to take abortion off the table as a federal issue. It seems the democracy defenders should have some faith in the ultimate justice of the people of Texas to fix this. Unless they don’t want to. Maybe they are just ideological heartless Gileadeans and Democrats should call them names for the next 4 years before they go and pay a bunch of pollster grifters to help you fantasize about turning Texas blue.

If every state had a Ken Paxton, maybe Harris would’ve won and would’ve deserved to win. In lieu of that, they made up a looming National Abortion Ban because a think-tank wrote a wish-list, despite DJT and Vance both disavowing the idea repeatedly. And it was sheer incompetence to centre this issue at all when clearly enough women were fine with where their states landed on this.

The difference here is, I’m not angry at anyone who voted for or supported Harris. I’m angry that a sizeable chunk of her voters seem to be spiralling into madness because of the false and self-assured hope they were given by a party that wasn’t even really trying. They look like they’ve been running on vibes since 2011, and their voters just found out. And the plan now? Ostracize your relatives. Divorce your husband. Shave your head. Cut off all contact with all that dares defy the Democrat. And don’t forget to ruin Christmas. This is a self-harm cult, not a political movement.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 6:12 PM on November 12

In lieu of that, they made up a looming National Abortion Ban because a think-tank wrote a wish-list, despite DJT and Vance both disavowing the idea repeatedly. And it was sheer incompetence to centre this issue at all when clearly enough women were fine with where their states landed on this.

DJT and Vance are liars.

It is sheer incompetence to center the issue that medical decisions should be left to doctors?

Ok buddy 👍 unsubscribe
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:21 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

I know, I’m just supposed to be morally outraged as a sign of how superior I am.

You don't have to feel any particular way about it. But you should probably try to accept that people who do feel a way about it, might have valid reasons for feeling that way, and might have valid arguments for why girls dying while doctors do nothing is a bad outcome. And may have seen those valid arguments fall on deaf ears for ages, while people continue to vote for the worst possible outcomes. We know democracy has failure points.

Should the national movement be judged for not reacting in a way you find palatable?
posted by mittens at 6:31 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I hate that we're going to have to wind up with back alley abortions in order for women not to die of preventable pregnancy complications. The Jane Collective should be a historical footnote. Not a going concern.

If the media were actually in the tank for the Democrats, these cases would be in the news cycle 24/7. As it is they are barely mentioned. Like with covid, it is another case where Republican sadism has become so commonplace it no longer shocks, and if it doesn't shock, what use does the 24 hour news cycle have for it?


Should the national movement be judged for not reacting in a way you find palatable?

There is a reason why so many right wing commentators and news outlets are gawking at people having emotional reactions to a genuinely important even in their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Understanding why people are sad and scared requires a degree of empathy that most of the online right is no longer capable of, having glutted themselves on rapist lifestyle influencers and misery porn.
posted by pattern juggler at 6:36 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I’ll also add that “if a state has more rights then it’s actually pro democracy” is not the win you think it is, and has a long bloody history in the US.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:10 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

Not for the sake of convincing the person who wrote it, but just for the sake of anyone else reading along and possibly getting the wrong idea: the in-thread retelling above somehow ignores the bit about the doctors waiting for a second ultrasound to repeat the results from the first -- not because the first was inconclusive (the OB had already given his condolences for their loss) but because while performing the first one they "hadn’t preserved an image of Crain’s womb in the medical record" -- and this despite her being blue-lipped and feeling near loss of consciousness since before the first ultrasound, and despite bleeding between her legs well before the second. Nearly two hours passed between the first ultrasound and her finally being wheeled to the ICU. By that point it was too late to save her, and her mother told her how strong she was as "old, black blood gushed from her nostrils and mouth."

Any quibbles about whether the fetus could have been saved with better treatment before that point, or the couple's religious beliefs, or whatever, can't account for those key two hours when the fetus was already dead and the mother was dying.

(But what do I know. I'm stuck in a self-harm cult.)
posted by nobody at 7:14 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

This is a self-harm cult, not a political movement.

i'll tell you what - when the powers that be get rid of their nuclear bombs and stop baking the world with their carbon emissions then you can call those harris supporters a self-harm cult

yes, i know how unlikely it is that the powers that be will do that - but i'm still going to point out the gross hypocrisy of it

we live in a death culture and we've yet to really revolt against it - (at the least we could stop watching entertainment programs with massive body counts)

no, the real interesting question isn't why some people can't manage to deal with recent events without a great deal of emotion - it's why the rest of us manage to cope with the appalling nonsense of our world without screaming our heads off
posted by pyramid termite at 7:18 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

If people in a state were "fine with where their state landed on the issue" if the issue was "no more treatment for cancer," would it be stupid to center that as morally outrageous? Removing access to life saving medical care for everyone in a state? Sounds super well informed and carefully considered.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:18 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

>I’m a poor, invisibly disabled Canadian.

I'm poor and disabled, too. It hasn't made me embrace a fascist movement.

Nor this poor, disabled, and now old Australian. If anything it has pushed me even further away from it than I already was, and made me even more determined to not be silenced about it, nor submit meekly to it.

Does help that I am old and have no wealth, nor children or dependents to be concerned about.*

But still, the personal price for me for being openly defiant could be nasty, probably mostly via control mechanisms such as social credit scores, which I predict are coming for most societies in various forms, soon, and will be very rough.

(*Don't even have a pet anymore. My furry friend is now dead and buried under one of his favourites trees, after having lived out his time with me in comfort and security and good health, knowing he was much loved, and with minimal suffering at the end, for which I am grateful.)

–––––

There are two ways to respond to the experience of tragedy, injustice, and pain. One is to say that was fucked, how can I stop that happening again to me or anybody else. The other is to say that was fucked, how can I make some other random innocent person hurt as bad as I do, and worse if possible, and revel in their pain.

If you choose the former, then millions will stand with you.

If you choose the latter, then you are on your own. Don't complain about the consequences.

Which you choose tells the rest of the world everything it needs to know about you.
posted by Pouteria at 7:26 PM on November 12 [4 favorites]

Find out why I feel the way I do

Caller, I'm listening
posted by ginger.beef at 7:57 PM on November 12

Sorry Pouteria...

Losing our animal friends is just the worst.

OK, maybe a fascist takeover is worse, but not for us that have lost our friends.
posted by Windopaene at 9:11 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]