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

like literally, every goddamn D politician should go to every debate with a bullhorn and when their opponent lies, should blow the fucking thing, every time

*foghorn

Apparently the debate and the ablelist terms under which it was scrutinized changed few minds, as ever.

making them feel part of an aspirational moment in which they do belong to the Dem coalition

Yes! Making something seem fun and exciting and then inviting people to enter and invest in it, is just good organizing! But also, you have to have actual fun and excitement and things that feel transformative to offer.

But it's also true — and will be true even if things aren't a total wipeout for the Dems — that the party really is lackluster, really does lack leadership and direction and vision, really has not articulated a clear much less inspiring vision for the future of the country.

O______O

Re the Fetterman debate, hearing some of the actual audio was extremely upsetting as he struggled to articulate things and get words out. I'm astonished at the amount of campaign work that's been happening while he recovered and wasn't always visible or heading up the work. It's so interesting how his wife (who famously embraced being the SLOP--Second Lady of Pennsylvania lol!) stepped in and took up that space on his behalf.

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

(We have a few Democrats like this, but they aren’t really in seats of power.)

Yet.

A hard turn from DC consultants against talking about racial equity, LGBTQ issues, maybe even abortion.

I fucking wish Dems talked about LGBTQ issues as much as Tucker and Cruz and the rest of the GOP rogue's gallery likes to convince people they do. Sanctimonious tweets from Biden and Harris on Coming Out Day don't amount to shit. A lot of us haven't forgotten that "signing the Equality Act" was promised as a Week One priority. And yes I know that's predicated on getting it through the Senate, but I'm not the one who articulated that promise without a Plan B.

Was listening to the Know Your Enemy podcast the other day, I don't remember which episode, and at one point they were riffing on the (I think correct) idea that neither Democrats, liberals or the left seem to have a vision of "America" to sell — an idea or ideal of America. Obama did, kind of, but it was of course totally superficial, just basically "Hey, we're all the same, we all love our country, let's all get along." We can all maybe intuit that it's a vision of pluralistic multicultural democracy with a strong safety net and so forth, but it's not clear or well articulated and tends to sound programmatic rather than aspirational or inspiring.

We can scoff at that kind of appeal maybe, but it's politically important if you want to pull people together. The GOP obviously has a vision of America, and while it's a crabbed and cramped and exclusionary one, it's at least fairly coherent and explicitly rooted in (their version of) the country's past and traditions.

Yeah, let me emphasize that slogans aren't for Smart People like us on ILE. Other people like slogans! I was at this university in 2007-2008 and I'd quietly mock student enthusiasm for YES WE CAN but it fucking worked.

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

We should all be training in change management imo.

I'm not saying there aren't animating ideas on the left, obviously they are. But there's not a compelling or inspiring public narrative around them that can resonate with an empowering idea of "America."

I get the yearning for fighters. And of course I hope the Fetterman style works in Pennsylvania.

But that type of candidate type (even foghorn-equipped) is not going to magically win in Wyoming or South Carolina or Tennessee or whatever.

Sometimes this line of thought annoys me a bit, like, "ok (Fetterman-style candidate) lost, but it was because he didn't have ENOUGH foghorns. What if he had had TWO foghorns?!?!?!"

There's not one election with one polity, there are thousands of each.

That's what inspired my first post. Of course access to abortion matters, but for the Cuban and South Americans I interacted with it's third or fourth on the list of priorities.

"Yeah, let me emphasize that slogans aren't for Smart People like us on ILE."

I like slogans, they aren't for stupid people -- good ones tell me the movement is in a good state, so they are vital.

thank you for doing what you do, alfred, and same to other ilxors who knock on the doors and phone bank and do all the stuff i admire but don't seem to ever do myself. i received one knock on my door this election season, a very shy and nervous and shaking young man who was there because my duplex neighbors put a giant sign for a fascist in front of our patch of sidewalk. i admired him and told him the same. it's hard to face people who are planning to vote for fascists and have already solidified their reasons for it.

i'm trying to limit what i say to positive things, so i will leave it there. good luck everyone

But there's not a compelling or inspiring public narrative around them that can resonate with an empowering idea of "America."

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, November 8, 2022 5:18 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I agree but I think part of the reason for this lack is that there's not one "America" that everyone to the left of Republicans agrees on!

Idk maybe I'm just disheartened by too many "we talked to this union organizer in Pennsylvania and he says he can't convince any working class men to support rights for marginalized groups bc they're happy being racists and homophobes oh noes what will the Democrats do to win them over?" podcasts.

Yep I agree, the first thing is actually articulating a 2020s vision of the country that can tie together the various dreams and priorities of the liberal-left continuum. I think it’s doable, but it hasn’t really been revisited since the sad triangulation of the Clinton era.

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

i don't know that my foghorn idea would have a greater chance of success, but if we're going to fail, I'd rather do it going balls-out and presenting a true vision confidently rather than micromanaging every idea/statement based on weaksauce ideas of 'electability' or who will be pissed off.

I mean, yes, there does have to be careful consideration of how to deliver a message to avoid alienating people, but Dems due it to maddening levels, ie giving lip service to anti-leftist ideas or saying "DEFUND THE POLICE? that's just CRAZY!"

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

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

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

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

This is actually a great argument

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

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

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

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

Thanos just needs to snap

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

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

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

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

xp

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

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

We should all be training in change management imo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's awesome. What great news!

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

Hmm..

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

— Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) November 8, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tax cuts should fix everything right up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-abortion people.