Apparently everyone has to have an opinion on "popularism" now, so lemme just say what I think is the single most important point in Ezra's excellent review of the debate: nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opi…
Namely this, from @anatosaurus. What voters hear about Democrats is only tenuously related to what Democrats say & do.
Fully half the media -- inc. the top-rated cable channel & the most influential FB pages -- is propaganda *specifically designed* to make Democrats look horrible. It's a little wild to me that this ongoing discussion about Dem strategy takes so little note of this fact.
The other half of the media ("MSM") devotes itself to defending against accusations of bias from the right. What reaches voters is both-sides stories of partisan dysfunction. So one half the media is saying "Dems are broken." The other half is saying "Washington is broken."
GOP messages blast, coordinated, across a whole giant multimedia propaganda machine. Dems toss messages out into the media swamp & then cross their fingers, hoping those messages reach the right voters. Of course they don't.
Take "defund the police." Sure, not a great slogan. But very few D officeholders seriously echoed it. It was mostly left activists. Nevertheless, RW media amplified it to the sky. RW media made sure it was center stage & as usual bullied the MSM into talking about it as well.
You might say, "nobody should have ever said defund the police." How would you enforce that? But whatever, OK, fine. Nobody ever said "ban cows." But guess what? That's what every single con -- & I bet quite a few normies as well -- think Dems want to do!
"Ban cows" is a real bad message for Ds. They definitely shouldn't campaign on that. But they didn't! No one ever said it. It's invented out of whole cloth. But it *still shaped voter views toward Ds*. What conceivable "message discipline" could counter that?
It just makes me pull my hair out that these discussions so often proceed as if the relationship between Ds & voters is created by Ds saying things & voters reacting, as though they are in direct conversation. They're not!
Between Ds & voters is a giant mediating layer, & right now, transmitting messages through that layer, such that they arrive at voters with original intent & meaning intact, is virtually impossible. For all intents & purposes, the layer is *devoted to preventing that*.
Progressives are devoted to exposing the corruption & structural discrimination & cruelty that keep society's powerful incumbents on top. Society's powerful incumbents ... own all the media, have most of the influence & voice, and actively want to squash that message.
TBC, I have no idea how to solve this problem -- it's one reason I'm so despondent about the future of US politics. But I know there's no amount of message discipline that would ensure voters actually *hear Dems clearly*. You can't say "ban cows" fewer than zero times.
The really thrilling part of this debate is that everyone on all sides of it seems to agree that Dems are screwed in coming years because the US WWC is too deeply racist to accept multiethnic democracy & too widely distributed to overcome via greater numbers. Whee!
Coda: just a pure data guy, y'all!
Extra coda: I'm contractually obliged to note that I've written about this before: vox.com/policy-and-pol…
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