Partisan leaders are major public figures who drive the public conversation about politics. If they are uninterested in something, or treat it as unimportant, the public will also treat it as unimportant. This is why Democratic strategic avoidance of corruption is a catastrophe
Democrats saw polls that said voters thought health care was their best issue (often on a list of, like, six generic issues - "Crime," "environment," etc.), and decided, ludicrously, that time spent talking about anything else was wasted
Like if only politics was so simple
This misunderstands things. It's not like Democrats can send a memo over to news outlets saying "Talk about this." It's that if Democrats spent a lot of THEIR OWN time talking about something, it will drive voter focus there, and news outlets will amplify
An alternative view from Neera Tanden, who is definitely not a party hack: "Democrats, the nation's largest major party, are the helpless victims of a media conspiracy and have no power to affect public discussion"
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Read this thread. Takeaways:
-economic sentiment is decoupling from national conditions, just like sentiment on other issues
-correlates with news coverage becoming much more negative
-there’s an asymmetric ratchet effect, where bad news gets much more coverage than good news
As @jburnmurdoch and others point out, the culprit here - both in traditional and social media - is likely audience capture. Digital media gives speakers a very fine-tuned sense of what gets lots of engagement, and doomerism does huge numbers while nuance or optimism doesn’t
@jburnmurdoch Over time outlets and social media posters select for the ideas that give them the most engagement, getting continuously better at it. So the vise of endless pessimism gets tighter and tighter
Rounding up 11 to 15 million means somewhere between 1 of every 25 or 30 people are snatched off the street. That's someone from every neighborhood, every block, every classroom, every workplace. It's a dystopian nightmare worthy of the German Gestapo or Russian NKVD.
That's a world where a van of armed agents pulling up and grabbing someone - often a young woman, or elderly couple, or a child - is quite literally an everyday experience in America.
Even if it were logistically possible to round up more people than live in the entire state of Pennsylvania, the process would continue for years and years.
This kind of right-wing legalistic gaslighting is such a menace. The reason I know January 6 was an insurrection or coup is because I WATCHED IT LIVE. I watched Trump lie for months, give an incendiary speech, instruct Mike Pence to change the result, and send support to the mob.
This is Orwellian in the truest sense: authoritarians showing you something and then, gradually over time, chiseling away at your ability to see it clearly, with word games and logical tricks, until the thing that was as clear as day seems like nothing at all. DO NOT fall for it.
Trump tried to overthrow the government. He tried to have state and federal officials change the result. He tried to make his own Justice Department do it. And when that didn’t work, he incited an armed mob to attack and invade the US Capitol. None of that is exaggeration.
I think one of the worst pathologies of our time is the conviction among so many powerful people that "being reasonable" and "acting powerless" are the same thing - that reacting to events in any way, or attempt to effect change on the world, is inherently unserious.
It's a huge part of what has left our politics so paralyzed in response to things like Trump. "Wow, Trump's bad," some of the most powerful people on earth say. "It's crazy that he's running for reelection after attempting to overthrow the government. Hope he doesn't win!"
Something about the endless bubble of screens and news we live in has trained our society's leaders to believe they're not really part of the world, just observers of it. They've absorbed the passivity of the cable TV watcher or Twitter commenter.
Reorienting the legal system to protect white people, regardless of whether it’s done under the guise of anti-anti-racism or whatever, is effectively the restoration of formal white supremacy. It was always inevitable that Trump’s far right would end up here.
This is the beating heart of Trump’s politics: taking the inchoate resentment of reactionary white people terrified that they are losing their racial privileges and using it to create a regime where those people can endlessly exact revenge on groups they believe subordinate.
“White reactionaries incorrectly believe they have been discriminated against and simply want to compete on level ground” - given that they ALREADY are competing with an advantage, what would a legal regime privileging this group look like?
Biden has been the most progressive policy president in 50 years or more. He's enacted massive stimulus and climate bills, he's governed with a full-employment mindset that has created a booming economy for workers, he's appointed progressives across the federal government.
He's made great court appointments, stood up for labor unions like no president in history, and stood by an anti-monopoly FTC chair that has big business howling in anger. He's cancelled tons of student and tried to cancel more. He's done SO MUCH.
It is ALSO true that his opponent is undisguised fascist and rapist who previously tried to overthrow the government, campaigning on a platform of, quite literally, dictatorship, bloody revenge, and concentration camps for immigrants and other perceived undesirables.