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!
One thing's already clear: Harris's Happy Warrior persona a) is incredibly appealing to meme-happy young people, and b) drives the right craaaaaazy. It infuriates them on such a deep level. The best thing she can do is: stay happy, stay laughing, mock these clowns, have fun.
It's going to be difficult. The harumphing jackasses on the right will be joined by harumphing centrist columnists and harumphing cable news anchors, all of whom will harumph about how this is Serious Business and she needs more gravitas & etc. Ignore them.
One thing conservatives (and lots of conservative Dems) feel in their gut is that a black woman in public life shouldn't be happy, or joyful, or silly. She should be grateful that we let her in the door, right? She should be genuflecting & making us feel magnanimous, right?
I watched the entire @AOC IG thing and I encourage you to do the same. Lots of people are on here caricaturing or mischaracterizing what she said. She is *not* ride-or-die for Biden. She's not dismissing anyone's fears about him. She's not telling anyone what to think.
What she's doing is acting like a fucking adult, ie, thinking through the problem in a systematic way, raising concerns that have been obscured by the unbelievable groupthink stampede of pundits & rich donors.
She's speaking to her constituents honestly, without bullshit. She wants them to know that the people behind this are not just averse to Biden, they want to parachute in the exact white moderates of their choosing, despite the near-impossible logistics of it.
In their int'l bestseller How Democracies Die, scholars Levitsky & Ziblatt point to one phenomenon above all others: democracies die, not just when there's a reactionary authoritarian movement, but when *center-right political & business elites join it*. amzn.to/3ycYLrj
Those center-right elites think they can manage the movement, use it to their own benefit, without letting it get out of hand. It never works. It always gets out of hand.
We are watching that process play out, here in the US, in the most flat-footed, explicit way possible.
Things might be different if those elites ran into a unified wall of social disapprobation when they tried this. They'd drop it like they touched a hot stove.
But that's not what's happening. Instead pundits are casting them as savvy operators. They're being rewarded.
One of the most shocking things you discover when you start covering US politics closely -- at least naive young me found it shocking -- is that most political journalists don't seem to give even a tiny shit about policy.
My take on politics, though I'm not sure I could have articulated it, is "I want good results -- increased welfare -- for my fellow citizens, and to get it, I have to figure out how this stuff works." I kind of assumed that's why anyone would pay attention to politics.
But I've spent a *lot* of time over the years talking to or working alongside political journalists & it is just wild how little it comes up & how little curiosity they evince about it, except insofar as it represents some sort of power play in the Great Game.
🧵The main thing Americans do not understand/appreciate about presidential elections is that you are not voting for a person, you are voting for an *administration* -- cabinet members, appointees, military leaders, advisers & analysts, the whole civil service, etc. etc.
You're voting for an executive branch -- that's an *enormous* organization. The president himself makes only a tiny fraction of the decisions in the day-to-day management of that org. It's a whole apparatus, vastly larger than one individual.
Yet people instinctively think -- and the media reinforces this misperception at every term -- that the president, this one person, is "in charge" of the US & responsible for everything that happens, that their unique personal capabilities determine the country's fate.
"Japan’s meteorological agency has issued a heatstroke alert for 26 of the country’s 47 prefectures, urging people not to go outside unless absolutely necessary, to use their air conditioners during the day and at night, and to drink plenty of water."