feels like the extent to which Democrats are at risk in the midterms because they did not do popular things (leave, permanent CTC, etc) and are associated with unpopular things (school curriculum change, etc) is actually what's underreported
https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1460658423222128653
one of the things I sincerely appreciate about the right, or at least did appreciate before the last few years when a mass psychosis infected it, is that we used to be pretty good about acknowledging a reason we often lost elections was because people disliked our ideas.
there's a whole family of rightist rhetorical tropes: "the two santa clauses," etc, about how Democrats promise goodies and Republicans offer the hard reality, etc, etc. true or not, it was a useful self image where we generally believed when we lost it was because...
... in fact our ideas were not popular. Of course that was paired with a critique saying that, hey, maybe popular opinion sucks and sometimes you have to steamroll what the people want to give'em what they need: Republic > Democracy, etc, etc
But the rise of "populist" rightism has really destroyed this kind of narrative, because now we're supposed to believe our ideology is in fact the real ideology of real Americans all over and if we lose it's not because it wasn't popular but because someone cheated us.
Really wish we could just go back to everyone supposing that losing elections or being low in the polls means that your actions were not popular, rather than supposing that in fact it's all just rigged.
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