Some of your priorities have become absolutely insane
Nothing about the government can be “bigger than policy.” Policy the government’s output. If your process concern matters it has to be because of the policy it will produce. So lay out those concrete harms instead of shrieking about “democracy.”
The problem here is that what you will find is your process concerns are contingency on contingency on contingency, while people have very real material concerns before any of those contingencies hit. The problem with figures like Elias is they draw attention away from those.
And this is why Democrats have chosen to go into the midterms looking distracted from the top concerns actually held by marginal voters.
The reason you have to be concrete is this: If your warning is “these anti-democratic thugs will make the government no longer responsive to you,” a lot of people will look at that and see a government that is already not responsive to them.
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Since the government and mainstream media achieved a tremendous degree of message discipline around the vaccine and uptake was still unsatisfactory, why do people think more private restrictions on who says what to whom would be a useful strategy?
The problem is that a lot of people don’t trust the official messages, and you won’t fix that by trying to restrict other messages.
There is also the practical matter that if you threw Rogan out of the Spotify walled garden back into a normal podcast available on many platforms his audience would grow, not shrink.
Gee, where could people get the idea that you can make this happen through the bully pulpit? Could it be because you grandly announced you were going up to the Hill to talk Manchin and Sinema into doing what they repeatedly said they wouldn't do?
Characterizing my objection to Amtrak's plan to spend BIF funds on 3h25m service from New York City to Scranton as "hating trains" is sort of emblematic of how liberals don't pay attention to whether their grand policy plans that are supposed to win elections are actually useful.
When I talk of people "wanting services on a normal schedule" I'm referring foremost to unreliable provision of K-12 school, though much of what government and private institutions do is heavily disrupted, as you may have noticed. It's the #1 way government underperforms today.
I think Dems are gravely underweighting this issue (frankly often being dismissive about it, as happened in Virginia) and are overweighting theoretical concerns about what legislatures might do in December 2024 -- which frankly would in any case fall to courts to resolve.
A lot of these academic leftists are deeply confused about the difference between money and the economy. You *can* give people money even if their work is paused, but you can't free society of the need for certain productive activities to happen. You can't close everything.
And this confusion is how you end up with the idea that expecting certain institutions to keep operating and providing services (very often public sector institutions!) is "neoliberal."