starting with "splinter.com"
posted by slater at 11:37 AM on November 9 [14 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News? I don't understand this person's argument -- the "must change their media diet" part. Yes, the Dems fumbled bad on economic issues, and that's a fault of what liberals watch?
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:42 AM on November 9 [12 favorites]

This is dumb. America is out of touch with reality. People believe inflation is up when it’s down. That crime is rampant when it’s at the lowest point in years. It’s true that mainstream media is less relevant but liberals reading it is not the problem.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:49 AM on November 9 [102 favorites]

I'm not convinced one political coalition is meaningfully more siloed than the other. Social media has everybody segmented up pretty tight and I'll grant that's a serious problem with managing a shared society, so I read this headline and the above-the-fold bit of the article and impulsively go to thinking, "Huh, what if they're right? I do know a lot of people who were blindsided and hurt by the election outcome. Maybe we all need to ways to broaden our perspective."

It occurs to me that if you wrote this article in 2020 or 2022 telling conservatives they were out of touch with America, their immediate response would be, "Fuck off."

So what, I need to give ground on understanding how the world actually works, but Fox News viewers don't? I have to suffer through a bunch of sensationalist bullshit about migrant criminals and climate change hoaxes to understand... what? Where does that get anybody? "Crime is down in my city but folks in the suburbs think its up so I guess we'd better lock up a bunch more people to keep their votes?" Like I'm not sure what's being proposed here.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:52 AM on November 9 [70 favorites]

The voters who drove this election supposedly overwhelming voted red due to economic anxieties. Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative. Now this article wants us to chuck the media that gave us economic reality (basically that we handled the post covid inflation better than most of the world and that Biden's progressive policies were subtle but solid in creating a sustainable path to lower inflation and stronger labor markets) in order to what...understand why we lost the election to an under-educated majority?
No thanks.
I'm not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle, other than to hope that the next two years are so patently awful that the same phenomena happens in reverse and the left wins back the legislative branch, driven by economic anxiety over actual bad policy and a collapsing economy and labor market. But of course no matter what happens, it will all be blamed on Biden and the magas will happily suffer just to continue to own the libs. Truly the dumbest timeline.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:02 PM on November 9 [47 favorites]

Okay, but those [economic] anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative

And you know what WOULD have been nice? Heavy and repeated communication from Biden, from Wednesday January 20th 2020 onward, in sixth grade-level plain language, about WHY egg prices are high or WHY supermarkets are raising prices 10% yearly. Not "Bidenomics", whatever the hell that was. Not Harris rambling about small businesspeople getting loans. Where the hell is James Carville when you need him?

So the DNC doesn't have a 24/7 Insoc telescreen megaphone like Fox? Then use some of that media-savvy-harper-reed mojo and find a way to hack the interwebs and get the correct news into TikTok and Instagram and whateverelsethefuck will work.

Sorry to rant, but if there's no way to shut off Fox News and the DNC can't herd the goats to find a workaround, then what are we talking about?
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:17 PM on November 9 [47 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.
posted by lucidium at 12:19 PM on November 9 [74 favorites]

I think the author did a poor job of expressing his point, but what I took away from it is that Democrats only talk about the things that concern them because they don't have any visibility into the things that concern people that aren't dyed in the wool Democrats.
I've actually been thinking for a few days that the fact that I don't have any social media and I run with an ad blocker means that I'm completely unaware of the type of b******* that most of the rest of the company is stewing in.
That doesn't mean that I need to start watching Fox News and believing the crap they're selling, but it does explain why I'm so incapable of understanding why anybody would vote for Trump--I don't know the messages that they're getting.
Yeah I know the most absurd examples (the kind that get mocked on liberal news sites and YouTube clips ), but the more garden variety misinformation that people are getting about things like the border and the economy and immigration and so forth I'm completely unaware of. I think that ignorance extends to most informed Democrats and probably also to most of the Democratic campaigns. I have a suspicion that the messages that were going out by the campaigns weren't speaking to the things people cared about because we were all (rightfully) afraid of creeping fascism that we fought against it instead of trying to win over the average uninformed voter as to how the democratic platform was actually great.
posted by Ickster at 12:20 PM on November 9 [21 favorites]

A shorter version of what I just wrote:

Because we don't understand the propaganda put out by the right we do a s***** job of counter propaganda.

Because we are generally intelligent and educated we tend to think that the stupidity and ignorance of the rest of the electorate is an unsolvable problem, but we don't have to educate if we can be more effective with propaganda. That might sound cynical but it's the only way forward.
posted by Ickster at 12:24 PM on November 9 [44 favorites]

I know I've said this in other threads, but I've recently come across The Tangle newsletter and podcast and it's great for this.
posted by coffeecat at 12:26 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

I spend all my time with working class brown and Black people who either voted for trump, considered it, or didn’t vote at all, and I have no substantial complaint with what this guy’s saying. In the months before the election, my deep blue friends kept posting this “wages are up; inflation’s down” bullshit on facebook. Nobody I know got a raise or had a prospect of a better job or cheaper groceries, so at some point, I imagine you get tired of being gaslit.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:31 PM on November 9 [35 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. For everything to get cheaper, that would require deflation which is its own kind of economic catastrophe.

We will never go back to 2019 prices, full stop.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:36 PM on November 9 [33 favorites]

>“wages are up; inflation’s down” bullshit

Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private

Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food
posted by torokunai at 12:38 PM on November 9 [12 favorites]

> I imagine you get tired of being gaslit.

Boy do I have some bad news for you!
posted by torokunai at 12:40 PM on November 9 [10 favorites]

(Sorry for posting repeatedly; still working this out in my own head.)

The point of the article is that we need to know the kind of information being fed to other people so we can counter it. What the piece missed is that simply spouting facts obviously doesn't fucking work (citation: November 5), so we need to learn propaganda and use it.

Posting links to the CPI and bitching that other people don't get it is like putting chess pieces down against an opponent who already set up checkers and then bitching that they aren't playing the game correctly.
posted by Ickster at 12:42 PM on November 9 [26 favorites]

It's not my job to dumb things down like that
posted by torokunai at 12:44 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

It's not my job to dumb things down like that

Well then I guess Dark Helmet was right. Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
posted by Ickster at 12:47 PM on November 9 [18 favorites]

We already tried fighting Russian-supplied disinformation on immigration, etc. with Russian-supplied disinformation on Gaza, etc.

Disinformation packaged and made palatable to one or the other side is still garbage information.

The problem was letting a terrorist state pick and promote some of the candidates, as well as guide our larger media options towards disinformation (including even from the paper of record), but it will require major introspection to get to a point where serious solutions will be considered and implemented.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:52 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

The thinkpieces claiming they've figured out how the democrats went wrong with the election are ... a lot of thinkpieces. This was a profound moral failure of the American people and it seems like everyone is dancing around that
posted by treepour at 12:52 PM on November 9 [67 favorites]

This sort of take is on point when you have a Nixon-McGovern style blowout. Last week’s election was determined by a handful of electoral college votes and when all the counting is done, it may show that the out of touch Democrats got the most votes!
posted by notyou at 12:55 PM on November 9 [13 favorites]

Disinformation packaged and made palatable to one or the other side is still garbage information.

Propaganda doesn't have to be misinformation.
posted by Ickster at 12:55 PM on November 9 [11 favorites]

Because we don't understand the propaganda put out by the right we do a s***** job of counter propaganda.

Our counter attempts are often sneering, which doesn't typically work. Knowing what the propaganda is doesn't help much if our only method for trying to change people's minds or behavior is through argument and derision. Honestly, though I don't know if I see that changing. I couldn't get people to stuff the attitude for five minutes in a mental health setting when it was their actual job, I don't think expecting random average citizens to be able to emotion regulate in the way this kind of deprogramming needs is likely to pan out. See, I'm not even doing it right now!
posted by brook horse at 12:55 PM on November 9 [19 favorites]

Note to self: Stop lecturing, start pandering.Got it. ;-)
posted by zaixfeep at 12:57 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

Hoover stomped Al Smith 444-87 (only the Deep South stuck with the Democrats) then it all flew apart in '29.

Reagan stomped Carter in 1980 thanks to the boomers flooding into the workforce in the 1970s, causing all kinds of inflation in housing and goods etc. Plus the twin oil market dislocations didn't help matters either. At any rate Clinton and the Dems retook power in 1992, only to lose it in the Gingrich revolution that gave us Graham-Leach-Bliley, laying the seeds of continued deregulation under Boosh that resulted in the GFC.

The people again turned to the Dems again, putting Pelosi in charge of the House in 2007 and Obama in the WH in 2009. Alas, that position in power was revoked in 2010 in the Tea Party revolts.

I'll skip current history since things are going to fall as they fall. It's going to be great to be a millionaire in this country this decade, even better to be a billionaire. Hope you got yours.
posted by torokunai at 12:57 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

This was a profound moral failure of the American people and it seems like everyone is dancing around that.

It absolutely was for the type of dipshit fascist who went to Trump rallies, but there's still a surprisingly large number of people who voted based on vibes who are going to be pretty fucking surprised by what they voted for.

I'm not saying Democrats are to blame for those people being ignorant and lazy, but Democrats did a worse job of getting those people on their side than the fascists did.
posted by Ickster at 12:58 PM on November 9 [24 favorites]

when all the counting is done, it may show that the of touch Democrats got the most votes!

There's a vote gap of 4 million with 95% of the votes counted. Let's not kid ourselves, Trump won the popular vote.

But yes, it's tiny margins. Something like 26% of US adults voted for Harris, and 28% for Trump. The rest voted for neither.
posted by biogeo at 1:03 PM on November 9 [15 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper.

Also decimate actually means to destroy of ten percent of a thing.

If the people who vote equate "inflation" with "higher prices," you either have to educate them, or just accept that the meaning of the word has changed and use it the way the voters use it. I got a small raise last year. My spending power is down. I am technically poorer than I was before the raise. Don't fucking quibble with me about the meaning of inflation.

Harris and the democratic party went out of its way to talk about:

- border security
- gun ownership
- fracking
- police support
- American Imperialism
- genocide okay if it's Israel doing it

and I have to believe that was in part because every one of those news networks listed to the left of Fox kept saying inflation was down.

Liberals are out of touch with human beings. The left DOES need media representation. It does. not. have it. Look at that first graph. Starting at zero, you go 6 points to the left, and you get the New Yorker and Slate. Now go 6 points to the right of zero. You get Brietbart, Sean Hannity. Do these two sides seem balanced to you? I would argue that the publications on the "far left" of that graph are pretty centrist. And meanwhile it doesn't even list ONN or Tucker Carlson, which we know are fairly popular, because the centrist publications listed cover them.

Nazis used to be bad guys, and now they're just kind of accepted as one more shitty thing in this country. People will vote for a convicted felon child molester rapist, nbd, but you know what's the dirtiest thing you can call someone in this country? The word that both the left and the right eschew? Socialist.

So yah, there's nobody countering the right, because there's no widespread news media on the left.
posted by nushustu at 1:08 PM on November 9 [41 favorites]

The voters who drove this election supposedly overwhelming voted red due to economic anxieties. Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative.

Most of the Rs voted red because that’s the group they identify as and they’ve voted that way consistently for years. Economic issues are one of their preferred explanations but every election most of them voted that way for the same guys no matter how the economy is doing or who’s running it, more consistent with things like racism. Trump’s turnout dropped slightly but most of the narratives about this are misleading because the thing which drove point shifts wasn’t huge numbers of people changing sides but one side not showing up at a much higher rate. That is likely driven by economic concerns but it’s getting less attention because it’s people who didn’t show up and most reporters are looking at the exit poll data.
posted by adamsc at 1:08 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

This article just described my boomer parents.
posted by iamck at 1:12 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

2016: TFG 62.9 Million vs. Clinton 65.8 Million
2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

TFG's numbers barely changed since the last election. He's likely maxed out his appeal. Those are the devoted R's who are going to vote R no matter what.

The Dems, on the other hand, lost 11 million voters. They didn't jump to the Republicans, so the argument that there's a big shift right in Americans, or that support for trans people cost the Dems votes from socially conservative minorities, is probably mostly bogus. The majority of those 11 million probably thought, "well, Trump obviously blows, but what the fuck have the Dems done for me these last four years? I can't afford my rent, etc. etc." And then the other 60 million potential voters couldn't be bothered because neither seemed to give a shit.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:18 PM on November 9 [33 favorites]

Socialism:

Old and busted: "The government takes your hard-earned money and gives it to lazy undeserving welfare types. Bastards!"

New hotness: "Y'know that rich Scrooge a-hole that owns your company and makes you work weekends and holidays for no pay? We're gonna tax the crap outta him and cut you a regular check from it. And NLRB will ensure he doesn't retaliate. How's that work for ya Skippy?"

Night and day.
posted by zaixfeep at 1:21 PM on November 9 [19 favorites]

Also decimate actually means to destroy of ten percent of a thing.

Actually it doesn't. Unless you're from the 16th century,

Don't fucking quibble with me about the meaning of inflation.

I wasn't quibbling with you at all, but I guess now we are quibbling. It is true that the public as a whole doesn't really understand what inflation is beyond "prices get higher." So the use of the talking point "inflation is down" is not gaslighting, it is merely ineffective and potentially counterproductive. It's hard to argue against the fact that the Dem messaging didn't get through as intended.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:22 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

Decimate is like marinate, just with powers of ten.
posted by zaixfeep at 1:24 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

The Dems, on the other hand, lost 11 million voters.

This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone, rather than for someone. That's disheartening and exhausting. I am not one bit surprised that people didn't turn out.
posted by nushustu at 1:25 PM on November 9 [18 favorites]

Liberals are indeed so, so out of touch. Liberals think voters still care about other people. That people are basically good. That they will work together to solve problems.

They think they can persuade Texans on abortion: “Women are dying!” You’re speaking to dead eyes and rictus smiles. When that Texan’s sister or daughter dies in childbirth, they’ll shrug. “Your body, my choice!” is all they’ll get in response.

They think they can persuade voters on rule of law: Surely this! For every transgression, each more egregious than the next. The killers sharpening their knives aren’t concerned about rule of law, and they hate you.

Governance, democracy, accountability, preparation, sustainability. They’ll make funny memes while they tear these apart. Propaganda has trumped reason and a huge chunk of the populace has gone totally fucking mad.

So yeah, the lib’s media diet is totally at fault.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:26 PM on November 9 [35 favorites]

I wasn't quibbling with you at all, but I guess now we are quibbling.

Nono grumpybear69 I apologize. I didn't mean you specifically. I meant this is what the news tells us and meanwhile I'm more broke so STFU news media.
posted by nushustu at 1:27 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

This New Republic article [paywalled] comes to a similar conclusion: this was a triumph of the Conservative media ecosystem. Conservative media is a well funded and ever growing ecosystem deliberately designed over the past 30 years to deliver the same propaganda messages to the public from as many different outlets as possible. At the same time, the Liberal media ecosystem, of which we are familiar, is struggling to survive financially.
posted by otherchaz at 1:28 PM on November 9 [8 favorites]

Dem messaging didn't get through as intended.

Not enough. However, in the swing states where Harris has a permanent comms (propaganda?) team, the Dem defections were only about 1/4 of the rest of the US.

Fighting Fox and X is probably more important than policy at this point.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:29 PM on November 9 [18 favorites]

Ground News attempts to sort the news by political leaning
posted by otherchaz at 1:32 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

The article notes that liberals believe in the NYT not just because it lines up with their beliefs, but that is seen as somehow authoritative, inasmuch as it is, after all, mainstream media. Point taken: we all know that Salon, Truthdig, Truthout etc. are lefty, and Rumble, Breitbart, Fox etc. are conservative. But even if liberals know that there is bias everywhere and that most media people are liberals themselves, I think that liberal news consumers feel, deep down, as if the Paper of Record really is truthier than more obviously biased news sources.
posted by kozad at 1:34 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

From the makers of Schoolhouse Rock, announcing NEW DEAL ROCK!
Democratic policy proposals and results, tailored to third grade reading levels and attention spans.

"Taxing the Rich, It's a Dandy Pitch"
"Clean Air and Streams, Make Ameica Gleam"
"Border Order, Let's Make the Line Shorter"
"Put Monopoly Man Back in the Can"
"The Flying Geriatrics and their Amazing Social Safety Net"

(gimme a C, a bouncy C...)
posted by zaixfeep at 1:38 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

How partisan liberals generally perceive democracy, as a celebration of American institutions most people hate and a once every two-year effort to “save the country” from Republicans, is not at all how most of the rest of America sees it.

Well, okay boss, why don't you tell me how the rest of America sees it? As many others have pointed out, this article sucks even if it has a nugget of truth. It's true both that college-educated liberals like me have a completely different perspective than people who get their news from fucking Tik Tok, and also that there's a huge Russian/Republican propaganda meatgrinder hurling the most obvious bullshit at people who have every reason to believe the Dems are going to put college-educated people like me way up the priority list from them.

If I get to choose how the Dems respond to this, it's publicly set fire to anyone who worked on Clinton's or Harris' campaigns and exile them permanently from any position of discursive authority, then cancel all the media buys and put together a volunteer network of propaganda generators. The truth gets lost in a thousand lies, or whatever the expression is.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:39 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

According to a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, conservatives have been building out their media ecosystem since the 1970s

Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

George Lakoff:

There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

posted by otherchaz at 1:52 PM on November 9 [29 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.
posted by lucidium
Dear lord, Toonces the Driving Cat... is MAGA! I mean, Victoria Jackson was in the car... How did I miss that all these years?
posted by zaixfeep at 1:53 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

The point at which I became aware of how out of touch Metafilter-types, left-ish types, were was the August 7 couchfucker thread. Shitposting for the choir. I closed tab and started preparing myself emotionally for a Republican victory on election day. 24/7 propaganda about immigrants doing crime is far more effective than some vague bad vibes. Fox News is cocaine for retirees and Facebook is their fentanyl.

This article is itself delusional—almost no one reads the NYT. They glance at the headlines and do Connections. It’s a cooking and games app.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:54 PM on November 9 [11 favorites]

2016: TFG 62.9 Million vs. Clinton 65.8 Million
2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

Democratic states were in the middle of pandemic lockdowns. Ballots showed up in the mail, so people filled them out, because there wasn't much else to do.
posted by otherchaz at 2:01 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

You can't stop someone from driving off a cliff by getting in.

So, thought I've been musing on for a bit:

I worked closely with people with clinical levels of paranoia and/or psychotic delusions in my hospital job. You actually don't need to know what their version of reality looks like to be able to talk to and connect with them. I was particularly good at getting extremely paranoid people to sign paperwork (their least favorite thing). I also was dubbed "the only real person" on the unit by patients who thought they were living in a simulation and that everyone in the hospital was a robot or actor, which is still among the highest honors I've ever been bestowed.

The thing is, the techniques I used to get through to them were the same techniques I used on individuals who were completely attached to reality but misinformed. Like, it's a pretty basic formula, honestly. Listen, find something to validate, then say "yeah, I totally get that; and then when--" and slip in a counterfact or reality check as if you're agreeing even if it's totally contradictory to what they're telling you. It's genuinely shocking how well this works; you can basically see the moment where it slips past people's mental defenses and they're starting to agree back before they realize wait, hang on... but at that point you're talking again, and they don't have time to think about it more or go back and reject it.

I used this a lot on staff who were convinced patients were just being manipulative assholes. "He's just playing games with me, he knows who I am, he was just trying to embarrass me by pretending we were meeting for the first time!" "Oh yeah, so frustrating to have the same conversation again. And the fact that his brain is literally not encoding memories at all right now and making him forget stuff over and over makes it so much harder!" (You do have to practice sounding very genuine and not sarcastic.)

The important part is not trying to find a sense of logic to counter like a game where if you slot in the right information the correct behavior comes out. I never spent time arguing anything wasn't true, I just dropped facts in places that emotionally vibed and let the subconscious take it from there. And it worked really damn well, regardless of whether the person was attached to reality or not. (Uhhh, this makes me sound a little like a brainwashing cult leader, doesn't it? Fuck, is this how Trump's gish-gallop works?)

Now this isn't a universal solution. There was some portion of staff that would literally, genuinely, not talk to me at all. One of the most popular nurses took one look at my butch dyke genderqueer self and Matrix dodged for the entire year to avoid even ever saying hello to me and pressured her friends to do the same. An occasional patient would respond to "hi" with "shut the fuck up" and walk away. So obviously I couldn't get through to those people. But people who were willing to talk to me at all I could do something with.

As this applies to politics, I think there's a portion we will never reach, but I think there's a good chunk that we can still shift. There were a lot of staff on my unit who weren't fundamentally bad people but absorbed the daily toxic messages from other staff members who believed genuinely cruel things about our patients. Including anti-trans sentiments. I saw pretty drastic shifts in behavior in those people over a year--did they ever get 100% where I wanted them to be? Fuck, no. But it was movement, and in fact in several people it moved to the point where they were taking advocacy actions for trans patients completely unprompted. Not because they considered themselves trans advocates, but because "it just made sense." There are a lot of people that are mired in a social soup of garbage messaging, and I think it can be easy to underestimate how powerful a force that is and how disconnected it can be from people's actual values.

Luckily, if you do it enough, people start to realize their social environment fucking sucks and seek out better spaces. I don't have to do this much at all any more with my mother in law, who left evangelical churches and returned to her local Native community and gets almost none of this toxic messaging anymore. But none of that involved keeping up with evangelical messaging or knowing how to debate facts about the Bible with her. It just involved a lot of emotional validation packaged with talking about my own reality as if it didn't contradict hers. Even--or rather especially--if it obviously massively did.

I dunno, maybe this doesn't make any sense. But that's my two cents on whether we need to be brushing up on the latest rightwing misinfo. (I do think we need to seek out more information about perspectives different from our own, but a newspaper isn't the place to get that, anyway.)
posted by brook horse at 2:19 PM on November 9 [125 favorites]

My primary supplier of media is just YouTube on my AppleTV. 99.999% of the political stuff was generic "Biden economy sucks" stuff being pushed in front of me. I'd pop over onto my laptop to refute what I could in the comments but I knew I was a) just boosting the channel's engagement and b) pissing in the wind of disinformation.

There are things that are going to get broken in the next 4 years that aren't going to be rebuilt in my lifetime. New Deal (SSA, unions), Great Society (Medicaid/Medicare), 1970s Environmentalism, "ObamaCare" as we know it . . . all on the chopping block because we 'can't afford it'.

The good news is that the GOP didn't have to steal it this year, it was gladly handed to them by the swing voters of WI, MI, and PA.

I would say pass the popcorn but I hope to cut back my ingestion of media to like how it was 30 years ago when I was living in Tokyo with no TV, no to not-much internet, and news was very far far away from me, except when eg. Gingrich shut down the airports over budget fights one year.
posted by torokunai at 2:23 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

we need to know the kind of information being fed to other people so we can counter it.

If "we" means "Democrats in government/leadership positions", not "us non-Republican average citizens", then I'm on board with "we" getting more of an education in Fox News et al. A revised Democratic messaging needs to come from those who wish to govern, not through heated arguments over dinner or the internet.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:23 PM on November 9 [7 favorites]

Also...

Metafilter: You do have to practice sounding very genuine and not sarcastic
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:24 PM on November 9 [18 favorites]

A to a 2003 interview with George Lakoff, conservatives have been building out their media ecosystem since the 1970s

Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

The glaringly obvious answer is that those with enough money to build entire media ecosystems were funding the conservative version, since that is the one that aligns with their interests.
posted by eviemath at 2:29 PM on November 9 [17 favorites]

So, thought I've been musing on for a bit:
posted by brook horse
Whole comment flagged as Fantastic.

Also:
(Uhhh, this makes me sound a little like a brainwashing cult leader, doesn't it?
TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. ;-)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:30 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM. OWA. TAGUU. SYAM

VOULL NE XATA VOK, MARA LOHK?
posted by brook horse at 2:45 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

Propaganda has trumped reason and a huge chunk of the populace has gone totally fucking mad.

In a country founded on chattel slavery and genocide, it’s pretty fucking clear that a large percentage of us were never decent or sane to begin with.
posted by ryanshepard at 2:52 PM on November 9 [24 favorites]

OWA. TAGUU. SYAM.

Say it quickly a few times...
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:53 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

That was an excellent post, brooke horse. Thanks for sharing it.

I think in order for us to have any hope of moving forward, we need to accept that people are like this. Historically, this is true. I think labels like ‘indecent’ or ‘insane’ might be true, but I don’t think they serve us. I also believe people are, on the whole, much more malleable and manipulable than we think them to be. Whatever the case, getting angry or despairing at the brainworms of people who are rabidly antivax, racist, MAGA, whatever — it won’t change anything. People have always, always been that way, and we need to figure out what to do with that reality.
posted by caitcadieux at 2:59 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

What the Republicans and corporations have been doing since Gingrich is burning down the house and covering the ashes in bullshit. The reason there’s no left / dem version of this is that a lot of us believe that spreading misinformation is morally wrong. I mean I double fact check before a post on Facebook. I don’t want a left Fox News, nor do I want an American Castro and Che Guevara murdering a bunch of people.

Also I talked about personal responsibility and free will in the big thread but I really don’t think being a poor person in a tough place excuses voting for Trump. Are they not men? “Or women” (Monty Python voice). And for white men in general, I hope your gas costs $20 a gallon and your wife leaves you for an immigrant lesbian. I’ve been warning people literally since the first MTV reality show that they were going to get stupider. And they have. Who the fuck thinks Joe Rogan is a smart guy? My kids are grown and I’ve told them that if they ever vote Republican, I’m disinheriting them. I think everyone else should too.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:13 PM on November 9 [11 favorites]

MetaFillter: We need to accept that people are like this.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:14 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

What I mean by that is that they do exist and by all accounts they aren’t going to change. It doesn’t mean we need to be cool with it (I sure as hell am not). But wrapping things up with “I don’t need to dumb things down for stupid people!” doesn’t solve the problem.

Honestly your comment is such a bad take on what I posted I’m a little astonished, zaixfeep.
posted by caitcadieux at 3:18 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]

I feel we also need to consider a further conundrum (as always I may be wrong). If I'm an elected Dem official, and I carry out my mandate -- affordable health care, strong social safety net, good-paying jobs etc. -- my constituents will eventually find themselves healthy, secure and prosperous. But if my typical voters become healthy, secure and prosperous, they are going to want to protect what they have, so many will start voting Republican. So my best path seems to be to never quite deliver what I promise, otherwise I'm out of a job after the next election.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:31 PM on November 9 [4 favorites]

Splinter: The Truth Hurts

Y'all, this entire blog is just an epic troll. You can tell from the subtitle. Stop wasting your time on it.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:41 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

caitcadieux, my comment was intended as a humorous/ironic comment on our own community here -- a gentle ribbing -- and I felt your sentence would be a fit for the long-running customary MetaFilter: {parody slogan} meme. Apologies. Ding me if you wish for being crass, but not for insulting you.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:41 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Y'all, this entire blog is just an epic troll. You can tell from the subtitle. Stop wasting your time on it.
posted by AlSweigart

Good call. We really shouldn't expect more than that from a rat who bosses around a bunch of cute turtles.
posted by zaixfeep at 3:45 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Oh, got it, zaixfeep. Thanks for clarifying — my apologies for reading such a negative tone into it.
posted by caitcadieux at 4:09 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

>This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone, rather than for someone. That's disheartening and exhausting. I am not one bit surprised that people didn't turn out.

Yes, but the someone wants to burn your house down. "Nobody made me feel inspired or motivated to get out and vote FOR someone, instead of merely AGAINST the guy who wants to burn my house down and make me eat a plate of shit every day." Seriously?

I suspect four years of the greater evil will make everybody more enthusiastic for the lesser evil. I also suspect by then it'll be too late.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:27 PM on November 9 [22 favorites]

I'm not going to read this, because I'm avoiding most of these "where the Democrats went wrong" exercises in finger-pointing. They ran too far to the left!, say the centrists. They ran too far to the right!, say the leftists. They talked too much about trans kids! They didn't talk enough about Gaza! In every case, people are projecting their preconceived opinions onto the election results, without much data to back them up.

I think the answer is not particularly ideological. It's close to an iron law of electoral politics that voters tend to punish incumbent parties when they are having a tough time economically. A lot of people still feel strained by the effects of inflation in the last few years. The Dems were the incumbent party, in the White House, anyway, and their suffering at the ballot box as a result is pretty unsurprising.

The same thing is happening all over the world, and it really doesn't seem to be about ideology. Consider that in the last year or so, incumbent conservative governments in Poland and the UK have been replaced by more left-leaning ones, while center-left coalitions in France and the Netherlands have been replaced by more right-leaning ones.

Derek Thompson notes that:

For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share

...and the chart he provides shows that the Democrats lost less vote share than almost any other incumbent party ... which suggests that they made the best of a bad situation.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns Money amplifies this:

[T]he shift [to the Republicans] was notably less pronounced in the contested battleground states, which is the opposite of what you would expect if Harris ran a poor campaign. There is no such thing as a flawless campaign but Harris had much higher net approval ratings than Biden, correctly identified the most competitive states, improved Democratic margins there, and was notably more competitive than other incumbent parties have done since COVID inflation (or than Trudeau is looking).

So: Dem leaders, and Dem voters, shouldn't beat themselves up too much about this loss. It's a disaster for the country in all kinds of ways, but there's probably little or nothing that they could have done differently to get a better result.

This may be a hard thing for a lot of people to accept. People want to believe that someone is in charge and will solve their problems -- or if they don't solve them, that they should have been able to. We all tend to look to our politicians like surrogate parents -- people who we can rely on, or at least people who we can blame for failing us if things don't turn out the way we want. But sometimes, voters just make poor choices, and shit just happens. And we just have to live with the results for a while.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:18 PM on November 9 [44 favorites]

^ unless a deadly novel virus sweeps through and wipes out ~300,000 people here the first year
posted by torokunai at 6:37 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

For what it’s worth, I voted for Obama in his first term. In every other election in my long lifetime I voted against the Republican by voting for a Democrat. I doubt my perfect candidate would please enough people to get elected. And nobody checks as many boxes as the “hell no” boxes of the other side.
posted by zenzenobia at 6:51 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

Not every liberal signed on to be a cult de-programmer well-versed in whatever misinformation is trending. Some of us just want to get the actual news.
posted by lemonshush at 6:57 PM on November 9 [10 favorites]

I'm with Greg_Ace. People who work in news or politics probably do need to figure out how to connect with the hypothetical Good Americans who accidentally voted for a fascist and convince them to not do that again. That would be a good thing to do! I wish them luck.

I am a private citizen with a boring job that, by design, doesn't involve talking to people much. I do not owe Trump voters the benefit of the doubt, or my scarce and precious free time. They have made my life harder and my free time scarcer. If I had infinite free time to read the news, a small amount of what poisoned the Trump voters might be useful? But I am already tired.
posted by mersen at 7:26 PM on November 9 [13 favorites]

It feels like the author is more concerned that people aren’t in the echo chamber he wants them to be in.

I do think the whole echo chamber thing is overblown in this way. I think those who use it are more upset when their article/tweet/post/blog is rejected by someone. Then it’s all “you disagree with me, therefore you must be in some kind of echo chamber.”

I think the larger problem is information overload and meme-ification of news. We live in big complex systems and people fall into a sort of paralysis when trying to understand what’s going on. So memes and sound bites fill the void which are also easily exploited to spread propaganda. I do think the so-called “main stream media” has eaten its own tail on that front - lack of differentiation between opinion and news, defunding journalists and in-depth reporting, etc. google and Facebook eating up online advertising hasn’t helped either, resulting in click-bait headlines.

I don’t know what the answer is to our media quandary, but I don’t think it’s what the author is proposing… if he’s really proposing anything at all.
posted by eekernohan at 7:33 PM on November 9 [6 favorites]

I live in a pretty red state and the whole premise of this article is bonkers from my point of view. The right's media arm is impossible to avoid, it's lliterally everywhere

Anyway it's a bit pointless to worry about what the Democrats should or should not have done or should be doing now. Electoral politics isn't a vehicle to combat authoritarian governments
posted by lescour at 9:11 PM on November 9 [9 favorites]

Sheesh. Fox News has the largest viewership of any news org in the U.S., and they happily tell lies about their preferred candidates, and have done so for years. You can't counter the entire Land of Make-Believe they've built since before Obama came along with logic or truth because people have their own logic, their own truth. They are fully on board with being gaslighted- look how many people who voted for Trump counter with "oh he doesn't mean the things he says" or "he's not actually going to do those things he said". The same folks will also tell you that China is going to pay a lot of money in tariffs, and that immigrants are eating cats- because Trump said so. You can't persuade people that have grown up in this system of misinformation with logic or truth- they refuse to take in anything that makes them slightly uncomfortable, and they've been told they don't have to, but instead they have the right to shut up or shut down anyone that does so. I don't know how you fix such a visceral aversion to learning anything that may shift one's world view, but this article certainly isn't the answer.

The "weird" campaign was probably the most effective tactic because it was 100% vibes, and some fool political posturer working for the dems shut it down.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:17 PM on November 9 [12 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News?

I mean, the two indie journalism outlets mentioned in the very first graf, Zeteo and Drop Site News, are on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Fox News—they're both leftist outlets. They're clear about their political orientation, and they do great reporting.

But you're never going to understand the thesis of the argument until you understand that "liberalism", in the 21st century and especially in the US, is a center-right ideology. I get that that fact upsets a lot of people, including on MetaFilter, but liberals are not on the left.
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:36 PM on November 9 [17 favorites]

Inflation is down. That just means things are getting more expensive more slowly. It doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. For everything to get cheaper, that would require deflation which is its own kind of economic catastrophe.

We will never go back to 2019 prices, full stop.

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted. They wanted lower prices. Telling people they can't have what they want lost her the election.

Would deflation have been as bad as another trump term? To billionaires and their pet economists maybe. To regular people almost certainly not.
posted by zymil at 2:02 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

Gonna read the thread now but my first thought was, "not out of touch with decency, at least."
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:50 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

I'm so sick of people always pushing "tHe EconOmY, stupid!" every presidential election. The only time I'm aware of the economy deciding an election was the FDR landslide of 1932. I guess its explicatory attractiveness lies in having nice things like numbers and theories. All the other elections since have been victims of war fears or cultural externalities "He has nice hair and teeth! Hippies on drugs killing people! Black criminals walking free! He played saxophone on Leno!, etc." This election was won and lost by women. And crazy people. I will admit, however, that the next election could very well be concerned with our economy.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:51 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted.

I heard her talking about lower prices multiple times, and its not like I hung on her every word, so it's not as simple as that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:51 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

They are fully on board with being gaslighted- look how many people who voted for Trump counter with "oh he doesn't mean the things he says" or "he's not actually going to do those things he said".

I have seen both of them ad nauseum in the same social media comment threads. Reality is optional, now. I don't think Democrats could change that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

(Oh, and also, "he never said that" and "that video/sound bite is fake")
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election

I believe someone else was president at the time. Vance did this very well, too. Implied that everything that happened under Biden was Harris's plan/idea. VPs in general have very little power, and what they do have depends on their working relationship with the president.

And simply talking about price controls wouldn't have helped. A recent study showed that voters preferred Harris's policies to Trump's if they were not told who proposed them.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:46 AM on November 10 [11 favorites]

Seconding the New Republic article chaznet linked to, Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? (which wasn't paywalled for me).
posted by Rash at 6:07 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

zymil said: Would deflation have been as bad as another trump term? To billionaires and their pet economists maybe. To regular people almost certainly not.


Rapid deflation is, in fact, pretty bad for working people, historically. Businesses typically respond by reducing their costs through layoffs, wage cuts, and production cuts.

And if you currently owe money, deflation makes this worse: the money you owe is now "more money" in real terms. Loan debt hits you worse. Credit card debt hits you worse.

Banks pull back on lending, too, since deflation means you lose money when you loan it out instead of sitting on it. Or they push for a big jump in interest rates to compensate for the effects of deflation. Either way -- and sometimes both ways! -- existing debt costs debtors more during a deflationary period, and the opportunity to get a loan to buy a home or a car becomes more limited.

The wealthy typically respond to inflation by cutting back on spending and investing. It promotes wealth hoarding, and makes simply saving up a lot of money into a reliable reliable source of passive income, since the value of each dollar increases on its own by definition.

Farmers and small businesspeople also get screwed by rapid deflation. The things they produce and sell drop in price.

In the U.S., the depression of 1839-1843 and the Panic of 1893 (which had negative effects lasting until 1897) were deflationary in nature, and the robber barons did just fine. It was the workers and the folks with savings accounts who got screwed, along with smaller banks that lacked the cash reserves to survive bank runs.

The Great Depression was a deflationary spiral, and that's part of why it lasted so long and hit so hard. Money got scarce, producers of goods cut back, people lost their jobs, so purchasing power decreased further, so production declined further....

Part of why a steady, low level of inflation is the usual goal in an economy is that deflation is generally Very Bad Indeed for most people, and is worse if you have less money or if you have debts than it is if you have more money.
posted by kewb at 6:10 AM on November 10 [11 favorites]

In reference to what the article is actually saying, I think what we're seeing in terms of neoliberals and neoconservatives living in two different media bubbles is the effect of modern Americans self-selecting their news sources entirely in a way that was, if not impossible, at least unworkable and would have required a great deal of effort as recently as twenty years ago.

At least since the mainstream adoption of network TV, Americans generally had a few widely agreed-upon news media sources. There were obviously newspapers, magazines and talk radio shows that espoused deeply slanted political perspectives on the world, and/or provided deeper dives on certain topics, much as we have today. But more importantly, you also had generalized news sources that most people agreed were accurate (no one thought that Walter Cronkite was gaslighting them) that provided a baseline of shared information that the average, non-crazy person believed to be the truth. (One lasting legacy of this, unfortunately, is the guileless boomer that believes everything they see on Fox News or read on Facebook, because how could they say that if it wasn't true??)

We don't have this anymore, but what that doesn't mean is that we do have a shared awareness that our individual perspective on the world isn't necessarily shared by our neighbor. We do not, I think it is safe to say, generally understand that our take on reality is straight up not necessarily the take of the person standing next to us. If I think, "Trump is a nazi!" my neighbor, who voted for Trump, may not be thinking, "Fuck yeah, nazis kick ass, bitch!!!" He may be thinking, "This gaucherie I voted for is an abomination, but ultimately he will allow our once proud nation to...retvrn," or he may be thinking, "Shit, man, I just want to be able to order a pizza and not sweat where that $20 is coming from," or he may be thinking, "At last the pizza pedos will go back to Soros Island, where they belong!" or he may be thinking, "Hitler! Aw yeah!" or he may be thinking something else altogether, something I could only understand if I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast, a thing I will never do but which millions of people are doing at this very second.

It is literally impossible for any human being -- regardless of their motivation, political persuasion, or massive bank of free time -- to absorb every news (and "news") source in an effort to understand his, her or their fellow humans. It can't be done. But it may be important to understand that these competing news (and "news") sources are out there, and that just because we find them distasteful, that doesn't mean people aren't listening to them.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:18 AM on November 10 [6 favorites]

Okay, but those anxieties were largely driven by partisan rightwing media creating a false narrative

We need a term for this, liberalsplaining? Like the economy sucks for a lot of people and inflation has been higher than it has been in like what, 35 years? My high grocery bill is driven by right wing media?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:29 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

People’s brains are pickled by billionaire-owned social media like TikTok, YouTube, and the Meta platforms (Instagram, Facebook), which take contextless clips from podcasts and livestreams and warp the truth.

We need to secure political power to break up google and Facebook, with candidates with the political will to so. Otherwise we’re just moving the deck chairs.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:29 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Oh! I forgot, the most important part about those shared, widely agreed-upon news sources was their accessibility. Network TV news? It was free. Everyone in America had a TV. A newspaper? Not entirely free, but very cheap, and available everywhere. The more individuated the news source, generally, the more you had to seek it out, the more you had to pay for it. A person who bought a newspaper and read deeply enough to hit the editorials would encounter both barrels of that outlet's bias, but most readers probably read the front page and skipped directly to the sports or the comics or the crossword puzzle.

Without this agreed-upon baseline of reality, you will have a world where everyone has their own facts.

How do we re-establish a kind of baseline consensus reality?

I don't know.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:30 AM on November 10 [7 favorites]

If Harris had instituted price controls she would have won the election, because that's what swing voters actually wanted. They wanted lower prices. Telling people they can't have what they want lost her the election.

1. Harris is not the president and can't institute anything! Has nobody watched Veep?
2. Even if somehow she could magically wave a wand and institute price controls across the entire economy, lowering the prices of all goods and services, that may (but probably wouldn't) have won her the election, at the cost of massively screwing over the economy.

So, yeah, maybe Harris should have lied a bunch about things she was going to do that she could then not follow up on, because that's what voters want - to be lied to, told what they want to hear, no matter how unreasonable or untenable.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:59 AM on November 10 [7 favorites]

> inflation has been higher than it has been in like what, 35 years

had been higher.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A6Ih

What caused it? The story of 2021 was that inflation was transitory as we transitioned from literal shutdowns. Was it? What tools did the Administration have to fight it? Why did all the money go to the wealthy?

Again, a very large bite of post-COVID inflation was rents, we're talking rent rises of hundreds per month for everyone. How is the Federal government empowered to fight that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/rent-average-by-county-change-rising-falling/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/states-rank-private-equity-influence-housing-health-care-jobs-pensions-rcna146818

Inflation, along with immigrants raping and killing people, and transsexual people playing in girls or boys sports were great kitchen table issue to run on of course. MMT proponents say inflation can be fought with tax rises, but since the 1994 Gingrich takeover they are entirely off the table now.
posted by torokunai at 7:05 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

The cause is irrelevant. What matters is how voters assign responsibility. And when the economy sucks they blame the person at the top. Denying the economy sucks is foolish
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:09 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

> Denying the economy sucks is foolish

The Biden admin and Dem majorities passed the Inflation Reduction Act so it was of course on their radar.

Did things suck? Wages are up 25% since 2020. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but that's not how the economy works.

What policy mistakes were committed in 2021-22? Should we have just let the system crash a la 1929-33?

I own my own home (and enjoy Prop 13 protections on tax rises for that matter) and my wages are up way more than the hit I see at my weekly visit to Trader Joes.

Trudeau stuck his foot into this same shit pie last year.

I get it that it's politicking 101 but annoying in that negative campaigning is so much more powerful than honest campaigning.

Employment-wise, things have never been better:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

Maybe we'll finally get that recession the GOP has been hoping for since 2021.
posted by torokunai at 7:22 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

> For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share

fwiw, ireland called a snap election friday and goes to the polls in a few weeks with another harris leading an incumbent party/coalition, which is riding high on a "cost-of-living package" + Housing for All & infrastructure. helping the campaign?

Week starting November 4th

This week, starting November 4th, will see four cost of living supports made. These include the €400 Working Family Payment, the €400 Disability Support Grant and the €300 lump sum payment for households in receipt of the Fuel Allowance.

The first of two Double Child Benefit Payments will also be made this week.

Week starting November 11th

During the week beginning November 11, a €400 lump Carer's Support Payment will be issued to carers. There will also be a €200 Living Alone Allowance paid to widows, widowers and other single-person households.

Week starting November 25th

Meanwhile, a €100 lump sum for people in receipt of the Child Support Grant, formerly known as ‘Qualified Child’, will be paid on the week beginning November 25th.

Week starting December 2nd

The second once-off double payment of Child Benefit for each child will be paid on December 3rd.

The Christmas Bonus Double Payment will be paid on the week commencing December 2nd.

funding the bounty for ireland's citizens? a record tax haul from multinational corporations you probably know (which are in ireland to evade taxes to begin with, granted! but also, loopholes have since shrunk if not closed entirely).

guess what? improving people's living standards materially gets them to vote for you!

also, while not a "developed country," it's worth mentioning mexico just went through its own historic realignment the other way -- led by (phd energy engineer) claudia sheinbaum -- with her socialist morena* coalition winning reelection by huge margins. that doesn't mean all is bread and roses. brutal cartel killings are a direct challenge and AMLO's constitutional overreach threatens mexico's judicial independence -- and democracy. but i do think it pushes back against the notion that incumbent parties all lost this year and were somehow helpless to do anything about it. which, if that is how people perceive things, maybe do stuff to change their perceptions?

---
*Ideology:
Anti-neoliberalism
Progressivism
Socialism of the 21st century
Left-wing nationalism
Left-wing populism
Latin American integration
posted by kliuless at 7:42 AM on November 10 [9 favorites]

Did things suck? Wages are up 25% since 2020.

There are these parallel worlds.

People in industries where there's good job growth and where people can change jobs *relatively* easily are doing fine. People in private-sector union jobs are mostly doing okay as new contracts come up, like the folks in the UAW, but are probably hurting until it's time for that new contract.

Retired people are objectively probably doing okayish since their income is a mix of stuff that's tied to the inflation rate and investments.

But there are also a lot of people like me -- people who work for state governments where you're in a world of 2-4% colas, people (also like me) in industries where they can't realistically switch jobs without uprooting your whole life and moving across the country, people in lines of work where they're still very disposable. I made more in 2000 than I do now, and the only reason I didn't make more in 1998 was that I was still in grad school.

It will be a cold day in hell before I vote republican. But honestly the "everything is actually great, you idiot" messaging kinda pisses me off. Shit sucks. I used to just go wegmans and buy shit and not really pay attention to the total. Now I gotta plan out buy this at wegmans and the other thing at walmart and aldi is good for this and remember to get this shit at bjs and I fucking hate it. Yeah great tvs are still cheap. I don't need a tv.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:05 AM on November 10 [25 favorites]

Not to mention buying a house.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:18 AM on November 10 [6 favorites]

What is the proposed answer, watching Fox News? I don't understand this person's argument -- the "must change their media diet" part.

In my house, we watch the news every morning. We start out with Al-Jazeera, then move to DW, then move to American News with the express intent of seeing what the rest of America is being fed. We don’t watch it to learn truth, we watch it to learn what propaganda our neighbors are being exposed to. And it makes us really, really good at talking to our neighbors about politics and of predicting the outcomes of elections. Both of us predicted Trump would win, we just thought we were being overly pessimistic/paranoid. It turned out we weren’t.

Changing media diet doesn’t mean believing all media - just widening your exposure.
posted by corb at 8:27 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

This was the third election in a row where I ended up having to vote against someone

I was in southwestern France last year, some of that time in rural areas away from the mainstream. At one of the smalltown hotels that I checked into, the owner struck up a conversation with me...and spent a good 20 minutes in a polemic about what a horrible person Macron was.

The thing is, after all that talk, I could never figure out if he was criticizing Macron from the left or from the right.

The French decided that they hated Sarkozy, and the UMP/Republicains got hollowed out. Then they got Hollande and the traditional Socialists, everybody decided they hated Hollande, and the Socialists have shrunk to minor party status.

Now everybody hates Macron (justifiably on some issues, in my opinion). Le Pen and the far right are still...barely...considered to be indigestible. Mélenchon and the left don't have enough support to take over.

They've gone beyond the U.S. two-party system, they've had at least five choices, and decided against all of them. So everybody hates everything, nobody has a path forward.

In the U.S., I've heard a lot of bullshit from TV pundits this week. One of the only legit pronouncements I heard was a guy saying "people are sitting around unhappy, and the ones who did vote went out to vote against something, without really thinking about it".

And, that there was a good chance that the pendulum would swing back and gripey, low-info voters would vote against Republicans in the midterms--again--as yet another protest vote.

At that point, Democrats might take back Congress, barely and weakly, and declare a big mandate for change, and accomplish nothing. Maybe staunch a bit of the bleeding from the wounds of the 2025-2026 cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Someday that cycle runs out, but it's still not clear what happens when entropy kicks in and that pendulum stops. In the meantime, we get disorder and the slow collapse of society.
posted by gimonca at 8:35 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

This discussion is so unreal to me.

Biden inherited a situation similar to if not worse than what was handed to Obama in 2009.

Also similarly, Pelosi had been returned to power as leader of the House two years prior and the Dems had a razor-thin majority in the Senate coming into office in the crisis year.

2009 saw ARRA etc, and 2021 saw ARP, and also the Fed expand its balance sheet (i.e. MMT):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A7R3 shows the bulk of Fed intervention came in 2020, with a topping of continued bond buying, mostly in mortgage bonds to lower rates to generational lows:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1A7TQ i.e. high 3s to high 2s.

Of course, lowering rates won't actually make housing less unaffordable, since that's impossible short of literal decimation of the population. Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

Anyhoo, back to the unreality of it. . . then in 2022 IRA and the infrastructure bill was passed and the electorate in its infinite wisdom gave control of the House back to the GOP and that was it as far as the Biden admin was concerned, like how Obama's 8 year admin was shut down in 2010.

The Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" vs the "sucky" status quo is the choice we had last week, and enough suckers have bought into it (or stood aside). The Second American Revolution is indeed coming, and it will be bloodless I guess, depending on further events.
posted by torokunai at 8:46 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Maybe I missed it but what were the biden administrations attempts to expand the housing supply?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:16 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

From my situation--Midwestern urban, middle class, settled but not wealthy--I've been facing two challenges as I countdown to retirement:

1. Homeowners insurance. This is becoming the largest item in my household budget. It's way higher than property taxes. Climate change is a factor here, both paying for people in Florida, and paying for local damage due to hailstorms. Republicans will do jack shit to help anyone on this issue, and if we deport a big chunk of our home construction and repair workforce, prices will spike for construction jobs, and homeowner's insurance will get pushed even higher.

2. Cost of health care. I'd like to go on Obamacare for a fairly short period before hitting age 65, but sheesh, it's expensive. I have to pay full price out of pocket and hope I get something back in a tax refund later. At my age, I can't just "wing it" and do without. And if it's this daunting to me, I can image how much harder it is for people with fewer resources to fall back on, not to mention for people who live in states where Republican regimes have hobbled it even further. And Republicans want to roll back the clock twenty years to an even worse scenario, where people lose the meagre protections and access they have today.

This isn't to discount many other very real issues that people face, these are just two of the ones that are in my immediate future.

There are very real problems in the economy--student loan debt is not going away, and the cost of education is another burden for a lot of people in the future. Transportation is a problem on many, many levels, where so many Americans are trapped in a life where they're forced to buy, fuel, and insure an increasingly expensive vehicle just to get food or keep a job. Here, too, solutions are complicated and need long-term work that will survive back and forth swings in the political climate. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, we have day-to-day conversations on the "economy" that are dominated by people who have plenty of money, but complain that they have to pay 50 cents more for a box of Hot Pockets. We're stuck having to please the sort of entitled, comfortable people who argue with the waitstaff over accepting a 10% coupon at the budget buffet. Republicans connect with that "anger" for short-term benefit, and the rest of the world crumbles around us due to the real problems that are never addressed.
posted by gimonca at 9:19 AM on November 10 [8 favorites]

It is true that the ACA marketplace is expensive, but maybe nobody remembers that before the ACA, health insurance providers could just straight-up deny you coverage for any reason they wanted. So it was a choice between "cheapish healthcare that only certain people can get" and "more expensive healthcare available to everyone." And maybe, hopefully, at some point, we will go a Medicare For All route where everyone gets healthcare for cheap, which will of course will have all of the downsides that we see in Canada and the UK. There is no perfect solution. But at least making it law that insurers can't just say 'NOPE" to whoever they please was a huge step forward.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:23 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, we have day-to-day conversations on the "economy" that are dominated by people who have plenty of money, but complain that they have to pay 50 cents more for a box of Hot Pockets. We're stuck having to please the sort of entitled, comfortable people who argue with the waitstaff over accepting a 10% coupon at the budget buffet. Republicans connect with that "anger" for short-term benefit, and the rest of the world crumbles around us due to the real problems that are never addressed.

In this election republicans did much better with non college degree people making under 100k than dems. I think this is the exact opposite
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:28 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

>the biden administrations attempts to expand the housing supply?

Since when is the Federal government in the "housing supply" business? Sounds like that would be "Washington Politicians Shoving black people High Density Housing Down Our Throats".

Nobody wants to live on BLM land. I suppose the Feds could privatize military bases like El Toro, but the locals there voted to make that surplus acreage a nice park, natch.
posted by torokunai at 9:34 AM on November 10

> if we deport a big chunk of our home construction and repair workforce

yeah I caught that too. I can understand the attraction to Trumpism for legal laborers though. Being militantly against illegal immigration is a big political football to push, since illegal immigrants can't vote.

>I'd like to go on Obamacare for a fairly short period before hitting age 65, but sheesh, it's expensive

? The PPACA subsidies were part of my retirement plan this decade to bridge me to age 65.

With $45K of retirement income, I can get a Silver plan at age 59 for $230/mo after $650/mo ACA subsidy.

I don't have any hopes that ACA subsidy will still be around in 2 years tho, so I've got to make other plans now. Thanks PA!
posted by torokunai at 9:42 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Kamala Harris spending the closing stretch shoving the John Kelly interview about Trump’s fascist impulses in everyone’s faces is more proof of how mainstream media narratives totally warp Democrats’ conception of America.

Just gonna use this as an excuse to post two columns responding to the election that I liked, shouting out their existence to everyone.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo“How Good or Bad a Campaign Did Harris Run?”

Tom Scocca at Defector: “Last Time Was Lucky”

The media is I think not responding to the moment, but the media has also done its darnedest to care about Biden’s age and inflation instead of DJT’s evil. The “media” is unequal to the challenge of describing Fox News as it is because Fox News is the media. And the Dems have, alas facilitated this a bit by not really getting into the fascism thing until much too late.

Anyhoo, the solution to all of this is obviously not to adopt Jacob Weindling’s positions but instead to adopt mine.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:45 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

Since when is the Federal government in the "housing supply" business?

I don’t know if this is a joke or not, but the housing market is probably the market that is the most intertwined with federal policy
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:48 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

I have to pay full price out of pocket and hope I get something back in a tax refund later.
It is true that the ACA marketplace is expensive

So, looking at current rules, it seems like people making more than 400% of the federal poverty level no longer qualify for a subsidy, so around ~60k for a single person. But you can also qualify for a subsidy if your benchmark plan costs more than 8.5% of your income.

For me, the ACA is opposite of expensive; it drops my insurance premium from nearly a thousand dollars to less than my electric bill. It's not the system I'd have chosen if I'd been given a magic wand (god no), but it has made a huge difference for many people, including me. If the ACA goes, I simply will not have health care.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:49 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

The point wasn't the the ACA is bad, it's miles above where we were before. The point is that it doesn't solve the problem of health care costs for everyone. I always expected that it would take us further towards a better system (like, you know, so many other countries in the world have), not that it would be an end in itself. People are still burdened by health care costs, even with the ACA.

And Republicans come in with the "we will fix it" message, when if you examine what Republicans want to do, they want to get rid of the ACA entirely with no replacement.

People voted for "change", and they're going to get change, and it will be the opposite of the change they want and need.
posted by gimonca at 10:11 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

>but the housing market is probably the market that is the most intertwined with federal policy

Feel free to add detail on your point here, I'll start you off:

“Most intertwined” is a reach I would feel uncomfortable making but, like, HUD is right there.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:15 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Here in "Commifornia", ACA has provided the framework for universal healthcare for people who are in the poverty levels. You're not going to find a personal doctor or therapist that takes MediCal but the walk-in clinics and hospitals now have MediCal to bill to when they see you.

That's my understanding at least. Clinton tried to touch this pole in 1993 and, yeah.
posted by torokunai at 10:20 AM on November 10

> HUD is right there

In 2023, $30B for Section 8 vouchers (the definition of neoliberalist policy), $3B for community development grants ($10 per capita goes farther than you think!)

People complain about high rents, but what about the poor landlords. Why aren't people happy for them making so much more money now??
posted by torokunai at 10:27 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I think people are upset about high rents and high housing prices, and people are also upset that the Biden admin hasn’t done much to address those issues.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:45 AM on November 10 [3 favorites]

And Republicans come in with the "we will fix it" message, when if you examine what Republicans want to do, they want to get rid of the ACA entirely with no replacement.

Yes, this is my fear.

But my slim hope is that since median wage is only around ~37k, destroying the ACA will be too unpopular for them to do all at once. That would immedately increase the cost of health insurance by hundreds or thousands of dollars for millions of people, in a way that is easily tied to specific policy positions. Those who only get a small benefit, or no benefit, and wouldn't notice much of a difference are making well above median. Instead, I suspect that they'll get rid of the ACA over time by weakening it piece by piece - but that still might give me a little more time to hopefully get any catastrophic health events out of the way before I age into dying in a ditch.

When the ACA passed my biggest fear was that it would take some of the energy out of efforts to push for better. And I think it did. But I also don't think we would have gotten anything better than it anyway, we're too fucked as a society, either too venal and hateful on one hand, or too gutless on the other. Alternate worlds, yadda yadda.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:51 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]

But there are also a lot of people like me -- people who work for state governments where you're in a world of 2-4% colas, people (also like me) in industries where they can't realistically switch jobs without uprooting your whole life and moving across the country, people in lines of work where they're still very disposable. I made more in 2000 than I do now, and the only reason I didn't make more in 1998 was that I was still in grad school.

Hey it could be worse! I'm a federal employee, so not only are my pay raises WAY below inflation (usually 1-2% with a "generous" 4% last year), I now get to deal with the very real risk of unemployment, losing my career and finances (because who hires a 40-something who hasn't worked in the private sector in 15 years) AND is probably one of the first in line for the eventual roundup or firing squad! Yay me!

It will be a cold day in hell before I vote republican. But honestly the "everything is actually great, you idiot" messaging kinda pisses me off.

Kind of? It makes me absolutely furious, it's borderline gaslighting. Protip: If you are starting to sound like a policy wonk and are lecturing down to people like a know-it-all academic vs actually listening to them then you just might be part of the problem. I have seen this all over MeFi (as well as Reddit and other forums) - they just do not get it.

Sadly a large number of college-educated Democrats I know in real life fall down the same hole. They are the intelligentsia and the educated elite after all, they must know what's best! Anyone who disagrees with them or has a different, less privileged life experience must be a soft-brained rube! It's definitely not what got us into this mess but it is really not helping. And as someone who grew up working class, it pisses me off to no end. Classism isn't just for those on the right.
posted by photo guy at 11:07 AM on November 10 [9 favorites]

So do you think people are 1) not upset about high rents and housing prices and/or not upset/not placing blame on the Biden administration
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:08 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

> HUD is right there

In 2023, $30B for Section 8 vouchers (the definition of neoliberalist policy), $3B for community development grants ($10 per capita goes farther than you think!)

Those are some numbers! I don’t have the savvy to interpret them, but they sound nice. I was more responding to the question of how much influence the administration has over housing. I don’t really know - but there’s a three-letter agency with the job, so it can deffo do something. And it sounds like it has been! Is it enough? I have no idea.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:14 AM on November 10

Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

This is well-put, succinct, and illustrates why we must stop allowing the necessities of life to be dictated by markets.
posted by mittens at 11:42 AM on November 10 [7 favorites]

Why, yes, let us change our diet to include healthy portions of rich people. We’re sure to not go hungry roasting entitled white guys.
posted by varion at 12:04 PM on November 10 [2 favorites]

Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.

National. Rent. Control. National. Rent. Stabilization.
posted by corb at 12:27 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

> So my best path seems to be to never quite deliver what I promise, otherwise I'm out of a job after the next election.

...

> Housing is always priced at the point of unaffordability since that's how markets work.


Hmmm. Hmmm. Is this how the donkey feels, never getting closer to the carrot?
posted by Rat Spatula at 1:25 PM on November 10 [2 favorites]

2020: TFG 74.2 Million vs. Biden 81.2 Million
2024: TFG 74.3 Million vs. Harris 70.4 Million

This is a really interesting comparison because it basically says that Trump hasn't moved much in 4 years. Broadly, I think that Trump didn't do much differently this time around than he ever has in the past. The part of the electorate that loves Trump hasn't gone anywhere. Despite all the ads attempting to model the idea of a past Trump voter who was now swapping to Harris, I think that was all some weird Dem fever dream. A tiny minority.

One problem is that Democratic messaging as the administration in power over the past 4 years hasn't been very good at breaking through to anyone who isn't a wonk. And people simply do not care to parse the definition of inflation when their grocery bill is insane. They do not care to parse what the differences are between Harris and Biden, or the powers (or lack thereof) of the VP. 11 million people decided she wasn't giving them enough reason to come out for her and they didn't. The unending barrage of ads (I live in MI, I know from whence I speak) did nothing except reduce turnout, because it made everybody exhausted with the whole affair, well before November.
posted by axiom at 1:41 PM on November 10 [4 favorites]

Another take that I think dovetails with the earlier ones I liked, from Brian Beutler.: “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem” (The dovetailing is perhaps unsurprising since Beutler is a Talking Points Memo alum)

[T]hose who truly believe there’s a set of commitments that would make Democrats more politically bulletproof should lay it out: What agenda is pro-worker enough that culture-war, divide-and conquer politics stop being effective? What specific agenda, or specific set of accomplishments, would make these voters cock their heads and say, Oh I get it now! Because it isn’t full employment. It isn’t trillions of dollars in health-care benefits, unprecedented support for unions and their pensions, major infrastructure investments, or any number of high-impact pro-worker and consumer rules and enforcement actions.

posted by Going To Maine at 2:43 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

To my fellow TL;DRers, from what I can tell Beutler's suggestion is that some kind of liberal Joe Rogan has to appear, someone who can relate to or inspire young dudes in their gooncaves to set down their dicks and/or video game controllers and/or drug paraphernalia long enough to hear the good news about...I don't know, the center left, I suppose. His concern is that dudes like that won't listen to dorks like him, but I kind of call on bullshit on that and I'll tell you why in two words: Jordan Peterson. There is literally no bigger nerd on earth, a man who would die if he ate a vegetable, a man with a voice like Kermit the Frog, just a guy who is like some kind of gothic Frasier Crane, and those dudes listen to him. So I don't think what we need is a hulking liberal, although if that were what we needed, Dave Bautista is literally sitting right there, so.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:14 PM on November 10 [3 favorites]

Conservative media targets people who want to be reassured they have a good bead on things and are in synch with the pack. Air America Radio failed because its typical listeners don't feel their beliefs need reinforcement, or they are certain they 'know better' than some celebrity or pundit in a studio somewhere. (I doubt rich/intellectual conservatives listen to or value non-business news conservative media.)

MeFi is a perfect example -- here we all are saying "Here's how I'm right" to each other, over and over. If we can reach any consensus on this topic before it auto-closes, I'll reconsider my lack of hope in the efficacy of a supportive media/propaganda system to counterpoint Fox et al.
posted by zaixfeep at 4:20 PM on November 10

National. Rent. Control. National. Rent. Stabilization.
Won't help anything if we don't have enough housing in places where people want to live, and will make things worse if it causes no one to be willing to build housing.

Housing is such a huge problem, and we absolutely need a lot of work to fix it. At the federal level, state level, and local level, starting with making it easier (and ideally, cheaper!) to build where there is demand. Kamala had some vague indications that she would start to address it, and I sorely hope we can see progress here. Given that most blue states are doing a dreadful job here, maybe we will see progress here, although I'm not holding my breath.
posted by ch1x0r at 4:48 PM on November 10

You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.