Political Roundtable Part XXX

[Wizardspride]

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[Pointgod]

I feel like Fetterman's an example, like Trump was, that noninformed voters (which is about 80% of them) respond more to personality than policy.

No one votes on policy. It’s all about the feels. Otherwise you wouldn’t have the majority of people blaming Biden for inflation because he just so happens to be President when inflation is rising or voting for Republicans who have literally put out zero policies to combat inflation. Sorry to say but Americans generally aren’t very informed voters, they vote on pointless **** like “this guy is a fighter” or “they’re not a typical politician” or “she’s not politically correct”

[Pointgod]

And you know how I know that no one votes on policy? Republicans are comfortable taking votes like this. Republicans aren’t going to punish them electoral, Independents aren’t picking a side, Democrats aren’t consistently turning out in record numbers, young voters aren’t turning out consistently to punish them, non voters can’t be bothered to register to vote them out. They’re going to continue to get away with it until it’s too late and there’s no amount of voting to make things right.

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[Pointgod]

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[queridiculo]

And you know how I know that no one votes on policy? Republicans are comfortable taking votes like this. Republicans aren’t going to punish them electoral, Independents aren’t picking a side, Democrats aren’t consistently turning out in record numbers, young voters aren’t turning out consistently to punish them, non voters can’t be bothered to register to vote them out. They’re going to continue to get away with it until it’s too late and there’s no amount of voting to make things right.

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GOP - The Cruelty is the Point.

[Zonkerbl]

I get the desire to point the finger at the GOP and it feels good to point out how evil they are. Gosh knows I've done it on this thread. But I think it is also useful to look at why the GOP is successful. They understand what motivates voters, and the Dems do not. There is a lot of community building that the Dems could do that they refuse to do because of their unconscious racism.

Why is legalizing marijuana too much to ask?

Why can we only talk about police reform, and not harm reduction?

Why can't we have a national level decarceration conversation?

Why can't we pass national level abortion protection laws?

Why can't we talk about a carbon tax?

None of these things are so controversial that a coordinated propaganda campaign repeating certain ideas over and over couldn't condition this nation of brainwashable idiots to accept it. The GOP gets it. Why don't the Dems? Why are they so afraid of persuasion?

[Zonkerbl]

I guess part of it is that the Dems need to actually pass stuff to be successful, why the GOP is successful if they stop things, which is much easier.

[Wizardspride]

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[verbal8]

I guess part of it is that the Dems need to actually pass stuff to be successful, why the GOP is successful if they stop things, which is much easier.

The GOP failed at pretending to be the party of small government, so they decided to be the part of bad government.

[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

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So the guy says it was just a family with kids, a nothing burger. Why lie about it then? When the Dems came out a year ago and said "hey we saw Republicans giving tours on Jan 5," instead of saying "YES YOU IDIOTS I GAVE A TOUR TO A FAMILY WITH TWO KIDS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PARANOID PEOPLE" like a normal person he LIED about it. So now here we are a year later with *proof that he lied.*

So given that enormous and, according to his version of events, *completely inexplicable and unnecessary lie,* why should I believe *anything* he says now?

[Pointgod]

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This woman is a psychopath and menace. I don’t know why the Jan 6th committee isn’t having her testify.

[Pointgod]

I get the desire to point the finger at the GOP and it feels good to point out how evil they are. Gosh knows I've done it on this thread. But I think it is also useful to look at why the GOP is successful. They understand what motivates voters, and the Dems do not. There is a lot of community building that the Dems could do that they refuse to do because of their unconscious racism.

Why is legalizing marijuana too much to ask?

Why can we only talk about police reform, and not harm reduction?

Why can't we have a national level decarceration conversation?

Why can't we pass national level abortion protection laws?

Why can't we talk about a carbon tax?

None of these things are so controversial that a coordinated propaganda campaign repeating certain ideas over and over couldn't condition this nation of brainwashable idiots to accept it. The GOP gets it. Why don't the Dems? Why are they so afraid of persuasion?

You keep saying that the Dems have unconscious racism but you don’t provide any concrete examples as to how that plays out.

The Republicans have smartly realized that the majority of policies and legislation get pushed through the state level. Everything you talked about, climate change policies, legalizing marijuana, ending qualified immunity can all be done at the state level. How many states have a Democratic House, Senate and Governor? I’m guessing that it’s less than 20. So that means over half of the states are either outright hostile to the policies above or there’s gridlock to do anything because of Republicans. At the Federal level Republicans have a built in advantage in the Senate where Democratic Senators represent something like 30 million more votes yet the Senate is 50/50 and the idiots like Manchin and Sinema refuse to get rid of the filibuster. It’s easy for Republicans in Congress to say vote for us and we’ll ensure that the big bad Federal government won’t tell you what to do, while they can carry out their monstrous agenda at the state level. The majority of people in Kentucky may want to legalize weed, but not if it’s the big bad government telling them they have to. Keep in mind, Kentucky has a Democratic Governor, at some point it’s up to the voters to hold the clowns in the state legislature responsible for blocking any type of progress.

And from a propaganda perspective the right wing is so far ahead that it’s actually scary. Billionaires are playing the long game. Look at people like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and realize that they have billionaire backers pumping tons of money into an online presence. The right wing ecosystem is coordinated to push propaganda and lies. Shapiro, Kirk, Bongino will push a message from the right and people like Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore push right wing talking points from the “I used to be Liberal but they are too radical” position. And that’s not even taking into account the big daddy Fox News. Just read some of these right wing nuts on Twitter and you’ll see that they have the same talking points but they at never any point tell their followers that both parties are the same or voting doesn’t mean anything. They put every issue as an existential threat to their freedom and that Democrats can never get power. There’s just not that coordination on the left where they attack each other and discourage voting for Democrats or voting all together. The answer is that there needs to be a sustained grassroots efforts in enough states that matter to move the Overton window to a less radical right wing view of politics and policies, but that takes time, coordination and a lot of money, but most importantly a sustained effort from voters to keep the GOP from gaining power.

[doclinkin]

And from a propaganda perspective the right wing is so far ahead that it’s actually scary. Billionaires are playing the long game. Look at people like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and realize that they have billionaire backers pumping tons of money into an online presence. The right wing ecosystem is coordinated to push propaganda and lies. Shapiro, Kirk, Bongino will push a message from the right and people like Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore push right wing talking points from the “I used to be Liberal but they are too radical” position. And that’s not even taking into account the big daddy Fox News. Just read some of these right wing nuts on Twitter and you’ll see that they have the same talking points but they at never any point tell their followers that both parties are the same or voting doesn’t mean anything. They put every issue as an existential threat to their freedom and that Democrats can never get power. There’s just not that coordination on the left where they attack each other and discourage voting for Democrats or voting all together. The answer is that there needs to be a sustained grassroots efforts in enough states that matter to move the Overton window to a less radical right wing view of politics and policies, but that takes time, coordination and a lot of money, but most importantly a sustained effort from voters to keep the GOP from gaining power.

I'd say the only way Dems win, consistently, is when there is a sufficiently charismatic individual who gets free publicity whatever their message is. Clinton, Obama. A guy like Biden can barely squeak in only because his opponent was so repugnant that it drove people to the polls. Republicans don't need a good guy, they can invent boogeymen. Boogeymen do best when you really don't know the details. The less you actually know, the worse it could be. THERE ARE EMAILS! HUNTER BIDEN HAD AN ACTUAL LAPTOP! WIKILEAKS! Ironically Fear is more democratic than Hope. Able to weaponize into a contagious infection of suspicion.

The only thing that counteracts that on a grand scale are movements. Demographic bumps like the Boomers. Music, sometimes, if there is a guy who has stadium sized charisma. A blockbuster movie that makes a convincing argument. Whatever the current day equivalent of a protest song might be. I don't know. It is probably a message in a video game. Some kind of 'We Can DO this' message that ends up registering people to vote. Or of course Tik Tok and other social media.

I mean its either that or like some kind of protest porn, I guess, I dunno. Some kind of thing that makes it sound like it is more fun and reasonable to be on our side. Party for your right to fight.

[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

I get the desire to point the finger at the GOP and it feels good to point out how evil they are. Gosh knows I've done it on this thread. But I think it is also useful to look at why the GOP is successful. They understand what motivates voters, and the Dems do not. There is a lot of community building that the Dems could do that they refuse to do because of their unconscious racism.

Why is legalizing marijuana too much to ask?

Why can we only talk about police reform, and not harm reduction?

Why can't we have a national level decarceration conversation?

Why can't we pass national level abortion protection laws?

Why can't we talk about a carbon tax?

None of these things are so controversial that a coordinated propaganda campaign repeating certain ideas over and over couldn't condition this nation of brainwashable idiots to accept it. The GOP gets it. Why don't the Dems? Why are they so afraid of persuasion?

You keep saying that the Dems have unconscious racism but you don’t provide any concrete examples as to how that plays out.

The Republicans have smartly realized that the majority of policies and legislation get pushed through the state level. Everything you talked about, climate change policies, legalizing marijuana, ending qualified immunity can all be done at the state level. How many states have a Democratic House, Senate and Governor? I’m guessing that it’s less than 20. So that means over half of the states are either outright hostile to the policies above or there’s gridlock to do anything because of Republicans. At the Federal level Republicans have a built in advantage in the Senate where Democratic Senators represent something like 30 million more votes yet the Senate is 50/50 and the idiots like Manchin and Sinema refuse to get rid of the filibuster. It’s easy for Republicans in Congress to say vote for us and we’ll ensure that the big bad Federal government won’t tell you what to do, while they can carry out their monstrous agenda at the state level. The majority of people in Kentucky may want to legalize weed, but not if it’s the big bad government telling them they have to. Keep in mind, Kentucky has a Democratic Governor, at some point it’s up to the voters to hold the clowns in the state legislature responsible for blocking any type of progress.

And from a propaganda perspective the right wing is so far ahead that it’s actually scary. Billionaires are playing the long game. Look at people like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and realize that they have billionaire backers pumping tons of money into an online presence. The right wing ecosystem is coordinated to push propaganda and lies. Shapiro, Kirk, Bongino will push a message from the right and people like Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore push right wing talking points from the “I used to be Liberal but they are too radical” position. And that’s not even taking into account the big daddy Fox News. Just read some of these right wing nuts on Twitter and you’ll see that they have the same talking points but they at never any point tell their followers that both parties are the same or voting doesn’t mean anything. They put every issue as an existential threat to their freedom and that Democrats can never get power. There’s just not that coordination on the left where they attack each other and discourage voting for Democrats or voting all together. The answer is that there needs to be a sustained grassroots efforts in enough states that matter to move the Overton window to a less radical right wing view of politics and policies, but that takes time, coordination and a lot of money, but most importantly a sustained effort from voters to keep the GOP from gaining power.

I'm so glad you asked, because in fact I've given many, many examples in this thread. But to save you the time of going back and reading them, here is just a sample:

1) The War on Drugs. Racist, racist, racist, largely created by a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans.
2) The unfettered worship of cops, who are clearly trained to target non-white people - racist.
3) The clutching of pearls whenever "defunding the cops" is mentioned - racist. I don't know if this counts as different from #2 but whatever. For Biden to say "For god's sake I don't want to defund the cops" when it was he people who want to defund the cops that got him elected? How does that even happen? What a disaster.
4) The refusal of Biden, who represents "moderate" Democrats, to even consider legalizing marijuana - racist.

Here's some new ones - I would argue that the failure of the Dems to pass nationwide prochoice legislation when they had the chance is racist by omission - white women will be able to get abortions, generally - although as I mentioned earlier, statistically between now and next November a pretty white woman will die from a complication because she couldn't get an abortion. It's just the law of large numbers. But statistically the women who will suffer the most from the Republican's abortion ban is non-white women. This is the demographic that is most responsible for kicking Trump out, and this is the thanks they get.

Generally the absolute refusal of the Dem party to embrace the Squad - to me that's racist, for the same reason. These are the Congressional Representatives of the demographic that defeated Trump. Has Nancy Pelosi over spoken out publicly in defense of AOC, like Republicans have publicly defended MTG and similar scum? You could make an argument it's not racism, but it's basically racism.

I could go on. Every time I complain about the Dems making some strategic mistake, it's because rich white moderate dems don't want to stand up for the true backbone of the party, non-white voters. Every time Dems strategize about winning elections, their first thought is trying to persuade hard core racist/xenophobic/misogynist non-college educated white males to switch back over to voting Dem, and I include Bernie in this, rather than trying to figure out how to maximize, for example, black voter turnout, in off-cycle elections (which you could do, for example, by taking defunding the police seriously).

You know how the Republicans maximize their turnout? They talk, talk, talk about what they plan to do, endlessly, even if it takes them DECADES to do it. The Republicans have done nothing but talk about how they want to get rid of Roe v. Wade, and their commitment to their radical right voters has earned them the radical right wing vote in return. And because of the depth of their commitment, they WON, SHOWING their voters that their trust was justified. Honestly I'll be shocked if the Dems ever win another election after this. What a CRUSHING DEFEAT electing Trump was. The victory was so complete that the Dems control three branches of the government and are completely powerless to stop Republican policy.

Democrats WON'T talk about abortion, they WON'T talk about decarceration, they WON'T talk about defunding the police, they WON'T talk about marijuana legalization, they WON'T talk about decriminalizing heroin and prostitution. Why is that? Because none of these things benefit white people, the "moderates." Now maybe you'll say that's not racism, and we'll just have to agree to disagree. But, IMHO, everything that's wrong with the Dem party stems from white moderate dems lack of enthusiasm for supporting issues that matter to the backbone of their party, whose only fault is not being white.

All the other stuff you say is true. The Republicans are committed to their core constituency. Having billionaires supporting Fox News is a red herring, imho - Fox News *makes* money. Having billionaire support helps, of course. It also helps that all of the issues on the right tie into one core issue - white supremacy - that makes holding the core coalition together a lot easier than on the Dem side. Dems have to herd all the cats - black people, latino people, gay/trans people, women, and college educated white people, who don't always see eye to eye on things, the main problem, imho, being the unconscious racism of the college educated white people - the group that, for some reason, is in charge, despite their repeated failures over the last 10-20 years.

There's a real easy solution to various constituencies in the Dem coalition telling each other not to vote. Have their back. Instead of saying "vote harder," say "defund the police." Out loud. Over and over and over again until the Overton window shifts.

[Zonkerbl]

For example, my sister is a college educated white woman. A doctor. When we talk about giving cash to poor people instead of food, she immediately says "oh those people will just buy alcohol or drugs"

This is flatly not true. The large majority of poor people, many of whom are black, are not alcoholics or drug addicts. But she believes they are, partly because, as a doctor, the people she sees are sick people, and a lot of sick people are alcoholics and drug addicts, and a lot of those people are black. That's selection bias - because she sees people who are in the tail end of the "disaster" distribution, she sees a lot of black, sick people, and thinks that's representative of the whole population. Similarly on tv, from the eighties to the present the large majority of black people you saw on tv were either bad guys reinforcing black stereotypes or cops reinforcing copaganda. Of course white moderate dems are racist, they've been trained by tv to be racist all their lives.

The difference now being that a lot of heroin addicts are poor non-college educated white people now. Nevertheless.

My mom, whose father was a card carrying member of the Communist party, was a bra burning feminist in the seventies, grew up in the Bronx in the fifties and absolutely believes that the reason why inner city New York went down the tubes is because black people moved in. She vehemently believes that Anacostia's economic well being is tied to poor black people moving out.

When I say white liberals are racist, I'm speaking from personal experience. We're racist.

[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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