Oh yes, I’m familiar, but thanks all the same.
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We’re all collectively in a societal bystander effect as we watch Elon Musk and Trump collapse the United States and no one is doing anything about it. Everyone just expects someone else to do something.
Everyone is that someone now. The only offramp now is physical mass mobilization in DC.
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I picture the AI in a Hungarian basement, producing that sunny answer with a gun held by Orban pointed at its head.
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ETA:
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She bings up some good points, both scientific and personal.
If you search for this video, it doesn’t show up. Fortunately I had it in my browser history.
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When anyone starts their remark with “I love XXX and have many XXX friends…” I immediately ignore everything they have to say.
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The far right, restored to power over the past two weeks, is said to be setting out to reverse the 20th century, undoing its progress for racial equality, women’s rights, queer dignity and freedom, and democratic fairness. But if the Republicans are seeking to reverse the 20th century, the Democrats seem to wish to simply ignore the 21st. Their strategies and impulses, their vision of how American politics works, no longer function in the present. Instead of adapting to the future, they seem to be sticking their heads in the sand, and waiting for the return of the past.
This is why the Democrats have not adjusted to the new age of political communications, in which voters can be animated and convinced by their information environment: Democrats tack to the right, over and over, and use traditional media like newspapers, cable news, and press releases to show off their new positions and distance themselves from their own ones. Voters don’t see it; they are too busy on social media, where Republicans are deftly setting the agenda that the Democrats can only feebly follow, chasing their opponents to the right even further. The result is that the party has not advocated its own actual worldview for years: Democrats have not shown a set of social values, or a theory of governance, or anything like a commitment to principle. They have not stood up for targeted groups, or articulated a real vision of democracy; they have never picked a bold fight, and they have never taken a stand that they don’t back down from when Republicans oppose it. No wonder the American public, when it thinks of Democrats at all, tends to think of them as out of touch, opportunistic, and cowardly. That is because they are.
The result is not so much that the Democrats are a weaker party as that they are not much of a party at all: it is the extremist Republicans, and they alone, who are communicating a vision of America to the public, and the whimpering, servile politicians who pass for an “opposition” never counter with their own vision but only whisper, barely audible, the feeble response: “Not so far.”
What Democrats need, now, is to discover their spine, and to articulate a set of values that they do not flinch from. The point is not to try to feign positions that they think the electorate already shares: the point is to take a stand with principle and integrity, and to let that guide draw the voters to them.
Elections are popularity contests, and the way to be popular is not through policy, but through personal robustness, through a willingness to put up a fight. If Democrats fight what they have long believed were losing battles – trans rights and abortion; healthcare and childcare; education; social security; good, union jobs – they might find that it is the fighting itself that proves persuasive. They have already tried compromise; they have already tried capitulation. It is time to try defiance.
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Well yeah, we’re not yelling at Johnson and Thune and other members of the GOP because they’ve already donned the uniform of the SS and pledged allegiance to their führers. We’re yelling for those who haven’t joined the fascists to confront the fascists. Which is the correct and obvious thing to do.
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Wow, way to ignore the elephant-owned mass media and social media sucking up all the oxygen in the room:
What Democrats need is not to “discover their spine,” it’s to find/own alternative media channels. Next to none of the existing ones are reliable, and I just saw people exchanging information about upcoming protests on Reddit this morning FFS. Even some of the progressive voices I normally follow are falling victim to this latest round of “Why Democrats are Doomed” or “They’re not doing anything” narratives that have increased in volume since the media’s favorite whipping boy Biden is no longer in office.
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The media is shitty, but so are the democrats. They don’t stand for anything. My existence is being criminalized and the democrats response is to call it a distraction. Trump’s opening up concentration camps and Dems are tweeting about how many more immigrants Biden deported and seeking bipartisanship.
ETA: State level democrats do seem to actually be fighting back, but at the national level, it’s bleak.
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That’s just not true. The Democratic Party isn’t just Chuck fucking Schumer.
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That is at least something. Doing what he can with what he has where he is. Now the rest of you “powerful people,” where is your action?
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It’s not just Chuck Schumer calling trans people a distraction.
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