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Comment by nzjrs | Hacker News Reader

I feel like no one here has read the article, and is just having their fun doing some character assassination.

  > “The election result completely reversed people’s views 
  > of the state of the economy. Republicans who thought that 
  > we were in a dystopia now think things look great, and 
  > Democrats, the opposite. And it shows that it isn’t all 
  > based on an objective assessment of the economy.”

Seems a pretty salient and uncontroversial observation.

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That's one thing that drives me crazy when I talk to people. When the other party does something they are outraged but when their own guy does it, it's suddenly OK. I guess the parties have achieved the final goal. People are not even capable of looking at a situation anymore and make up their mind. Instead they just blindly follow what they are being told.

I believe in a quite majority that is perfectly capable of independent thought and self-awareness, but lacking news outlets they trust to give them anything but narrative. It could be the slow death of newspapers that led us here.

The lack of newspapers they trust is just a consequence of political parties undermining that trust. You still can read the New York or Wall Street Journal and get enough information to form a reasonable opinion.

I disagree. Media seems to me to have gotten much more sensationalist and click baity over the last decade and often really stretches the facts in interests of agenda. To be fair maybe they feel this is necessary to survive in the face of the internet.

Trust is hard to establish but only takes an instant to break.

I agree that media has gotten more sensationalist. CNN for example is just horrible. But I would still say that it's not difficult to filter out real facts if you want to. Most people don't want to though.

Ya, true enough. Most people want to believe what they want to believe.

It's just interesting to see how quickly the flip happened. I think it's in part due to the fact the Democrats have tried, and failed, to capture the business interests the Republicans have largely accumulated over the decades. I even remember back in '98 hearing from folks who called themselves the "new" Democrats which were supposedly business friendly but also socially progressive. Clearly that approach didn't work and I don't think it'll ever work since businesses have no interest in pushing for social change when largely it doesn't improve their profits. So now the Democrats are going back (sorta) to their roots of being for the "little guy" but the fact that folks like Pelosi continue to squawk about being capitalists shows how fake that change is that it amuses me to no end. The fact Pelosi even freaks out at the idea of single payer healthcare proves the Democrats can't or won't really change and this is all for show.

People have become too politically consistent. Thoughtlessly so.

A huge part of that is perceptions of Obamacare's impact on the economy and the outcome of the election's expectations to change it.

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