Nah, cynicism is the only rational reaction now. Lots of people died from covid and our poor government response, but Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
You guys need to stop being so disingenuous (and get some new material). EVERYTHING got a lot more expensive under the previous administration. Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant. A poor economy motivates people to vote for the other party, ESPECIALLY when the average person felt they had better economic prospects when “the other team” was in power (again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant).
> Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant
> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant
For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.
If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?
What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.
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Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.
In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.
In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.
Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.
The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?
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The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.
The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.
But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.
One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.
The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.
How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?
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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU
2. https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/e...
3. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...