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Comment by dgacmu | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of Republicans who aren't the rolling coal crowd, though. The partisanship is really weird that way. More Americans support environmentally friendly policies than vote Democrat, for example -- unless you tell them it's a democratic party policy, in which case they reject it.

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> unless you tell them it's a democratic party policy, in which case they reject it.

The Democrats are that bad, huh.

30 years of propaganda will do that

> 30 years of propaganda will do that

That's a bullshit excuse. Who knows about the future, but for the last 30 years the Democrats have been perfectly free and have had ample opportunity to counter any "propaganda" against them. If their association taints popular policies in the eyes of the Americans, the party is, at a minimum, incompetent.

Countering propaganda here involves stooping to levels of lies, deception, corruption and scorched earth policies that are categorically abhorrent and frankly I don’t think the kind of people that run as democratic representatives are capable of.

It plays a role though. The right wing has been lying for decades and making up their own version of the world and a lot of people have bought into that such that we now have a dangerous clown as US president (and they still think he's great).

> we now have a dangerous clown as US president

And what does it say about Democrats that Americans rejected them to chose a "dangerous clown" instead?

the real question is: what does that say about humans in general (since we see this pattern repeated recently in a few other countries), particularly when stressed?

it turns out, a few thousand years of civilization isn't enough to evolve significant growth in the prefrontal cortex or atrophy in the lizard-brain, so to speak

we're not much more rational than cavemen, and thus biologically as likely as them to break stuff when angry or be fooled by those who promise salvation

unfortunately, some seek to exploit those vulnerabilities: making the promises; feeding the anger; manufacturing stress & FUD to decrease decision quality

i think it says a lot more about the American citizenry. they'd rather burn it all down or hate their fellow citizens than whatever they did have.

You keep making some sort of vague attacks against the democrats, and yet haven’t made any concrete comparisons. Starting to wondering now if you’re a Russian shill.

Agree Democrats are largely ineffective and incompetent.

But countering propaganda is way harder than spreading propaganda. It's easier to spread all over right-wing media that Democrats are working tirelessly to protect an MS13 gang member than to protect due process and the rule of law for all Americans while defending a man that most likely has no ties to MS13 or crime in general and was wrongly deported.

It's like the Fox news defamation case loss against Dominion. They spread those lies (while knowing they were lies) for weeks and millions of Americans believed them. Those same Americans have no idea they paid close to a $1 billion settlement for those lies.

Propaganda fits nicely in 3 sentence memes that are designed to invoke fear and emotion but is hard to counter without long and sometimes complex explanations that involve nuance.

How many conservative still believe there are public elementary classrooms that have litter boxes for kids to identify as cats?

Americans still think other countries pay for Trump's tariffs. Why? Because it's easy for Trump to tweet lies 40 times per day about how good tariffs are and it's finely time for these countries "to pay their fair share". How easy is it to counter with a rational and thoughtful economic discussion of why the tariffs will fail to achieve any stated goal?

But it's not. Look at the number of people who voted for Trump believing he would do things he explicitly said he wouldn't. Right-wing control of media sources is a really powerful thing, from Murdoch to Sinclair.

The democratic party gerontocracy is a problem - they really seem to want to just play politics and get individual people re-elected in many cases - but we really do have a propaganda problem in addition to a batch of senior democrats wholly unprepared to face the moment.

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