I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is.
I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is what I anticipate.
Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act.
The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters and the Republican Party has blocked them all.
They play the game to win. And they do.
> Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one.
It depends on the pollster and where you're polling. I guarantee you rural Tennessee will not agree with downtown Washington DC on any of these issues. In contrast, rural California will likely agree with rural Tennessee. It's not as cut and dry as a homogeneous national poll of 2500 people. Every state, city, county are different. That's why there are federal, state, city, and county governments.
For instance, Abortions are legal nationally. States can individually decide how, or if, they wish to restrict it. This is as the constitution intends under the 10th amendment:
> powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people.
This allows for democracy to take place at the local level, rather than having particular regions thousands of miles away from each other ultimately oppress the other.
To the point on LLMs, I think it's abundantly clear they will be used to propagandize and similar to social media will lock people in a bubble without alternative opinions. It'll be the worst of both worlds, the question is who's the puppet master. At some point soon, I imagine it'll be the AI.
Which amendment protects someone's bodily autonomy or medical treatment from interference by the states?
If the Federal Congress passed a law providing that abortions are legal on demand up to the 22 week of gestation, after which it would require the corroboration of two doctors, would that stand, or would it be struck down by SCOTUS?
Same for legalization of marijuana, and many other "social" issues.
The pretense of Dobbs is that laws against abortion are like laws prohibiting medical marijuana or setting speed limits. This contradicts the purpose of laws against abortion and the actual language of most of them. It was obviously a desperate decision, irrespective of the truth about abortion
You left out immigration, crime, and “moral values”: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/top-problems...
The same thing for "taxing the wealthy." 59% of Americans think their own taxes are too high: https://news.gallup.com/poll/707951/americans-tax-views-rema.... And the difference isn't as big between parties as you think--49% of Democrats think their taxes are too high. So Democrats are in a position where they have to advocate for raising taxes on "the wealthy," without scaring any of their own voters into thinking that includes them.
Even a blind squirrel could find these nuts. Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept. For example, 2024 was the first time they spent real money trying to go after immigrant voters and minorities, and they made huge gains. But the on-the-ground operation disappeared after the election. Meanwhile, democrats are in these minority neighborhoods 365 days a year pushing their message.
They're not. They're really not. They're incredibly capable and are currently executing long term plans successfully, one after another. This goes all the way back to Regan and the disenfranchisement of education. They know exactly what they're doing to erode democracy.
Calling them inept is dangerously stupid at best, and at worst is just right wing propaganda to try and lull people into a false comfort and not act.
Democrats, by contrast, have much more permanent political infrastructure. At the top law schools, for example, there's probably 10x as many liberal organizations as conservative ones. Democrats enjoy politics, so they are always out there organizing and engaging. Meanwhile, Republicans dislike the institutions through which politics is done, and so they gear up once every four years and then go back to their day jobs. Among the sort of more educated people who actually run the parties and serve as line staffers, republicans also self-select into private sector jobs, and out of public sector or political work.
Most importantly, putatively neutral institutions are de-facto aligned with democrats (because the professional class that runs these institutions is overwhelmingly democrats). Conservatives might have Fed Soc, but liberals own the ABA. Virtually every legal organization that isn’t expressly conservative or highly niche is de facto liberal and participates in support of democratic policies.
FTFY
They have no profit requirement or even revenue neutral requirement. So they can just operate poorly at a loss and still wreck other businesses because people will put up with breadlines to get bread for ultra cheap.
The general thing to watch out for with all of these “surely it can’t be evil to do nice thing X” is suicidal empathy. It can seem correct to your gut on the surface while it’s extremely destructive in the long term despite participants wanting to destroy something as an explicit goal.
If you've got 5 people in a car and you play ABBA in every road trip, then one day you suggest to change, the problem is not in being okay with "something else", but on agreeing what that other thing should be, set against the already known thing.
That's why there's so much infighting in the left.