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Notes -
Random theories about this election I’ve seen discussed so far:
We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.
Some pundits are decrying the existence of right-wing echo chambers as corrupting our young men while fleeing to Bluesky and Threads so they don’t have to interact with conservatives. Bluesky “block lists” of conservative voices appeared almost overnight, to overcome the lack of algorithmic protections.
And, of course, everyone’s bringing up their favorite culture war issues as the “reason” why Trump won, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not that factory workers in the rustbelt are transphobic, it’s that factory workers in the rustbelt are tired of someone’s pronouns being given more attention than their grocery bills. Abortion received a ton of support on referendums while their states still went to Trump; is it because we made having children a “women’s issue” instead of an economic one? Telling women they should lie to their husbands who they voted for isn’t a great way to win over men who already feel scorned by today’s society.
I also don’t understand how the party who claim to be championing women and minorities is also the party fighting so hard for mail-in ballots. Secret ballots are a feature of the system, not a bug. Filling out the ballot at your kitchen table makes it really hard to hide it from your husband, or your employer. The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.
In the meantime, my guilty pleasure is watching liberal election-denier conspiracy theories. arr “SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like. I feel like I’m in an alternate reality when I see things stated “Vance was a bad pick, no one was excited about him” because I remember the enthusiasm for having someone young and capable on the ticket. Maybe I’m just stuck in my own echo chamber, and don’t realize it; I should do my own introspection.
The Republicans were unfortunately no better on this front, though their social pressure went straight to registered Republican voters and so was less visible than the Democrats’ efforts. Here’s one of several texts I received in the days leading up to the election (emojis and text formatting are original):
I received a few more that included variants on the same veiled threat. I wasn’t and still am not very happy with that approach, but I imagine it probably is effective, given that both sides were trying it.
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People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left. There is a sense among dedicated left-wing partisans that they are a tiny minority.
Like most of the narratives that people tell themselves about their own political tribes, this is probably false or at least illusionary, but the point is that when people complain about the absence of a left-wing media ecosystem, those probably are not people who regard most of the media as currently on the left.
This is certainly true, but I think when Democrats are talking about this in the context of losing the election they literally believe that the Democrat-aligned media is lacking, not communist-aligned media. I see this all the time on Reddit.
I believe your average non-communist Democrat sees it this way. Republican-aligned media like Fox puts party support above all else. They put no value on truth, morality or fairness and just spew misinformation 24/7, anything to help Republicans. Meanwhile the NYT is primarily concerned with Truth, Justice and Objectivity. If this shakes out to favoring the Democrats that’s just because “reality has a liberal bias” and “it’s not politics just basic human decency”, the NYT only favors the Democrats by this convergence of their values but they would not lie, cheat or steal if it helped the Democrat cause. So the NYT doesn’t count as Democrat aligned in their mind
I’ve seen many Dems on reddit lamenting the whole “when they go low we go high” strategy and wishing they could fight dirty as they perceive Republicans are.
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In general, both the Republicans and Democrats are centrist parties. And more ideologically-driven members of both parties are, IMO, correct when they say that "RINOs" or "neoliberals" are weaksauce versions of their ideologies.
Trump talks a big game about deportation and immigration, but will accomplish very little. No mass deportations will occur during a Trump presidency any more than under a Harris presidency. Trump also talks about repatriating trade, but will only implement tarriffs that will increase prices without increasing US manufacturing. Republicans also talk a lot about how great of a pro-life success Dobbs was, but as far as I can tell, handing control over abortion policy back to the states has resulted in a more pro-choice regulatory landscape than under the status quo. And there's a lot of discussion of "law and order," but the streets are unsafe even in red states, and forget about riding public transit.
Likewise, Democrats talked a big game about defunding the police, and while there were definitely areas where budgets were slashed, no actual "defunding" or "abolishing" took place. They've also talked about healthcare reform for a long time, but since 2010 have accomplished approximately nothing. Redistribution of wealth in any appreciable sense has never happened, and entitlements continue to be soaked up by boomers with fat wallets while the poor and disabled are still means-tested to the bone. Significant movement on workers' protections hasn't happened; instead delusional baristas are setting up labor unions, because when I think of exploitation of labor, I think of not putting up rainbow flags. And not, you know, what's going on in Amazon warehouses.
But while the serious economic and philosophical problems of the US continue to fester, we keep getting distracted by irrelevant culture war issues like weird sex and gender identity things and whether or not Trump is literally Hitler. It's good to know we're focusing on the important things!
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DeBoer does this:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clinton-and-obama-gave-us-trump
The Marxist left thinks of the left-right in economic terms and considers anyone not explicitly socialist/communist as being right wing, the reactionary right considers the divide mainly in cultural terms and thinks anyone not based is essentially left wing.
I was thinking of Robinson. I always remember an incident in his debate with Chris Rufo:
This seems absurd, because it's obviously only possible to consider Jacobin "the leading leftist magazine in the country" if you have an extremely idiosyncratic definition of what counts as "leftist".
Whereas I'd say that most people would use the word 'left' to mean 'of America's two big political factions, the one that is further to the left'.
I had a French friend who used words this way. He would use the terms 'far left' and 'far right' to refer to the most left party's beliefs and the most right party's beliefs. Obviously in France that gives you a bigger window.
I found the habit annoying because he always called me 'far right' and obviously that has a very negative implication in English, but he just meant 'UKIP supporter'. It's a nice, consistent system. Perhaps we should adopt it.
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Legacy media is left wing. New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.
Now make no mistake, Rogan and Trump are allies of convenience. But they are allies nonetheless and arguing with him about dragons just makes democrats look shrill and out of touch(Rogan's audience, like most normies, answers esoteric paranoid schizophrenia with 'interesting, so, uh, did you see the game last night? How about that weather we're having, huh?).
These are related. Just like how Fox News was the biggest cable news channel, despite being a drop in the bucket overall. They were the only people putting out a product lots of people wanted. In addition to that effect, the current crop of left wing views cannot sustain themselves in a questioning environment. Joe Rogan and the podcast sphere didn't start on the right, they slowly walked there because that is what happens outside of the left wing censorship regime.
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The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
The total media dominance in print, tv and web news and the monoculture turned everyone even mildly dissenting to alternative pastures. And there was demand for right wing content and the market delivered.
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They do? Social media, except X, is all on the left too.
Certainly themotte didn't leave Reddit because Reddit was censoring Democrats.
I used imgur the other day (because someone couldn't see a catbox link), and it's literally worse than reddit. Then you go to funnyjunk or iFunny and it's all zoomer holocaust jokes. Same with the old forums, resetera vs rpgcodex(?) etc.
Social media is totally pillarized at this point, but it seems obvious to me that the leftist ones reach far more people. It's just that the leftist extremism has gone way too overboard to actually help the Democrats; they're trying to run a "we're normal, they're weird" campaign, but their entire youth wing is posting "glory to the martyrs for stomping magat colonizer babies to protect trans kids" memes.
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Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
You'd still get banned for saying "you cant be a woman and have a penis" so its still far left of the center.
Youtube and Facebook and to some extent Instagram are weird that way. Moderation is obviously slightly woke but the commenter base is definitively anti-woke. Places like Reddit, 4chan, X have a more typical convergence of leadership and userbase.
Reddit will ban you for such statements as well
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The fact that the YouTube comments for Kirby's Air Ride: Item Bounce haven't been closed yet is proof that YouTube doesn't have complete control over ideology on their platform.
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It’s interesting the Dems have been focusing on “we have to figure out a way to get our message out” and not on “maybe the problem is the message.”
The Democrat rank and file seem to have have largely convinced themselves that the Democratic party message is Just Being A Decent Human Being. It's hard to pivot from that to the message being a problem.
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All my neighbors had Kamala signs. I mean, not all, but there were a lot of them. In my neighborhood of several hundred households, I counted exactly one Trump sign. My county went about 3:1 for Kamala, and since it includes Newark I would be very surprised if my particular neighborhood was worse than that (I don't know where to find precinct-level results, unfortunately). So there's likely lots of Trump supporters keeping a low profile.
I saw very few yard signs at all this cycle. I thought everyone simultaneously realized they were cringe.
One house on my street had a single sign that just said "Kamela". Every single one of the others had multiple signs, banners, and flags. One at the intersection had a big banner of trump snarling with some slogan about the face of stupidity, racism, and fascism. Most others also got updated What This House Believes signs with the new firmware.
They all popped up within a week of the Kamelanomicon being opened.
Suspect I'm on a list for not having one. With the neighborhood going 80D-15R it's pretty easy to spot the dissidents.
Wow, where do you even live? I live in Seattle, which is probably also 80D-15R and while there was a conspicuous lack of Trump signs (thanks Antifa!) there were not a lot of Harris signs either.
Putting up a Harris sign is a pretty cringe move in a place like Seattle, which is probably why so few people did it. Who puts up a sign to say "Yay Regime"?
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My immediate neighborhood had very few signs, but there were absolutely places within a 15-20 minute drive where loads of houses had signs for one or the other. Roughly speaking, the places with quaint, walkable mini-downtown shopping area had mostly Harris signs, the people who seemed like they frequently used their pickup trucks to actually haul stuff had mostly Trump signs, and nice suburban houses with big lawns could go either way. (Location: Pennsylvania)
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Ah, thanks. My district actually IS worse than that, close to 4:1... but still, there's a lot less than 20% Trump support visible.
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