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Millions of Christians not planning to vote this November, could shape election: Study
(www.dailykos.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I live in Europe.
In my country the politics of the Democrat Party would fall between those of our most rightwing mainstream party and the far-right parties. We do have a Communist party here and they're seen as far-left so it's not as if the policies in Healthcare, Education, Public Transportation and Social Safety Net supported and expected by pretty much everybody here are "Communism".
And this is Portugal, which is a disgrace next to, say, Scandinavia when it comes to being a proper State that properly represents the interests of most people.
You only think the political "weekly reaming" (not in a good sense) over there is great because you know no other way to live and the other guys are the "daily reaming" party.
The US is just horribly bad when it comes to treat all people in a fair and humane way, so being thrown a sweet after their weekly reaming is enough to make many think they're so priviledged and led by such wonderful politicians, as is normal in an abusive relationship.
It's not so much that I think it's great as I understand all the individual causes of everything, since I follow politics. The details are important, who votes for what is important. It's just a lot to track, and generally isn't paid much attention unless someone is specifically interested in politics. It's a very complicated mess, but being accurate has its own value.
I've been following politics in various countries and have even been a member of small political parties in two of the countries I've lived in (as an EU citizen I get to vote in Local and EU Elections in any EU country I live in) and the lies and deceit also cover the "causes".
I would say the deceiving goes at least 3 levels deep, sometimes more. You're being fed spin and misinformation to make you draw the desired conclusions and are even being fed spin and misinformation to make it more likely that you would trust the former kind of spina and misinformation.
What really openned my eyes to the deep stack of lies upon lies in modern politics, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, was being right smack in the middle of the Investment Banking Industry in London during the 2008 Crash and the "Recovery" years after it: the "causes" we were being told about were bullshit if you looked at the Industry from the inside, the official economic figures we were provide were bullshit if you dug down on them (in at least one case doing the calculations from publicly available raw figures using standard Economic formulas yielded very different results from the Official figure) and the people they ended up helping were the ones who least needed any help (pretty much the opposite side of society that needed it).
A lot of what you see might look like good things because you're fed a carefully crafted picture of the "we have no other option" kind as rationale or you're given some of the reasons but not the full picture so that you yourself naturally reach the conclusion others desire using that half-picture and hence think they're doing the right thing. Further, there are various cognitive shortcuts in the human mind, one of which is called "Anchoring" - things look much or they look little always relative to other things - which is used in Sales to get people to accept higher prices (basically, you given them an even higher figure upfront in some way and then the real price doesn't look so much because the brain is judging that price relative to the first figure), and also in Politics to make barelly benificial measures (or even measures that merelly remove detrimental previous measures) look like they're great things because that how it looks for people who are used to only getting shit.
Mind you, this kind of manipulation impacts me as much as it does you. It's just that as the slant is different here and I have a different experience of politics in the various countries I lived in, I can look at what's done in the US with lots of examples of how governing can be so much more for the majority of people than it is in the US even by the Democrats.
It's like when I first moved out of my own country, Portugal, to The Netherlands - with the broadening of experience from seeing how things were done elsewhere, looking back at my own homeland revealed all sorts of quirks and ways of doing things which were pretty bad, at all levels (not just Politics) that before I thought "that's just the way things are". By having a broader experience of "what can be done" and having my axis of reference moved by that broadening of experience, suddenly things that for me before looked like good things were now viewed as being "the minimum they can get away with", symbolic and purposefully innefective or similar.
There are other biases worth paying attention to as well, confirmation bias most particularly. This is why details are so important. It's not good enough to simply wave your hand at "bullshit". You need to examine exactly what the bullshit is, who it benefits, and most importantly, who votes for it.
That last part is critical. We can whine all day long about our systems, but in any representative government, those votes are the most important data point. Here in the States, for instance, we had a couple specific people in the Senate stonewalling our recent attempts at progressive policies. These specific individuals need to be noted and remembered, instead of taking the easy way out and handwaving the whole system or whole groups of people away.
On top of that, there is still the electorate to consider. The reason the US leans to the right of most of Europe is because the American populace leans much further to the right, to the point of openly flirting with fascism. And not just now, either, it's littered throughout our history. Even pre-WW2, there was a significant amount of fascist support here, and its never really gone away. Because of our form of government, we will get what we ask for, for better or for worse.
Agreed.
The reason why I simplified it down to "bullshit" is because my post was too long already without going into details about the what the "bullshit" actually was. ;)
And yeah, having returned to my homeland with all the political experience from abroad, I also see here the cultural factors that keep the system as is, as well as how the voting system written into the constitution mathematically creates a pair of "winners" - not as bad as the US but not all that much better - who are the only ones who could change said Constitution to make the system more Democratic, which they will never do).
The US is, IMHO, even more calcified socially and politically (some years ago I would've said "not so much in the personal freedoms axis" but lately all the attacks on things like women bodily autonomy and trans-sexuality make me think otherwise) and hence far harder to steer away from Ultra-Capitalist dog-eat-dog Far-Right thinking and into even just the minimum subset of Social Democracy ideas (such as Universal Healthcare).
I don't really know what might work to change things there. I can only thing of grassroots campaigns against specific congressional candidates (like plastering posters with pictures of Palestinian childrens' corpses - tiltle "This is what X has been paid to defend" - all over the place in the areas of were candidates who got AIPAC money are running and doing the same on the run up to the next Democratic Primary).
That said, that doesn't change the point that the Democrats are not a party "of the people, for the people", which probably explains how so many less well off and less educated people ended up being drawn so fast to the populist rhetoric of Trump and his wannabe clones - most of the Democrat Party has become so bad at ruling for normal people (and the Press so riddled with slick lies and manipulation in defense of doing things for the benefit of the few) that any old loud raging bollocks that just sounded different was enough to attract lots of votes.
Looking from the outside, it seems to me that the field that Trump sowed and already harvested once was plowed and fertilized by all those years when both parties were ruling for the few whilst using the Press as nothing more than Propaganda outlets to deceive and swindle the many.
Agreed on some points, but again, the details are important. Most dems do consistently vote for more beneficial policies, stronger social support structures, against tax cuts, etc. It needs to be understood exactly how our legislation gets passed, how a filibuster works, etc though. You cannot simply say "well, dems were in charge, so why wasn't everything fixed?" without going into the details of what sorts of tools obstructionists have at their disposal. Details are critical if one wants to accurately understand, you can't just stay at a big-picture view regardless of how tempting it is.
I do think the answer is grassroots, but try to remember, in a right-leaning society people won't care as much about Palestinian children. That's not a right-leaning position. The right-leaning position is to shrug your shoulders and callously go "not my people". So it's important to think about how to frame things in a way that will convince typical Americans, while acknowledging their biases.
My opinion of Democrat politicians was formed by observing the consequences of Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act (i.e. the 2008 Crash), who and how Barack Obama helped in the aftermath of that crash (major asset owners and financiers, unconditionally and by taking money away from the many which resulted in a decade were inequality in the US exploded and social mobility crashed to Latin America levels) and how Hilary Clinton sold herself very overtly to Finance (for example, being paid a cool half a million to give a speech to a handful of Goldman Sachs' employees, which she did just at the start of her electoral campaign against Trump and almost certainly caused her to lose the election).
I'm sure some Democrat voters aren't greedy sociopath assholes, almost certainly most of them, maybe even an overwhelming majority of them, but Democrat Politicians are mainly slippery sold-out sociopath snakes (with a few notable exceptions) who when it comes to anything but Moral Liberalism are almost as Rightwing as the Republicans and far to the Right of the rest of the World and as the Israeli Genocide is making painfully clear, even in the domain of Moral Liberalism for all their playacting of anti-racists who just want equal treatment for all, they're de facto racist that support extreme violence if committed by those they see as a "western" (read: white) race against those they see as "lesser" races (Muslims, which is so fashionable do discriminate against these days in the West), same as the Republicans.
As shown by what they chose to do when the Republicans can't actually block them, the Democrats claiming it's the Republicans blocking them is often scapegoating the other side for they themselves not wanting to do something.
The Democrats do however have a much slicker and more heavily hypocrite Propaganda than the "modern" Republicans, which reminds me very much of the polished deceiver and hypocrite style of the Rightwing (not just New Labour but also the Tories) in the UK and even of the Upper Class there in general (in the real world the English Gentleman is not somebody who does the right thing, it's somebody who projects the right appearance whilst doing what's best for themselves without caring about the consequences for others - it's a learned skillset for image management and deceiving others, not a moral compass)
Yeah, Bill was pretty neo-liberal. That's still the center of our electorate, though, that was politicians giving our people what they wanted. Us wanting the wrong things is an education problem, not a corruption problem. Anti-smart-people sentiments are unfortunately very strong in our country, though, as our current climate demonstrates very sadly, though attitudes have been changing. Then Obama's bailouts of the banks were unfortunately necessary at the time, as bank failures are a good way to worsen an economic crisis. Hilary taking money from financiers isn't really the coup the media makes it out to be, either, from a neo-liberals perspective such people are very important. Regardless, I like to think we have learned from these economic mistakes.
Regarding Israel, let's not pretend the US hasn't saved some Gazan lives. 2 million people live there, Netanyahu wants them gone, yet most are still alive. How did that happen?
Again, details are important. We could point to the Build Back Better plan that Biden pushed, almost passed, but wasn't quite able to. Look at who voted for it. You seem to want to think in "groups" of people, you should cut that out. People are individuals, responsible for their own decisions. We need to pay attention to all of them, regardless of how challenging that becomes. Propagandists will not want to do that, though, they will only point you at entire groups of people, demonizing them. This is no good, and is a strong sign you've been propagandized. Simple common sense dictates that a person cannot be judged solely from their group membership.
edit: Additionally, you may note that even in the height of our neo-liberal 90's, not everyone voted to repeal Glass-Steagal. 8 Senators had better sense. Most were dems:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1061/vote_106_1_00354.htm