this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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The ones voting for him are listening. That's exactly what they think they want want. The average republican voter is simply too stupid to understand the long term implications of their choices. This is the same stupid push that led to Brexit.
They're being controlled by the smart republicans that are using it to enrich themselves at others expense.
While democrats do this kind of manipulation too, at least they aren't pushing straight up authoritarianism.
Came here to say this. How many times are we gonna watch one of them "accidentally" quote Hitler in a speech, or talk about the benefits of slavery, or talk about how they want to make women second-class citizens, then pretend that they didn't? They gathered under a banner at CPAC that said 'We are all domestic terrorists'. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I honestly don't know if I buy the "Republicans are all stoopid" argument entirely; there are plenty of relatively intelligent people that have supported him.
More than a lack of intelligence, I think it's more a radical lack of any empathy or concern for anyone they don't see as being on their same side. I mean, the Republican platform is essentially nothing more than "Own the Libs" at this point. It's not so much that they don't necessarily know the consequences of their actions; they don't care, and would rather prioritize hurting their enemies.
Having much of my family being republican, I think you are leaving out an important piece of the puzzle - fear.
Republicans are terrified all the time. Fear of the other, fear that how they grew up and the people they know are being called wrong for what they think and say. It manifests through anger.
If they can knock you down then you are weak and wrong and they are justified in doing it.
I can second this. Every time my parents have expressed a political view, it came from some shock-news spin of how America was a murderous wasteland on the brink of disaster (not because there are more guns than people, but because of all the non-white people who live here).
When I told my parents I was going to New Orleans for a weekend vacation, they were terrified I would get murdered because they had been barraged with news about it being a lawless Democrat-run warren. (Not to downplay the actual violence that has taken place in NO, but their response still made it clear they had seen some first-class fearmongering).
Hmmm...interestinf point...is there a way to break down this deeply-embeeded fear?
I would classify someone who hurts themselves to hurt others as stupid.
I think they’re listening but not hearing. The majority of Americans, and even the majority of republicans, tend to support marriage equality and cannabis legalization, and even support things like a government health care program in significant numbers.
When polled on individual positions, Americans tend to fall well to the left of the republican politicians on most social issues. But that changes when you specifically identify a position as a democratic position. There has been a never-ending barrage of branding attacks on words like “democrat” and “liberal” to the extent that even democratic politicians felt like they had to avoid labels like that for a long time.
I think they have the ability to get people whipped up, because news canalization prevents people from hearing opposing viewpoints. They get away with saying they want to ban drag shows because they don’t want four year olds to watch open sex acts which a) is already illegal and b) has nothing to do with drag. But they don’t hear that - they hear the overblown and patently false rhetoric and that’s what will drive them in the near term.
I’m afraid we’re going to lose ground in both the legal sphere and in public opinion as homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and racism become to be seen as more acceptable, but as of right now we still have made a significant amount of progress. But if the news media and politicians treat them as areas where multiple legitimate opinions exist, we’re absolutely going to backslide, and it’s going to take decades to just get back to where we are now.
What are some examples of manipulation from the Democratic party that you are equating here?
Their entire platform is, "at least I'm not him" they don't do anything to combat it because they benefit from them. I believe that the Hillary campaign even secretly helped promote Trump early on because they thought it would be an easy win.
I think this is a more cynical view than can be supported by facts in evidence. For sure, in Ye Olden Days when the parties weren't actually all that far apart, there was some level of building up a bogeyman to get out the base while everybody was friendly behind closed doors. But especially in the era of Trump, I think most congressional Democrats (leftwards of Machin and Sinema, at least) are genuinely afraid of what a second Trump turn would mean for the country, not least because it would likely mean a practical end to democratic processes at the federal level. Hard to benefit from the bogeyman when the bogeyman has made your presence in politics impossible-to-illegal.
And yet 2.5 years into this administration what has been accomplished? These people are too old to care. Biden was always a conservative, even during his campaign he said he would never support public healthcare. It's almost like they are doing nothing on purpose.
Because, frustratingly, Biden isn't the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama's first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden's entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there's only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.
Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn't going to vote for that. But it's still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn't been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular -- and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare "both sides are the same!" It's to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.
There's things around LGBTQ+ support that are more opportunistic than actually caring, there's things around environmental support that get said but not acted upon, there's things around taxes and medical coverage that also get said but don't actually happen.
Yeah, I hear you. Lots of things get said, but little gets done-- I can't argue with that. But I'm looking for concrete examples because most of the goals and results people are expecting, from my perspective, are things that only get accomplished through legislation. Democrats have recently been focusing on voting rights. A solid voting rights bill would be a solid step toward tackling the issues you mentioned, but in June the most recent bill was voted against by all 50 Republican senators.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz still exists and is a Democrat. And I think another thing people have issue with. Is that while it's understandable that Sinema and Manchin exist and are horrible. Democrats seem to most often use that as an excuse to not even try. Republicans try and thankfully often fail to do horrible things. But they try. It's one thing to say you support X. It's another to be seen trying to support it. Democrats talk the talk, but most can't walk.