Democrats aren't going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem

[EarlG]

14. I think I disagree with this somewhat

I think we are in a situation now where the public at large has come untethered from traditional information sources, but that's not necessarily a win for Republicans.

It seems to me that the onslaught of information created by social media and addictive algorithm-driven news feeds over the last 20 years has caused a scenario where, more than ever, people are less interested in macro issues and are more interested in the things that affect them personally (whether those things actually affect them personally or not), and are specifically interested in the things that scare them.

The right-wing's propaganda network is powerful, but I think it only succeeds when things are going generally well for large chunks of people. That's because if you're in no danger of losing your job, and your wages have gone up, and you don't have any problems getting health care (all things that Democrats have improved for people in recent years) then you're not going to give credit to the politicians who made that happen -- you don't even think about it. Instead, you just have more time on your hands to read your news feeds and panic about your kid coming home from school a different gender.

Think about January 6, and how so many of the rioters weren't desperate poor people trying to overthrow a brutal, repressive government -- they were realtors, dentists, middle-class professionals, who had been duped into believing their vote had been stolen. The reason that Republicans kept harping on about how they were like "tourists" is because many of them acted that way -- like they were just cosplaying a revolution, but really, it was all a bit of "fun" for many of them.

But I think this goes both ways. If whatever Trump does next really does tank the economy, and people really do start suffering "temporary hardship" as Elon Musk puts it, then I think you will see large chunks of the electorate swing back, hard. There's a reason Barack Obama won a massive landslide and Democrats took 60 Senate seats in 2008, and it wasn't because we "pierced the right wing propaganda bubble" -- it's because George W. Bush did that himself, by starting an unnecessary war in the Middle East that got thousands of US troops killed, and then presiding over the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

As ever, the public turns to Democrats when Republicans fuck things up, and then turns back to Republicans after Democrats fix their fuck-ups. It seems to me that once again, that's what's happened.

The question now is what will be left of the country to fix after Trump is done with it this time around.