You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.
I don't think there's been a greater indictment of a political program (the one you likely subscribe to) in history than Trump's landslide victory in 2024.
You guys used to call deprogramming by another name, I think it was called "re-education". Maybe you should sign up for your own class.
> You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.
In part the propaganda machine that started in the 80s with AM talk radio, culminating to algorithmic feeds today.
If that is the case, you have to explain why right wing propagandists have been so much more successful than left wing ones.
That seems relatively straightforward, so likely incomplete: the left is a collective of various interests that often don't align internally and the right has very consistent and largely aligned interests. One of those is easier to steer. Another facet could also be education levels. As they say, a lie can get across town before the truth has its pants on. Being educated takes time and effort, and the educated lean left.
They are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, their propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
I really encourage you to avoid the language of "they" and "we." It's a discussion, and it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side, or as you put it, binary thinking. As written I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left.
I think you want to read my comment a certain way and it's not allowing you to, so you posted both:
> it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side
and also
> I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left
Which are contradictory, if you think about it. I am not sure what you want me to write if I can't use "they" to refer to other people. Also, I didn't use "we", something you somehow also seem to want me to say, and didn't.
Thanks for the reply.
"They" is exclusive. "We" is inclusive. One goes with the other. The point I was getting at was that when you use that language in a discussion it comes off as if you are directly involved, rather than commenting from the outside, or having an opinion.
I didn't want you to use "we" either :) Here's your comment, rewritten twice, that fits in better with HN rules and avoids emotion:
> The left are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the left's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
> The right are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the right's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
As you can see, I couldn't tell which side you were talking about. I hope the above example helps. A lot of political discussion denigrates to us-vs-them. It is not helpful.
My guess is lack of morals
Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you. Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for years and decades.
Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.
And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion.
(I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
I don't want to ascribe any particular political beliefs to the commenter, the quip about re-education was somewhat of a joke given the irony of somebody arguing against dictatorship by invoking mass "deprograming". But many a true word is spoken in jest.
There are no real Maoists or true communists in the US anymore, at least not enough to constitute meaningful political forces. To the extent they exist they are irrelevant, and one can argue further that no true left remains in the US at all.
As for my analysis of the Trump phenomenon, I only have intuitions and biases to offer, so caveat lector.
I don't think it's particularly mysterious. The general perception is that the American left has made identity politics and social justice its main political and social programs, to the detriment of basic governance, most importantly the economy and security, thereby breaking the social contract.
You cannot be a party that aggressively defends and promotes the interests of minority classes at the expense of the majority without loosing the support of the majority. In some cases, these minorities are so small as to border on the absurd.
Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size. The same goes for the LGBT population, which represents maybe 10% of the US population (and that's a liberal estimate).
Try as you might, you cannot escape the cold, hard fact that 60% the US population is white, with something closer to 70% identifying as white or partly white. 90% percent of that group is going to be straight.
The US middle and working classes still really haven't recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, the aftermath of which precipitated a huge transfer of wealth from these classes to the upper class, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.
So you have a majority of the population who are reeling from a devastating loss of wealth, station, and status, unable to keep pace with inflation, watching one of the two main political parties aggressively promote the interests of a tiny minority at their expense, or at least that is the perception.
Putting aside the nature of the minorities in question, the subservience of the political class to a minority of the population has another name: elitism. The natural response to elitism is populism, which is what we are seeing.
The protection of minority rights is a noble cause, but it's primarily a civil rights issue, and the focus should be on making sure those classes are treated equally under the law. The goal should not be the elevation of their social and cultural station above the majority.
Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy. People can rage at me all they want for that description, but that is what the majority of Americans perceive. Again, putting aside any questions of morality, it is political suicide.
Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration. Again, the perception is that interest of minorities (in this case migrants) are primary to the interests of the majority. In this case the minority are not even American citizens.
There's a lot more to say on this topic, and I'm sure you can find more persuasive analyses from better sources, but these are some of my intuitions.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
1. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
> Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error...
This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people.
On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have?
"Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable.
Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.
This is a great example of a well put together, level-headed analysis, that I still think misses some key facts about how right wing propaganda works.
> Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration
Both Biden and Obama turned away more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. And Clinton is the kind of denying asylum. The idea that we just had completely open borders and nothing was being done about is a fabrication.
> Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size
If you actually pay attention to who is talking about Trans people, it is the right. Liberal media may be occasionally baited into arguing about it, but to say it was a major platform is a perception the right crafted. Fox was talking about it 24/7 leading up to the election [1]. Musk and Trump were tweeting about it constantly. They ran political ads saying they wanted to convert your kids to trans ideology. It's gotten so bad that our current president just harasses women that look kinda manly, saying they are trans.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-news-covers-transgender-issue...
If the Democrat leadership weren't going all-in on this ideology despite the demonstrable harms it's causing, the Republicans would have almost nothing to say about it.
As an example, replacing sex with "gender identity" in prisons policy has inflicted considerable harm on women prisoners, who have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by male prisoners who were transferred to the female prison estate on the basis of their supposed "female gender identity".
Feminist groups like WoLF spoke up on the horrors of this first, and the Republicans followed when they realized they could capitalize on this politically. But really it shouldn't have happened at all.
>You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.
Propaganda, 1 in 6 Boomers being exposed to amounts of lead in childhood that lead to measurable cognitive declines, average age of the US population being on the rise with lower birth rates means most eligible votes are in the age groups most likely to suffer low grade dementia, and the weaponization of social media by foreign adversaries and wealthy elites.
There's maybe 4-5M true believers, the rest are gullible lead-addled old fools who got brainwashed by Fox News. That's the unvarnished truth of it.
There was no landslide. Trump got 49.9% of the vote. And it was after his attempted insurrection to overturn a valid election in which he was soundly rejected. He's never received 50% of the vote despite his relentless lies about voter fraud.
I'm not upset at people for having a differing opinion or being upset at some economic conditions attributable to Democrats, but rather their persistent belief in provably false information like the relative danger of immigrants, the causes of climate change, vaccine safety, election security or whether or not a particular ethnic group is eating their pets. This isn't a matter of opinion or it's a matter of observable reality and fundamental human morality.
> Trump's landslide victory in 2024.
What are you talking about?
If you want to challenge a point, then challenge it. Don't cower behind ambiguous snark.
It wasn't a landslide.
It's on you to argue it was, e.g. by comparing it to other clear landslide victories like Reagan in 1984. Truth is that 2024 the final popular vote gap was 1.5%, compared to 4.5% for 2020, -2.0% for 2016 (yeah, really), 3.9% in 2012, 7.28% in 2008, and so on.
Does the term landslide have a widely accepted definition? One definition could be winning every single swing state, which Trump did.
I think you also have to factor in the degree of political polarization today, and in particular Trump's polarizing nature, which means that there is smaller pool of "effectively independent" voters to fight over. So 1% today is worth more than %1 in 1984. These, are of course, not particularly quantifiable measures.
The point is taken tough, "comprehensive victory" would have been the more appropriate description.