Rich shitbags funding divisive propaganda to make the plebs fight each other and vote against their own interests.
Any war but a class war…
Musk and JK Rowling come to mind, specifically.
The 1% needs to endlessly divide the working class against itself. It’s an old game with new tricks.
Wedge issues.
Equal rights for
everyone
regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.
The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties are so similar in their other policies that they have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the two parties align in lockstep behind the other issues. The super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause ALL of us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions so they have their demagogues loudly trumpet the absolutely miniscule differences between them and the conservative parties to whip their voters into a frenzy in support of voting against their best interest.
Then, I have to fight with unwitting dupes in the comment section that have fallen victim to the marketing gimmick that the black female version of Reagan is “fighting for good” despite her being politically aligned with Reagan on virtually every issue other than identity politics.
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Chomsky proved this conclusively.
That fucking rock was installed a few years ago to keep homeless people from sleeping. Very inclusive 😡
Yup. The DNC should use that in an honest rebranding.
Equal rights for all (except the poor).
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Some More News did a segment on how Regan forced the Democrat Party to go further right in order to achieve power. Same thing happened in the UK after Thatcher. The Labour Party swung right to get votes.
I don’t have the data however I would imagine, that after the the conservative 80s, a lot left wing parties moved to the right to capture votes.
Also Regan elevated Jerry Falwall and the Christian Religious Right.
Coverage naturally gravitated toward Lynchburg, Virginia, preacher Jerry Falwell, who had supported Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay-rights crusade, and Virginia Beach television mogul Pat Robertson, who was involved with the Washington for Jesus rally of April 1980 (scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the first landing at Jamestown).
Falwell, head of the Moral Majority (another nod to Nixon), was more eager to enter the political arena. He thus became the first anointed spokesperson of what was then commonly called the “Religious New Right.”
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Evangelicals had entertained possible GOP alternatives to Carter since at least 1979. Options abounded— ranging from right-wing purist Philip Crane of Illinois to early front-runner John Connally of Texas—but Reagan, long a darling of conservatives in general, was an especially compelling choice. By the time Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, the deal was pretty much sealed.
Truly Regan was a piece of shit.
That’s actually a bullshit talking point used by the Progressive Policy Institute (which are not even remotely Progressive) and other right wing think-tanks. They pushed right because of the DLC. They used the “capturing votes” thing to excuse the rightward push. They STILL love that talking point despite Bernie having the most bipartisan grassroots support in the last 40 years…
They had to move heaven and earth to cheat him.
IMO, Clintonites and neoliberals were even more nefarious since they successfuly pretended to be leftists while purposely pushing the Democratic Party rightward to what we see today. Coupled with regulatory capture in the form of Citizens United, they now have a virtually-impenetrable corporatist stronghold in the US.
Further reading: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/
great answer…no sarcasm. But what does FPTP stand for?
First past the post. Here’s my go-to graphic to describe how it affects democracies.
How the Swedish parliament would look is how the current British government does look. For exactly this reason.
I was thinking about that just now.
They did Corbyn dirty in almost exactly the same way that they did Sanders. It has been worst-case-scenario from there on out.
Have they fully privatized NHS yet?
Thankfully not and the party that wanted to is the blue one that lost massively in July.
If it’s as bad as it is in the US, they ALL want to privatize it.
I’ll never forget Joe Lieberman swooping in and literally letting health insurance companies completely rewrite (destroy) the Affordable Care Act from an incremental step toward Single Payer into a law that codifies their profiteering. It put everyone into three categories:
A.) people who make more than their incredibly low income means testing are required to shop for expensive private health insurance on the free market. Health insurance companies literally raised their rates right after this. Because of Joe, health insurance profits, medical bankruptcy, and death from being under/uninsured (70,000 people per year) are at an all-time high! Any real illness won’t be covered and you’ll be forced to cover it with a GoFundMe!
B.) people who face stiff fines if they don’t have health insurance (neoliberal paternalism much like charging people for plastic bags and sugary drinks)
C.) people who somehow manage to sneak in under the means testing income bar! If you are 300% or more below the actual poverty line, you get the most bare bones medical insurance possible!
Astroturfing.
Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.
These days, foreign influence operations (often based in authoritarian countries) aimed at increasing the polarization of a target population also play a major role.
You had me in the first half. All this foreign influence talk is hugely overblown. Not non-existent, but so small that it may as well be. It’s a convenient excuse for Clinton’s embarrassing election failure, and it’s convenient for manufacturing consent for heightened belligerence toward Russia.
Hey folks, nothing to see here. Just the .ml account telling us that Russian influence in the US is overblown! (Just as the DOJ shows us the tip of the iceberg of Russia desperately trying to get Trump elected.)
these things come up whenever the right wing needs a distraction. they have to keep finding new groups to blame society’s ills on, so that conservatives don’t realize it’s their politics that lead to those.
whenever a group inevitably becomes too accepted (or at least not feared enough) to be a distraction, they move on to the next group. sometimes they bring an oldie back because that’s fashion for you.
If that were the case, the Dems could just stand up and say, “You and I both know that those aren’t even issues. They are open and shut case of right vs. wrong. Here are the issues that actually matter to people on both sides of the political spectrum:
- stop sending our tax money to bomb people
- give us Single Payer
- break up monopolies
- make it possible to afford a home
- make college education free
- increase wages
- help labor
- etc”
and they would win in a landslide (if elections were even fair in the first place).
But they don’t because they know that it allows them to give the donors (who are considered PEOPLE with ability to funnel ANY amount of money to a candidate because of Citizens United) what they want (more money) while doing ANYTHING to distinguish themselves to their sheeplike electorate.
There are 8 billion people in the world. If 10,000 people on Xwitter are upset about something, it’s statistically insignificant.
This is what pisses me off about people that go on about I’m sick of this woke society or sick of these “crazy trans people”, or whatever else.
And I’m like brother I do not care and most people do not care. Let people do what they want it ain’t that deep. I’m off the view if it doesn’t negatively affect me then what business is it of mine how people live their life. The things they get outraged over is just from some minority of loons on Twitter and not everybody.
literally russian bot farms
🤦🤦🏾♀️🤦🏻🤦🏽♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏿🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽🤦🏿♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏽
Conservatives have been furious about that progress this whole time. They will never accept progress. If permitted, they will undo every bit of anti-bigotry progress made in the last 100 years and return us to a slave-based economy.
Conservatism is a deadly social cancer. It always has been.
I suspect the truth is a lot more jarring/disruptive to your worldview than you might be ready to admit. I’m positive that you’ll shoot the messenger. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.
The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil. When conservatives accuse the DNC of running the media, they’re not wrong. The DNC and their stable of “diverse” demagogues are masters of stage-managed, focus-grouped mass marketing. If they tell the truth, they are quickly disposed of.
Please read some Chomsky, my friend.
Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.
This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.
For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.
Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.
Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.
And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.
That was a low effort response to a well written detailed post that took quite a while to write. At least deal with some of the issues raised, don’t just ignore everything they said and dismiss them as willfully ignorant.
It was because I thought the author both understood and even agreed with my point in principle but then did intricate mental gymnastics to disagree with my point and let everyone off the hook including the person that I was disagreeing with.
I don’t want to continue talking in circles with Centrists telling me that the piss pouring on my head is in fact charitable rain drops from the benevolent libs.
That’s a much better response!
Thanks for pulling it out of me.
Kind vibes to you, friendly and intellectually honest fellow fediverse Lemmy user. 🙏
