Democrats spending millions to learn how to speak to 'American Men' and win back the working class

[Sympthsical]

102. I actually agree with much you say here

Particularly on matters of policy

But here is the core difference, and it has to do with the idea of propaganda. The Right has been very good at penetrating social media. They have found an audience willing to the listen to what they have to say. The crux of my viewpoint is that we have primed that audience to listen to what they have to say. You read your own website. You must see the hostility towards males and various racial groups depending on the time of day. Usually white people, sometimes Latinos, and AAPI get noticed once in a while for their white adjacentness.

We keep alienating what should be natural allies. It becomes a question - Do you want to win elections or do you want to grind grievances? And somewhere along the way, we decided we wanted to grind grievances. And unfortunately, our grievances are heavily, heavily anchored in identity politics, so our expressed politics - the politics other people see and the cultural results of those politics - are primed to alienate people. We have a whole system of who is allowed to say what to whom. Of course Republicans exploit grievance. They're very good at it. Which circles around to the point in my previous post. If we're having a contest over which side is good at exploiting grievance, Republicans will win. They're good at this stuff. And they're also a bit more homogenized than the Democratic party. So when we start down that road, we might get negativity pointed at Republicans, but we also start firing at each other inside our own tent. It's the nature of our party. We cannot do grievance politics centered on identity and minimize the friendly fire. It's impossible in a political entity so utterly dependent on coalition politics.

I think where you and I differ is in how we read the media. You think I'm spreading propaganda. However, I'm usually relating either my lived experience, the experiences of those I keep in contact with, or reading outside of the MSM. I read a lot, I observe a lot, I listen a lot. To everyone.

I would love to be a reality-based community. We are not that anymore. I have zero intention of relitigating this, but we can see in this Biden/Tapper stuff that there is a very, very closed bubble that thinks everything is propaganda. Everything. And it is well outside even the average Democratic voter. When two thirds of Democratic voters are saying one thing, and it's being dismissed as MSM propaganda in these closed partisan spaces, who's in touch with reality? Over the past two years, just saying "Damn, prices at the grocery store are crazy!" was considered some kind of contrarian statement. Why? Because it imperiled a political narrative that everything was great? Pick a topic. Just saying uncontroversial exceedingly obvious things gets push back. Oh, that's the MSM! They're lying! They're lying about what? What I just paid at the grocery store? Guys, I have the receipt in my hands.

There is so much of this on our side now. "You are not seeing what your eyes and ears are clearly seeing and hearing. It's all propaganda."

Voters see this. The sun is up. They can see us. Narrative reality is increasingly becoming an alternative lived in reality aided and abetted by enclosure in sealed partisan spaces. I suspect what you and I see as propaganda are going to be very different things.

I know Republicans are bad. It's why I don't vote for them. I don't need to be told they're awful. What I need to be told is what the party's strategy is going forward to create a sustainable electoral majority. Particularly because that 2030 census is coming, and it scares the hell out of me. 2026 is probably in the bag for us. 2028 will probably be ours to lose. And after that? Is our electoral fate really "Well, let's wait til Republicans wreck things, then we'll win the election!" Because that's kind of been our strategy for most of my life. Republicans take five steps backward, then we come in and do a bit of spot cleaning, then Republicans come in and push us another five steps back. I think the trajectory of this electoral habit has been painstakingly clear.

Either we figure out how to start talking to the parts of the country who don't already agree with us, or the electorate will change our party by force in the 2030s. We're so desperately bad at seeing problems coming until they arrive (or until they've already passed and we've lost major elections). Because we dismiss anything we don't want to hear as propaganda.

Wouldn't it be nice to tackle a problem before it arrives? Just for a fun change of pace?