On the Eve of Something Legendary

Any way that you look at this, tomorrow is going to be interesting. Either we will elect our first female president, or Donald Trump will be headed for his second term in office. I don't think there's any fair way to look at this other than saying it's very close. I think this will be remembered as the election where widespread disinformation from both sides of the aisle was instrumental in creating a quorum of public opinion that agrees only on the inherent unreliability of public information. Which was, of course, always the point.

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The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Can confirm. The 'zone' is, indeed, flooded with shit. So here we are.

The quote is from Steve Bannon.

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The Right - what does it get wrong?

The world view of the typical right winger extends from a patriarchal sense of family with respect to power dynamics. Which is why Tucker Carlson giggling to a crowd of Trumpers that "daddy was coming home to spank them" was just a little bit on the nose. So although it's comforting to trust an authority figure, unfortunately that's not the world we live in. All institutions are suspect, and a modern thinker needs to vet each and every data point that comes through in a systemic way. That is a difficult thing to do consistently, which is why most, if not all of us, are falling into some level of inadvertent embrace of disinformation.

So that's where the lies are coming from: billionaires with deep pockets who are interested in changing the minds of an entire generation to make them more palatable to a lack of privacy, uber-corporatism, permanent war, and patriotic isolationism.

The Messaging

It's the union's fault. It's the brown people. Corporations are my friend, and my neighbor is my enemy. I need guns to keep me safe.

My 2 cents: you are right that lots of people are lying to you. You're just wrong about who's telling you the truth.

The Left - what does it get wrong?

The left has been a bastion of goodwill for the underserved members of any given community for generations, which is why at this point they are just banking on the public sentiment that they feel they 'own.' Which is a consistent source of resentment from the progressive left, who has been trying for most of my lifetime to push Democrats further to the left while somehow only achieving the opposite. So what the 'mainstream left' consistently gets wrong is that this is the best we can do. That seems to be the message and no one's buying it, we can't have single-payer healthcare, the best we can do is this nightmare we are all living in. We can't protect women's right to healthcare and reproductive freedom, we're just gonna ring that bill for every election to get out the vote. We can't allow progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders to have an actual chance at winning, instead we're gonna fight to keep Jill Stein off the ballot while complaining loudly about election fairness in places like Ecuador amd Brazil.

The Messaging

This is all Trump's fault. Everyone on the right is stupid. We are the smart ones. When we control public narratives, it's smart politics, but when other people do it, it's cheating.

My 2 cents: we can and should be doing better by the weakest among us. If we are going to talk the talk of a higher moral ground, then we must walk as well. Republicans may not even want a fair primary, but Democrats certainly do.

What about the rest of us?

The saddest part, for me, of all this posturing and get out the vote energy is simply that it misses the point. Companies love to support get out the vote initiatives because it's noncommittal, with almost no potential for blowback. So the T-shirts and the mugs and the pens and the glow sticks all get printed up and sent out, and given away, and it starts feeling like we are only just going through the motions because that's truly all that we are doing. How does it make any sense at all to spend this much time pretending that the election even matters, when we've spent absolutely no time uncovering how and for what reason our primaries became so deeply, if you pardon my French, fucked? You can keep calling it bread, but if we pay no attention to where the wheat, the water, the yeast and the salt are coming from - eventually, you will almost certainly have a very different product. Replace the water with piss, and the wheat with shit, and you don't have a loaf of bread anymore, you've got a sewage problem. This is what concerns me.

We are supposed to be the great shining democracy, yet more than 12 months into an unprecedented genocide, we somehow have zero options for ending this tragedy. Stop saying this is the best we can do, because it certainly is not.