David Sirota reports on the bigger picture: a breakdown

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Fri, 08/06/2021 - 2:36pm

Incrementalism for All Who Can Survive It is the article to be broken down here. Here's the subtitle:

As massive catastrophes unfold, politicians, pundits, and voters are responding with demands for compromise and incrementalism.

Here's the money quote:

In effect, we are living inside of an asteroid disaster movie, and yet the response is a collective sigh and pious odes to caution — and it’s the same discordance outside the Beltway, as evidenced in this week’s Ohio’s special congressional election.

The next paragraph diverges from the asteroid disaster movie, unfortunately, to comment on the special election in Ohio which happened this week. It, however, is also telling:

There, super PACs, Republican donors, and corporate lobbyists bankrolled Shontel Brown’s campaign to defeat former Democratic state Senator Nina Turner, who ran on a promise to push the Democratic Party to embrace Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other policies that would at least give the country a fighting chance to halt this epoch’s existential crises. For the crime of pushing too stridently, Turner was voted down at the polls in favor of a candidate whose major promise to voters was a pledge of lockstep fealty to Democratic leaders in Washington.

There are some other links embedded in Sirota's text -- readers should be able to access all of them -- but here in copying and pasting this paragraph I have highlighted the one link that mattered. The one financial entity most principally responsible for Nina Turner's defeat, the one prime mover of all the other entities, was the DMFI PAC, the Democratic Majority for Israel.

This should cause you to think "cult" every time you hear or read a Democrat complaining of Russian influence in US elections. There is a foreign country with rather outsized influence in US politics, and it's not Russia. You don't see a Democratic Majority for Russia, do you?

At any rate, Sirota spends much of the rest of the article trying to explain a certain type of Democratic Party voter, the one that prefers "incrementalism" to practical politics:

it’s a simple truth even if it’s painful for many progressives (including me!) to acknowledge: A sizable portion of the Democratic primary electorate willingly and enthusiastically votes for incrementalism, regardless of how insufficient incrementalism may be in meeting the moment’s challenges.

Krystal Ball tries to understand this electorate as well:

At any rate, what needed saying at such a point was that the Democratic Party is itself a cult. This truth about the Democratic Party should have been obvious from Hillary Clinton's campaign, which spent large portions of its time shuttling back and forth between enclaves of rich people in America (Beverly Hills, San Marino, Silicon Valley, Marin County, the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard, northern Virginia etc.) soliciting funds. The Democratic Party cult wishes to sidle up to the Cult of Money, promoting a right-wing (pro-Israel etc.) politics amenable to the wishes of the super-rich, while at the same time fumbling for the right words which will make perceptions of America's problems vanish in some mysterious and magical way (absent of course any real solutions). And everything is totally fine, you see, for the Democrats who represent, because they have money.

Thus Democrats will tell you, as the Earth dies, that everything is fine and okay and we need someone with experience in public office to stay the course, so that they will continue to have money. One thinks, for instance, of yesterday's Zoom meeting with the People's Party, in which Nick Brana told everyone that members of The Squad told him that either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris will be running unopposed for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2024.

Trump supporters, on the other hand, know full well that neither the perception of America's problems nor the problems themselves will magically vanish. Trump supporters, however, being also members of a cult, will tell you that the one and only solution is something like God, guns, and Trump, in other words, social regression. This stuff is lame and not entirely serious. It is really no wonder, then, that as the Trump cult acquired public power, its representatives were so easily co-opted by the same possessors of money who so fascinate the Democratic Party elites.

One has to imagine that both of these cults, (D) and (R), will eventually spiral out and die. The Jonestown cult came to an end when its members, self-exiling to Guyana, were forced, on orders of Jim Jones himself, to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The Democratic Party elites may choose to self-exile to their own version of Jonestown: I am thinking of perhaps luxury suites in Alaska or New Zealand or some place where the summers will not be as brutal as they were, say, in Portland, Oregon this year:

Were you all wondering what the talk was about when Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland from Denmark?

As for the Trumpies, y'all might start to inquire what those guns are for.

The bad end for the "we endorse the (D) cult because the (R) cult is so much worse" people? As Worf said in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "That remains to be seen."

Tags:

Democratic Party cult

Republcian Party cult

# climate change

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Comments

Submitted by fire with fire on Fri, 08/06/2021 - 3:56pm

Sirota Overestimates Voter Sophistication

Leaving aside the question of whether votes are counted accurately, I think that Sirota is mistaken when he asserts that Democratic voters prefer incrementalism. Most voters, literally, do not know what "incrementalism" means -- let alone grasps the difference between Medicare For All and Obamacare.

This is not to argue that the people of Cleveland support Turner's policies. Most people just have no reason to do the homework necessary to develop a coherent conception of the American Government and its citizenry. It just means that Sirota is reading too much into the results of that election.

In 2004, the CATO Institute published a summary of the research on voter knowledge:

Extent of Ignorance

As political scientist John Ferejohn has written, “Nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.”10 Few people dispute the well-established conclusion that most individual voters are abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information. Ever since the seminal research of the 1950s and early 1960s, evidence has accumulated to reinforce this finding.11 Nonetheless, the sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research. Currently, almost 70 percent of Americans do not know that Congress recently adopted a law adding a massive prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, the largest new federal entitlement in decades, and arguably the most important piece of domestic legislation adopted during the administration of George W. Bush.12 Equally striking is the fact that more than 60 percent do not realize that a massive increase in domestic spending has made a substantial contribution to the recent explosion in the federal deficit.13

A survey taken immediately after the closely contested November 2002 congressional elections found that only about 32 percent of respondents knew that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election.14 That result is consistent with research showing widespread ignorance of congressional party control in previous elections.15

Such widespread ignorance is not of recent origin. As of December 1994, a month after the takeover of Congress by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans, 57 percent of Americans had never even heard of Gingrich, whose campaign strategy and policy stances had received massive publicity in the immediately preceding weeks.16In 1964, in the midst of the Cold War, only 38 percent were aware that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO.17 Most of the time, only bare majorities know which party has control of the Senate, some 70 percent cannot name either of their state’s senators, and the vast majority cannot name any congressional candidate in their district at the height of a campaign.18 Overall, close to one third of Americans can be categorized as “know-nothings” almost completely ignorant of relevant political information.

In 2016, CATO published more recent information on this topic of voter ignorance:

And the evidence is overwhelming that the amount of political ignorance out there is pretty severe. For example, in our last election in 2014, the main issue at stake was which party would control Congress. Yet in surveys taken not long before the election, only 38 percent of the public even knew which party controlled the House and which party controlled the Senate. Similarly, in most recent elections, one of the big issues is the future of the federal budget, yet surveys consistently show that most of the public has little to no idea how our federal government spends its money. They massively underestimate the percentage of the federal budget that goes to major entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, even though these are among the largest items in the budget. On the other hand they massively overestimate the percentage that goes to foreign aid (which is only about 1 percent of the budget). The ignorance that we observe is not just limited to particular issues — it also goes to the very basic structure of government. A recent survey found that only 34 percent of the public even knows the three branches of the federal government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.

To ask someone who is not an internet regular or a politics junky to grasp the policy differences between candidates for the Democratic Congressional Nomination might be reasonable -- but it will not get a very good answer in this vale of tears called America.

—

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Submitted by doh1304 on Fri, 08/06/2021 - 5:33pm

The Squad is right - and we are doomed

Not-the-wrestler will run unopposed (in the primary) in 2024 and lose, but that won't be the story. It is easy to say that people will vote for incrementalism because they are ignorant - because it is true - but also out of selfishness and fear. Most people are satisfied with the status quo, they have low expectations but those expectations are generally met. They are far more afraid of losing what they have than what they have already lost or are sure to lose. And when they start to lose they cling to someone who promises to give them back what they had, not what they actually need - because what they want is antithetical to their lives, but they liked it. People want SUVs and 32 oz sodas and 52 inch plasma TVs and cheap Wallmart junk made by third world child labor.
And they hate Democrats because they know they're wrong, and they know they're going to pay, but the Democrats stab them in the back at every opportunity.

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On to Biden since 1973

Submitted by Battle of Blair... on Fri, 08/06/2021 - 11:00pm