I was going to write about Maureen Dowd and her brother’s idiotic column, but just couldn’t find it in myself to do it. Luckily David Roberts offered up a pithy twitter thread that got the job done.
This is such horseshit.
Among the many reasons this is horseshit, this whole genre of liberal-scolding rests on the premise that the offended heartlanders are responding to what Dems actually say — the intramural debates in which people like Dowd are involved. They’re not!
By & large, Trump’s base has no idea what Dems actually say or do. They are responding to a ludicrous caricature they see on RW media (& RW social media). They are responding to lies & conspiracy theories. Dems changing how they talk *won’t change any of that*.
It’s very weird how America’s elite journalists/pundits/etc. wring their hands over “post-truth politics” & the problem of misinformation, but then turn around & treat the things voters do as a direct response to Dem “messaging.” Voters rarely HEAR Dem messaging.
Because — stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times — the RW has a giant propaganda machine that carries their messages directly to the ears (& id) of their voters. Dems lob messages out into the MSM & hope for the best.
Originally tweeted by David Roberts (@drvox) on November 27, 2020.
Thank you. This constant whimpering about how mean everyone is from the “Fuck your Feelings” crowd is enough to make me want to break things.
No matter how many pork rinds Democrats eat or how many animals they kill or how many times they throw their arms around white policemen and kiss them on the lips — the right wingers will not change their minds because they will not even know about it. They only know what their media and their Facebook feeds are telling them and they have become addicted to more and more extreme, absurd nonsense. I mean, millions of them believe that the Democratic Party is run by a bunch of cannibal pedophiles and Trump and JFK Jr (who is actually still dead) has a secret plot to stop it. Millions. They’ve elected a bunch of other believers in that swill to the US Congress! Right now, Fox News is hemorrhaging viewers to Newsmax and OAN because it’s telling them that Trump didn’t actually win.
They. Are. Brainwashed.
This problem is way too complex for “Democratic messaging” to have any effect. It’s going to take years of deprogramming.