Watch what they watch, hear what they hear
Brian Beutler wrote an excellent piece about the Democratic Party and the working class that you should read in its entirety. I think his analysis of the dysfunctional relationship is spot on. But the piece is called “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem — If they ignore the media environment in their 2024 post-mortems, it will be the first major error of the second Trump era” and this is why:
There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle. The policies they enact aren’t unrelated to the challenges Americans face: Insulin and hearing-aid costs, insurance premiums, wages, roads, worker leverage, etc.
What I think would make a lot of these elites go bug-eyed would be to spend a day shadowing working-class or rural midwesterners purely to understand the kind of information they absorb, intentionally and passively, from their earliest moments to when they shut off their televisions, phones, or computers at night. I believe they’d be disturbed. I believe they’d be so alarmed that they’d convene the most powerful people in the party and declare an emergency.
I hope they try an experiment like that. And then I hope they act. Because my experience over the past eight years tells me they won’t believe it when someone like me pleads with them.
Being a successful party requires more than just competent governance and legislative success. It requires understanding all the country’s major challenges—including homegrown ones—and addressing them directly. Democrats needed to create a cure for the fascist mind virus circulating in America. Instead they created a sedative, hoping that, with sufficient bedrest, Americans would neutralize the virus themselves. If they don’t revisit that decision, the sickness will keep getting worse, and may lead us to ruin.
There is a ton of commentary out there about how the Democrats need to create a new and more modern media infrastructure which is not uncommon in the wake of a losing election. I recall many a blogpost written on this subject during the Bush years. It seems we’re always playing catch-up. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true and with the rapidly changing media environment of thelast few years it seems clear that we have fallen more behind than ever.
I live on the internet and I don’t think I was aware of this. It’s so easy to retreat into your comfortable silo among your friends. And I am probably too old, too west coast and too female to truly appreciate the media landscape Beutler describes. But I hope that some of the people with the means and and the focus do so and then make a move to figure out how to deal with it. It’s clear to me that it’s vital if we ever expect to make this system work properly again.