The scary thing about progressives wailing when people won't listen to their wisdom is how quickly they're willing to conclude that they'll just have to find ways to use more force than persuasion, for our own good.
In the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber conducts a long-winded analysis of the "Obama-Springsteen" echo chamber. I had to get to the very bottom to find his point: his crowd always has hoped and believed, with good reason, that they can conduct stealth politics by controlling popular culture, but now he finds with dismay that people sense the stink of propaganda and tune out the culture. People outside the Obama-Springsteen echo chamber may actually recoil and find both their entertainment and their political messages elsewhere--from those bad, bad people with a different message that we haven't managed to squelch yet.
Indeed, many of the people Obama wants to reach are the ones who systematically avoid him for reasons of culture, politics, or both. . . . Obama demonstrates the toxic effects of Fox News by recalling an anecdote from late in his White House tenure. He had gone to visit a community college in a red state, and the locals tuning in to his speech from a nearby bar asked, “Is this how Obama usually sounds?” to a reporter who was there with them. Clearly they had been getting their news from sources that rarely broadcast the commander in chief speaking uninterrupted.
“Now, keep in mind, at that point I had probably been president for the last five or six years,” Obama says to Springsteen. “The filter was so thick that I, as president of the United States, could not reach those guys unless I actually went to their town.”
Why, yes, you can inspire a target audience to recoil in horror and, even if they can't escape your deeply unpopular laws, to exercise their right not to soak up your condescending lectures. They aren't required to continue to listen. They may even start listening to other people whose messages you deplore. This is what happens to people who don't genuinely believe in the power of persuasion, only the power of propaganda and, if that fails, censorship and force.
Kornhaber concludes that the peril of the echo chamber "only emphasizes the limits of politics-as-culture":
The Biden era has already provided a clinic in the seriousness of those limits: Here is a president, like Obama before him, backed by Hollywood and enjoying a popular-vote majority—yet still unable to pass his agenda due to intractable political obstacles. Would any amount of conscientious conversation nix the filibuster or sway Joe Manchin? Money, demographics, institutions, and pure power still rule, and many of the stories we tell lately in hopes of shifting that reality just end up distracting from it.So the problem is money, demographics, institutions, and pure power, not that Biden can't get his way because too many people despise the policies he's now pushing, after running a campaign in which many understood him to be promising something completely different. Kornhaber seems to labor under the delusion that Biden conscientiously conversed with voters, who inexplicably failed to listen. Frankly, Biden didn't try, and if he had, the voters' rejection wouldn't have signaled a problem with their ears, but with the content of the message. Thus Biden follows up with the notion that he's "running out of patience." And the terrible voters don't like that either.
6 comments:
One would think the 2010 election results would have taught the Boundless Ego that he wasn't all that and a bag of chips.
From the earliest days of his presidency, Obama inserted himself in criminal matters in a prejudicial way whenever race was involved. Henry Louis Gates and the Beer Summit; saying that Trayvon Martin could have been his son; launching an investigation into the Ferguson, MO PD, which had data showing it was not targeting blacks and if anything was letting them get away with more but claiming it proved racism.
The framing that the "people Obama is trying to reach" reject him for cultural reasons is slanted to the point of dishonesty. He is not trying to reach them, and was never trying to reach them. He wants to correct them and has no ability to listen to them.
I would have thought the 1998 mid-term [ Contract With America ] election results would have taught the left in general and MRS. Clinton in particular the lesson it seemed to have taught President Bill. Focus on "triangulation". Let the insurmountable barriers remain on both sides, and work together -- or at least, work for a half-a-loaf solution for both sides -- on issues that aren't existentially fraught. Don't eliminate welfare, but "End welfare as we now know it." "Safe and Legal, but Rare." Etc. More street level cops AND midnight basketball.
Bill was as corrupt a politician as ever held the office, but he WAS a politician. He stole the best ideas from all sides and claimed all the credit for delivering any part of them.
I blame Ross Perot, personally.
He is probably right that Obama's efforts aren't going to be persuasive, and partly for the reasons he hits upon: Obama is producing the wrong kind of media to talk to the young people he wants to persuade. No one is going to invest in glossy print books about Obama who isn't already persuaded that Obama is the coolest guy ever.
Still, they're fooling themselves if they think running up everyone's energy bills while projecting American military weakness is a crowd-pleaser. They pulled out all the stops in 2020, using the pandemic as cover for a lot of fraud-enabling and illegal maneuvers with the election -- and they still barely won, and so narrowly that (as the author notes) they can't effect their agenda.
They're having their moment, but it won't last. When the bill comes due, it may be large.
We ain't seen nothin yet.
The unintended consequences of the lock-downs trashed our economy, and the unintended consequences of the jab mandates are going to throw it in the dumpster. We are already suffering the worst shortage of workers in our history, and now somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of our CURRENTLY WORKING people are going to be forced out?
This is, to put it bluntly, pure fucking lunacy.
It is going away- all of it. Health care, food, tech, money- poof.
I am not sure it is possible to believe people are that stupid- so I am going with Cloward-Piven malignant animosity. They are doing it on purpose.
Years ago, a wise executive gave me some advice. Always remember, he said, when you are running an organization of any substantial size, you are not seeing reality. It's like you're watching a movie in which you get to see only maybe one out of every thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.
This is even more true in politics...a voter sees maybe only one in a billion frames about what is going on, in foreign affairs, in criminal justice, on the border, etc etc.
Now think about how much power this gives the people who edit the film and decide what frames to show.
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