"Why won't anyone listen to us?"

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.