Today we're going to take a break from the daily barrage of life-and-death lies pushed by fascists and talk about the importance of scale.
Not vibes. Not anecdotes. Scale.
Because one of the things the last decade has taught us—over and over and over again—is that if you don’t understand scale, you don’t understand propaganda. And if you don’t understand propaganda, you’re already losing.
The subject of scale -- or, rather, the conspicuous avoidance of the subject of scale -- glided quietly past during one of the Pod Save lads’ daily recitations of the “Why Democrats Suck” rosary—Kamala was a bad candidate, Joe Biden is history’s greatest villain, etc.
Anyway, then there was this (with emphasis added)
Jon Favreau: Yeah. I mean to the ... to the broader question of that Lakshya [Jain] raises in that in that Argument piece about like why Democrats aren't gaining on the generic ballot by as much as Trump's approval is falling. I do think there's a probably a number of reasons.
Jon Lovett: Oh, definitely.
Before we move on, a quick side quest into a subject these people never discuss in depth... and which I have been writing about on this blog since these gentlemen were fresh outta college, Kerry campaign volunteers.
Both Siderism.
Let's start with how most people have traditionally understood politics for a long time. The idea that politics behaves like a thermostat. From Good Authority:
Good to Know: The public is a thermostat
Why there is a never-ending cycle of governments doing something and the public wanting the opposite.
...one of the most enduring puzzles of democracy [is that] governments, no matter what they do, often seem unable to satisfy voters. When governments take action, the public often seems to want the opposite. Push policies left, and opinions shift right. Increase spending, and people want cuts.
This phenomenon – where public preferences shift in the opposite direction of government action – is known as thermostatic politics.
The thermostatic model, first formalized by political scientist Christopher Wlezien in 1995, describes the public’s reaction to government policies as akin to a thermostat adjusting a room’s temperature. Just as a thermostat signals when to cool down or warm up based on current conditions, public opinion signals to policymakers when to increase or decrease policy activity.
A little like Newtonian physics, right? Push and pull. Action, and equal and opposite reaction.
But that Newtonian model is broken. Broken by 40+ years of Both Sides Do It bullshit from America's Very Serious pundits and professional opinion-havers. Despite the fact that America's two major parties are almost exactly diametrically opposed on almost every issue, thanks to the daily barrage of media Both Siderism, for millions of voters, that Newtonian model of action and reaction has been replaced by a kind of Einstein/Schrödinger quantum politics, with the parties becoming "entangled" in the public mind regardless of how distant and different they are from each other.
By now you all know how this entanglement shows up in the everyday language of way too many American voters. For example, a few months ago we talked "Steve" who was one of the subjects of a Vox article titled, "Meet the newly uninsured -- Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."
"Steve" is a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job. But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage. His story is tragic and, with minor variations, is being experienced by millions of American families including ours.
But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.
Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.
They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.
But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.
Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.
“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”
He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.
“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.
Even when the stakes are life and death -- and even when proof of who is right and wrong is at everyone’s fingertips -- allocating blame correctly feels literally unthinkable to tens of millions of citizens who have come to believe the “Both Sides Do It” lie as gospel.
So, when Republican corruption, lies and policies fuck them over, in order to make the quantum entanglement between the two parties balance out, somehow, in some mysterious way, these people hold as irrefutably true that Democrats must be equally to blame.
Every time you hear another "undecided" or "independent" or "centrist" or "unhappy Trump voter" bitching about "Congress" or "politicians in Washington" or "both sides of the aisle" in the the face of a Republican party which has devolved into a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues...you are seeing the effect of 40+ years of Both Sides Do It media curb-stomping thermostatic politics and replacing it with quantum entanglement politics.
And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on pumping that narcotic lie into our politics than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.
But this was just supposed to be a side-quest, wasn't it?
Damn.
Well, let's pick it up in Part 2, which I'll get to later today or tomorrow when we get back to the subject of "scale" in what I am sure will end up being a TL;DR post.
See you all in a bit.
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