The 1872 presidential election (Ulysses Grant vs Horace Greeley) represented the last time progressive change was brought about through a national election. Since then, progressive change has either been forced by mass action (Women’s suffrage, Welfare, Social Security, Unemployment insurance, Civil Rights, Gay rights, &c) or been a small part of a bill the bulk of which was to increase the burden on the working class (Affordable Care Act). The job of our elected representatives since 1877 has been to either to rubberstamp what they can’t avoid (then, if possible, taking credit for it), or to pass a defeat off as a victory.
And yet, in spite of this, so many, especially among the petty bourgeois intellectual set, are still convinced that progressive change not only can, but MUST come through elections. This is a testimony to the power of propaganda.
And yet, however powerful propaganda is, it has its limits. Poker theorist Mike Caro said, “It is hard to convince a winner that he is losing.” It is also hard to convince a man who can’t feed his family that the economy is doing well and everything is fine.
I don’t want to compromise your brevity achievement, but would you please elaborate your first sentence with some parenthetical examples comparable to the ones you provided in your second sentence? The parity would be very helpful.
The last sentence by skzb is the real issue right now. Politicians always point to the stock market as evidence of a good economy. The stock market is driven by inflation, so it is a false tell-tail. Unless workers can feed their family and have a place to live, the government is not serving their responsibilities.
Yesterday a 20 year old who has previously donated to progressive “get out the vote” causes attempted to kill Donald Trump from a roof located outside of a fundraiser for the former president in Western PA.
This attempt strikes me as misguided, as a lone gunman is no substitute for a mass popular movement of the working class with a program to address the material needs of the population. If it had succeeded, the Republicans would simply have nominated another capitalist politician, likely DeSantis or Haley, and carried on as before.
But the propaganda from the corporate media that a vote for Biden is urgently needed to “save democracy” may have influenced the young man to act more decisively.
We don’t currently know much of anything about the gunman’s motivations. We do know that someone with his name and address donated $15 to a progressive org. We also know that someone with his name and address was a registered Republican. Looking online, you do have to supply a Pennsylvania ID number.
He used an AR style weapon that apparently belonged to his father.
Propaganda and counter propaganda will flow from this. It is good to be diligent in separating things that we seem to know from that propaganda.
And, speaking of propaganda, the judge in the documents case just threw out the whole thing on the grounds that the special prosecutor was illegally appointed.
The timing and rationale are both propaganda pieces in the extreme.
This is something we agree on, even though we come at it from very different places and draw very different conclusions from it. One major problem with centralizing power in a few hands is that propaganda can be used to seize that power, and the cost of taking it away again in terms of lives and suffering is higher when that power is greater. The main argument most people make in favor of centralizing power in the hands of officials is that it’s a quicker path to progress (and I think you and I do have similar definitions here in terms of more individual freedoms and more equal access to resources), but it doesn’t really expedite that, in part because most politicians prioritize their constituents. Add in the fact that centralized power makes it easier for autocrats to take the reins of power and never let go and suddenly big government is a threat to progress, not a path to it. There’s a pretty compelling argument that a Trump victory this cycle would represent the last US election resembling a free one and while he can use propaganda to seize the mechanism of government, he would never have had the capability to build it.