“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

-Yogi Berra

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I made this point on a live stream a few days ago, but there are two real issues that have the opportunity to drive a wedge between Trump and coalition that came together to put him into office: Making America “Great” Again (whatever that means; and Epstein. There is a real opportunity to peal a non-trivial amount of support away from Trump right now, but it might require using rhetoric and approaches that the left hasn’t been willing to engage with previously

    The “Making America Great Again” is effectively an argument that whatever Trump is doing is the opposite of that. This has come up on a number of RW podcasts, but probably the two of greatest importance are the JRE and PBD podcasts. The best example I have of this comes from the PBD podcast, where the issue has come up directly a few times. There was a Majority Report/ Sam Seder clip where I think Vincent (or maybe Adam?), during the NYC mayoral debate, where they were discussing the candidates and one of the talking heads said something along the line of “Mandami is the only one up there who sounds like they are putting New York first, America first” or something long those lines. Its come up as a through line several times across RW media and as a talking point it has staying power.

    The second thread is on Epstein, and we’ve all been watching the RW meltdown on this issue. The entire RW politics sphere is having to gaslight its audiences on an issue they’ve spent literally decades building up in the minds of their constituents; its just not something they can easily undo. The problem we have currently, is any pressure being put onto the Epstein fault line is being done so through what I would describe as a "traditional DNC/ Democratic lens, approach. Hearings, documents, civil procedure; its not going to get through to the RW media landscape, and even might be counter productive to further driving this wedge (if you are rw and the critique coming from Democrats it must be BS right?).

    The real problem we have right now on the left is that our media infrastructure/ landscape isn’t built to take advantage of these fault lines. Traditional media is right out. No one at all listens to them; they mostly serve as a punching bag to validate RW narratives. But, necessarily, on leftist media, we’ve had to use purity test, validation and crowdsourcing to both self fund but also maintain discipline when it comes not being co-opted by RW/ corporate interests. The result is we don’t have very many outlets that can act as a gateway drug to cleaving off support for Trump. And the thing is, cleaving off even 1/2-1% support would be huge.

    Political movements are momentum driven. The fly wheels to grow them effective require constant acceleration to maintain steady state. What this means is that if we can even cleave off a half percent of support among Trump voters, we’ve sent the entire project into retrograde.

    Trumpism is a mental health condition and we should be approaching breaking it apart that way. Its mass delusional psychosis. When you are trying to approach someone, deal with someone in a psychotic or delusional state, it does you no good to argue with them about what reality is. You can’t come into those situations with a mentality telling them “Well you are just wrong about reality”. If you want to reach them, you have to find points of “agreement”, and then, slowly, move them to where you want them to go.

    I mostly feel like there is a real opportunity right now to split off at least some of the base support for Trump by focusing on some specific coalitions, but its not going to happen without a change in the approaches we’re seeing used.