electoralism

not really shocking. i don't know many people with a coherent politics. the hegemonic ideology is a flashy, exterior scaffolding meant to distract from the massive gaps in the decaying, malevolent structure. the hegemon is incoherent, and we all live in its shadow.

as others said before me, the US is a project held together by cheap treats. that's what people know: what are the treats they like. how these treats arrive before them is generally mysterious and unimportant to their enjoyment until the treats aren't within reach.

many will accept whatever logic they are exposed to. "i can't afford housing because there are too many regulations." or "i can't afford housing because wall street." that's as far as it goes. people aren't provided the tools of critical or material analysis in education. frankly, they are mostly given thought-terminating cliches, wound up, and sent out into the job market.

i work with a lot of libs, but many of the gen X and elder millenials are either infected with "entrepenurial innovation" brainworms or just incurious about material analysis. younger colleagues seem more prepared to question the assumptions of the structure, and a few random career-stalled olds are in the mix that, thankfully, recognize the adversarial nature of the ruling class and engage with imperialism/decolonial narratives so they recognize how those structures are being deployed within the core. but there's this big chunk in the middle, frankly people my age, who aren't interrogating. i think it's because at my age, if your career and net worth are still on some type of OK trajectory, you're likely to have bought-in and are unnerved by boat rocking. you stay in your lane, you focus on your situation and care primarily about the politics that intersects explicitly with your turf.

all that to say, politics here are a combo of vibes and material conditions. i used to work in a community and situation that was considerably more antagonistic to left politics and worker organizations, so i have this pathological predisposition to seeming to blend into some kind of politically vague median. like camouflage. nowadays, i say political shit fairly frequently about being pro-worker or adversarial to rentier politics, surveillance tech, and war but few ever pick up on the thread. the result is everybody my age who talks to me assumes i share their "common sense" centrist-civility politics. lol.

i legit think that a lot of the political evolution in the US is held back by the continued functioning of the treat machine and the lack of a project that is unifying around a tent-pole issue. in my experience, people are issues focused. i think having a coherent politics is worthwhile, especially when building a project, but it's the lightning rod issue that will blow it up and make it unignorable. something like healthcare, a catastrophic energy crisis, or a massive national ecological disaster is what i would expect to snap the reigns.

the fact that nobody with a national platform even talked about universal healthcare for almost 10 years, and that there was a global pandemic during that period, shows just how desperate the establishment was to prevent it from being the inciting issue. i still think it has potential if someone could get on and recruit for a national platform and just never shut up about it. and embrace total fanaticism: won't change their mind, won't change the subject... universal healthcare. but, right now my money is on a major and acute energy crisis. like diesel & No2 Heating Oil $10+/gal type shit. somewhere up there is a price point that pierces the centrist-civility fog and has people reimagining the possible.

I don't think these people are unreachable. I think they have the opposite problem. I think they are so easily reachable by anyone that nothing sticks. You could take hours carefully explaining the situation to them and it would seem to work. They would nod and agree and say they'd never thought of it like that and seem impressed by your insight. They won't apply anything you explained to anything else, and the next time cable news comes on it'll all drip out of their ears. By the next time you see them you'll be back to square one.

Marianne, a 57-year-old independent voter, said she thinks traditional Democrats are "more centrist" and cater to more corporate interests.

"But they also care about the people as well, the working people," she said. "Whereas socialist Democrats are more about community."

It's becoming ever more clear to the average working person that neither party supports their interests. Without a materialist explanation and socialist solution, they're left to pull what levers they've been given to try and make change. And of course in a bourgeois democracy, those levers aren't connected to anything.

"Dems were in power and shit got worse, might as well vote for the not-Democrat" isn't much less rational than any other individualized electoral strategy.

It's generally a bad use of time and resources to try to sway the most backward workers, like ardent Trump supporters (and obviously this is even more true with the managerial and petty bourgeoisie that make up a large part of his base).

But we can't expect the average worker to come to us with a coherent, perfect ideology. There's all sorts of algorithmically-generated brainworms that we're gonna have to help people move past. My experience from trying to organize different workplaces is a there's massive heterogeneity of obscure, often internally-contradicting, beliefs from person to person. There isn't much in the way of a common epistemological framework for people to use, so they're left to whatever their Facebook or tiktok algorithm feeds them.

Isolate the backward, educate the intermediate, organize the advanced.

I'm sure people will take this to mean "we can reach them!" but I just take this to mean they're just anti-incumbent. They voted for Biden because they were voting against Trump. They voted for Trump because they were voting against Biden/Harris. Now they'll vote for anything as long as they're voting against Trump. "I don't like the current thing and would like to try New Thing." That's it.

These people have zero coherent ideology.

I feel so left out of opinion polls because they always want people who voted biden in 2020 but not kamala in 2024

And like, I didn't vote for Holocaust Harris in 2024 because of Palestine, but I didn't vote for Biden in 2020 because of Iraq. They're excluding me for being too correct.

going from Biden to Trump means I implicitly do not give a shit about anything they "think"

Or maybe they're unreachable burger reich demons

What do I know