this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Libs don’t crave that message. They believe violence is wrong no matter what and that being a victim is synonymous with being a hero. Dying to protect your family wipes away all sins in the liberal mind. Libs want to preach civility when someone acts rationally against the enemy they’ve said is an existential threat to their democracy. They joke that he can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes which if taken seriously means they’re suggesting he’d wipe cities off the face of the earth but they still think the future of millions of people in whatever cities he would target must only be decided by a vote in November. They will talk up January 6 and insist the enemy will take power by any underhanded means but then handicap themselves with high minded values. Let the whole world go down with the ship if it means they upheld their philosophical values.
We can give Dems more potent words, like all the left academia terms they absorbed and disarmed on the summer of 2020. This is what happens when we trying to win the spectacle on their terms; be it “the news” or social media. Those mediums are totalized by capital and cannot be won by an anti capitalist faction.
Not sure what the winning play is but I think it necessarily is some kind of sustained direct action that creates friction in a world of frictionless spectacle. Some sort of denial of treats and entertainment or easily digested narratives… it has to be totally divorced from the forces that determine success in the spectacle. Whatever it is, it will be incredibly unpopular due to the disruption, it will probably be illegal or be later made illegal by reactionaries… so it can’t be planned online.
(lol I got into a little bit of a rant mode. This is not intended to be overly confrontational, libs are just so damn disappointing.)
Based on polling the lib voters are actually a lot less addicted to that victim-as-hero image than their representatives are. The problem is that the message the Democrats sell to their voters from the top-down has consciously been chosen to be the "when they go low, we go high" message. But letting their voters cast themselves as the hall monitors of democracy and decency is just the form of appeal the top Dems consciously crafted to be most advantageous to them in their simultaneous pursuit of rewards from capital and everyday voters--who have the potential to become far more radicalized.
People will go toward whichever mainstream and widely publicized figure/party that agrees most with their views, just like how most people choose to go see studio movies over Indies because that's what has the ad spend. So Dem voters choose which leaders to follow and let themselves be guided by based on who they're putting on the TV, but what the popular Dem politicians and pundits espouse do not represent the fixed baseline average for what their voters already believe, just the fixed baseline for what their voters feel free to say at the current moment. Looking at an example from the other side, Republicans were terrified to call out Iraq for being a disaster until Trump called it out in a debate and opened the floodgates overnight.
The Dem voter-politician split on Gaza, Medicare 4 All, etc. is so stark, and while Biden is pulls his anti-Trump ads out of decorum the liberal voters online, especially on black Twitter are like "I don't give a fuck if he got popped." The message their voters crave has no mainstream figure to articulate for them yet.