The "Green Bay Sweep"--One Year Later

[Dill]

(01-25-2022, 11:49 AM)hollodero Wrote: Dill wrote: Something has happened to break their judgment, undermining trust in government (including the FBI,CIA, and CDC) and academia--all outside authority--rendering every false equivalence a credible trump of pro-democracy candidates and policies, and it happened between 1974 and 2016--and especially after 9/11.  I'm including here many "independents" as well, who have difficulty seeing much difference between Trump and every president who came before him.

In general, I think your frontiers have just hardened over the last few years, that reality and facts really do not matter any more. You don't need facts, you need talking points repeated amongst your own peers, and it does not matter any more to convince anyone but your own. Which goes both ways, but of course is way more extreme on the Trump/GOP side of things. I even feel that being egregiously fact-free is actually not problematic, but a bonus for many. It makes the libs go so crazy, and that is the main objective.

Sorry I am a week getting back to this, Hollo. But you raise some discussion-worthy issues here so I don't want to ignore them.

 Your phrasing of the bolded above implies a symmetry, with only a matter of degree distinguishing the parties from one another. But I’m arguing that recognizing asymmetry and qualitative, structural differences between the parties should take priority in political analyses assessing “what is wrong” in U.S. politics. (Remember that thread I began last year on the structural differences between MSM and Right wing media, not to mention my posts on the structural differences between the parties which make Republicans now something like a regime party?)
 
To be sure, there are symmetrical features, mostly at the level of rhetoric. E.g., each side now accuses the other of trying to steal the election. “Both sides” say that. But if each party’s talking points don’t circulate well amongst the other side, it is not because both disregard “reality and facts.” If you take the extra step to ask “Ok, what are those facts then, and how are they vetted and circulated as ‘talking points’”? then some rather strong differences appear: in one case the circulating points are grounded in signed documents, videos and recorded criminal phone calls which can be evidence in court; and in the other case, they are grounded in mere claims of Trump and Giuliani, with a surrounding penumbra of Chinese paper and the Italian laser conspiracies.
 
So we have two very different information environments, in which statements purported to be true and factual are vetted and circulated according to different rules. One--created by and for the GOP--can’t maintain the Big Lie that Biden stole the election with documents, data, and vetted testimony; one has, rather, to delegitimize the MSM, the Dems, the FBI and to some degree even courts manned by Trump-appointed judges. It is an environment which induces audiences to self-censor, to avoid reading/listening to other sources, prejudged as “fake news.” This has been going on for two decades now. It's why people make cult analogies to the current GOP--cult leaders teach their followers how to spin and dismiss counter evidence as proof of "lies" and "hypocrisy," and so to stay away from the "normies" and any sources of information contesting the cult leader's views. That cultic self-censorship indeed creates a hardened "frontier," as the Berlin WAll once was, which prevents dialogue and exposure of leader's lies. Back in 1988 it would have been very odd to claim the Berlin Wall existed because "Germans" had hardened the frontier between the BRD and DDR.

The GOP leadership plays for the team, sure. But Trump—no longer a player--is the coach who decides game strategy and who gets to suit up. So the party as a whole has to operate on alternative facts, not grounded in documents, data, emails, and vetted testimony. While Trump was president the GOP protected him from consequences instead of exercising its oversight responsibilities. Now it is following a lie to fuel a rolling coup.

The other information environment, which I'll call "MSM" here, is much more diverse, not committed to a political leader and party. "Lies" may appear in it, but they get vetted, contested, and eliminated pretty quickly. They cannot continue to circulate for years and become the rally ground for tens of millions of voters supporting an autocratic leader.
 
Outside of grousing about our 2-party system, I don’t see how your views/reactions on GOP behaviors differ from those of most Democrats. You understand, as do most Dems, that there is no evidence Trump lost the election because of fraud. There IS evidence that his Meadows/Giuliani-run team tried to overturn a legitimate election. Those are Dem “talking points,” sure, which we circulate among our peers. But it’s not like no one tries to circulate them across party lines, and it is certainly not like we “don’t need facts” to main tian those points.

So when you, referencing U.S. voters, say OUR “frontiers hardened” and WE “don’t need facts,” I don’t recognize myself or the MSM or the Dem party in general in those statements. Yet, for reasons that are not clear to me, you speak as if "both sides" were "hardened" and "don't need facts" when clearly that description is only accurate for one side.