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Sure, I understand what an oligarch is. I just think their influence is overestimated, and the amount of people that think neo-liberalism is legitimately a good thing from a philosophical standpoint is underestimated.
People tend to blame that on oligarchs, which is a convenient cop-out imo. Oligarchs have become this boogey-man we can conveniently blame our problems on instead of having to take a more critical look at our problems in things like messaging and communication.
edit: Like, look at Joe Rogan. I don't think his success in communication is due to oligarchy in any of its forms. That's an example of the kind of communication and outreach that we lack, though. They've got it, we don't.
I mean, a lot of news outlets are owned by the same groups funding politicians on both sides and far right think tanks. After 9/11, somebody bought up over 500 local news channels with the express purpose of running more anti-Muslim news.
There isn't some big conspiracy going on, but the facts of US politics are that since Reagan, the laws have been made based largely on the whims of the rich. More often than the majority, at least. And what do the rich want? More money. And dumb, angry people have been great for revenue. So the rich make decisions to benefit their bottom line, and politicians are beholden to their corporate sponsors, and it all leads down the rabbit hole of grifters and tech bros and all. Not in some long con conspiracy, but in idiots chasing infinite growth and infinite profits with no thought for 2 years down the road.
I think there's a big issue with Dems in their messaging, both in style and who they platform to, but the extremists have an advantage here: people think emotionally, not rationally. So if your job is to tell people that it's not their fault their lives suck, it's the fault of (insert minority group here), that's going to be a lot more palatable to people than "Biden added 500,000 jobs to the economy during his presidency" when much of the country have to choose between food and heat this week.
I also agree with the neo-liberalism (also, both sides-ism and centrists), but I think that also can be partially blamed on the Dems, and also our culture in general. The Dems have been the party of "reaching across the aisle" since before I was born, and my entire life it has only allowed things to get worse. The Dems clearly have a losing strategy, but they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas because they refuse to let truly progressive candidates lead the party for fear of giving up their power/positions (and their corporate sponsors).
Not entirely true, laws being to the benefit of the rich requires some cherry picking. Dems have allowed tax cuts to the rich to expire, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Obama taxed private health insurance to fund the ACA, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Free school lunches are not a benefit to the wealthy, nor is increased minimum wage in many states.
People have forgotten all of this, though, which is a failure in communication imo. I do agree that the dems need to fight more fiercely overall, though.
I wish I had the studies in front of me for the stats, but studies done by schools like Harvard have shown that the US cannot be considered a democracy (technically, we've been a republic anyway) and has been an oligarchy since at least the 70s. Nobody gets their way all the time, but since the 70s, laws have been passed in favor of the wealthy twice as often as the majority. You can easily pick out examples for any side, of course. Like I said, nobody gets their way all the time.
I never meant to imply that the Dems are as bad as the Republicans, anyway. Just that they act as a stop gap in the push ever right. There are those among them who are actually actively fighting against the flow as well, but overall, they are the party of the centrist/moderate status quo, and they hamper the more progressive side of the party when they can. There are a few in office who side with Republicans more often than not. Even the ACA, as great as it has been, was cut to be more palatable to Republicans before they ever even saw it. What we got is a very neutered version of the original, which I will forever love to remind Republicans was based on Romney-care, a policy created by a Republican governor of one of the most left leaning states in the nation. A Republican who was re-elected and is still looked upon favorably to this day for his actions while in office.
Before the current MAGA party, the biggest difference between the two parties was that Dems largely believed in equal rights and strong regulations, and everything else was largely arguing over the minor details like just how strong those regulations should be, tax brackets, etc. Like you said, both parties still believe in Neo-Liberalism.
Personally, I think the Dems (the leadership, in particular) just don't really care to fight because they believe they have golden parachutes just like the CEOs when they bankrupt yet another company in the name of short-term profit. The Dems were more than happy to throw trans people under the bus this election, and then blame them and "identity politics" when they lost. They seem to think that nobody who matters will be hurt in the next 4 years and people will come crawling back to them in the next election. And if we still have free and fair elections in 4 years, they'll probably be right about the second part.
Ultimately, the Democrats have a leadership issue more than anything, and a changing of the guard is in order if we are going to solve the problems at hand. Our politicians are largely old and out of touch.
I can agree with most of that. I'm not so sure where you get trans people being thrown under the bus and blamed for the loss, though, LGBT folks in general voted at a pretty high rate afaik.
Ultimately, there's just not enough of us, though. I think that's the core problem. The general sentiment most prevalent geographically across the nation is right-leaning, and due to the electoral college (edit: and Senate distribution), that gets to determine an outsized amount of policy. We can't not make something palatable to the gop, or we simply get nothing. That's what they want, after all, us to get nothing. It's what we have to work with. We can't magically just change that without the actual votes to do so.
Especially when the Supreme Court is considered, which we haven't held in decades. But even in the legislature, our majorities when we infrequently get them are narrow, with no real room to maneuver. The thing I'd personally most like to see is voting rights protections and campaign finance reform, but I know that'll never pass without 60 Senate seats, which feels like a pipe dream. Nobody's leadership can do anything about that, they have to work within the rules too.
The Harris campaign blamed "identity politics" for their loss - even though they made no promises on trans rights and only mentioned trans people in passing.
The rest I agree with, except for maybe the idea that there aren't enough of us. Studies show that 60% of the population is more left-leaning than the government at any given time, and many Republican voters agreed with Bernie Sanders' policies in 2016 (so long as you told them the policies before telling them whose they were). We are stymied by a system that makes our votes as unimportant as it can, followed up by making it as difficult to vote as it can.
Another key issue the Dems have is that they never promise more than they think they can achieve, and in this recent election, didn't speak to the issues people care most about. They didn't talk about the ever increasing issue of the average person's dwindling income, while Republicans promised the moon. It doesn't matter that Republicans lie, because what people want is change, and they promised them that. The last time we had a Democrat run on a campaign of hope and change, we had the largest voter turnout in history. Harris campaigned on how much moderate Republican politicians liked her, and her support in swing states dropped immediately afterward.
I've seen people within the Harris campaign blame all sorts of things. "Identity politics" is broad enough that it can be almost anything. Republican and democratic are even identities these days.
Any idea where I can find any of those studies? That'd be an interesting read. It's certainly not my experience when driving around the country, where outside of every city dems have almost vanished it seems. Perhaps policy is less important than Fox News messaging.
I dunno, I think Biden promised a lot he couldn't deliver, things frankly outside of his power like codifying Roe, and it hurt us a little bit. But maybe I just prefer realistic, detail-oriented perspectives instead of hope. I want to know how a person is going to get the votes they need to pass legislation, how they are going to convince a Senator from a red state that drifted blue to support their policy, even when the whole gop propaganda machine attacks them for it.
I wish I remembered where those studies were, but the Bernie one was from a news poll or something during the 2016 primaries, and the rest from Harvard and the like were from even before then, IIRC. I do know there was an article making the rounds just the other day about a similar study to the Ivy League school ones about how the US can be considered an oligarchy, but I didn't look at it.
As you say, policy is less important than what Fox News tells them. My grandfather and my first boss when I was in high school were both life-long Republicans who had the exact same answer when asked who they were voting for: they'd look at you like you asked them a stupid question and respond, "I'm a Republican. I vote for the nominee." These are people who have had a strawman fed to them their entire lives of who "the enemy" is and vote entirely on that feeling and what the guy with an R next to their name tells them they should be opposed to. We have 70 years (and going) worth of Red Scare propaganda that lets them rile up the cult with scare words like socialism and communism. There was a great story from a few years back of a trans woman in New Hampshire who used that mindless voting block to her advantage to get elected county sheriff on a defund the police policy with one simple trick: nobody from the Republican party was running for the position, so she signed up as the Republican nominee and won in a landslide from all the people who didn't bother to read up on the candidates and just showed up to vote for whoever had the R next to their name.
Speaking of policy, though, I think one of the big stumbling blocks we can add to the pile for why people don't get out to vote and vote against their interests is how difficult it can be to access the info on who is running for what and what their policies are. Hence why people just listen to Fox News on who they should vote for. I can say from personal experience anecdotally from working with kids whose families were staunchly Republican during the 2016 primaries that they were shocked to hear what Bernie's actual policies were and that they agreed with a number of them - like legalizing marijuana.