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I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :) I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the

I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :) I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. Trump and his admin are emboldened, and what little resistance there was to domestic actions just… dissolved.

walkabout 1y ago
Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win. There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
kevinfiol 1y ago
> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.
- walkabout 1y ago
  I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored. It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying. Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.

walkabout 1y ago

Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win. There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.

kevinfiol 1y ago

> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.

walkabout 1y ago
I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored. It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying. Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.