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Mik's avatar
Jan 15Edited

It's a combination of a few things. The silo'd algorithim'ified media environment does hurt. I mean even today LA remains on fire and there's a sizable number of media consumers who think that firetrucks were turned away at the CA border because they violate emissions standards or that Pete Hegseth is absolutely right about there being DEI "quotas" in the military. Zuck and Co have done far more damage with social media as "rage bait" than I think any of us are prepared to accept. I don't have all the answers on how to pull back (honestly I probably sound like old man yelling at cloud but it were up to just me given the damage social media alone does to kids, I'd outright ban all of it in the US or at least add a govt ID age-gate of 18 to everything from YouTube to Meta products) but we've got to deal with the fact that a certain subset of persuadable voters are only reachable at the moment via their algorithimic feeds.

The other piece is just a total lack of perspective and lack of willingness to acknowledge reality. As a millennial I'm well aware that the cost of living has sky rocketed in my life (especially housing). But it seems most people are too stupid to acknowledge that's largely something we've accepted thanks to local politicians (and the GOP at every level) being unwilling to act and home owners embracing the "fuck you I've got mine" attitude. So people think "well 6 years ago my rent was 1200/month, now it's 2350. The economy is terrible!" Except it's not "the economy". It's what we've all accepted from local politicians (which includes some of our Dem politicians in high COL areas) and NIMBYs. A refusal to understand how this works and throw a tantrum over this has gotten us to where we are. Any Dem who would have proposed some kind of national housing movement would have been tarred and feathered as a marxist social communist all day and all night (though Dems get called this even when they embrace conservative ideas so....)

As a millennial who graduated from college in 2008, it blows my mind that people can think the current economy is bad when so many of us lived through the great recession. THAT was a bad economy and it's not like that was 60 years ago, it was 15ish years ago. There were no jobs, you'd apply and call and network and there was just NOTHING out there for even the smartest and most connected of folks while people were losing or on the verge or losing their house left and right. The Biden economy isn't utopia but it's not anywhere near that and listening to some voters talk about the "feel" of the current economy, you'd think we were in the thick of the financial crisis. I don't know what the solution to this is but to me, this is the other big issue.

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Mary Zuccaro's avatar

Next time, we had better pick a talented communicator. My money's on Secty. Buttigieg or Gov. Newsom. Naming that bill Inflation Reduction Act was a cruel tactic. It set up expectations that were not met--a fatal error. I hope whoever did that has learnt their lesson. More than ever, we need to encourage young people to step up and take over the Democratic Party, so that we can move toward a future worth living into. Everybody under 30: off the bench--run for something!

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