Just over half of interviewees (51%) in a Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University study, who identified as “people of faith,” responded that they are likely to vote in the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The “people of faith” label is given to those who identify with a recognized religion, such as Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism or Islam.
The study found that approximately 104 million people under the “people of faith” umbrella are not expected to vote this election, including 41 million born-again Christians and 32 million who regularly go to church.
There are other biases worth paying attention to as well, confirmation bias most particularly. This is why details are so important. It’s not good enough to simply wave your hand at “bullshit”. You need to examine exactly what the bullshit is, who it benefits, and most importantly, who votes for it.
That last part is critical. We can whine all day long about our systems, but in any representative government, those votes are the most important data point. Here in the States, for instance, we had a couple specific people in the Senate stonewalling our recent attempts at progressive policies. These specific individuals need to be noted and remembered, instead of taking the easy way out and handwaving the whole system or whole groups of people away.
On top of that, there is still the electorate to consider. The reason the US leans to the right of most of Europe is because the American populace leans much further to the right, to the point of openly flirting with fascism. And not just now, either, it’s littered throughout our history. Even pre-WW2, there was a significant amount of fascist support here, and its never really gone away. Because of our form of government, we will get what we ask for, for better or for worse.
Agreed.
The reason why I simplified it down to “bullshit” is because my post was too long already without going into details about the what the “bullshit” actually was. ;)
And yeah, having returned to my homeland with all the political experience from abroad, I also see here the cultural factors that keep the system as is, as well as how the voting system written into the constitution mathematically creates a pair of “winners” - not as bad as the US but not all that much better - who are the only ones who could change said Constitution to make the system more Democratic, which they will never do).
The US is, IMHO, even more calcified socially and politically (some years ago I would’ve said “not so much in the personal freedoms axis” but lately all the attacks on things like women bodily autonomy and trans-sexuality make me think otherwise) and hence far harder to steer away from Ultra-Capitalist dog-eat-dog Far-Right thinking and into even just the minimum subset of Social Democracy ideas (such as Universal Healthcare).
I don’t really know what might work to change things there. I can only thing of grassroots campaigns against specific congressional candidates (like plastering posters with pictures of Palestinian childrens’ corpses - tiltle “This is what X has been paid to defend” - all over the place in the areas of were candidates who got AIPAC money are running and doing the same on the run up to the next Democratic Primary).
That said, that doesn’t change the point that the Democrats are not a party “of the people, for the people”, which probably explains how so many less well off and less educated people ended up being drawn so fast to the populist rhetoric of Trump and his wannabe clones - most of the Democrat Party has become so bad at ruling for normal people (and the Press so riddled with slick lies and manipulation in defense of doing things for the benefit of the few) that any old loud raging bollocks that just sounded different was enough to attract lots of votes.
Looking from the outside, it seems to me that the field that Trump sowed and already harvested once was plowed and fertilized by all those years when both parties were ruling for the few whilst using the Press as nothing more than Propaganda outlets to deceive and swindle the many.
Agreed on some points, but again, the details are important. Most dems do consistently vote for more beneficial policies, stronger social support structures, against tax cuts, etc. It needs to be understood exactly how our legislation gets passed, how a filibuster works, etc though. You cannot simply say “well, dems were in charge, so why wasn’t everything fixed?” without going into the details of what sorts of tools obstructionists have at their disposal. Details are critical if one wants to accurately understand, you can’t just stay at a big-picture view regardless of how tempting it is.
I do think the answer is grassroots, but try to remember, in a right-leaning society people won’t care as much about Palestinian children. That’s not a right-leaning position. The right-leaning position is to shrug your shoulders and callously go “not my people”. So it’s important to think about how to frame things in a way that will convince typical Americans, while acknowledging their biases.