Bulletins and News Discussion from November 4th to November 10th, 2024 - This is a Giant Problem

Great post. The average American is so replete in contradictory positions that it's hard to nail down exactly how many more votes Harris would have gotten if she had done XYZ but seeing people (including Hasan, whose electoral coverage I watched over the night to keep me awake if anything else) point out that the issues that the media finds important are NOT the same as the ones that people find important was an eye-opener for me. Like with his example that Harris' initial policy of punishing grocery store price-gouging was very popular and only became MORE popular despite the Republicans and right-leaning Democrats pumping out propaganda about how the mildest price caps so poor people can afford to eat would be 1984 communist Venezuela Soviet totalitarianism China dictatorship hyperinflation.

I've expressed over the years my "observation" (which probably unknowingly draws from some French philosophers that I haven't gotten around to reading) that Western and especially American politics is this cultural miasma that is disconnected from the rest of the world and material reality, with Atlas carrying this abstracted-away propaganda reality on his shoulders, which explains why despite bettering of material conditions ought to poll well (and often does), a massive minority or perhaps even majority of Americans just cannot be persuaded to give a shit. It's like the political version of how the stock market literally does not reflect anything anymore, every single oil refinery on the planet could implode in one hour and the oil markets would budge by like, 5%, and then correct themselves and go back to normal. Japan had a massive single-day crash semi-recently and then it just got back up if as nothing happened because it wasn't connected to anything, it was just a psychological thing or some rich guys trying to make money or whatever happened there.

But now I'm beginning to think that actually, I'm the idiot and this political disconnection never truly existed and I was being propagandized and brainwashed by the media to think that Americans just don't give a shit, when clearly, millions really do! Biden being this absolute dogshit candidate even back in 2020 getting the most votes ever while campaigning on "nothing will fundamentally change" broke my brain and I believed the media when they said that those two facts were connected, when it doesn't actually seem to have been because Harris was even more "nothing will fundamentally change" and now the Republicans won the fucking popular vote! So I'm glad you've more eloquently expressed this nascent thought. I really ought to have connected the dots better because I go on and on about how Day's hypothesis of brainwashing not being real but for some reason it was a huge blind spot for me. The spectacle of the voteball consumed my critical thinking; the owl of minerva flies at dusk.

I am a proponent of the "Americans don't care about foreign policy" line. In this case, I don't think foreign policy helped, but at least the one exit poll set of data I saw had 4% of people saying it was their top issue compared to 33% or something saying the economy and 15% or something saying immigration. The American electorate is insulated enough from the most direct outcomes of American foreign policy by way of geography that its just not as big a driver of how people live day to day as other things. Like lots of things, the actions of the imperial state are generally not popular with the electorate, but other topics trump it.

Also, people care about foreign policy for different reasons. Here on this anti-imperialist/marxist news forum, we care because we support global liberation movements as a way to improve the lives of people everywhere and disdain the moral depravity of imperialist policies. That to me is different than someone in the US thinking "damn we're pissing away money on Israel, they should fight their own wars so we can have more health care/tax cuts/infrastructure". In this framing, which I don't think is uncommon, foreigners aren't peers with the American voter, they're just an obstacle to Americans getting what they want.

Finally, Americans are an insulated nation by way both of geography and material conditions. Most Americans don't travel outside the country, their education system is myopic and bad, and since they make all the TV, they aren't encountering culture from elsewhere on the globe.

All that said, you're right that for the purposes of actual agitating in the imperial core, as anti-imperialists we can't just indulge in a thought terminating cliche and then stop explaining. We must never stop explaining.

great post, this is a much more thoroughly thought out version of what i was trying to say in a post i made a few days ago

Death to America

Good point. Also, between the antigenocide movement on the left and the anti-Ukraine war, mostly from the right the center still insisting that we give billions of taxpayers dollars while their constituents treats are being squeezed through inflation and austerity is probably missing the equivalent of a political layup.

I think you can also argue that Americans do care about foreign policy because it affects them. People know that the wars have a big party of the responsibility for inflation and the cost of living crisis and people can see that they can send trillions to the periphery to get blown up while the core is falling apart.