• BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The article could have, but didn’t, make the point that our politics and the rhetoric surrounding it today serve the right by subverting faith in democracy, and by exhausting likely voters’ critical faculties:

    Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.

    One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.

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    There’s also the tendency for people to assign to the incumbent all of the problems that happen on his watch- at this point, even with material improvements for most people, it’s a hard sell to convince people that they’re better off when every bit of right-wing media is devoted to telling people they’re worse off and the mainstream media just both-sides it like there isn’t one party trying mightily to end American democracy.