Is the democratic party under deliberate demolition?

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I feel like people like Weinstein spend far too much time interpreting the world through Twitter.

The fact is, only something like 23% of Americans are on Twitter, and of that 23%, 80% rarely or never Tweet. So that leaves you with 4-5% of Americans sending 80% of American tweets. Of that 4-5%, how many are tweeting about intersectionality and critical race theory? Maybe 10%? That’s 0.5% of Americans. It’s a tiny number. It’s an irrelevance. And the people who define themselves in opposition to that, as Weinstein does, are tilting at windows.

What are the things Joe Biden talks about the most? Healthcare, jobs, investment, climate change, education, justice reform, the bread and butter issues that people care about. He doesn’t talk about critical race theory or any of those academic boogeymen. That’s just not what the Democratic Party is about right now.

Now look at the Republican Party: obsessed with Antifa, abortion, Hunter Biden’s emails, and the Supreme Court. Trump claims that Joe Biden is coming for your cows and your church, that President Biden will “kill God”. Which of them is out of touch with the common man? Hint: it’s the one that is down 9 points in the Presidential polling and down 7-8 points in the generic ballot, and likely to lose both the Presidency and the Senate in the upcoming election despite having a huge theoretical advantage in both. The Republicans are the ones obsessed with culture war issues and identity politics, and Trump is the embodiment of that.

Will the Democrats collapse once they hold power? Perhaps. Governing isn’t easy. But the Republican Party is going to have a crisis of leadership. It’s unbelievable that we’re coming up to an election where there is more chance of Biden getting 400+ EVs than losing, and people are suggesting that it might be a bad thing for the Democratic Party.

tl;dr:

The trouble here though, to break off a bit on the 'woke' topic, we're having a problem of institutional capture. It doesn't have to be a huge percent, they just have to be highly motivated to ensconce themselves in HR wherever they can manage and can still cause an outsized amount of damage, not actually achieving any of their said goals but deprecating the heck out of parts of the system that the broader public needs to have a decent standard of living. The worse standards of living get the more people feel compelled to join mass movements. It's not the kind of feedback loop we want to have while we're both dealing with a change in media gatekeeping (old institutional media to... ?) which leaves us with proliferation of fake news and what's really the 4th industrial revolution where you'll have mass obsolescence of people - which will in and of itself, if we don't deal with that proactively, almost assure revolution as not many people would voluntarily lay down and die for the efficiency of the economy.

It's too close to seppuku on the Enlightenment project IMHO not to be paying attention and it's a bit too savvy at pulling on people's natural wiring for tribal conflict.

The Democratic Party is not a monolith, and there is quite a lot of tension between Biden/mainstream party and the more radical element. Right now those factions are aligned because of opposition to Donald Trump. Maybe general hatred of the republican party is enough to hold them together once he's defeated but I doubt that to be the case.

America is due for a political realignment. The current status quo cannot hold. I think the Republican party has already imploded under Trump. Any gains made by embracing him in 2016 were Pyrrhic in nature, and turning into the cult of Trump has shrunk the party. The Democrats are not far behind.

Difficult to say what the future holds. Historically the US has always returned to a two-party system after brief periods of either one party rule(1800s-1820s, 1930s-1940s) or political chaos (1850s). But I'll bet your two parties of 2040 look drastically different than your two parties of 2020.

It is frustrating and baffling that both some influential companies, media, and local government officials have caved in to and adapted anti racist/critical race ideology. I thought the democrat voters in general and their black base in particular by nominating Biden soundly rejected these revolutionary ideas.

That is what Biden was referring to during the debate when he said he beat the other candidates. But then Biden had a Hillary moment when he said he wanted to transition the oil industry out of business. Trump is so unpopular it might not make a difference but jeez.

Biden said something reasonable. A few old pundits can insist it's a Hillary moment but that doesn't make it so. Everyone already knows the oil and gas industry is living on borrowed time.

I was not referring to the merits of the oil industry going out of business but the political wisdom of saying you are going to help the process along.

Which is to say planning to prepare to deal with the inevitable. I suppose ignoring the inevitable like his opponent would be the wiser approach?

If the oil industry is actually living on borrowed time(they were predicting there would be no oil left to mine as far back as the ‘70s) all the planning in world is not going to matter if Trump is reelected.

Running out of oil isn't the only potential issue. In this case they're not on borrowed time because they will run out of product to sell, they're on borrowed time because renewables are becoming increasingly competitive and because there's dire need to reduce carbon emissions. Continuing to subsidize the oil industry might keep it around for longer, but why should we all (continue to) be stolen from to fund a highly profitable industry that clearly needs to be replaced and allowed to die?

Biden stated the obvious and Trump is trying to attack him for being correct. Trump just looks more foolish than usual.

A bit more in favor of seeing this two-way transformation of parties where working class is drifting Republican and elite and billionaire party becoming more the Democrats:

The corporate interests that control the parties were never going to let either become a true party of the working class. The Republicans pay lip service to being one, but only the white working class buys into it, and Republican policies are notoriously anti-labor and anti-union. They just push the narrative that what is good for the wealthy is good for the worker. Any shortcomings in these policies helping working Americans is blamed on Democrats/overregulation/foreigners/etc.
You would think this would lead to Democrats becoming the party of labor, but this is obviously not the case. Because open criticism of capitalism and economic inequality is heresy in the US, the Democratic party and the mainstream left were forced to latch onto identity politics. Pushing for social equality without also pushing for economic equality is a non-starter, but if Americans figured that out it might hurt the donor class's pocketbooks.

Why do you think the MSM and most of the Democratic party have been so obnoxiously, monotonously fixated on identity politics? Because the corporations that back the MSM and the Democratic establishment have snuffed out any nascent move towards pro-labor, anti-corporate politics.
The corporate donors ruthlessly enforce mandatory political capitalism. This means that the disagreements between the parties on economic issues are never significant, and neither party will bill itself as pro-union, pro-labor or, heaven forbid, socialist.
The mainstream ideological debates then center around social issues. The result is a GOP that plays to white and christian nationalism, and a Democratic party that pays lip service to everyone else while remaining careful not to propose anything that might benefit labor at the expense of capital.
This results in a cycle where:
Democrats take power -> economic inequality is not addressed -> social equality cannot come without economic equality -> Democratic policies do not benefit those harmed by inequality -> voters become disillusioned with the Democrats -> Republicans get elected to power -> we get administrations like Bush and Trump -> voters remember that the GOP sow inequality and division -> Democrats take power.

This is why neither party can become the party of the working class. This is why Democrats are so half-hearted in their pushes for equality. This is why unions and labor in this country are crippled as they are. Mandatory political capitalism.
No party will become the party of labor until unions and socialism cease to be dirty words in American politics.

It might also be part of why if they can't simply ignore people like Bret and Eric Weinstein or Jordan Greenhall they'll do what they can to shadow ban then from Twitter, Facebook, etc., ie. to prevent this from causing a strong enough third party from emerging.

The Democrats ran on a very strongly pro-labour platform in 2020, even for public sector workers, despite the multitude of evils committed by police unions, teachers’ unions, and transport unions. Nobody seemed to notice the contradiction between saying you want to decrease the employment security of the police while also saying you want to strengthen the institution that gives cops incredible job security.


The old “evidence, please?” comes out here.

I mean, three specific claims or assumptions:

1) that the Weinstein brothers and their ilk are sufficiently influential to form and lead a major political party

2) that existing political parties wish to use social media to suppress democratic threats to them

3) that social media companies would go along with that

I would suggest that all three claims or assumptions are far-fetched.

On 1), nerds keep trying to run for office in unconventional ways in the US and keep failing. I don’t see any reason for the Weinsteins to be significantly more successful than Lawrence Lessig or those people who want two Presidents who alternate days. A successful political party doesn’t form from Tweets about how college campuses are too “woke”, they come from getting out on the streets and talking to voters about the things that matter to them, they come from winning local races and building up to bigger ones, they come from name recognition and voter trust. If you’re actually interested in this stuff then read something like *101 Ways To Win An Election*.

On 2), perhaps Trump would like social media to be his propaganda network but most politicians recognise the value of free speech and are not interested in interfering with it. (That said, bad takes about Section 230 are disappointingly common across the political spectrum)

On 3)... I mean this just seems incredibly out-of-touch with how these two networks regulate their content. Twitter has literally changed its policies so that it didn’t have to ban Trump. Facebook appointed Nick Clegg as VP for Global Affairs for Christ’s sake! Certainly neither organisation has perfect moderation policies or institutions but there’s no real evidence they are biased and I certainly can’t see them deliberately interfering in political affairs after years of taking very cautious approaches.

What you have: Twitter banning Unity 2020, Facebook locking Bret's account, Facebook locking Jordan Greenhall's account, Facebook turning around and locking moderators of several IDW-ish groups all about the same time.

I think where this gets challenging - plausible deniability's a great thing. To suggest there's intent behind plausible deniability, even in deliberate use, fails most peoples test as a conspiracy theory because such evidence of intent is unavailable. The question is can you ever really construct intent from results or for the greater good do we need to leave that door open so as not to have the public dialog overrun with said conspiracies? My thought on what might be a workaround for that is consistency and quantity of the pattern.

I'm willing to admit that I'm probing a gray area and at present there really isn't a way to obtain 100% certainty on it. Similarly as for why 'nerds' would matter to the DNC, Twitter, or Facebook, if they start having a barrage of 'accidents' you'd have to ask them.

One more quick thought if it does sound like I'm tending to conjecture (which I'll admit is a consistency in the thread):

If I say that I, perhaps 'we', live in a perpetual lying machine it's not a conclusion I reached by not having people agree with me on conjecture. Rather the opposite - noticing constant duplicity in other people's behavior, and politics, and how people are willing to treat other (being an aspie doesn't make you a special kind of target - you're just as much or little a target as any NT), it means that with the game theory of the environment if you aren't entertaining at least some of these as credible that half of the time some underhanded 'fast one' will be getting pulled. It's one thing to act irresponsibly on potentially false positives, another to discuss them. If there's a consistency with little 'c' conspiracies it's that human civilization is and nearly always has been a constant froth of them - particularly any time longer than several decades after a major reset where niches are getting carved out again and that much more so when there hasn't been any significant house cleaning in a given institution for decades (lack of introspection, particularly willful, can also point to this).

Oh, I didn’t realise that the Weinsteins were the people behind Unity 2020 Yes, I think that illustrates my point quite nicely. Nobody is suppressing cranks like that. They’re less of a threat than the Libertarian Party or the Green Party, and comparable to Kanye West or, yes, Lawrence Lessig.

Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter suspend people all the time. It’s impossible to know why these suspensions are in place. I would not be inclined to trust the word of the people affected by the suspensions. I do think there is much more than plausible deniability here, it’s more like a claim with no supporting evidence. Not to say it couldn’t possibly be true, but you’d have to be pretty conspiratorially minded to not simply blame the algorithms.