tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post3345501273470919963..comments2023-12-25T12:40:36.613-05:00Comments on National Notice: Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily HaveNoticing New Yorkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15726747803887470424noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post-24577362540239078022021-04-06T09:29:30.125-04:002021-04-06T09:29:30.125-04:00I left another comment. But it didn't show up....I left another comment. But it didn't show up. I assume it was put into moderation. Could you check for it? Thanks, BenMarmaladehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02701062765483715442noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post-35336233353156446052021-04-05T10:32:20.273-04:002021-04-05T10:32:20.273-04:00I noticed at the end of your post you quoted Chris...I noticed at the end of your post you quoted Chris Hedges: “And yet from both of the parties (except maybe abortion), none of these majoritarian issues are being addressed.” Is even that true? <br /><br />Religious right Paul Weyrich stated that issues like abortion were never that significant. He tried to organize the religious right around the culture war issues, but failed. It was only until racial segregation in Bible schools was overturned by the Supreme Court that the religious right became a political force.<br /><br />Up through the 1970s, most Christians, including most conservative evangelicals, were fine with ensuring women had access to safe abortions. The debate was rather limited at the time, but divided along two lines. Many first wave feminists and Catholics (or at least the Vatican) were anti-choice, whereas second wave feminists and Protestants were pro-choice.<br /><br />It required massive funding and propaganda campaigns to create the culture wars as political wedge. That was a large purpose for creating the Shadow Network of the CNP, Heritage Foundation, etc. Much of it had to do with gaining control of government but more important gaining control of the American mind.Marmaladehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02701062765483715442noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post-89030086687441839942021-04-05T10:22:55.592-04:002021-04-05T10:22:55.592-04:00If you're interested, besides some older posts...If you're interested, besides some older posts, I've recently written about this topic:<br /><br />https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/fox-news-americans-are-the-left-wing-enemy-threatening-america/<br /><br />https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/polarization-between-the-majority-and-minority/Marmaladehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02701062765483715442noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post-67362064884209004882021-04-05T10:21:10.397-04:002021-04-05T10:21:10.397-04:00That was a great piece. I've been harping on a...That was a great piece. I've been harping on about this for more than a decade now. It was in 2010 that, for some reason, I got curious to look at polling data for myself. I looked at all the sources of polling over decades. And I was shocked how far left the majority was. That has been true for a long time. The leftward trend has been continuous. Yet there is almost no talk about it.<br /><br />I'm a GenXer, although on the younger end, if old enough to remember once having heard Ronald Reagan speak in person (my cub scout troop was invited to sit in the front row). I grew up with the religious right's rhetoric about a Moral Majority. The Moral Majority organization lasted Reagan's entire administration and year after, but the majority claim persisted. The political and media elite have always treated the religious right as if it held privileged status, never to be questioned.<br /><br />The interesting thing is that Paul Weyrich, at the launching of the Moral Majority organization in 1980, publicly admitted to a cheering crowd that the religious right was not a majority and would never win any elections without voter suppression. How is it that the corporate media and corporatist politicians have ignored that? It's not like any of this data is a secret. And it does show up in occasional news reporting, only to quickly disappear again, but almost never framed in a way to convey its significance.<br /><br />I'm not one prone to ideological dogmatism and extremism, but the MSM and two-party system always gave me the sense that I must be radically far left because I never heard my views given voice. Then, after looking at the data for myself, I realized on most major issues I was somewhere near the center of majority public opinion. Yet how can a supermajority be on the 'left'? Shouldn't a supermajority of public opinion, almost by definition, be the center of the political spectrum?<br /><br />It is irritating, frustrating, and demoralizing. The right-wing elite push a narrative of a few people on the far right fringe being victims of "cancel culture." Yet no one talks about the hundreds of millions of Americans on the political 'left' who have been so canceled as to not only be silenced but treated as if they don't exist. Even the simplest of truths have no political power to enforce political will until they gain public awareness and so become a social fact.<br /><br />The American public never acts like a supermajority because they don't realize that they are. That was the necessity of the Wirthlin effect in controlling social identity through manipulated symbolic issues and ideological labels. But I suppose this is nothing new. The suppression of democracy has been the common theme running through all of American history. An aging Thomas Jefferson privately stated that the republican experiment of governance had been a failure basically because the founders had dismissed democracy, but he believed that republicanism lived on in the spirit of the people.Marmaladehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02701062765483715442noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709263540833549991.post-85866411001820301642019-05-15T14:37:18.892-04:002019-05-15T14:37:18.892-04:00I've been reading an author, James A. Tyner, o... I've been reading an author, James A. Tyner, on "population geography," who gets onto the salience of death/mortality as a matter of human awareness and as a spur to culture and a search for "solutions" if not meaning, and he succeeds this by discussing life processes in which humans distinguish themselves by planning, abstraction and use-value in the tool-wielding occupations....I get to wonder if he gets to mentioning consolation.<br /> I read "Everybody's realizing...the Things the Vast Majority of American's Want..."--suave technology, with fully staffed and book-lined public libraries, countervailing democratic institutions, social amelioration, etc,etc, all being sacrificed by delusional actors willing to see the voting "supermajority" reduced to a vulnerable precariat ala Central America, Brazil, China...<br /> Nixon, Reagan, 'Poppy' Bush went beyond where Trump has vis a vis rogue diplomacy as presidential candidates and Robert Mueller is in the family lineage and way with Kennedy era C.I.A. honchos Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell, purveyors of a behemoth diplomacy which did not aim at the consolation of the world's reserve labor forces, and can it be imagined that they were personally warm human or social beings, either, and not rather seekers of redundant reassurance in the exersize of cartesian rationality in an abject work environment? In which, O Christ, you die, "buying it," whatever luck you had at dating, social advancement or having fun, outside of a disconsolate home environment, to which all the arts of human existence that ever were, turned themselves in charity, being 'careful for nothing,' and for the loss of which arts, as though for "poverty of great men," "we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime." Augustine City of God II.21 quoting Cicero.<br />Jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02588474981216673597noreply@blogger.com