"I don't see it as irrational behavior by liberals so much as disconnected, and too often under- or uninformed, evaluation by a wide swath of voters who don't necessarily do their due diligence before offering their opinions, much less their votes. At some point it's on them if they refuse or fail to adequately evaluate the full picture."
For folks like you or I who have both the time and the informational literacy to be able to parse out the full picture, it's easy to shrug off everyone who doesn't have these things as "un-informed or under-informed." Not everyone gets to be as smart as you or I (or many Bulwark readers/listeners), and that's one of the downsides of democracy: it involves letting a lot of people who aren't informationally literate have a vote at the table. This is why, as even you say yourself, perception matters more than reality in politics. Perception involves both lived experience--"vibes," and feelings of how things are going in one's own anecdotal experiences--and the narratives being sold that attempt to explain and detail why people get those "vibes" and feelings. This is something that the GOP has understood for a long long time while dems tend to stick to the cerebral factual evidence.
The thing is, when the evidence cited goes counter to the lived experience, people who are not informationally literate or wholistic tend to stick to their lived experience rather than the evidence cited, because they understand that people can cherry-pick evidence to hand-waive away lived experiences (the "pissing on my head while telling me it's raining approach" backed up by selective stats and glaring omissions). People like you and I understand the power of context omission paired with cherry-picked stats being used to sell narratives, the thing is, unlike you or I, a whole lot of people can't tell the difference between stat swindling paired with context omission and citing a wholistic view of the empirical evidence. That's where information literacy comes in, and a whole lot of folks--probably the majority of Americans, lack a good sense of information literacy and that's simply a fact of how we exist as a country and its impact on electoral politics. This is all *before* we talk about politics being downstream of culture. The fact is that "vibes," "lived experiences," and "narratives" are more powerful than empirical evidence that can be mispurposed in an attempt to sell narratives anyway (read the book "how to lie with statistics" for more on this).
I wish I could like this more than once! In the end, it doesn't matter why ignorant voters feel/think the way they do. What matters is what vote they'll cast. If you can't win them over with facts and statistics, regardless of how accurate those are, they don't matter in the context of convincing a voter that doesn't understand or believe them. You have to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were or where we feel they should be. Long term, we need to work on improving the knowledge and political literacy of the mass of American voters. In the near term, though, we have to work with what we've got and if what you're doing isn't working, you need to change tactics. What won't work, for sure, is telling people they're wrong for not agreeing with or understanding you, regardless of the charts and graphs you can show to support your argument.
Very astute analysis here, Travis. I would add that "the working class" is not a monolith. It is a huge swath of the populace with varying degrees of education, lived experiences, and economic success / security. To treat it as anything less than that is a mistake. It won't fit neatly into any single analytical formula as to what, really, it is or how *it thinks*. I think I'm in a pretty good position to make that assertion, since I've been a bone-deep member of it myself my entire life.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that working class people are not stupid in any greater numbers than any other economic group. They may have less formal education; they may not all be voracious "information consumers"; they may not pay attention to politics the way you or I or any of the Bulwark members here do. But many, many do pay attention. And if there's one thing they're really good at recognizing, it's condescension. You want to turn off a working-class voter, just give 'em even the slightest whiff of "I know what's better for you than you do." They are proud people, generally seeing themselves as what makes this country "run", and they are intolerant of attitudes that call that self-perception into question. As well they should be. Because while all of us have a role to play in the life and well-being of this country regardless of what "class" we belong to, they're not wrong.
I agree with everything you've said here. That's why I focused my comments more on informational literacy and lived experience vs selective stats and narratives. Even the college educated can very easily succumb to selectivity biases when doing their "research" on issues, and the way you hear so many of them talking about the economy being "good" is a perfect example of this. It's also why you'll find plenty of post-college people diving headfirst into the "crunchy-to-conspiracy" pipeline that starts with wanting to eat healthier and ends with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. Just because someone is college-educated and is smart in a single field does not make them better at information literacy more broadly. Humans are *rationalizing* creatures, not a rational creature. That's why I've seen post-college folks believe insane shit just like non-college people have.
Here's a perfect example of a "narrative" at work. I'm semi-retired, working 3 days a week in a small, family-owned tool and die shop. I'm the oldest guy there, even a few years older than the oldest of the brothers who own and run the place. One of the youngest guys on the floor is a young man of about 25 who's had a couple of other jobs before taking this one a couple years ago. He's not the sharpest tool in the shop in some ways, but he sure as hell isn't stupid by any means.
Some time ago after the Fed started its anti-inflation crusade, the kid said something to me one day about hoping he wasn't going to lose his job. I asked why in the world he was worried about that; the shop had lots of work and had been working overtime since before I'd started there nearly a year before. They'd been trying to hire more people for even longer than that with no success.
Turns out the kid (sorry, at my age anyone under 35 or so is a "kid") had been reading and listening to all the "recession" talk that was pretty much saturating the news at that point, and he was convinced a recession was on the way and that he'd probably get shown the door. At his age his "perspective" and lived experience regarding such things is quite limited, so I gave him the benefit of my much longer view. I told him anything was possible, but that if I were in his shoes, I wouldn't be quite so worried, especially considering the job situation he has, which is a pretty good one. He then spoke of his concerns about interest rates and the price of homes, since he hoped to be able to buy a small starter home soon.
It's true that at that time the housing market, especially in my state, had lost its frickin' mind, and mortgage rates were on the rise. I again gave him some perspective, having at his age experienced the hyper-inflation and, by today's standards, astronomical (14% at times) mortgage interest rates of the late 70s and early 80s. He was dumbfounded when I started by telling him that when I was his age I'd have "killed" to get a mortgage at 9 or 10%. I also spoke about how at some point the housing market would start to regain some sanity.
This kid's "smart" in most ways, but like all of us, his outlook on things is a result of the totality of his lived experiences, both educationally, "informationally" and "in the real world". And with his relatively short "experience" he was particularly vulnerable to the recession narrative then being promulgated in the mainstream media and the feelings of insecurity that comes from something like that.
We are all walking bundles of various biases, all influenced by the totality of our lived experiences. The insecurity this working-class kid felt was absolutely real, even if the underlying cause was a bit less than that. And that's where the "feelings don't matter, only the facts do" crowd gets it so wrong sometimes.
"We are all walking bundles of various biases, all influenced by the totality of our lived experiences. The insecurity this working-class kid felt was absolutely real, even if the underlying cause was a bit less than that. And that's where the 'feelings don't matter, only the facts do' crowd gets it so wrong sometimes."
I remember back in college just after 9/11, some of the most conspiratorially-minded people I met were hardcore left/liberal. This one guy in my International Conflict and Security class, who was as "crunchy" as one could imagine, was insistent that 9/11 was an inside job. A lot of his evidence was based on "common sense." One example was how slowly we were to scramble fighter jets to take out the planes. He didn't like the idea that perhaps the government wasn't prepared or was otherwise incompetent. He had a narrative in his mind that the government was super capable and competent with contingency plans galore, and that such a conspiracy could actually be kept a secret. Right, left, center, conservative, liberal... we're all just people and are capable of all of the same things, for better and for worse.
I had the same experience. The first *modern* conspiracy theories I came into contact with were the "9/11 Truthers" that came from the left. Then they became "the party of science" while being full to the brim with people who thought that "Big Pharma" secretly had the cure for cancer and that vaccines caused autism. I once told some of them (friends of mine) that there are whole meta studies out there that show that eating organic food does little to no difference for health, and that growing organic food leads to more deforestation because organic yields on farms need more acreage to be equivalent to synthetic farm acre-outputs by weight--even showing them these studies--and oh boy did I ever get pushback from "the party of science" lol.
I showed them the 9/11-Truther debunking stuff, I told them that the larger a conspiracy is the harder it is to contain the truth and that the 9/11 and "Big Pharma" and "chem trails" conspiracies would involve the cooperation of hundreds to thousands of people to contain the secrets, and that having worked for the government personally I knew how inefficient it was at even simple projects to prevent it from maintaining conspiracies the size of the ones they believed in. Did it matter? Not one bit. These people had their narratives in hand and weren't going to be moved by facts, logic, or evidence that countered their claims. Conspiracism is akin to religious zealotry. Even if you show people who take the bible literally that the sun came into existance before the earth did, they're still believe that a supernatural being created the earth before the sun (and all the other stars) because of narratives and zealotry.
Also overlooked (as another commenter mentioned) is 30 years of right wing lies and propaganda about the Democrats. I came from the poor/working class. I have relatives who are working class. I don’t look down on these people because they didn’t go to college and work with their hands. I do despair that they pay more attention to football than the news and that they hear things from their friends and neighbors and then regurgitate the lies.
It doesn’t help that people like Charlie insists on chatting with people who don’t like Dems (as much as he really doesn’t) like Joe Klein and Ruy, who might once have actually been a Dem and probably still thinks of himself as one--but has found a new home at the American Enterprise Institute. Come on.
The right has never cared about the working class except for their votes. The right commentators supporting the GOP for years have stoked these people’s fears of everything, yet their actual policies (when they had them) worked directly against these same working class folk. So please stop with the sanctimonious lecturing.
When a check-out clerk at Target tells me we are in a recession--which we aren’t and I’m sure she doesn’t even know what the means--that isn’t the Dems’ fault. It’s what the Dems have to battle against.
How informationally literate do you think that check-out clerk at Target is? Like I said, one of the downsides of democracy is that it incorporates the votes of many people who don't have the time and/or the informational literacy to be able to put the full empirical data picture together, and as a result, they decide with their gut more than they do with their minds because they themselves understand that their methodology in deriving the wholistic empirical picture won't result in the truth, so they lean on *narratives* (simplistic explanations) from people they trust personally to explain to them why they're living through what they're living through. So when the GOP and conservative friends comes to them with narratives while the dems come to them with data and statistics they don't trust (again, see the book "how to lie using statistics"), they believe the conservative narratives that sync up with their lived experiences more than they trust liberals citing statistics who *want* them to shrug off their lived experiences in order to keep their favored incumbent in the reelected column. Dems and liberals need to work on their economic narrative game and get it to sync up with the lived experiences of the working class if they want to win more working class voters.
For an example of stats being used to wave away lived experiences, imagine dems running around in the years between 2012-2021 telling black people that a handful of videos of police killing unarmed black suspects should be waived off because these very real statistics show that racism and racial violence isn't nearly as bad now as it used to be. It would sound tone deaf and it wouldn't sync up with the lived experiences of black people, even if those stats on racism and racial violence were true right? That's what liberals and anti-Trumpers telling the working class that the economy is actually good right now sound like to the working class who have a very different lived experience to the selective stats being cited.
No one is denying their “lived experience.” Prices went up for sure. I feel it every time I am at the grocery store. The Dems are trying to address this with the tools (and legislatures) they have. In PA, Gov Shapiro has removed the requirement of a college degree for many state jobs and made breakfast free for school age children. The Dems are pushing to increase the min wage, make permanent the child tax credit, passed an infrastructure bill that puts working people to work, bring down drug prices for seniors, and are trying to walk the fine line between transitioning to green, preserving current jobs, and helping workers get trained for the new jobs that are coming.
Dem leaders aren’t the ones who passed right to work laws, aren’t the ones driving people from education with strict bans and directives, among many other things that hurt the working class and poor. Why didn’t Charlie and Ruy talk about that? No, it’s much more satisfying to bash and embrace the tired tropes. If we Dems aren’t being “condescending to the working class” then we are all “too woke and focused on identity politics” or we are just “out of touch limousine liberals.”
Where on earth would this young woman have gotten the idea we are in a recession but from the media, and especially RW propaganda, that even if she doesn’t listen to the news, she hears from friends or sees a headline or views in a chyron in a fast food joint with a tv on. If we were in a recession she wouldn’t have a job. But I guess if I tell her that I’m denying her lived experience.
The GOP doesn’t offer these folks narratives. They feed them lies that make them believe the worst—the Dems are turning the country over to illegals who are taking your job! The economy is terrible because the rich Dems are stealing from you to give to “those” people—that’s why you feel poor!
My point is Ruy and Charlie aren’t really offering solutions. They’re just furthering the whole Dems suck line.
Yea, that's the one shortcoming from Charlie and Ruy, they're not offering solutions other than "stop doing what you're doing." I tried offering a few here, but they probably won't happen. It's like the old workplace saying goes "don't point out problems if you don't have a solution."
Did you hear Charlie call Ruy a "progressive Democrat"? I almost fell out of my chair laughing. The guy works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for god's sake.
Ruy and Charlie brush off the needs of the "working class" to concentrate on the WHITE working class, like most conservatives. Except POC are 45% of the working class.
Charlie and Ruy failed to mention that much of the infrastructure money is going to red districts in the form of jobs, new construction, battery plants, etc - districts that are majority white.
So how is it Biden and Democrats are "ignoring" white working class voters?
"I don't see it as irrational behavior by liberals so much as disconnected, and too often under- or uninformed, evaluation by a wide swath of voters who don't necessarily do their due diligence before offering their opinions, much less their votes. At some point it's on them if they refuse or fail to adequately evaluate the full picture."
For folks like you or I who have both the time and the informational literacy to be able to parse out the full picture, it's easy to shrug off everyone who doesn't have these things as "un-informed or under-informed." Not everyone gets to be as smart as you or I (or many Bulwark readers/listeners), and that's one of the downsides of democracy: it involves letting a lot of people who aren't informationally literate have a vote at the table. This is why, as even you say yourself, perception matters more than reality in politics. Perception involves both lived experience--"vibes," and feelings of how things are going in one's own anecdotal experiences--and the narratives being sold that attempt to explain and detail why people get those "vibes" and feelings. This is something that the GOP has understood for a long long time while dems tend to stick to the cerebral factual evidence.
The thing is, when the evidence cited goes counter to the lived experience, people who are not informationally literate or wholistic tend to stick to their lived experience rather than the evidence cited, because they understand that people can cherry-pick evidence to hand-waive away lived experiences (the "pissing on my head while telling me it's raining approach" backed up by selective stats and glaring omissions). People like you and I understand the power of context omission paired with cherry-picked stats being used to sell narratives, the thing is, unlike you or I, a whole lot of people can't tell the difference between stat swindling paired with context omission and citing a wholistic view of the empirical evidence. That's where information literacy comes in, and a whole lot of folks--probably the majority of Americans, lack a good sense of information literacy and that's simply a fact of how we exist as a country and its impact on electoral politics. This is all *before* we talk about politics being downstream of culture. The fact is that "vibes," "lived experiences," and "narratives" are more powerful than empirical evidence that can be mispurposed in an attempt to sell narratives anyway (read the book "how to lie with statistics" for more on this).
I wish I could like this more than once! In the end, it doesn't matter why ignorant voters feel/think the way they do. What matters is what vote they'll cast. If you can't win them over with facts and statistics, regardless of how accurate those are, they don't matter in the context of convincing a voter that doesn't understand or believe them. You have to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were or where we feel they should be. Long term, we need to work on improving the knowledge and political literacy of the mass of American voters. In the near term, though, we have to work with what we've got and if what you're doing isn't working, you need to change tactics. What won't work, for sure, is telling people they're wrong for not agreeing with or understanding you, regardless of the charts and graphs you can show to support your argument.
Exactly.
Very astute analysis here, Travis. I would add that "the working class" is not a monolith. It is a huge swath of the populace with varying degrees of education, lived experiences, and economic success / security. To treat it as anything less than that is a mistake. It won't fit neatly into any single analytical formula as to what, really, it is or how *it thinks*. I think I'm in a pretty good position to make that assertion, since I've been a bone-deep member of it myself my entire life.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that working class people are not stupid in any greater numbers than any other economic group. They may have less formal education; they may not all be voracious "information consumers"; they may not pay attention to politics the way you or I or any of the Bulwark members here do. But many, many do pay attention. And if there's one thing they're really good at recognizing, it's condescension. You want to turn off a working-class voter, just give 'em even the slightest whiff of "I know what's better for you than you do." They are proud people, generally seeing themselves as what makes this country "run", and they are intolerant of attitudes that call that self-perception into question. As well they should be. Because while all of us have a role to play in the life and well-being of this country regardless of what "class" we belong to, they're not wrong.
To emphasize your point: the working class do more to make this country run than tbe managerial class.
I agree with everything you've said here. That's why I focused my comments more on informational literacy and lived experience vs selective stats and narratives. Even the college educated can very easily succumb to selectivity biases when doing their "research" on issues, and the way you hear so many of them talking about the economy being "good" is a perfect example of this. It's also why you'll find plenty of post-college people diving headfirst into the "crunchy-to-conspiracy" pipeline that starts with wanting to eat healthier and ends with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. Just because someone is college-educated and is smart in a single field does not make them better at information literacy more broadly. Humans are *rationalizing* creatures, not a rational creature. That's why I've seen post-college folks believe insane shit just like non-college people have.
RE: "selective stats and narratives"
Here's a perfect example of a "narrative" at work. I'm semi-retired, working 3 days a week in a small, family-owned tool and die shop. I'm the oldest guy there, even a few years older than the oldest of the brothers who own and run the place. One of the youngest guys on the floor is a young man of about 25 who's had a couple of other jobs before taking this one a couple years ago. He's not the sharpest tool in the shop in some ways, but he sure as hell isn't stupid by any means.
Some time ago after the Fed started its anti-inflation crusade, the kid said something to me one day about hoping he wasn't going to lose his job. I asked why in the world he was worried about that; the shop had lots of work and had been working overtime since before I'd started there nearly a year before. They'd been trying to hire more people for even longer than that with no success.
Turns out the kid (sorry, at my age anyone under 35 or so is a "kid") had been reading and listening to all the "recession" talk that was pretty much saturating the news at that point, and he was convinced a recession was on the way and that he'd probably get shown the door. At his age his "perspective" and lived experience regarding such things is quite limited, so I gave him the benefit of my much longer view. I told him anything was possible, but that if I were in his shoes, I wouldn't be quite so worried, especially considering the job situation he has, which is a pretty good one. He then spoke of his concerns about interest rates and the price of homes, since he hoped to be able to buy a small starter home soon.
It's true that at that time the housing market, especially in my state, had lost its frickin' mind, and mortgage rates were on the rise. I again gave him some perspective, having at his age experienced the hyper-inflation and, by today's standards, astronomical (14% at times) mortgage interest rates of the late 70s and early 80s. He was dumbfounded when I started by telling him that when I was his age I'd have "killed" to get a mortgage at 9 or 10%. I also spoke about how at some point the housing market would start to regain some sanity.
This kid's "smart" in most ways, but like all of us, his outlook on things is a result of the totality of his lived experiences, both educationally, "informationally" and "in the real world". And with his relatively short "experience" he was particularly vulnerable to the recession narrative then being promulgated in the mainstream media and the feelings of insecurity that comes from something like that.
We are all walking bundles of various biases, all influenced by the totality of our lived experiences. The insecurity this working-class kid felt was absolutely real, even if the underlying cause was a bit less than that. And that's where the "feelings don't matter, only the facts do" crowd gets it so wrong sometimes.
"We are all walking bundles of various biases, all influenced by the totality of our lived experiences. The insecurity this working-class kid felt was absolutely real, even if the underlying cause was a bit less than that. And that's where the 'feelings don't matter, only the facts do' crowd gets it so wrong sometimes."
Well said.
"the 'crunchy-to-conspiracy' pipeline"
Awesome.
I remember back in college just after 9/11, some of the most conspiratorially-minded people I met were hardcore left/liberal. This one guy in my International Conflict and Security class, who was as "crunchy" as one could imagine, was insistent that 9/11 was an inside job. A lot of his evidence was based on "common sense." One example was how slowly we were to scramble fighter jets to take out the planes. He didn't like the idea that perhaps the government wasn't prepared or was otherwise incompetent. He had a narrative in his mind that the government was super capable and competent with contingency plans galore, and that such a conspiracy could actually be kept a secret. Right, left, center, conservative, liberal... we're all just people and are capable of all of the same things, for better and for worse.
I had the same experience. The first *modern* conspiracy theories I came into contact with were the "9/11 Truthers" that came from the left. Then they became "the party of science" while being full to the brim with people who thought that "Big Pharma" secretly had the cure for cancer and that vaccines caused autism. I once told some of them (friends of mine) that there are whole meta studies out there that show that eating organic food does little to no difference for health, and that growing organic food leads to more deforestation because organic yields on farms need more acreage to be equivalent to synthetic farm acre-outputs by weight--even showing them these studies--and oh boy did I ever get pushback from "the party of science" lol.
I showed them the 9/11-Truther debunking stuff, I told them that the larger a conspiracy is the harder it is to contain the truth and that the 9/11 and "Big Pharma" and "chem trails" conspiracies would involve the cooperation of hundreds to thousands of people to contain the secrets, and that having worked for the government personally I knew how inefficient it was at even simple projects to prevent it from maintaining conspiracies the size of the ones they believed in. Did it matter? Not one bit. These people had their narratives in hand and weren't going to be moved by facts, logic, or evidence that countered their claims. Conspiracism is akin to religious zealotry. Even if you show people who take the bible literally that the sun came into existance before the earth did, they're still believe that a supernatural being created the earth before the sun (and all the other stars) because of narratives and zealotry.
Also overlooked (as another commenter mentioned) is 30 years of right wing lies and propaganda about the Democrats. I came from the poor/working class. I have relatives who are working class. I don’t look down on these people because they didn’t go to college and work with their hands. I do despair that they pay more attention to football than the news and that they hear things from their friends and neighbors and then regurgitate the lies.
It doesn’t help that people like Charlie insists on chatting with people who don’t like Dems (as much as he really doesn’t) like Joe Klein and Ruy, who might once have actually been a Dem and probably still thinks of himself as one--but has found a new home at the American Enterprise Institute. Come on.
The right has never cared about the working class except for their votes. The right commentators supporting the GOP for years have stoked these people’s fears of everything, yet their actual policies (when they had them) worked directly against these same working class folk. So please stop with the sanctimonious lecturing.
When a check-out clerk at Target tells me we are in a recession--which we aren’t and I’m sure she doesn’t even know what the means--that isn’t the Dems’ fault. It’s what the Dems have to battle against.
How informationally literate do you think that check-out clerk at Target is? Like I said, one of the downsides of democracy is that it incorporates the votes of many people who don't have the time and/or the informational literacy to be able to put the full empirical data picture together, and as a result, they decide with their gut more than they do with their minds because they themselves understand that their methodology in deriving the wholistic empirical picture won't result in the truth, so they lean on *narratives* (simplistic explanations) from people they trust personally to explain to them why they're living through what they're living through. So when the GOP and conservative friends comes to them with narratives while the dems come to them with data and statistics they don't trust (again, see the book "how to lie using statistics"), they believe the conservative narratives that sync up with their lived experiences more than they trust liberals citing statistics who *want* them to shrug off their lived experiences in order to keep their favored incumbent in the reelected column. Dems and liberals need to work on their economic narrative game and get it to sync up with the lived experiences of the working class if they want to win more working class voters.
For an example of stats being used to wave away lived experiences, imagine dems running around in the years between 2012-2021 telling black people that a handful of videos of police killing unarmed black suspects should be waived off because these very real statistics show that racism and racial violence isn't nearly as bad now as it used to be. It would sound tone deaf and it wouldn't sync up with the lived experiences of black people, even if those stats on racism and racial violence were true right? That's what liberals and anti-Trumpers telling the working class that the economy is actually good right now sound like to the working class who have a very different lived experience to the selective stats being cited.
No one is denying their “lived experience.” Prices went up for sure. I feel it every time I am at the grocery store. The Dems are trying to address this with the tools (and legislatures) they have. In PA, Gov Shapiro has removed the requirement of a college degree for many state jobs and made breakfast free for school age children. The Dems are pushing to increase the min wage, make permanent the child tax credit, passed an infrastructure bill that puts working people to work, bring down drug prices for seniors, and are trying to walk the fine line between transitioning to green, preserving current jobs, and helping workers get trained for the new jobs that are coming.
Dem leaders aren’t the ones who passed right to work laws, aren’t the ones driving people from education with strict bans and directives, among many other things that hurt the working class and poor. Why didn’t Charlie and Ruy talk about that? No, it’s much more satisfying to bash and embrace the tired tropes. If we Dems aren’t being “condescending to the working class” then we are all “too woke and focused on identity politics” or we are just “out of touch limousine liberals.”
Where on earth would this young woman have gotten the idea we are in a recession but from the media, and especially RW propaganda, that even if she doesn’t listen to the news, she hears from friends or sees a headline or views in a chyron in a fast food joint with a tv on. If we were in a recession she wouldn’t have a job. But I guess if I tell her that I’m denying her lived experience.
The GOP doesn’t offer these folks narratives. They feed them lies that make them believe the worst—the Dems are turning the country over to illegals who are taking your job! The economy is terrible because the rich Dems are stealing from you to give to “those” people—that’s why you feel poor!
My point is Ruy and Charlie aren’t really offering solutions. They’re just furthering the whole Dems suck line.
Yea, that's the one shortcoming from Charlie and Ruy, they're not offering solutions other than "stop doing what you're doing." I tried offering a few here, but they probably won't happen. It's like the old workplace saying goes "don't point out problems if you don't have a solution."
Did you hear Charlie call Ruy a "progressive Democrat"? I almost fell out of my chair laughing. The guy works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for god's sake.
Ruy and Charlie brush off the needs of the "working class" to concentrate on the WHITE working class, like most conservatives. Except POC are 45% of the working class.
Charlie and Ruy failed to mention that much of the infrastructure money is going to red districts in the form of jobs, new construction, battery plants, etc - districts that are majority white.
So how is it Biden and Democrats are "ignoring" white working class voters?
Ruy and Tulsi Gabbard pretty much serve the same function.
Well said
Both of these arguments are well said.