I’m not sure how 79% of respondents haven’t heard of Hasan yet 51% of Democrats think the party shouldn’t follow his proposed politics. Methinks that’s 51% of polled Democrats who know who he is.
To be transparent, I find it distressing that this conversation seems to come up every second week on a forum that is nominally for leftists, but I will nonetheless give you a summary.
Imagining counterfactually that all of the tacit assumptions about humanity you are making are true, the answer is still not an enlightened oligarchy, because that simply is not a real system of governance (oligarchy is, relying on arbitrary enlightenment on a personal level is not). You cannot construct any such system that doesn’t just become a bureaucratic monstrosity that has very little regard for whatever sort of enlightenment you were initially selecting oligarchs for. Either democracy must be made to work or there is no real approach to progressive politics that isn’t just the Dictatorship of You, Personally in place of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The ruling ideology in all societies is the ideology of the ruling class. Ideology overwhelmingly functions effectively as a survival strategy, whether in terms of guiding practical action toward the world or developing coping mechanisms to rationalize action and inaction informed by the former. It should be extremely obvious why leftist spaces tend to be populated by people of various marginalized identities, because these are the people that the ruling ideology nakedly hurts in a way that is either intolerable or fully not survivable, so they seek out alternatives. This does not mean that they were born with superior souls to the social majority [“social majority” means people society socially privileges, even if they are in the numerical minority, like men or white South Africans or whoever], it means that the circumstances they were met with disincentivized them from turning a blind eye to the barbarism of the status quo, usually in the interest of protecting themselves or people in their lives. It is the job of every socialist to change that calculus by various means in the minds of more and more of the population until we have a popular base for making the proletariat the ruling class with its own ruling ideology.
The people are not above criticism, but they aren’t as bad as you are portraying them to be and this is blatantly an absurd extrapolation even setting aside that we don’t really know why the polling data looks as it does.
The website being this tolerant of misanthropy and bald-faced elitism is really not to anyone’s benefit.
It feels very wrong that I can do a ton of research on candidates, dig into their backgrounds, do my homework and yet I have the exact same voting power as someone who is filling in ovals because the candidate hits some demographic (I’ve heard voters vote for only women for example) or has a certain letter next to their name of because they were the first person on the list (yes that actually happens and there’s a small advantage to being on top of the list on a ballot). People don’t vote when it’s raining outside. People vote “how Jesus told me to vote”.
People voted for Kamala in 2024 simply because she was black. Some simply because she was a woman. Some voted against her simply for those reasons.
People ARE fucking stupid and I have a lifetime of dealing with these people to back that up. Normally being dumb is harmless or at least only self-inflicted injury. I don’t know jack about fishing so I don’t fish. No harm no foul. No one gets hurt.
But people who know nothing about how the world works or are blindly following whatever because most people are sheep… well they vote and they outnumber people like us who have put in the hours and studied, read books, learned all of the history, etc. So stupid wins. And my family suffers for it. My friends get hunted by the government because of it. I can’t ever afford a house no matter how hard I work because Cletus and his 12 kids outnumber me and the Baptist Evangelical church they all go to told them to vote Republican. I’m sick of it!
Or: 28% of polled democrats answered ‘no’ to the question ‘should the party follow the politics of <arabic name I’ve never heard before>’.
And the dem establishment is now pointing to that to say ‘see, the voters love Israel! My strategy of unlimited $$$ to raytheon, unlimited livestreamed genocide on the arab world is not electoral suicide!’
Didn’t Cory Booker say something about how he disagrees with him but had never watched him? Sure some advisors said he was pro-Palestine and that’s all he had to know.
What Booker claimed (which may or may not be a lie) is that he doesn’t know anything about Piker except for a couple of clips shown to him by some advisor, probably the 9/11 one and “it doesn’t make a difference ifremoveds happened on 10/7” [to the question of genocide being “justified,” but that context is left out], and was prompted to weigh in on if it would be reasonable to go on Piker’s broadcast, and he was content to say “no” based on that information.
I’m not defending him, he’s obviously a performative zionist scoundrel, I just assume you’d like to know what the precise story is and I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.
Are Congressmen seriously proposing anti-Hasan resolutions? Wtf?
They are trying so hard to cut off their left flank before the midterms, but shit like this will only make people dislike Democrats more.
Voters: “Healthcare plz….”
Democrats: “No! We need to expend all our capital on condemning a Twitch streamer most people haven’t heard of! That’ll win us the White House in 2028 for sure.”
Full poll results (abandon all hope, ye who enter here)
that’s a slim majority
I’m not sure how 79% of respondents haven’t heard of Hasan yet 51% of Democrats think the party shouldn’t follow his proposed politics. Methinks that’s 51% of polled Democrats who know who he is.
“I don’t know who he is but I trust senator
” is a voting demographic
Explain to me again why democracy is an ideal when the majority are just plain dumb?
To be transparent, I find it distressing that this conversation seems to come up every second week on a forum that is nominally for leftists, but I will nonetheless give you a summary.
Imagining counterfactually that all of the tacit assumptions about humanity you are making are true, the answer is still not an enlightened oligarchy, because that simply is not a real system of governance (oligarchy is, relying on arbitrary enlightenment on a personal level is not). You cannot construct any such system that doesn’t just become a bureaucratic monstrosity that has very little regard for whatever sort of enlightenment you were initially selecting oligarchs for. Either democracy must be made to work or there is no real approach to progressive politics that isn’t just the Dictatorship of You, Personally in place of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The ruling ideology in all societies is the ideology of the ruling class. Ideology overwhelmingly functions effectively as a survival strategy, whether in terms of guiding practical action toward the world or developing coping mechanisms to rationalize action and inaction informed by the former. It should be extremely obvious why leftist spaces tend to be populated by people of various marginalized identities, because these are the people that the ruling ideology nakedly hurts in a way that is either intolerable or fully not survivable, so they seek out alternatives. This does not mean that they were born with superior souls to the social majority [“social majority” means people society socially privileges, even if they are in the numerical minority, like men or white South Africans or whoever], it means that the circumstances they were met with disincentivized them from turning a blind eye to the barbarism of the status quo, usually in the interest of protecting themselves or people in their lives. It is the job of every socialist to change that calculus by various means in the minds of more and more of the population until we have a popular base for making the proletariat the ruling class with its own ruling ideology.
The people are not above criticism, but they aren’t as bad as you are portraying them to be and this is blatantly an absurd extrapolation even setting aside that we don’t really know why the polling data looks as it does.
The website being this tolerant of misanthropy and bald-faced elitism is really not to anyone’s benefit.
It feels very wrong that I can do a ton of research on candidates, dig into their backgrounds, do my homework and yet I have the exact same voting power as someone who is filling in ovals because the candidate hits some demographic (I’ve heard voters vote for only women for example) or has a certain letter next to their name of because they were the first person on the list (yes that actually happens and there’s a small advantage to being on top of the list on a ballot). People don’t vote when it’s raining outside. People vote “how Jesus told me to vote”.
People voted for Kamala in 2024 simply because she was black. Some simply because she was a woman. Some voted against her simply for those reasons.
People ARE fucking stupid and I have a lifetime of dealing with these people to back that up. Normally being dumb is harmless or at least only self-inflicted injury. I don’t know jack about fishing so I don’t fish. No harm no foul. No one gets hurt.
But people who know nothing about how the world works or are blindly following whatever because most people are sheep… well they vote and they outnumber people like us who have put in the hours and studied, read books, learned all of the history, etc. So stupid wins. And my family suffers for it. My friends get hunted by the government because of it. I can’t ever afford a house no matter how hard I work because Cletus and his 12 kids outnumber me and the Baptist Evangelical church they all go to told them to vote Republican. I’m sick of it!
Or: 28% of polled democrats answered ‘no’ to the question ‘should the party follow the politics of <arabic name I’ve never heard before>’.
And the dem establishment is now pointing to that to say ‘see, the voters love Israel! My strategy of unlimited $$$ to raytheon, unlimited livestreamed genocide on the arab world is not electoral suicide!’
Didn’t Cory Booker say something about how he disagrees with him but had never watched him? Sure some advisors said he was pro-Palestine and that’s all he had to know.
What Booker claimed (which may or may not be a lie) is that he doesn’t know anything about Piker except for a couple of clips shown to him by some advisor, probably the 9/11 one and “it doesn’t make a difference ifremoveds happened on 10/7” [to the question of genocide being “justified,” but that context is left out], and was prompted to weigh in on if it would be reasonable to go on Piker’s broadcast, and he was content to say “no” based on that information.
I’m not defending him, he’s obviously a performative zionist scoundrel, I just assume you’d like to know what the precise story is and I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.