If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direc...
The Democrats aren’t just averse to class war, they’re also averse to learning anything useful.
Roger Ailes created the FOX News alternate news ecosystem to try to prevent a situation like Nixon being impeached ever happening again. It worked, like gangbusters.
The Democrats are still living in the 90s, trying to do everything through an old, dying media format.
They tried to build their own alternate ecosystem with stuff like MSNBC, but the world has moved on, the digital social media landscape is where it’s at now, and the right-wing media ecosystem moved in quickly.
If Democrats want to create a media ecosystem of their own, they’re making a losing proposition by moving to the corporate owned Bluesky instead of turning to Mastodon to truly create their own media ecosystem free from corporate control.
Otherwise Democrats will always be beholden to what makes money, and helping people doesn’t make money. They have to escape a media ecosystem driven by money and build something outside of the corporate sphere. The tools are there, and the Democratic party could be using its war chest on helping develop Mastodon instead of pissing it away on cable TV commercials only half dead people see.
The Democrats have a lot of catchup to do in terms of media literacy and using modern media to their advantage, and they’re always going to have to cede corporate control if they keep choosing the corporate options. Didn’t Musk prove that without a shadow of a doubt, that you can’t trust a corporate-owned entity to not eventually try to fuck you over, or that if their goals don’t align with yours they will silence you. They need their own servers that they can control, and that can only be done with Mastodon (or something similarly open source), because Bluesky isn’t actually decentralized or federated.
I don’t see the Democrats seeing the writing on the wall with this. Even the smart Democrats are moving to Bluesky (AOC first to a million followers) instead of charging down the path that Roger Ailes showed them fucking works.
In general, hard conservative media is free to consume, light conservative (aka ‘liberal’) media is locked behind a paywall.
The problem is that the new media is being bought by billionaires and their personal interests. There is no one who will fund the “tax people like me broadcast company” for the left. All major media, whether new or legacy, whether right or “left” are a cudgel to beat the working class in the class war. The left/right descriptor is applied in reference to their stances on social issues that don’t cost anything but nice cheap words, like whether transgender people should have rights.
This is asymmetrical warfare. The billionaire class have all the means to propagandize and we have to rely on having some really good individuals hopefully get popular enough to spread naturally.
While the issues of marginalized peoples are very important, as you can see from the exit polling most people of all stripes are concerned about economic issues (the class war) and no media will properly address that as it doesn’t suit their desires (fabulously wealthy newscasters) or their owners.