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Notes -
"The Democrats' new sunny vibes"
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-democrats-new-sunny-vibes
Noah Smith argues that with Kamala Harris and her surge in the polls gave the Democrats more chill and optimistic vibes. Going back to normalcy. The only thing missing is a "It's morning again in America" ad.
Case in point: I read right now the headline that Joe Biden warns about the "bloodbath" Trump allegedly promised if he loses the election. It is like soothing cool aid for /r/politics, but it does sound a bit hollow from a cranky old Biden, doesn't it? I don't think Harris will make the same doom & gloom attack. Maybe there is a bit good cop / bad cop dynamic here.
Regarding her VP pick Tim Walz I read the worst about him here, but looking at pictures of that guy I just don't feel it. He looks harmless and nice. Noah says the record shows that Walz is a pro market Yimby guy who is pro-nuclear. When the biggest problem of America is that it can't build anymore than you want a guy like him at the top. And mirroring the tone change of the Democrats Walz message is not an angry "kill the rich!" like from blue-haired-Antifa-communists, but a pragmatic "help the poor".
Walz may not appeal to social conservatives, but the aim is to appeal to independents/undecided anyway. And he is the sort of guy who both signals that woke is over, because woke won:
"Post-protestant middle-American orthodoxy" is quite mouthful. But it is not quite the professional–managerial class, instead a bit more folksy.
Regarding the lefty fringes, neoliberalism is back on the menu:
The Democrats have realized that memory is short, at least in the sense that bringing up what your opponent did three years ago has less relevance than what he's saying now. Trump was unusually restrained while he was leading, and Biden's references to his past behavior didn't stick because they seemed at odds with the Trump of 2024. Now that Harris is the nominee the strategy is for her to run a straight shooter campaign that accentuates the positive and only criticizes Trump in terms of his most recent statements, to the extent that they even pile on rather than letting these statements speak for themselves.
One of Trump's primary weaknesses as a candidate is his tendency to pander to his base in situations where it costs him votes among constituencies he needs to win. If Trump calls Harris a DEI candidate then his audience cheers but ordinary suburban swing voters think "Is he really going there?" She doesn't even have to respond, since him belaboring the point is only digging himself in a deeper hole. Similar thing with Tampon Tim — trans issues get right wingers fired up but aren't going to swing an election. The more time spent attacking a vice presidential candidate on that just makes it look like the Republicans don't have their priorities straight.
The worst thing, though, is that Trump seems to be doing to himself what Biden never could. Trump was able to keep a more or less even keel through all of Biden's Threat to Democracy talk. Now that Biden's out of the race, Trump can't help but make election theft comments about a popular Republican swing state governor. Why should Harris say anything about it when Trump is all too willing to remind people himself? What does bringing this up accomplish for Trump? Are there really that many Biden voters out there who think the election was stolen? Do swing voters need Trump to remind them of all the things they find distasteful about him? As long as Trump keeps making these kind of bonehead moves, the Harris campaign is going to sit tight and talk about positive vibes. Why go after Trump in this situation? It's an attack ad without the downsides of running an actual attack ad. And Trump seems more than willing to oblige. The question isn't only one of how long the shine stays on Harris, but of how much Trump will add to his own stink.
I think a lot of that might not be true. The normies might be more sympathetic to positions on the right than we’ve been lead to believe simply because modern office politics and the fact that most social media is public tends to lead to normie self censorship. This was what made polling a mess in 2016. People knew better than to publicly support a lot of Trump positions. Being less than thrilled that your kids can check out nearly pornographic gay sex books is labeled right wing, but I don’t think the actual opinions have changed that much. And I’d say the same for things like transgender kids — most people are not in favor of young children starting down that path, and would absolutely be livid if their child’s interest in such things were actively hidden from them.
What’s actually happening is that the left has put shame-filled labels on them, included them in HR training and thus put people on notice that their livelihoods and even their ability to keep their children depends on them at least publicly being open and inclusive and mouthing the lefty talking points on those things. And because of the conforming culture of PMC and aspiring PMC whites, they mostly go along with the watchwords and even out those who refuse to conform to HR. Try saying something vaguely populist right at a normie dinner party. The over the top reactions are not those of genuine disagreement. They’re fear. These people act like Inquisition Spaniards hearing something heretical, not people who have thought through the issue and come to a reasonable conclusion about the issues.
Trump might be pandering to his base, but I don’t see it as a negative simply because I don’t see a lot of people who actually oppose the things he’s saying. They’re mostly afraid to be publicly on his side. And the thing is that voting is the one place where you can express a heresy without fear because the ballots are private.
Unfortunately, this works. Most people can't maintain the kind of doublethink necessary to publicly believe but privately disbelieve. Force them to say the words and they'll come to believe them. It's a technique which works in brainwashing, it works in struggle sessions, and parents even use it to train their children through forced apologies.
Wow - it never occurred to me to frame political peer pressure as a matter of cognitive strain, rather than simply as a matter of personality traits or commitment to principles. I never really considered the fact that it could be physically difficult for people to maintain a set of public-facing lies, and that over time this could have a palpable effect on their actual beliefs. To me, it's water off my back to say that I'm voting for Kamala when I'm actually voting for Trump - I get a thrill out of constructing elaborate lies anyway, I view it as a sort of theatrical performance - but is this the case for everyone? Almost certainly not. It's something to keep in mind, anyway.
And if this does have measurable large-scale social effects, then that's a tough blackpill to swallow, because it implies that any "silent majority" that opposes wokeism will shrink over time, and the perception of wokeism's dominance will more and more become reality.
This was one of the core themes of 1984, from what I recall, that if you force someone to say a lie enough times, then the cognitive dissonance, or "doublethink," between what they believe and what they say becomes too difficult to maintain, and it gets resolved by their beliefs matching their actions (speech). I think this is an important insight that explains human behavior in all sorts of contexts, not just ideological or political. In the end, Winston truly, honestly, in his heart of hearts, loves Big Brother, just like Picard in that one Star Trek episode about 4 lights that was referencing 1984 truly, honestly believed that he saw 5 lights despite there being 4. I think one aspect 1984 got pretty wrong is in how it vastly overestimated how much effort it would take to cause someone to truly, honestly, believe that metaphorically 2 lights plus 2 lights make 5 lights. The organizations in the novel and the protocols they followed seem like someone bringing an RPG to a situation where a Nerf gun would suffice.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen this exact sequence of events outlined by a "woke" person as the means by which they will actually come to become dominant. Honestly, I thought this assumption was sort of "baked in" to any sort of analysis of the "woke" (and more broadly any authoritarian ideological movement that coerces people into repeating certain lines).
IIRC doublethink was not what you describe, but the ability for Ingsoc subjects to believe two contradictory things at the same time and to reflexively shut down any realization of the contradiction ("crimestop"). Good modern examples are instances of what Michael Anton calls "The Celebration Parallax" ("That's not happening, and it's good that it is").
It's been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC "doublethink" had 2 different definitions, possibly contradictory by intentional design. I'd thought that what I wrote was one of the definitions, but it seems similar enough to what you wrote that your definition might be one of the correct ones, and mine isn't.
I could believe that there were two definitions. I don't remember well enough either.
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"By informing people that the expression of racist or sexist attitudes in public is unacceptable, people may eventually learn that such views are undesirable in private, as well. Thus, Title VII may advance the goal of eliminating prejudices and biases in our society."
From a footnote to the opinion of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, 858 F. 2d 345 - Davis v. Monsanto Chemical Company
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