The first Obama administration was when Fox News truly went off the rails. They were always conservative and disingenuous, but holy shit did they flip out on Obama. They played the racist rage into higher and higher rating. Really was amazing to see.
Credit where it’s due! A single television station steamrolled American politics in just a few short years, becoming the most popular news outlet in America. That kind of thing was impossible when I was a kid with 4 station to choose from. Amazing indeed!
Nah, it started well before Faux Nooz existed. I don’t remember the details I read somewhere a while back, but basically this started in the early/mid 1970s when some Republican strategist realized they could use abortion as an extremely effective “wedge” issue to attack liberal politicians. Additionally, they learned to use brain-dead, but charismatic figures like Reagan to be the likeable face of the Republican party when they couldn’t find a smart one who was popular with a wide audience.
Fox’s success was made more possible by increasing knowledge and expertise of effective strategies to manipulate people that newer psychology and data science fields brought to the table. Conservatives have always been quick to jump on new methods of controlling people - ones that liberals by their very nature aren’t all that prone to taking advantage of.
Basically, it comes down to two pivotal decisions on the part of the Democrats. First was Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, in which he chose to bail out the banks and let average Americans get screwed over, setting the stage for a decade or so of “bimodal” recovery in which the rich were doing well while working people increasingly struggled. Second was the Democratic Party’s suppression of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy.
The general trend is that the Democratic Party has been unwilling to (a) acknowledge real economic pain that working Americans are/were experiencing and (b) oppose the interests of economic elites. Instead they have sought to focus on race and gender issues, and often in a kind of high-handed, censorious way, while making it clear that if they are in power “nothing fundamental is going to change,” even though the system is increasingly not working for many Americans.
Trump arrived, promising to shake things up and was able to articulate the struggles that working Americans were facing.
What I can’t explain through all this, is how he won the second time. And this is probably because he didn’t actually win the second time.
How did America go from Obama to Trump
Right-wingnuts are rabidly racist assholes driven over the edge by the mere reality that there was a (half) black man in their precious WHITE House.
If Trump keeps fucking around making 51st state jokes, that White House might end up going back to bright orange.
Please and thank you
They can’t handle a black mermaid either
The first Obama administration was when Fox News truly went off the rails. They were always conservative and disingenuous, but holy shit did they flip out on Obama. They played the racist rage into higher and higher rating. Really was amazing to see.
FTFY
Credit where it’s due! A single television station steamrolled American politics in just a few short years, becoming the most popular news outlet in America. That kind of thing was impossible when I was a kid with 4 station to choose from. Amazing indeed!
Nah, it started well before Faux Nooz existed. I don’t remember the details I read somewhere a while back, but basically this started in the early/mid 1970s when some Republican strategist realized they could use abortion as an extremely effective “wedge” issue to attack liberal politicians. Additionally, they learned to use brain-dead, but charismatic figures like Reagan to be the likeable face of the Republican party when they couldn’t find a smart one who was popular with a wide audience.
Fox’s success was made more possible by increasing knowledge and expertise of effective strategies to manipulate people that newer psychology and data science fields brought to the table. Conservatives have always been quick to jump on new methods of controlling people - ones that liberals by their very nature aren’t all that prone to taking advantage of.
Basically, it comes down to two pivotal decisions on the part of the Democrats. First was Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, in which he chose to bail out the banks and let average Americans get screwed over, setting the stage for a decade or so of “bimodal” recovery in which the rich were doing well while working people increasingly struggled. Second was the Democratic Party’s suppression of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy.
The general trend is that the Democratic Party has been unwilling to (a) acknowledge real economic pain that working Americans are/were experiencing and (b) oppose the interests of economic elites. Instead they have sought to focus on race and gender issues, and often in a kind of high-handed, censorious way, while making it clear that if they are in power “nothing fundamental is going to change,” even though the system is increasingly not working for many Americans.
Trump arrived, promising to shake things up and was able to articulate the struggles that working Americans were facing.
What I can’t explain through all this, is how he won the second time. And this is probably because he didn’t actually win the second time.
Say it louder for the folks in back who still think America chose an open fascist over the status quo.
Two words: Rich cunts