A Pandemic of Magical Thinking in Politics
It’s one thing to be an optimist and do the work necessary to make a vision become reality. It’s another to wander about yelling randomly at people who don’t care what you think. This really grinds my gears, even when I generally agree with the people in question.
Social media has enabled extreme partisanship as a player in US politics. This plays upon our tendency toward magical thinking, which comes from the basic structures of human cognition. We want things we should know aren’t likely to be. This wanting gives us comfort in the short term, but by itself won’t change the world.
Rookie owner Elon Musk may have solved that problem with Twitter, since it now mostly plays like a record (those vinyl things they put music on) with a serious scratch. It’s either repeating, repeating, repeating, or showing irrelevant content sandwiched in between ads for hinky hustlers. Think of it like Top 40 radio.
One of the local bits still appearing in social media is content from the We Hate Todd Gloria crew. This isn’t to say he’s a saint or that he’s changed for the worse. He’s Todd Gloria, Mr all-things-to-many-people; it’s just that some people are more important than others on occasion.
The media outlet most focused on dethroning hizzhonor is La Prensa, a publication with a storied background in the Chicano community. It’s obvious they have some sources in high places. Some of their reporting appears to be dynamite stuff, except where it counts, actual change in or around the targets of their stories.
It’s like those tabloids at supermarket checkout stands; you can’t unsee the headlines. I’m a sucker for this stuff, I have to look. But the only supermarket screamsheet I’ve ever thought about paying for was the Weekly World News, which gave me inspiration in the pre-internet days for filler graphics in the underground papers I was editing.
Anyhow, this week they’re running with a story (picked up by the OB Rag) about how Mayor Todd Gloria is “vulnerable” according to a recent poll. Old people hate him. Congressman Scott Peters would crush him at the ballot box. And the city is going to hell in a handbasket because of homelessness and it’s all Todd Gloria’s fault.
This is magical thinking, starting with the widespread mythology about one politician or one unit of government “solving” the homeless problem. This illusion about “solutions” is a bipartisan phenomena.
Democrats think they can throw money at the homeless industrial complex and maybe loosen building codes.
Don’t get me wrong, services for our most downtrodden citizens are needed…just like services for housed populations that are near-impossible to get. Mental health treatment is the best example. Even with insurance, the process of getting to a caregiver makes it an impossible task unless you’re wealthy and can pay out of pocket.
Republicans, like El Cajon Mayor and Congressional wannabe Bill Wells don’t want homeless people to be in their neighborhoods, based on the “fact” that they’re on the streets due to some personal failings. Unhoused people are “otherized” to the point where mass incarceration or state-sponsored elimination are the (mostly) unspoken ultimate solutions for this way of thinking.
What Todd Gloria and Bill Wells and Gov. Newsom can’t say is homelessness is a symptom, who’s underlying cause needs to be treated. (Can you say late-stage capitalism? I thought you could.)
The political will to make change on this aspect of our society doesn’t currently exist, even though there are politicians who advocate for the partial solution of reeling in too-big-to-fail monopolies.
Back to this dynamite polling story. If you read down to the end there IS a nugget, namely that Kevin Faulconer (who can run because he skipped an election) is thinking about getting his old job back.
The most important thing here, however, is that the polling was done by Colorado’s New Bridge Strategy, who are described as “a research firm based in Colorado, with roots in Republican politics.” (Granted, they do work across the aisle on occasion on conservation, but still…)
Nothing is said about the nuts and bolts of the poll, nor is there a link where one could see sample size and demographic make up.
Let’s get down to it: even if Todd Gloria is vulnerable, there is no organized opposition. Republicans have a brand problem– you won’t see Faulconer wearing a blue “:Hell No” (AS opposed to MAGA) baseball cap.
Taking out a sitting mayor takes on-the-ground organizing, and the Democratic Party has a hard enough time keeping itself together. Dumping Gloria would –in my opinion– shatter what’s left of an already damaged group.
Plan B would involve recruiting a celebrity, since name recognition is Gloria’s inherent advantage. Maybe Bill Walton would consider such an endeavor, but he’d need an organization to raise money, turn out voters, and take the rough edges off his image. Let me know when and if that happens.
So my point here is that picking fights you can’t win without organizing is a fool’s errand. And I’ll bet the polling cited by La Prensa was paid for by some entity caught up in the magical thinking of a Republican renaissance.
Round two of this rant about the impossible dreams floating around politics comes via polling written about in the LA Times along with a Quinnipiac University poll of registered Golden State voters, and transmogrified into a Newsom-is-probably-doomed article by Politico California.
It is likely true that most people don’t want to see Newsom run for President in 2024, especially with Biden continuing to pick off the low hanging fruit of wingnuttery coming out of the GOP. I’m guessing the will-he or won’t he articles about the incumbent President not running are no longer gaining traction.
Story number one is packed with suppositions about the coming budget fight in Sacramento. It ignores the fact that even during GOP administrations, a budget agreement is reached at the last minute. Speculating about a politician’s popularity based on what’s going to happen in the back rooms at the state capitol is also a fool’s errand.
***
While I’m on the topic of magical thinking, all the “investigations” promised in the GOP-led House of Representatives are worth a look.
Think of the cartoonish Keystone Cops when envisioning the present state of things in Congress.
From the Daily Beast:
Call it a mad-dash turf war or call it cooperative force multiplication, but House Republicans seem to be taking a Venn Diagram approach to investigations.
Oversight has quickly become a primary focus of the GOP’s new House majority, which realizes that investigations may be their sharpest political weapon under divided government.
But with Republicans staking so much on their role as the chief investigators of the Biden administration, ambitious lawmakers seem to be scrambling to grab as much jurisdictional territory as possible.
From COVID origins to the U.S-Mexico border to Ukraine aid and social media “censorship,” Republicans on different House committees are all jockeying to plant their flags on the most coveted political turf for the party.
Five committees during the past month have held hearings on the Southern border, many of which involved the same witnesses. There are 10 letters requesting documents or testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Three different committees are looking into U.S. aid to Ukraine. Two committees are getting ready to hold hearings on the “Twitter Files,” a very selective batch of internal company documents released by CEO Elon Musk.
All of this oversight doesn’t include Hunter Biden, Benghazi, or Hillary Clinton’s emails. It appears as though GOP expectations of uncovering a treasure-trove of scandals aren’t going to happen, in part because the inmates are running the asylum.
Their inquiries are of increasing importance to the GOP, since the party’s projected accomplishments include stripping away healthcare from millions of people, undoing the millions of jobs involving infrastructure funding, and figuring out a way to scare more people about history, non-heterosexual humans, and library books with ‘subversive’ conduct.
Add to that list continuing resentment (with more to come) over the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion, student loan forgiveness (probably), the environment, affirmative action, voting rights, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and gerrymandering.
It’s no wonder the Republican party is reduced to magical thinking when it comes to Congress.
***
A plug for my overlords…
I publish this newsletter on a platform called Substack. It does all the backroom stuff and I just get to write. Lots of writers, both famous and not, have made the switch.
Competition at Twitter and Meta/Facebook has shuttered due to lack of interest. We’ll see if my homies ethics change for the worse now that they’re king of the hill.
Yesterday, there was big news about Substack. Really BiG
Via Axios:
There are more than 2 million paid subscriptions to writers on Substack, Axios has learned — up from 1 million last reported in November 2021.
Why it matters: Substack's subscription audience is bigger than that of most news organizations in America.
In addition to paid subscribers, there are now more than 20 million "monthly active subscribers" on Substack, or people who subscribe to at least one Substack newsletter (with a free or paid subscription) and read a post within the month it's published, a source told Axios.
A reminder: subscriptions to Words & Deeds are free. Any donations are passed along to other writers doing great work. I’ll have a column about them soon– the response has been far greater than I imagined. So maybe my thinking wasn’t magical enough…LOL.
Like I said…
You can follow me at:
Twitter (for now)---> @DougPorter506
Post —→DougPorter@wordsdeedsblogger
Tribel ——> DougP Porter@dougporter506
Mastodon ——> DougPorter506@mastodon.social
NEW! –Spoutible —>@dougporter506
Facebook —----> https://www.facebook.com/WordsAndDeedsBlog
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
I’m not sure if reading your post depresses me or gives me hope. Your mix of local and national commentary illuminates or at least tries to make sense of what is out there in our political world. Maybe it’s partly effects of post-Trump fallout or pandemic stresses that cause such anxiety resulting in anger for so many people, that rationality is smothered. As to Twitter revealing a smothering of right wing voices pre-Musk, so many more Americans were getting those voices via Fox News and that curtain has been pulled back.
I miss seeing the hedlines of the Weekly World News. My favorite one is "400 year old talking skull." My second favorite was about living dinosaurs found in Arizona. Then there was Bat Boy running for President of the USA. Who can forget "Secret Service building a bunker for Hillary Clinton's alien baby?"
About homelessness in the USA, while there has always been unhoused people in this country, there was huge uptick in this population when the Reagan Administration closed our vrious state mental institutions. Suddenly people with few skills in the activities of daily living were on our streets.
For some reason we want to blame one person for our woes when it is the system that is flawed. No one really wants to look at the system because then we would have face our own responsibility for our participation in the flawed system.