You can harbor all sorts of doubts about opinion polls, and I do. The way the questions are worded can skew results in predictable ways. People will say they want something but reject it when they're faced with its implications; for example, people who support a government-run universal healthcare program may change their minds when they learn that they'd have to give up their private healthcare insurance. People will tell pollsters what they think they should say. And so on.
But the comments on this tweet took a different tack. For example: "Yes, but once it’s framed perniciously as a 'socialist plot against America,' that support evaporates. We are not a nation divided so much on policy as we are polarized due to false perceptions created by the proliferation of political disinformation." This is absurd: the person seems not to have bothered to read the poll results. But when you're so much smarter than the Sheeple, when you alone have 'scaped the media brainwashing, who needs to read?
Yes, Medicare has been been demonized as socialism, like just about everything else that benefits most Americans, but despite decades of propaganda against it, most Americans like Medicare and want to keep it and expand it. There is, of course, intense corporate pressure against these expansions, but they don't seem to rely on ranting about socialism, and it's a bit late for that anyway. And to repeat: despite the corporate media campaign against it, 88% of those polled favor lowering Medicare prescription drug prices, 84% support expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care; and so on.
This person agreed with the previous tweet: "absolutely. Facts don't matter, what those who you trust say, matter. It doesn't matter what they say since your trust is depending on what you are scared of.
Enough scare will overturn any kind of fact. So you lose." It makes no sense either, because scare tactics have failed to dent people's approval of these policies. As Molly Jong-Fast remarked, it's hard to get 88 percent of Americans to agree on anything, and you can't claim that they do so because of a media blitz pushing them to want paid family leave, universal pre-K for children, and the like, because the push has gone in exactly the opposite direction. It appears that media brainwashing has failed to produce its intended results, except among a select group of liberals and leftists who know that people are stupid and don't want programs that would be good for them. How they can believe this I don't know, except that they seem to believe the very media that they claim are brainwashing everybody else.
True, some responses went in another direction, such as "I’ll bet 88% would agree that raw cookie dough is delicious," which I presume is meant to imply that just because the Sheeple want something, it doesn't mean it's good for them, they're like children. This poster claims to be ex-CIA, so of course it bothers him that the masses aren't responding to his firm but brutal guidance. A reporter for Bloomberg chimed in: "Both raw cookie dough and icing are disgusting," and others agreed. I don't know; it may not be good for you (it's what we're told), but a lot of people like raw cookie dough, and if icing were disgusting, why would it turn up on cakes and other goodies?
Another genius weighed in: "'Make murder legal' probably polls at 85% against 14% for 1% unsure." Sure, making medicine more affordable is objectively morally equivalent to murder. If only the rabble would listen to their betters!
And so on. I've come up against this before, when I got into a fight on Facebook with my nephew's boyfriend over the same point. If this poll were telling us something new, the incomprehension wouldn't be as surprising. But it's just repeating what polls have shown us for decades, and outside the usual suspects (corporations and their bought elites) most people resist the propaganda we've been subjected to all that time. It seems that the media brainwashing I hear so much about doesn't work, but it's kinda fascinating to see who does succumb to it: the portion of liberals and leftists who fondly believe they're immune.
I'm reminded of Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky's notion of manufactured consent, though they didn't invent the idea that a government that doesn't want to control the population by force must rely on subtle persuasion and manipulation: it goes back at least to the American founders. At this point that manipulation seems less effective than ever before. While that is in many ways a good thing, it gives me forebodings about the future. Deranged conspiracy theories about elite media lies aren't all on the Trumpian right, they're bipartisan, just like support for these supposedly socialist policies: Republicans like them too. The trouble isn't so much that people are being lied to and they know it: it's that they know their government is unresponsive to their needs and wishes. That knowledge makes them cynical and fatalistic, which will make them tolerant of movement towards authoritarianism and ultimately fascism.
The genuinely populist, people-driven movements represented by Bernie Sanders are a hopeful sign, but they are fiercely resisted and attacked by the Democratic Party leadership as much as by the GOP. The trouble is less ordinary Americans than it is rich ones and their hangers-on, yet many on the left prefer to blame the majority rather than the few. I almost called the majority "left-of-center," but by definition the center is where most people are; the few who oppose, e.g., lowering Medicare prescription drug prices, are by definition extremists. It's telling that the corporate media insist on calling Democrats like Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin "moderates" instead.
