QOTD -- Suppressing Indignation

 

"...I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.

"It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.  [snip]

"But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.

"Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself..." -- Brian Beutler, in his "Off Message" Substack, on how Democratic consultants and their Democratic politician clients react to shocking developments like the illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for the "Epstein ballroom."  Beutler likens the difference between how Democrats react and Republicans react to having your finger in the wind to see which way it's blowing (Democrats) and making the weather (Republicans).  

There's nothing more visceral to most Americans than seeing the sudden destruction of part one of the iconic structures of our democracy, a house that belongs to the American people, not to a lawless, convicted felon temporarily living there.  Why hasn't this penetrated some political skulls by now?  We realize the fire hose of outrages is coming fast and furious out of the Malignant Fascist and his regime.  But this outrage against the American people, symbolic as well as tangible, deserves much, much more than a brush off from accommodating, tin eared politicians.

(Photo:  a scar where the East Wing of the White House once was)