The results are in and despite what you have observed in your own life and on-line, Biden’s Gates of Hell speech was a huge success. According to a new poll close to 60% of Americans now think Donald Trump and his nefarious “MAGA movement” are a threat to our democracy. Not only that, 60% of Republicans do not think the MAGA movement represents the majority of the party. It looks like it is all over for Trump and the tens of millions who support him.
Now, most MAGA people will dismiss the poll as just another example of the craven efforts by the regime to prop up their chief stooge. This is, of course, the result of Putin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign. These conspiracy theorists questioning the veracity of polling, especially this poll, are just doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin and are probably semi-fascists. They are semi-fascists because they do not know they are being turned into fascists by the Trump movement.
Granted, the details of the poll are not available so there is no way to examine the crosstabs to see if it supports the press release. The only clue in the press releases is that the poll was weighted toward self-identified Democrats. It also subtly suggests that only 25% of the self-identified Republicans in the poll agree with the claim that Trump is a danger to the planet. There is growing evidence that the dispossessed are no longer identifying as Republican, so there is that.
In all seriousness, this is the sort of story that underscores the problem with mass democracy in the mass communication age. This poll could be a complete fraud, but there is no way to know. More important, your favorite news site is never going to check or question it. They just pick it up as a part of the automated service they use to plug into news feeds like Reuters. The left-wing news highlighter Matt Drudge is running this poll in red at the top of his site.
As de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” Drudge is a left-wing partisan, but his site is like most news sites these days in that it relies on feeds to populate itself. Even with site-created content, there is little editorial control. It is easy to inject a false opinion into the system and see it get repeated a million times in minutes.
Of course, there is the other problem. Who cares if a majority of people are falling for the latest conspiracy theory? That is, after all, what all this hysteria about Trump and the MAGA movement is, when you examine it. It relies on the assumption that there are sinister, unseen forces at work behind the scenes. The old people wearing red Trump caps at the diner are not just people who hold contrary opinions. They are part of an invisible army of fascists and evil doers.
Imagine a poll that reported a majority of people thought there are little green men visiting earth on a regular basis. You do not have to imagine it. There was a big global survey half a dozen years ago that claimed a majority of people on earth think there are little green men out there. A majority of Americans believe in ghosts. More people think psychics are real than think Ron Paul is real. Big Foot is ten times more popular than the vice president of the United States.
The point is, most people are stupid, at least when it comes to understanding things that have no direct impact on their lives. They may know accounting or chemistry, but they can also think disagreeing with the government is bad for democracy. This has always been the argument against democracy. Most people lack the desire or capacity to master the material necessary to make good political choices. Giving them a ballot is like giving a toddler a hand grenade.
Of course, opinions change. Fifty years ago, when Joe Biden entered politics, few people thought he should be elected to anything. When he ran for president in 1988, he was laughed off the stage. In 2008, he was seen as a joke candidate to give the media some entertainment. In 2020, his own party preferred an item from the museum of communism, but then everyone changed their mind all of a sudden. The same change of heart happened on election night. Opinions change.
Clearly, a polling outfit would know that their polling is a snapshot in time and may not mean anything in a week. That Reuters poll also reports that close to 60% of the respondents think the speech will make things worse. Half never bothered to watch it and two thirds think Biden is a bum. In other words, the poll is invalid on its face, but it makes for a handy false opinion, so it gets minted and passed onto gullible dupes like the rent boys running the Drudge Report.
This is the problem with mass democracy in a mass media age. Our culture, including the political process, is a giant lie machine. Imagine if people went about their day with people from the state following them around with a bullhorn, constantly shouting random slogans at them. This is what we have today. We are awash in nonsense from the mass media but are expected to have sensible opinions. It is no wonder that the political system is unresponsive to the public will.
It is the irony of mass democracy. The stated point of democracy is to make government more responsive to the public will. Instead, it reveals that the people who are in charge have no interest in the public will. They serve other interests. That means those who oppose the prevailing order should ignore the public will as well. Instead, the focus must always be on who decides. The solution to the ills of democracy is to let democracy murder itself and be ready to bury the corpse.
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One of my relatives is a doctorate with one of his specializations being psychology in polling questions. The short story is there are a thousand ways to subtly manipulate polling questions to get to a predetermined output. This, of course, is a big problem for people who actually want to get a truthful pulse of a people, but a bonanza for less scrupulous people.
Wouldn’t really be surprised if it was a reasonably balanced set of people asked, but can also guarantee that a good percentage of that 60% would turn around and vote for Trump and not see any contradiction. Just like the no fly zone question where people agree to have it over Ukraine until it’s clarified no fly zone requires shooting down planes.
For any dissident, the message is clear: Forget polls, project strength.
8
“there are a thousand ways to subtly manipulate polling questions to get to a predetermined output.”
Statistics is a powerful tool to understand reality and even make limited predictions about the future, but when the prerequisites for veracity (like random sampling) are deliberately and skillfully violated, it becomes a powerful tool to tell lies plausible to the unwitting.
5
As William Briggs repeatedly points out, models can only say what the modellers make them say.
I have long suspected that, more often than not, a poll tells us more about those who conducted the poll than it does those who responded to/participated in it. Using polls to make sweeping statements about the general public seems like a con in the vast majority of cases. And, as you indicate in your comment, human beings tend to be fickle. What many of them think at one moment could shift in an opposite direction on a mere whim. One gets a distinct impression that most folks are largely oblivious and lack fixed conceptualizations and principles. They do not have a fundamental intellectual core that would produce any consistency of mindset or opinion. Their opinions are often whatever is fashionable at the immediate hour. It goes no deeper than that.
As to the sacrosanct (yet wholly fraudulent) phenomenon known as “democracy,” I think H. L. Mencken got it right when he quipped, “Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
2
“It is the irony of mass democracy. The stated point of democracy is to make government more responsive to the public will. Instead, it reveals that the people who are in charge have no interest in the public will. They serve other interests. That means those who oppose the prevailing order should ignore the public will as well. Instead, the focus must always be on who decides. The solution to the ills of democracy is to let democracy murder itself and be ready to bury the corpse.”
As far as I know, the old question of which political system is best and who should rule goes back to Plato and his “The Republic.” And I confess I haven’t the foggiest idea of which system is best — if indeed any system can be “the best.” But I do have convictions about which is the worst. To my mind the worst is when you don’t even know who your real rulers are. That’s the system we live in. Everything is smoke and mirrors, and the ruling class operates through stooges and marionettes, the most egregious of whom is currently the brain-dead zombie Biden.
14
Here is an example of who the canadian gov’t and msm use for polling https://nanos.co/our-experience/advocacy-and-associations/ , there are dozens of red flags in the way they word the entire site….”an advocate for change” is among my all time favourites.
Of course, it’s used in the same way…”authoritative sources” and “canadians have spoken” and all the rest the B.S. we’re way past tired of. Today’s article and normies belief in polls go to show “it’s the counting of the votes that matters.”
2
I can’t say I will ever understand the people around me even the seemingly intelligent ones. I think of myself as somewhat intelligent but looking back thirty years I can’t believe that dumbass is me. Same IQ supposedly.
A lot of people I know,even siblings are good in the smarts and accomplishment department but are ridiculously obtuse about the world, politics or self agency. It all seems hopeless.
13
Most upper class people have never have to deal with the basic state of Nature, living their lives in air conditioned offices and scheduled routines. If they rebelled at all, it was in the approved ways.
Given many of them lived in the controlled education bubble until they were twenty-five, they literally can not see a world where the authority school teacher does not grade what they do, and they’re smart enough to know how to get that smiley face sticker.
It’s always fun that these same people will lecture you about how Priests used to control every aspect of people’s lives, and only recently have we become truly free from such shackles.
8
David
Great word, obtuse. Slow to learn/understand.
My adult kids are that way. Hard working, devoted, loyal, but as gullible as a three year old. I regularly send stuff for them to read and they complain because I send “negative” articles/posts. They don’t want to know just how effed up the world is. I tell them that it’s ok, the world will let you know itself.
With regards to looking back and cringing at ones past, it’s pretty clear that when I was 23 I knew everything. At this point in my life, I’m like Jon Snow;
I know nothing.
5
Right David. This is why Zman’s “theory of emergent behavior” amongst the Elite is such a plausible, indeed powerful, theory. Right before the GFC, I was in a room full of billionaires and Masters of the Universe (at a famous “power” conference) and nobody knew what was happening. I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around purported Elite conspiracies ever since.
This “obtuseness” you cite is by itself no reason for hopelessness. The goal is to learn from experience. When people refuse to learn from experience is when I feel despair.
4
With all due respects to Plato and the giants on whose shoulders we stand, the cool kids said it best, and heeding the Bard’s dictum, in brevitis: “it’s all fake and gay.” FnG. The devolution of 2,000 years of accumulated wisdom encapsulated in, appropriately enough, an acronym.
4
I have never had a high opinion of politicians from any party. The last two years have shown that today’s politicians are not fit to fetch coffee for the politicians of Margaret Thatcher’s day.
American politics seem to have a bit of blood and thunder,while British politics is full of mealy-mouthed weasely third-raters.
I would be interested to learn the Zman’s opinion on the new Prime Minister Liz Truss. I think she’ll be worse than Theresa May and David Cameron combined and they’ll be a General Election in January.
5
When your first act as the new national executive is to announce price controls (energy bills) you’re not off to a good start.
“Hi boys, I’m the new PM. Has anyone ever told you about the glories of rampant inflation? You’re going to love it!”
5
Truss is humiliatingly stupid. During the run-up to Russia’s incursion into Europe’s fakest country she made some comment about Britain never consenting to Russian control of areas that were integral parts of Russia, not the Ukraine. The Russian foreign minister laughed in her face. Read a damn map sugar-tits.
5
Her top advisors do not include a white man for the first time in British history. A nation of Saturnine Norsemen is led through an existential crisis by a woman who won’t appoint a single man from the population whose ancestors lived on the continent for milllenia. At the same time the population films an African invasion washing up on their shores.
I don’t blame Liz Truss. I blame the British men who have gone missing. Some day they are going to have to stand up, make a claim and back it up.
7
A few short years ago, it was “basket of deplorables” now it’s “domestic terrorists”. Trump is old news and let us down repeatedly but it would be so great if he would just say “Eliza Fletcher could have been my daughter.”
Spent some time on the NC coast surrounded by whites families. The only hint of danger were the riptides. Not a concern about a crazy savage hunting down white women or targeting and shooting white men because they are white.
Movie night was “Master and Commander”. It was a dvd, so no need to regurgitate commercials with black men and white women on camping trips.
It’s such a beautiful film but sad to realize how far off course we have fallen.
20
We also recently watched “Master and Commander.” It came out 2003 and is based on the novels of Patrick O’Brian. It’s an excellent film and I think most expected to see more movies based on those novels, but that never happened. But if it does happen, we all know the what the cast will look like.
4
As defined, there is no such thing as democracy anywhere and there likely never has been. Historically even very small tribes weren’t governed by the outcome of the tally of individual votes but instead operated by consensus. Since everyone knew everyone else personally they were also able to successfully evaluate their ideas and solutions to problems. Men with dominant personalities weren’t able to overcome disinterested people who had grown up with them. In countries of millions this is not the case. Only a handful of people are personally familiar with any national political figure or their own representative of senator. The elite, who feed and train the political class, have the same responsibility toward the elected as you might have for your Lhasa Apso.
4
“The solution to the ills of democracy is to let democracy murder itself and be ready to bury the corpse”
Well, I’m not sure that democracy can murder itself without murdering all of us. That’s the problem.
9
Some will survive but, yeah, you should probably and except Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior
3
3
Which party does he belong to?
2
Given the use of “except”, there’s a reading of this post in which you advocate for the death of Christ. We really need an edit function!
Once in a while God conjures a laugh.
https://rense.com/1.mpicons/ele/02.jpg
Drudge? Damn! I forgot all about that guy. He must have gotten a handsome payoff from somebody to kill his site the way he did.