Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

What I find very interesting about some of the election post mortems, and there is an echo of this in this essay too: Poland had a similar political crisis just a few years ahead of the US. A "Trumpist" party, funnily enough called PiS, took over from a fairly successful and liberal centrist coalition, and held on to power over quite a few nationwide elections. There were so many commonalities: abortion rights, strongman government, convicted criminals in government, etc.

The key reason why the fairly competent, liberal and inclusive agenda lost time after time was that the people promoting it felt so self-important with their advanced degrees and great pedigrees that they felt that should be enough to win. That it will be enough to remind the voters that the other side is Bad and that's job done. The PiS party, in turn, was incredibly good at reaching voters, they spent ages building grassroots structures, including in unglamorous rural areas, where they remain very popular now. They have cohesive, very populist, but clear and catchy slogans nad programs. They have cultural clubs, newspapers, TV channels, everything.

The good news (if you're liberal) is that the centrist parties finally got organized, ran a common election platform and campaigned beyond "surely, you'll just all vote for us because we bothered to turn up to your smelly little town". Although whether they learnt they have to do that every time remains to be seen.

Yet, most of the destructive policies have not been replaced by the new government eg abortion issues.

Yeah, the returning liberals are kind of OK, not great. Still, people seem to forget how bad the alternative is. It's not an excuse for the liberals, they need to try harder, but frankly I'll vote for them even if they don't get their act together, because lazy liberals are still better than busy illiberals.

I wish I would see in other countries this same new reach on new channels and new media, but I just don't. It's almost like only neonazis know what a tiktok is, while the very few historical parties members trying it are stuck at "fellow kids" approach. Not even on Facebook, called home of the boomers, are they even trying. I'm sorry but I can call this only stupidity, fully agree with your points, and hope those folks learn the new lessons as well.

I think politicians only learn this when in opposition, and for long enough. Only once they see that what worked for them N years ago is falling flat and flatter again on its face, do they change.

By the way, I think that's a clear benefit of a multi-party system. When there's only two, you don't really compete for most of your voters, because they will vote for you no matter what. It is only the marginal voters that need your attention, so there's plenty of opportunity to slack off.

But when you can't take your own electorate for granted, you suddenly become much more attune to how you need to reach them.

Power flows from controlling the media. Those who have that power lock out those who are outside the Overton Window, and the further they are outside, the more they are locked out. Those who are out have to turn to fringe media in order to get their message out at all.

But in the internet age, "fringe media" can become mainstream rather quickly - more quickly than the old gatekeepers can keep up. The gatekeepers think in terms of "we control these media, and they're the only media that matters", rather than "we control access to information, no matter via what medium. If there's a new medium that starts to become important, we need to control it."

So the outsiders sometimes become powerful on a new medium, and then the medium becomes important, and now they're powerful on an important medium.

In some ways, it's good that there's a way to do an end run around the gatekeepers. But in other ways, the people who do it are... often not the ones you would wish to have success at controlling any medium.

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