good day fellow sea urchin, just passing by

I think they choose those talking points strategically because they don’t want to talk about money too much because they’d get exposed quickly as being pro inequality and immoral (the classic you only deserve to live well if you are ‘worthy’ ie a small business owner) so they try to cover it up by focusing on anti climate change reforms, pronouns, trans sports people, and things like that to scare their listeners/viewers about the left, classic calculated fearmongering where they try to pick tabloid level stuff they think will land with their base. It’s another question why it even lands when it’s mostly about personal liberation, from abortion to trans rights.

Btw another funny thing they do sometimes is also paint liberals and centrists as ‘far left radicals’, put them in the same bin, like I heard ‘Von der Leyen is a communist’ not long ago lol.

both the right wing and the libs have been very aggressive and over-militarized about this border thing, they could put that energy into building processing centers for migrants at the border instead of moving the military around and larping like they’re these big strongmen and it’s ‘crisis time’ (if this is a crisis then what does a real crisis look like?), also they started this back and forth with Belarus by helping organize anti-Lukashenko protests a few years ago

real

Reminds me of when Ben Norton had journalist Brian Mier on after the last Brazilian election and Brian mentioned how there are many small parties in Brazil that will cooperate with anyone from Bolsonaro to Lula as long as they are offered some concessions, a purely transactional attitude, just worried about their own little carve outs, at the same time they always clear the minimum vote requirement to get into government lol.

Ok, sounds like the main reason the Indian opposition alliance exists is a lot of those politicians are tired of losing and want to try a single voting list, a bit like the opposition parties tried to do in Hungary (and still ended up losing).

Thank you both for the replies, it’s interesting stuff that I’ll try to look into more in the future. I see that in the 2019 elections BJP managed to win in a lot of regions, except for the south and southeast. Much has happened since then like COVID and the farmer protests so I suspect the BJP won’t be as dominant in 2024. I also see there was a new 26 party ‘opposition alliance’ created last month.

By the way, is it common to see people from the northern states show more of a regional prejudice? Are the northern areas richer and protecting their wealth through discrimination, or is it just the cultural and religious differences between the states particularly messing with people’s perceptions?