A new political poll finds that
the GOP, specifically GOP voters
have been more likely to hear about
nonsense like Dr. Seuss and Mr.
Potato Head.
Instead of important substantive
political issues like
the Coronavirus relief package that
just passed in Congress and
was signed by President Joe Biden.
Now, I want to give you the numbers
in this poll, it was done by
Politico and Morning Consult, and
they found that nearly half 48% of
GOP voters said they'd heard a lot
about The doctor Suess's decision,
according to the survey.
And it's more than the share of
Republicans who had heard about any
other news event tested in
the poll,
including the House's successful
package of the $1.9 trillion
Coronavirus relief package.
Only 44% said that they had heard
a lot about that from the media.
And clearly since they're on
the right,
they're far more likely to watch or
listen to Rightwing news content.
And they love to be knee deep in
the culture war because that
helps them deflect from the fact
that they don't have any actual
solutions or policy proposals that
would improve people's lives.
So let's all get upset about Mr.
Potato Head and Dr. Seuss instead.
>> Yeah, so there's two
things here, one is a comment you
just made, I think you made it on
an earlier show too about, well,
if you don't have a single
policy that would help the American
people, what do you want to do?.
You want to distract them?.
So, we've talked about that a lot
on this show,
it's the squirrel phenomenon.
We want to keep your wages
ridiculously low and we want to
make sure you don't have health
care in the middle of a pandemic.
This case not score but Seuss, Dr.
Seuss distraction here in there.
And that was such a good point I
think I stole it from you and
put it on a tweet and
it did really well, so, thank you.
>> [LAUGH] You're welcome.
>> So, but the second half of this
is that is honestly they're not
wrong in terms of politics,
not in terms of policy, okay?
So, people focus on the things that
the media is talking about.
So, when the Rightwing Media all
talk about the same thing,
it gets into people's heads.
I mean, more people know about this
than the fact that we're supposed
to get vaccinated.
The Biden administration's
guaranteeing vaccination by May.
Well, like a third of people know
that versus the Dr.
Seuss controversy in among
republican circles, right?
Democrats don't understand
the value of branding.
So when they have a good issue like
the minimum wage, it is very, very
popular, you should focus on it and
talk about it over and over and
over again.
Democrats never do that.
Republicans are excellent at this.
Now does the substance of this make
any sense?
Of course, not.
It's not the government,
it's not the Democrats,
not the libs that pulled the book.
It was the Seuss family, it is it's
state that pulled six of his books.
By the way he's written 60 books,
they did not pull any of
the popular books.
By the way, one of the reasons
they pulled the books, those six is
because they weren't selling,
that's called capitalism.
And so ironically, Tucker Carlson
and Trump and Kevin McCarthy
are making an argument that they
shouldn't have property rights,
they should not be able to make
decisions on which books they own,
they can sell or not sell.
That's an insane position that
is not anywhere near conservative.
They're just doing it to get you
angry and of course, as usual,
they're lying about
all the specifics.
>> Yeah, and look, I think it's
important to understand everybody.
Like the political moment we're in,
by actually listening to experts
and not political pundits.
So I want to go to this second
video real quick in this story,
because this is a political
scientist, Peter Mayer, who has
a theory that I think is spot on.
Take a look.
>> Government is about one thing,
driven by forces largely beyond
the control of parties.
Elections are something else.
That begs then other questions,
which is that if elections are not
about these issues,
these core issues of government,
what then are they about then?
Will there be about paraphrase
Raymond Carver, what do we talk
about when we talk about politics?
We talk perhaps but
something anodyne like leadership
and trust and so on so forth.
Which is generally a non party
specific or we talk about something
Maverick can particularistic like
local level politics,
personalities, identities and so
on so forth.
Or as Krastev also warned, we
talk about something dangerous and
the parties talk about something
dangerous.
We talked about a populist
politics which doesn't address key
socio-economic policies, but
instead talks of things like
religion, or ethnicity or values,
or whatever it might be, which
are removed from the socio-economic
concerns of government.
>> [BLANK AUDIO]In the early
aughts, and unfortunately he was
ahead of his time and
then he passed away.
But I think that he's spot on
he wrote a book called
Governing The Void.
And as politics becomes less and
less about changing systemic issues
that negatively impact American
socio-economic status and
quality of life.
You'll see political parties focus
more and more on nonsense like
whether it's cults of personality
and hero worship.
Or in this case,
the culture wars which we always
get served by the Republican Party.