Occasionally foreign policy issues can filter to the wider electorate. See: Ukraine.
Very few people outside of the politically engaged core gave a serious shit about Ukraine even before the propaganda came pouring in through Fox and OANN, which is why Trump and the GOP becoming extremely hostile to Ukraine was done without a fucking peep from their base, and without much outcry from Democrats.
See also: WWII.
… the American electorate literally did not care about WW2 before we entered, and there was considerable opposition even to the limited aid offered by the FDR administration until Pearl Harbor. Like, even American national museums on WW2 and public schooling systems acknowledge this apathy.
Trump certainly wasn’t campaigning on the issue because it’s something only lefties care about.
Trump was campaigning on the issue because:
There is an extremely strong Israeli lobby in the US which distributes literal hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘supportive’ candidates.
There is a core of politically involved right-wingers in this country with strong foreign policy views. They are certainly not moderates or everyday people, which is what I specifically said; I did not restrict foreign policy interest to leftists, but to politicos.
Unfortunately, many Jews in this country, while formerly more Palestine-sympathetic than the general population (polls post Oct 7 have been mixed), still have a great emotional attachment to Israel and view support of Israel positively. Polls pretty consistently show a very strong majority of Jewish-Americans maintaining, by their own admission, a strong emotional support for the state of Israel.
Trump was not campaigning on stopping Gaza, but on explicitly making the genocide worse in support of Israel, which is a distinctly right-wing view. Furthermore, aside from the specifics of the foreign policy, it gave him a chance to, in typical fascist strongman fashion, beat his chest about how cruel he would be to brown people, which his racist, savage base adores. This is also why he pretended to be ‘hard on ISIS’ and then ignored the issue once he was actually in office. No one who voted for him actually fucking cared about ISIS - they just wanted to hear him talk about how he was going to murder Muslim families for the crime of being related to suspected terrorists.
Context matters. It’s one thing to be a hyperdedicated Zionist during peacetime; it’s another to be one during a genocide. People can see and act based on the difference.
Bruh, you and I both know that this genocide has been going on for decades. Furthermore, it’s not like this was a fucking secret, which is why I was so skeptical of claims early in 2024 that opinions were changing - mainstream media outlets in the 2010s reported on Israeli war crimes regularly, and Americans didn’t give a flying fuck. Seeing a Palestinian kid blown the fuck apart by an Israeli artillery strike was one of my first introductions to the issue on a more-than-surface level.
Also the narrative was almost entirely “vote blue no matter who” even among progressives.
… were we not on the same Lemmy? Fuck, man, mainstream outlets were reporting on such ‘cute’ nicknames as “Genocide Joe” and “Kamalacaust”, both centrist and left-wing American media outlets. There was clearly some amount of penetration of the far-left “Bothsides” narrative into the mainstream, especially since media outlets tend to be cautious in repeating such things.
If someone picked out the voice of dissent to listen too, then that’s because they liked what they heard, not because they were mindlessly led along by what they heard online.
… what the fuck is the difference between those two ideas?
At this point to even have a chance you’d need to eliminate all dissent, and even then it’s likely some of those people would simply become the dissent.
How would it require eliminating all dissent for a fraction of people who voted for Joe fucking Biden in 2020 to vote for someone less pro-genocide than Joe fucking Biden in 2024?
By all dissent I also mean Arab-Americans who were having friends and family murdered and just didn’t care anymore,
Apparently they didn’t care about themselves or the family and friends remaining in Gaza. But of course, there was also a plurality of Arab-Americans in Michigan, one of the most Arab-American states in the country, who voted for fucking Trump, so I don’t know how much water the “They were really worn out by Gaza and just couldn’t support someone who insufficiently opposed the genocide” argument carries.
anyone who follows global news with any frequency
Again, that’s not your ‘everyday, moderate voter’ in America.
and Republicans ready to exploit any political weaknesses in the Democrats’ position.
… aren’t we supposed to try to suppress the effects of their activity…?
People can have views from more than one point of the political spectrum. Every now and then on European communities you’ll see people with left-leaning views say something about immigrants taking their jobs, so yeah.
Alright, then that leads to the issue that non-Dem leaning voters were considerably less likely to be anti-Israel, and considerably more likely to be pro-Israel? Your average moderate was not fucking sitting there thinking about Gaza.
Very few people outside of the politically engaged core gave a serious shit about Ukraine even before the propaganda came pouring in through Fox and OANN, which is why Trump and the GOP becoming extremely hostile to Ukraine was done without a fucking peep from their base, and without much outcry from Democrats.
… the American electorate literally did not care about WW2 before we entered, and there was considerable opposition even to the limited aid offered by the FDR administration until Pearl Harbor. Like, even American national museums on WW2 and public schooling systems acknowledge this apathy.
Trump was campaigning on the issue because:
There is an extremely strong Israeli lobby in the US which distributes literal hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘supportive’ candidates.
There is a core of politically involved right-wingers in this country with strong foreign policy views. They are certainly not moderates or everyday people, which is what I specifically said; I did not restrict foreign policy interest to leftists, but to politicos.
Unfortunately, many Jews in this country, while formerly more Palestine-sympathetic than the general population (polls post Oct 7 have been mixed), still have a great emotional attachment to Israel and view support of Israel positively. Polls pretty consistently show a very strong majority of Jewish-Americans maintaining, by their own admission, a strong emotional support for the state of Israel.
Trump was not campaigning on stopping Gaza, but on explicitly making the genocide worse in support of Israel, which is a distinctly right-wing view. Furthermore, aside from the specifics of the foreign policy, it gave him a chance to, in typical fascist strongman fashion, beat his chest about how cruel he would be to brown people, which his racist, savage base adores. This is also why he pretended to be ‘hard on ISIS’ and then ignored the issue once he was actually in office. No one who voted for him actually fucking cared about ISIS - they just wanted to hear him talk about how he was going to murder Muslim families for the crime of being related to suspected terrorists.
Bruh, you and I both know that this genocide has been going on for decades. Furthermore, it’s not like this was a fucking secret, which is why I was so skeptical of claims early in 2024 that opinions were changing - mainstream media outlets in the 2010s reported on Israeli war crimes regularly, and Americans didn’t give a flying fuck. Seeing a Palestinian kid blown the fuck apart by an Israeli artillery strike was one of my first introductions to the issue on a more-than-surface level.
… were we not on the same Lemmy? Fuck, man, mainstream outlets were reporting on such ‘cute’ nicknames as “Genocide Joe” and “Kamalacaust”, both centrist and left-wing American media outlets. There was clearly some amount of penetration of the far-left “Bothsides” narrative into the mainstream, especially since media outlets tend to be cautious in repeating such things.
… what the fuck is the difference between those two ideas?
How would it require eliminating all dissent for a fraction of people who voted for Joe fucking Biden in 2020 to vote for someone less pro-genocide than Joe fucking Biden in 2024?
Apparently they didn’t care about themselves or the family and friends remaining in Gaza. But of course, there was also a plurality of Arab-Americans in Michigan, one of the most Arab-American states in the country, who voted for fucking Trump, so I don’t know how much water the “They were really worn out by Gaza and just couldn’t support someone who insufficiently opposed the genocide” argument carries.
Again, that’s not your ‘everyday, moderate voter’ in America.
… aren’t we supposed to try to suppress the effects of their activity…?
Alright, then that leads to the issue that non-Dem leaning voters were considerably less likely to be anti-Israel, and considerably more likely to be pro-Israel? Your average moderate was not fucking sitting there thinking about Gaza.