We have met the enemy
I am on a Facebook diet.
I don't blame Facebook for being toxic. I blame Americans--me included--for wanting toxic stuff.
I still look at a few Facebook posts that involve fall colors, vacations, and pictures of children, happy stuff. Stuff from junior high classmates. But then I leave without looking around. It's a bad neighborhood.
The media is full of news about how Facebook manipulates us by referring things that reinforce our anger, insularity, outrage, and tribal ignorance. We liked "civic low quality news," because it made us angry. It was like eating Red Hots candies. It hurts, and for some reason we like to savor the hurt.
I don't blame Facebook. They aren't a mental health fiduciary. They are a merchant. Merchants display and stock what people want to buy.
Facebook is on us.
Let me continue in that vein.
I don't blame Big Oil, either. My friends on the environmental left are angry with oil companies and blame them for the climate crisis. I don't. I blame us. We Americans are dependent on electricity, most of which is generated with fossil fuels of one kind or another, still mostly coal. We built interstate highways and live in single-family houses in spread out neighborhoods, so of course we are dependent on cars. Or actually trucks. The most popular vehicles in America are the Ford F150, the Chevy Silverado, and the Dodge Ram.
Big Oil gives us the fuel we need to live our lives. If fueling stations stopped selling gasoline and diesel today, by the second day the country would be in panic, with people stranded and trucks parked on the side of roads. By the fourth day we would need martial law. We couldn't get anywhere and neither could people we depend on for food, power, water--for everything. We would freeze to death in the dark if roving gangs of people desperate for food, water, and whatever gasoline we still had in our tanks didn't kill us first.
Blaming oil companies for climate change is hypocritical. It displays our moral blindness. How can we condemn the people who sell us what we demand? Climate change isn't on Big Oil. It is on us.
I don't blame Biden. Progressive Democrats are disappointed that he is not delivering transformational change. Give him a break. He doesn't have the votes in the senate. Progressives think their policies are popular but they didn't elect progressive Democrats in swing states and House Districts. Progressive Democrats talk like they deserve the fruits of victory because they came close to a majority and their cause is righteous. That is the same error Trump's supporters make, thinking they deserve the presidency because they came close in 2020 and they think Trump righteous. Progressives turned off a lot of voters--incredibly enough, about as many as Trump turned off. They failed themselves.
I don't blame Joe Manchin, either. He told liberals an unpleasant truth, that he has never been a liberal nor pretended to be, which is why he is a Democrat who gets elected in West Virginia. Liberals should quit complaining about Manchin and start wondering why they lose White working class voters by four-to-one margins, then do something to fix that. It isn't happening and it's getting worse. The results in Virginia indicate that the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost western rural counties, the ones adjacent to West Virginia, by a margin of five-to-one.
No one, including myself, likes thinking that the problem is with oneself. It is more pleasant to blame Facebook, the oil companies, Biden, and Manchin for some of the frustrations we feel. The most psychologically pleasant thing to do would be to add a comment to a Facebook post that complains about the climate crisis saying the whole thing is because Biden is weak and Manchin is a jerk from a coal state and he should be primaried.
Democrats need to reconnect with working Americans, most of whom are patriotic, religious, protective of their families, resentful at being called racist, and suspicious of people making top-down rules that appear to bear harder on themselves than it does on the rule-maker.
Crazy and extreme and dangerous as the Trump-ified GOP has become, and as much as voters don't like them, it turns out that in Virginia, and lots of other places, voters seem to dislike and distrust Democrats even more.