The Manipulation Game in Politics

 Based on a strong referral from Grim, we read the essay.  It shows how Obama came to power--and how he retained that power right through the crash-and-burn of Harris.  It involved social media and required the cooperation of "the press".  It was not hard to gain the cooperation of industry and banking, because lawsuits and regulation, of course.

This is the part we found most informative:

...while most political consultants worked to make their guy look good or the other guy look bad by appealing to voters’ existing values, Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others. While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”...

In brief:  you sought the approval of certain 'types of people'--whether the Intellectualoids, the Industrialists, the Bankers........no matter.......so to gain their approval, you voted The Right Way.

Which was actually the Very Wrong Way. 

Then came Musk's purchase and Augean-Stables-Cleansing of Twitter.

Clarice wrote a shorter version of the above-quoted essay it is here.