A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a short post, the contradiction between Trump’s tough, macho rhetoric, and his constant complaints about his imagined mistreatment. There is another, even more fundamental, pervasive and longstanding contradiction, not only involving Trump, but the entire Republican Party over many years. That is the contradiction between their claims of being advocates for “the people,” and their support of oligarchic, big business interests.

Now that I am back from a week of jury duty, I am ready to address this issue. A caller to Thom’s show resulted in me deciding to write about this topic today, rather than some other one, by asking why most voters have considered the Republican Party to be better on economic issues than Democrats for many years, even though data indicates the opposite. This is an excellent question, and basically the gist of this topic.

First of all, it is my hope, and hopeful observation, that Trump may be managing finally to put an end to this false association between Republicans and good economic practices. However, we still have a lot of work to do in order to make the large majority of voters realize that progressive Democratic policies are best for our economy – and yes, there are still some Democratic voters and politicians who have yet to realize this as well.

Actually, the main answer to this question is fairly apparent, but most people probably don’t want to believe it. The primary reason that people falsely associate the Republican Party with good economic practices is the propagandic bias of news media toward the interests of the wealthy. In turn, the reason for this bias is that news media – even relatively liberal news sources – are owned by enormously wealthy people. It takes great wealth to buy a national news outlet – remember how much money Elon Musk spent to buy Twitter? – and likewise, mainstream news outlets are a tremendous source of revenue. This is why independent media has become more trusted to much of the public, and has gained in popularity, which is a good thing, generally speaking, although there are many good journalists on the more liberal news outlets such as MSNBC and to a lesser extent, CNN.

But but but, the average voter may be inclined to ask, aren’t we too smart to be fooled by news media bias? Actually, news media bias does not really have to sway the minds of the majority of people, in order to influence public opinion. To put it in another way, if, for instance, 75% of voters are unmoved by propaganda, but 25% of them are moved in the direction of the news media bias, the end result is still skewed toward more people believing the propaganda than would otherwise be the case.

It is possible for propaganda to backfire, but only when it reaches the point that it is so untrusted as to become toxic. To go back to my hopeful point from earlier, the right-wing opinion machine, ranging from the Trump administration, to Republican politicians, to conservative news media bias, appears to be reaching that point. Normally, however, propaganda is effective on a large scale, even if many or most people do not believe it.

To give a very apt analogy, compare conservative talking points to advertising. Suppose that virtually everyone sees the same advertisement for a new cereal. Will most people be swayed to run out and buy that cereal? Most certainly not. However, people will become aware of that cereal, and when shopping, more people will decide to buy that cereal than would have without the advertising. Conservative talking points work the same way when spread throughout society.

Thus, we are exposed to the idea that, for instance, government should be run like a business. We are also exposed to the idea that big business is “good for America.” On top of that, we are exposed to “trickle down economy” ideas advocating for tax cuts which further enrich those who are already wealthy, and increase wealth inequality and national debt drastically. Additionally, we are exposed to the idea that deregulation is somehow good for us. And the list goes on and on, over and over again.

If we start from a point of 50% of the population favoring Republican economic policies, while 50% favor Democratic economic policies, shifting even a fairly small percentage such as 10% from Democrat to Republican-favoring, results in what pollsters would consider a strong advantage on economic issues for Republicans, of 60% to 40%, even if all the data indicates that Republican policies are worse economically.

The fact is, that Republicans have been the party of would-be oligarchs for many years. That so many “working class” voters have failed to realize that, and thus still vote for Republicans, is a tribute to the large-scale effectiveness of that party’s misleading economic messaging. Of course, there are other reasons, such as racism, sexism, and “culture wars,” that cause many people to vote for Republicans as well, to which Republican voters for the most part will not admit. However, they do tend to cite economic reasons for voting Republican. Perhaps for some it is a cover for their real reasons that I just cited. However, a majority of voters have favored the Republican Party on economics, when polled, for many years, despite that party promoting policies that hurt most people economically.

We are past due to flip the script and bring the large majority of voters to the realization that the Democratic Party actually has economic policies that work better for all Americans. I think we are at a turning point, where reality is slapping even conservative voters in the face with this information, given Trump’s tanking poll numbers on economic issues. If public opinion turns against oligarchic, Republican economic policies decisively enough, perhaps even once conservative news outlets, as well as liberal ones, will abandon such messaging. We must not waste this opportunity to educate the public about the superiority of progressive economic policies.