Pointing out manufactured consent is not calling people dumb or blaming them.

Although there was certainly some manipulation of the ground war by the DNC, that’s really not the same as “manufactured consent.” The citizens looked at the evolving situation and made what can easily be justified as rational decisions.

It is important to understand that we are constantly bombarded with corporate propaganda and that people quite rationally don’t devote tons of time to understanding politics, therefore they get a lot of their ideas from that corporate propaganda.

Hmmmmm.

First off, what you are defining as “propaganda” is most likely a mix of actual propaganda and solid information. Not everything that is generated by public and private entities is false, I hope you agree.

Part of being rational is sorting through the good information from the bad. You’re quite right that that DOES take time that many are unwilling to give to the exercise, especially since we lack unbiased reporting in our media outlets these days.

Secondly, although it’s possible to measure (to some extent) misinformation, it is *not* possible to measure how impactful that misinformation is. Put another way, if Joe doesn’t vote the way you think he should vote, was Joe:

a) a sucker for misinformation, or

b) a rational actor who discerned the good information from the bad, and simply disagrees with you as to the best road forward?

So if you want to think about why people seem to be “rejecting social democracy” you also need to think about WHY people would reject something that in a real sense would make their lives better and for it to fit into rational thought.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this question. The rational response is simply that we in the US simply do not trust our politicians to have that much control over either the economy or our lives. We trust the laws of supply and demand much more.

The rational BASIS for that point of view …. well, you see it played out in real time on the news every day. :-)