America is full of incognizant yokels.

Truly we are the harbingers of the devolution of Political Man.

The average American says "Eugene who?"

But I actually don't think I've ever seen any positive coverage of Amazon anywhere. Where is the propaganda? The closest thing I can remember was that bullshit HQ competition. All the stuff I see people talk about (IRL or in non-political spaces online) is either Bezos' obscene wealth or workers dropping dead in warehouses or drivers pissing in bottles. Bezos doesn't even have the cult of personality that Musk has.

You know, I think it might have to do with the ambiguity of the question. Like, do they like Amazon as a company, or as a service? Like, I guess I like the website? It's pretty convenient? But that's not the same as liking what they do.

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Police less so but Amazon is shocking to me. I’ve basically never known anyone whose opinion on Amazon isn’t between “I still use it because it’s way cheaper and more convenient than alternatives, but they’re absolutely evil” and “Guillotine Jeff Bezos”

Yes! Wrt the police, I thought it would be more mixed. Partly because of the recent Uvalde stuff drawing more outrage, but partly because those protests were only a couple years ago and most people approved of them at the time. Plus, I actually don't know anyone but chuds (less than 40% of the population) who even like cops. Was expecting more ambivalence.

I don’t know that that’s true, tbh.

I think it is. Look through some of Pew's polls from the last few years, for example. Or look at this poll looking at the reasons for Biden's low approval ratings across different demographics.

It's a pretty persistent pattern I've noticed. And a weird one. Left-wing politics (talking about things like self-professed support for socialism and attitudes toward billionaires) tend to be more popular with the groups you'd expect: women, PoC, lower-income workers, queer people, etc. But age tends to be one of the stronger predictors. There are economic factors, and others like racial diversity, but I think the internet being more permeable to dissenting views (still mostly controlled by corporations though it is) is another.

Or even if it is, it’s actually not the case that boomers, or anyone older than a millennial at any rate, have (as a broad demographic) always had the political constitution that they currently do.

Both age and generation are factors. Politics tend to shift to the right with age, but attitudes also shift generationally, the trend being leftward over the last few. Only a slight majority of people supported the civil rights act at the time, for example. Compare with today. I don't think most Boomers were ever particularly left-wing, even when they were young.

The reality appears to be that the populace of the country as a whole only becomes more reactionary as conditions worsen.

Can you substantiate this? Because politics on the whole have shifted pretty dramatically left (insofar as socialist politics exist again for the first time in like 60 years) within the last eight years or so, while living conditions have declined dramatically. And I'm talking about public attitudes and organizing, not US policy, which we know has next to nothing to do with the popular will (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and is still dominated by the older generations. Fascists have become more emboldened, but they're still a minority, and they skew disproportionately older.

or it could mean the liberal scaremongering and wagon-circling worked. If trump's covid response wasn't a factor, either because the pandemic didn't happen or somebody told him he could make a killing on masks, i think biden would've managed a loss.

There are many reasons pills are wrong, but the salient fact for organizing is that they are ridiculously malleable and incoherent generally. I can and have convinced many libs that explicitly disagree with nearly everything about a socialist candidate... to enthusiastically say they'll vote for that candidate because we had a nice rapport and I agreed with some nonsense they were saying and backed off on everything untill we found one shared position. We've all seen 180s happen rapidly, and the example of the George Floyd protests was a clear double-whammy: overwhelming support for police before, then middling during, then overwhelming again, particularly in cities. This also applies to war: supposedly against it in theory, but become bloodthirsty jingoists so long as the narrative is right, then regret later on for most. Regret that never turns into a consistent anti-war position. Regret that is media-manufactured via rationalizations for why it failed to meet "our goals", rationalizations about efficiency rather than the destruction of countries. Just like the support was media-manufactured. Just like the general opposition to war, in theory, was manufactured.

You could also look at the breakneck speed of "we must defend Ukraine and save those people" as compared to the US-supported genocide in Yemen. Americans can't find either on a map and know nothing about either. They just get jerked around by propaganda up until it becomes too inconsistent for them and then they have a breakdown and start getting into conspiracy theories or burn out.

Another lovely example is how COVID is now just "over" in the US via a concerted propaganda campaign.