Online Media Discourse Worlds Make Almost No Difference

I’m frequently amused when some commenter chides me because I am saying this or that and it doesn’t fit some Democratic talking point and said commenter says something like “This isn’t responsible messaging” or the like. I’m like, “what are you talking about, this is a blog, nothing here or anywhere in internet political world really matters much at all.” I know we like to think what we talk about is important and that if we message this way or that way, it will matter. It does not and it will not. It’s fun to talk about this stuff, but the first lesson of life should be that each and every one of us are the least important person in the world. In fact, I think we would be a much better world if we eliminated our own individualism and realized that every other person is more important than we are.

In any case, in the Democratic Populism post from the other day, I noted that all of these things that obsess online political people are completely and wildly disconnected from the reality of not only the morons who are swing voters, but actual core Democratic voters who more or less pay attention to things and show up. The Abundance Agenda of Ezra Klein is just warmed over neoliberalism, but boy does it get a lot of attention in the political media. But how many people have heard of it?

Lmao reminder that the elite policy discourse is its own bubble pic.twitter.com/btOPDoDAzX

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) May 22, 2026

Hilarious. And really, people like us who hang out and talk about these things need to stop pretending that it matters. There are ways to make politics matter–that’s called grassroots education and propaganda, both of which I think we should invest in quite heavily. But the idea that even core Democratic voters are paying attention to policy and online debates and the like is totally delusional. Again, nothing you do matters. Or nothing I do. Our lives are an irrelevancy, but no more so than anyone else’s life. We surround ourselves by communities that make us think we might matter because we share commonalities of interest. We do not matter. Neither does Ezra Klein. And that’s a good thing. We can act from that. One thing the communists understood was this–the individual is irrelevant and must be subsumed to the mass movement. We don’t have to be communists to realize this can have significant political effectiveness. You can serve larger causes from that. But putting ourselves and our desires and our personal agendas as front and center? That’s going to go nowhere, if no other reason than you will delude yourself into thinking that you are communicating them effectively and you are almost certainly not.

Alternatively, you can completely disagree with all of these musings and that’s fine, but you still have to deal with the absolute fact that the political debates happening online are still utterly irrelevant for the vast majority of even solid Democratic voters.