No. of Recommendations: 1
You're no competition for the echo chamber in which they exist.
Despite your exhaustive efforts, you have gained zero ground with the likes of Dope and his mini-dope.
I think you're missing the point. I'm not arguing that the modern electorate is free from ignorance, myth, bias, lies and propaganda. Rather, I think you're severely underestimating the degree to which the electorate has always been afflicted with those things.
You don't need an echo chamber to be resistant to arguments against things you believe in. I'm old enough to have had lots of arguments with people back in the day when the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect. I didn't change many minds back then either (though I had excellent discussion). It's always and forever been the case that most people are inclined to believe what they want to believe, and reject things that contradict their beliefs.
And the folks in those long-ago electorates were vastly more ignorant of the world than anyone today who is capable of accessing the internet. Virtually none of them would have completed as much as a high-school education in 1860. Your typical Fox-watcher may be led to be outraged by the latest hearings in the Judiciary Committee - but our 1860's era voter wouldn't have even known that the Judiciary Committee existed. Assuming it did - I actually don't know when the committee structure was adopted - but whatever the 1860 analog is. Skewed perspectives over the merits of a candidate for Secretary of Defense are one thing, but voters back then wouldn't necessarily have been aware of the existence of a Cabinet or the nomination/confirmation process or even that we had a Department of War (or whatever the label was back then).
Again, I think you're grossly overestimating the degree to which any U.S. electorate at any time in history has been free of ignorance, myth, bias, lies and propaganda. Or even less affected by those things than modern voters. The sources of all of their skewed worldviews and unsupported biases and false beliefs may have changed over the many decades, but the existence of all those things has been a constant.
