The relative importance of material reality versus propaganda, as Brian Beutler notes in this bit about immigration, is something professional Democrats need to wrap their heads around (boldface mine):

I think it’s definitely fair to say Biden and Democrats underestimated the political consequences of immigration. But that’s almost entirely because the party as a whole has, for years, underweighted the political impact of propaganda relative to material reality. If politics was largely downstream of lived experience, immigration would have been a fourth- or fifth-tier issue. You’d expect it to be a big issue in border states, and a really big issue in overwhelmed border communities. But even if the unauthorized population increased by five-million people nationwide under Biden, the overwhelming majority of Americans would never have noticed on their own. And not everyone who did would have formed negative views of the new population.

The reason people in communities with no appreciable influx of immigrants decided immigration was a top-tier issue starts with right-wing propaganda, and then reaches beyond the direct consumers of propaganda through social knowledge. People talk and share ideas and suddenly Americans whose lives are totally untouched by illegal immigration are very concerned that Biden’s out of control open-borders policy is creating chaos and endangering the country. Or whatever.

If Dems had a better appreciation for how politics works, they might have approached immigration policy somewhat differently; but they also might have gone about all of their politics in a manner designed to compete in the information wars, leaving us in a much better place today.

I first really understood this after Trump teargassed protestors near Lafayette Park* in D.C. when he did his photo-op showing ‘resolve’ (that was the one where he held the Bible upside down). Many media reports would have had you believe that the city was in flames (TEH RIOTZ!!!), when, in reality, it was minor property damage limited to two blocks.

Most of us (mis)perceive what is happening elsewhere based on media reports (media is construed very broadly here): obviously, we can’t be in multiple places at once! But as Beutler notes, that is how we make sense of current events.

What worries me is that the professional Democratic class believes that the coming carnage from the One Big Butt Ugly Bill will ‘sell itself.’ But it won’t: Democrats must remind people constantly of how bad it is. And they will have to do this in a media environment that is heavily biased against them, which means they’ll have to figure out how to draw attention to their attacks (hint: Schumer sounding and looking like Eeyore isn’t going to cut it).