Astroturf 2020 style

 2020 is most remarkable.

All my adult life, the United States Postal Service has been in decline, and especially in the past twenty years.  It is a buggy cart business in a Tesla auto age.  Its volumes have been declining, costs rising, revenue falling, service plunging.  Seemingly every NextDoor neighborhood has its stories of bad service, stolen mail, mail stolen by carriers, packages not received, checks not delivered, etc.  

Its a wonderful old institution with a storied and important past but it has been ill-adapted to adjust to current conditions, current demands and current cost structures.   

And it isn't just the USPS.  National postal systems everywhere have become financial anchors on national accounts.  Problems with delivering services that are appreciated and desired by customers at rates which can be afforded are rife.  Some have adapted better than others but I am unaware of any national postal system which is financially self-funding and with happy customers.  

The US Postal Service has a fixed obligation to serve all Americans but has no monopoly on service, which is one of its problems.  For fifty years, it has been whipsawed by Administrations of both parties and by Congressional policies from both parties.  Its current condition is an entirely bi-partisan product of lack of political will, lack of leadership, and lack of willingness to make unpleasant decisions.

And all of sudden, locally and nationally, as if coordinated, there is a "grass-roots" effort to engender support for the USPS as part of a larger effort to defeat Trump.

On NextDoor there are, as of about two weeks ago, new and unfamiliar posters making the simultaneous  cases that the poor condition of USPS is a recently engineered and deliberate partisan policy AND that the USPS has also always provided an excellent and widely appreciated service.

Same thing appears to be happening on Twitter.  So planned.  So coordinated.  So fake.

On the local NextDoor comments, it is almost as if participants have received a blow to the head.  Some threads have spun on a dime and are playing the party line.  "It really is a wonderful service."  But the effort to switch Orwellian truths is hard.  Clearly the effort is there but so far it is not working paeticularly well.  Some people try and chime in with support but the threads quickly go sideways.  It comes out as "It is a wonderful service and I don't blame them for not delivering my mail for the past three weeks because things are hard."

There are some threads which were already humming prior to this new effort to redeem USPS.  They were already red-hot with complaints.  Then two or three new accounts try and crash in and explain why the problems being complained about are not real and even if they were real, they would be the consequence of recently planned policy changes.  That particular tanker is hard to turn.  The red-hot complainers far outnumber the astro-turf.

It is fascinating to watch.  And such an accomplishment.  Getting at least some (possibly) Americans to praise a favorite public punching bag.

And its only August.

I am now considering that it is possible that by December there will be some astroturf social media push to explain why the IRS has always been misunderstood and why the DMV is actually a model of customer service.