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It’s really cute watching all the Neolibs pretend like their conservative policies attract the leftists they need to win elections.
Sucking up to a demographic of old white conservative men was not a winning strategy for the Democratic party.
BlueMAGA is literally Russian propaganda. Anyone who uses the term unironically is a troll.
I use it unironically and just think you’re an idiot.
inb4 comment removed!
Liz Cheney
Didn’t realize Liz Cheney called herself a democrat
Watch your tone Liz Cheney is a national hero for Democrats https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-award-liz-cheney-others-with-presidential-citizens-medal-2025-01-02/
Neither blue or MAGA tbh
Do tell how she ended up on a stage next to Kamala if she was not Blue.
The MAGA part is the denialism from Democrats about it.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Liz Chaney is a staunch opponent of Donald Trump, she is a career politician, and the last of the Grand-Old-Party. In a desperate attempt to stop MAGA from replacing the GOP Liz Chaney aligned herself with Kamila Harris and that’s why. I’d argue that makes her a Red Democrat more than a Blue Republican but really that’s down to interpretation. I don’t think anyone was in denial about why she was being paraded around like neat novelty. These are strange times my dudes.
I was also on the side of vote for Kamala fix it after because with Trump fixing is impossible with Kamala maybe. But whenever I see stuff like
45 Democrats Vote With GOP to Pass Bill Sanctioning ICC Over Netanyahu Warrant
Senate Overwhelmingly Rejects Sanders Resolutions to Block Arms Sales to Israel
it makes me doubt how feasible this approach would be too. Sure Kamala is factors of magnitude better than Trump for the USA, for Ukraine, for LGBTQ people, for women etc. But I can understand a US citizen with roots in the middle east etc not voting for Democrats after seeing disgusting stuff like this.
“PATRIOT Act” passed Senate 98 to 1. Partisanship is for complete morons.
45 democrats didn’t vote the way you want? And how many republicans didn’t? Are you really saying both sides are the same?
No they are not but I am convinced that about 2/3 of the democrats don’t give a shit about the party they are a member of nor its voters. If their only opportunity was to be a republican candidate they would jump at that opportunity without any internal moral conflicts. And I understand how frustrating it must be when a majority of a party that you are told to vote for has no moral issues with bombing a country where your relatives live to the ground.
There are 215 Democrats currently serving in the house. The 45 that voted with Republicans don’t even make up a quarter let alone 2/3.
I am talking about the Sanders vote though. I think, there were about 10 that said yes to stop selling weapons.
two different wings of the same shitbird…
Not even different wings. Both are right wing parties. The left wing of this bird was long since broken.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans. This means that the crazy option is wildly unpopular and would never pass under a democrat. I’m not seeing the problem here.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans.
21% of Democratic voters voting for Republican candidates would be completely unacceptable. Why is it ok for 21% of our representatives to vote for genocide?
Oh right. It’s ok when it’s the only thing centrists actually want.
And “centrist” in the US really means far right.
For a second I thought I saw my name and was confused what this had to do with me :-D
I mean you guys elected that asshole…
Missed the point again award. If people want to vote for conservatives, they’re going to vote for conservatives, not conservatives lite. If people want to vote for leftists, they’re going to vote third party, vote for the dipshit threatening to tear it all down, or stay home, not vote for conservatives lite. If you’d take a few seconds to really use your noggin, you’d understand that people are fucking drowning and desperate for a change. Not “lol the guys at the Goldman Sachs fundraiser said we should think about a 1% COLA for social security”, I’m talking burn the house down and start over change. There’s a reason why there’s the phenomenon of the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter or Bernie-Trump voter. It’s not the sexism, it’s the promise of change. Obama failed to deliver, and Bernie didn’t happen, which just leaves us with that fucking guy. The democrats miscalculated twice and thought that voters surely wouldn’t vote for that fucking guy over their promise of change so mild that even fox news would get bored. It’s not the voter’s fault that the democrats failed to put forward a good platform. To the Democratic party and the people towing this line, I say: voters don’t owe you victory. In fact, voters don’t owe you a goddamn thing. Stop blaming them and get your shit together or get out of the way.
Yes to all of this. Neolibs in this thread are really pressed.
Probably still would’ve been less bad if people voted for the lesser of two evils though
Maybe. There’s an argument for accelerationism. I’m not convinced of it yet, but clearly the system has entrenched interests that benefit from things being awful for everyone else, and the majority power in the Democratic party has showed that it’s all too willing to roll up its sleeves and make minor adjustments. Most folks don’t have 3000 years to wait for the democrats to finally adjust things to where they need to be, and in the case of climate change, we certainly don’t have that time. Yes, pushing the system to collapse is going to be fucking awful, but I actually wonder if the net suffering will be less than waiting however long it takes for the lesser evil to turn good.
The argument against is that people like me need healthcare and are about to get fucked.
I guess. I worked in EMS for fifteen years and saw my fair share of the system exploiting, abusing, and killing (yeah, I’ll stand by that one) people for profit. We’ve also had major medical events in the family, and had to deal with the insurance fucking with us to try and get out of paying. It only ever seems to move in one direction, which is towards fucking people harder. A system like that deserves a swift kick in the pants, not a gentle polishing.
Biden did more to battle climate change than any president in living memory. Trump has done the opposite, we don’t have another four years of runway to speed the collapse, the time for revolution was when Bush stole the election.
Biden did more to battle climate change than any president in living memory.
You know what causes ungodly amounts of pollution? war. Blowing up and burning whole cities. Biden sent the bombs that blew up all of the west bank and Gaza, and ensured the war would continue. Dont lecture us about how great an environmental president he was. Biden also set up drilling and mineral exploitation everywhere. He was no environmentalist.
As opposed to all the presidents we’ve had who didn’t send bombs to Israel or set up drilling and mineral exploitation?
We need to invest in renewable energy production if we are going to survive the next century, Biden invested more than any president in my lifetime.
Dude, we’re just not going to meet the climate goals we need to. Not with Biden, not with Trump. We need someone that’s not afraid of the owner class removeding and moaning and withholding donations, and our system simply isn’t wired that way.
But I’ll bite, what did Biden do to address climate change, and what’s the tangible impact?
The Inflation Reduction Act encouraged $3 trillion of investments in renewable energy, he’s been working to triple nuclear energy production, and he blocked the construction of oil pipelines.
It’s not about picking a candidate to meet the goals, that ship has sailed. We had the choice between Biden/Harris and Trump, the difference in climate policy between them is staggering.
…No, he didn’t. Just by any measure no he didn’t. Even if you just limit it to US presidents, no he didn’t. Nixon did more for climate change than Biden, by several orders of magnitude.
I have no idea, so in total seriousness, I would love to hear details.
Nixon created the EPA, expanded the national park system as well as explicitly protected the Everglades from development, and worked to transition from coal to nuclear power. He was the last of the conservativism = conservation conservatives.
There are accounts he primarily did all of this to just ensure his reelection and accumulate political capital and good will, but that hardly changes the fact he was one of the best US presidents in terms of environmental policy.
Thanks for the info!
It sounds like it relies on the hopium that at some point people will wake up. You are certainly more optimistic than I would be.
Just a different kind of evil. Not lesser.
What sort of evil are you thinking of that Kamala would do that Trump wouldn’t also do, but even worse?
Temporarily yes. Perhaps not in the long run, though. Sometimes you have to go through some pain to cure the disease.
You could call it temporary if this was part of a clear plan for a better future. But it isn’t.
The Trump victory doesn’t lead to anything good. It isn’t ‘temporary’ pain for a long-term fix. It is simply going in the wrong direction, and it won’t turn around by with magic or wishful thinking.
No one has anything like a plan to fix things. The point is to break everything hard enough that the staunch status quo idiots with their heads in the sand are forced to look up and start doing something. Failing that we’ll have a quick death rather than a long and torturous one.
So your plan is to fuck everything up in order to motivate ‘status quo idiots’ to do something, so that you don’t have to. Is that about right?
It seems to me that instead of trying to make things worse, you could instead try to make things better. But I guess activism is much easier when you don’t actually have to do anything yourself.
To be clear, this isn’t my plan. I’m just relaying the reality of the situation to you. This is what is happening and we have to deal with it.
This is more putting through people through certain pain for uncertain, perhaps never coming cure.
Hell of a gamble.
Slow death versus a possible quick death with a chance for a cure.
It’s like facing a canyon and hitting the gas pedal instead of working slowing the car down. But they, who knows, there might be a ramp lol
It’s more like facing a cliff and pulling the handbrake to crash the car in the hopes it rolls to a stop before going over the edge instead of bickering about what speed we want to go over the cliff at.
Handbrake would be a drastic action to slow down. In this case accelerationists want to accelerate towards the cliff, hoping there’s some good outcome from that, instead of trying to slow down.
Though it’s true that that doesn’t capture the fact that it’s outright making things worse for people, especially minority groups, for really uncertain hope that things will drastically improve.
instead of bickering about what speed we want to go over the cliff at
It seems sensible to try and vote to slow down the speed instead of accelerating lol. With slower speed you have more time to actually stop the car.
I don’t even want the democrats to get their shit together. I want them to get the fuck out of the way. That party needs to go the way of the fucking whigs.
When Democrats move to the right in order to capture conservative votes, conservatives don’t believe they’re sincere. But the left does.
The AOC+Trump voters would also fall into that category
Very fucking right. It’s toe the line though if you’re interested in improving things in a very small way.
I’ve heard that before, but tow the line, as in to pull something by a tether, makes contextual sense to me. Folks are doing work trying to carry that argument.
The phrase is authoritarian. As in “you’d better get your toes on the line I just drew in the dirt, or I’m gonna hang ya, boy.”
Didn’t know that, thanks!
I do love it when you can justify using a different homophone than the etymologically correct one.
“eggcorns”. You can really do some fun ones. For all intensive purposes, they’re pretty much equivalent.
Privatized gains, socialized losses except instead of losing money, your daughters die of a miscarriage in the waiting rooms of hospitals
At least centrists didn’t have to move left.
Yes, they got to maintain their rightwing purity.
This is like being smug because you let the dog shit inside to make a point about how you never wanted a dog in the first place.
At least your purity is intact, and that’s what matters most.
Nobody let a dog shit anywhere. Trump gained like 3 million votes compared to last time, and Harris/Biden lost like 6 million. You want to blame someone, blame the 77 million openly fascist voters, not the < 1 million third party voters who didn’t make up a sixth of the difference that your genocidal candidate lost by. The fact that you want to go online and pontificate about how the real activists cost the election, when they didn’t, just shows that for you this is all about your ego and has nothing to do with justice or making a better world. You can’t even take responsibility for the absolute monster you did vote for. You can’t even get the facts of the situation straight, that’s how much you really care.
Bruh I am not the one going into every thread whining about centrists. Right or wrong, acting smug isn’t helpful to all the actual vulnerable people who are about to eat shit. I get that y’all are privileged enough that it doesn’t matter, but how about a bit of empathy for those who aren’t.
Oh yeah, the old “the only people in the US pointing out that it’s an empire that kills millions of people are privileged” line.
My point is largely that the hallmark of an internet troll is that they don’t ever engage on any other topics and then change the subject early and often. We are talking about whether it’s productive to come into every thread about US politics and be smug that Donald Trump won, and whether this serves any productive political endgame besides some kind of juvenile accelerationism.
I’m not sure what empire has to do with it or how you think Donald Trump is going to change that.
Now I’m confused. Who is your original message about?
Well of course! You’re privileged to be American! Now pick up that rifle, American Exceptionalism needs to be enforced by violent colonization under the guise of nation building. That IPhone was made in China after all.
*ignores voters*
*loses election*
“heh, stupid voters”
I’m glad we have a sexual assaulter to tell us how it is.
If Trump is a conman, rapist, fascist, etc. & Democrats still lost to him, says a lot about how shitty & out of touch Democrats have been, maybe you should focus on that?
Or it shows that when you are truly awful, racist, homophobic, transphobic, idiots, your children move away from you to the cities where they don’t have to talk or interact with you, which concentrates the intelligent and worthwhile portion of the population into blue centers that aren’t evenly distributed across the electoral college?
Which is generally true, but he also won the popular vote. That’s an indication that being awful is less important to most voters than being entertaining. The lesson I see here is Dems need to focus more on engaging rhetoric than silly trivialities like “competence” and “beneficial policy”
The dems need to give us universal healthcare and education and stop the wars. They won’t do any of the above except admonish and shame voters for voting wrong. Fuck them and fuck their braindead supporters.
The last time Democrats held the House, Senate supermajority, and the Presidency for a total of 73 days in 2009 and we got Obamacare. Then the Republicans spent the next decade doing everything they could to tear it down.
Trump’s narrative, despite being just a makeover of the political establishment, is that he’s anti-establishment. Democrats are just nakedly the political establishment with clown makeup pretending to be “progressive”. Trump’s message resonated with his audience, the Democrats’ message didn’t. Both of them are genocidal maniacs that are using nuclear weapons to hold the entire world hostage. Let’s keep our eyes on the target here.
He isn’t anti-establishment though, except that he’s more concerned with self aggrandizement than practical policy. Democrats are establishment that occasionally align with voter needs, Trump is 100% aligned with his own needs, which occasionally defy the establishment when there’s a conflict with his interests.
Again, this comes down to messaging, i.e. rhetoric. Not in content, but in vibes. The Democrats need to pay more attention to vibes, rhetoric, than content. You’re just repeating what I said with different words.
He isn’t anti-establishment though
He’s not, but that’s his brand. And one of the few things he’s good at is selling his brand.
What you’ve got is a bunch of people fed up with the system in some pretty fundamental ways, many of which don’t even know how to voice their problems accurately. One side sells itself as anti-establishment (even though it’s not) and the other side is nakedly as establishment as can be (to the point that they’ll ratfuck primaries against anyone who rocks the boat even a little) but is very vocally progressive when they don’t have to actually do anything about it or when doing so won’t rock the boat even a little.
Correct, because, again, they are better at rhetoric/messaging/branding. Again, that’s what we need to be doing.
So you’re content with democrats just lying to get elected instead of making material changes in their policy that make people want to vote for them? You want them to be the better option than Republicans… by acting like Republicans, with the exact same policy, but it’s a woman or a POC doing the policy??
I am not repeating what you said, we have fundamentally different understandings of this system. Trump and Biden are both puppets of an imperial machine. You are trying to play strategist for the Democrats, my interest is in ending the machine. You are under the illusion that Trump emerged out of left field and is operating of his own accord, I am aware that he’s just a slight rebranding of establishment policy made to look like some kind of wildcard.
Your understanding of my point is incorrect. I am under no such illusion. Your interest in “ending the machine” lacks praxis to accomplish that goal. My interest is in Democratic strategy only insofar that it is a stopgap solution to that very same goal. I have no interest in equivocating liberals and fascists. Certainly, the one begets the other, in the same way a tiger cub will become an adult tiger, but I am more confident in our ability to overcome a cub than an adult tiger.
I seek Democratic victory only insofar that I do not see a mature threat to the establishment, and I seek an establishment party which is easier to subvert in the meantime, while meaningful praxis matures. Slow descent into fascism is preferable to accelerated descent into fascism, because I do not believe that accelerationism is in the interest of the people. The risk of enduring fascism is too high.
Now kiss. We’re all on the same side here. Left infighting is what has doomed us all. Yes Trump is a disgusting capitalist bigot piece of shit, but that’s what the American people want. They may be too fucking dumb but they want the system to change and Trump is offering to flip the whole table.
Stop fucking fighting and let’s figure out what to do.
In 2020 Trump won 74.2 million votes compared to 75 million in 2024. Meanwhile Democrats got around 7 million fewer votes. The lost to voter apathy, not to Trump. That apathy was fed by propaganda.
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I am so glad I left this bubble for a spell, because it’s fun to come back and see all the great new propaganda tactics being floated. Blue maga is hilariously internet! Love that for you.
Anywho, blaming the dems for trump winning, and ignoring all the people who voted for him is not coping, but pointing out that cities are liberal havens is?
I guess I’ll get back to focusing on my job instead of lemmy nonsense, because this place has always been completely unreasonably biased nonsense. My job is in a blue state whose taxes pay for the welfare of the rest of this removed of a country, after all, so if I don’t do it, those trump supporters can’t buy his merch!
I had a different approach going in, voting for Harris to avoid this situation.
But now after the fact, I might still prefer incremental improvement rather than burning it down and starting over, but the latter literally seems more plausible now. Incremental changes are going full speed in the wrong direction now. The capitalists are currently on a sharp upward trajectory, not going down.
I keep coming back to the vote counts though. Trump got the second highest ever vote count for president in 2024. The only person who ever got more was Biden at the end of Trump’s disastrous first term.
If this country has the “opportunity” to rebuild in the wake of Trump 2.0, I don’t just worry but expect that a huge part of our culture will want it to be more libertarian and probably even more Christian from the ground up. I do not know my fellow Americans to say sensible things like “why can’t we be more like Europe?”
Yeah your best chance at incrementalism was probably going to be less voter shaming (since the dems lost anyways) and getting out the vote for third parties. Not to get them elected, but to pressure and signal to the Democrats just how far the country is to the left of them and what motivates us to vote. If nothing else, a party gets federal funding at 5% of the national vote, which might have been achievable, again, if we were less focused on carrying democrats’ dead weight over the finish line.
Turns out, you tell people their third party vote is worthless, they rather stay home than vote for something that goes against their values. The absolute least we can do is get hard data on what their values are.
I’m a third party voter who didn’t go to the polls this time for the reasons you’re saying and I can’t see myself ever going again.
That’s okay, many of us that don’t believe in electoralism are instead getting organized in order to make change in our communities and to be ready when the two big parties fall. Try seeing if there’s a PSL or FRSO chapter in your area, or head out to a protest on Jan 20 and keep an eye out for orgs you might join. Orgs like this have given me a lot of hope for the future :)
Hopefully that’s cause you think there won’t be a vote that matters instead of just because you didn’t like how this one went.
Voting. Voting at all even if it’s for nothing but a blank box is better than staying at home and wasting even the protest.
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But now after the fact, I might still prefer incremental improvement rather than burning it down and starting over, but the latter literally seems more plausible now. Incremental changes are going full speed in the wrong direction now. The capitalists are currently on a sharp upward trajectory, not going down.
I keep coming back to the vote counts though. Trump got the second highest ever vote count for president in 2024. The only person who ever got more was Biden at the end of Trump’s disastrous first term.
I’m glad you’re going through a wake up call. Btw re Biden’s 2020 election, he would of never had that support had covid not happened and the BLM protests not happened. Both events fired up the base, and trumps covid response didn’t help things. If it was just another election, say 2004 but biden was on the ticket instead of Kerry, he would of lost.
The capitalists are consolidating power quickly and there’s no one in power to stop them. But there’s a lot more of us than there are of them, and look at how they’re throwing the book at Luigi with trumped up charges because he killed one person who just happened to be important to the ruling class. Nobody else who murders one person gets hit with charges to that level. We need more actions like that, we need to actually threaten them.
Unfortunately I think the biggest part of my ongoing wake up call is not the need for radical change, but that my disillusionment with the American people got even worse. I can only hope that a very large amount of Trump’s support is from ignorance, because there’s definitely a lot of enthusiastic informed support of him too.
But there’s a lot more of us than there are of them
I want to believe. I know there are more decent caring people than billionaire capitalists, but are there more decent caring people than the capitalists PLUS their boot lickers PLUS their useful idiots? And with the momentum going in the wrong direction?
In total it seems like we are much more likely to be rescued by a small platoon of extremely motivated and self-sacrificing Luigis, rather than our society at large actually wanting to fix itself.
So this feels personal to you and I’m sorry you have issues with your family. It sucks but they are not everyone.
It’s not. My family is anti-trump, and mostly harmless these days.
But blaming the democrats for the people who voted republican is a stupid online trick that both sidesers like to use.
The fact is, if the democrats were “more in touch with this country” they’d all act like Trump. That’s what this country wants. That’s what this country deserves.
Wow.
That’s a heck of a response and I don’t want to legitimize pretty much any of it so…
Okie dokie then.
Now you’re roughly getting how I felt reading the comment from OP!
No. I am seeing a lot more anger about simple truths than I am feeling.
I don’t feel what you feel and I am alright with that.
Nothing the Democrats did mattered because the truth didn’t matter. Propaganda, lies, and foreign interference lost the election.
I’m pretty sure one major reason Trump won is that he wasn’t in prison. Which is fucking weird since he tried to overthrow the country!
And Democrats lost because no one wanted to vote for them.
I have a big hunch that Trump never went to prison because the Democrats wanted to run against him again. Surely if we fucked around again, we wouldn’t find out twice, right?
And why did no one want to vote for the Democrats? The lies and propaganda.
Also the facts.
And here again jumping to conclusions that are undue. Lies are hard to keep and you over extend their effectiveness. People want to believe them if they offer no followup and the lies could be cleared by a level of direct action in the public eye.
There are ones that are malicious and meant to eat at the more readily willing broken people, but that’s also a difference in who each party is searching for and cultivating.The centrists and liberals have absolutely stretched so far thin their generosity and miracles of modern society that people don’t feel them anymore and yet the baggage is still felt.
No one wanted to vote for the Democrats cause people are tired of the weight and want to feel free of it even if it’s falling to their doom from the floor dropping out. Now it’s a game of chicken for which party actually starts pushing real change first. And if the people stuck in the middle will freak out before getting pancakes by both.
The Democrats lost. And deserved to
More so than a convicted felon, rapist, and conman? Bullshit.
Because this election was about the need for change, as every one since 2008 has been. As the need has gone unaddressed, voters have grown increasingly willing to embrace more extreme platforms. That Trump is a huge piece of shit that definitely won’t help anyone is beside the point- he promises dramatic, systems-level changes while Democrats are offering tweaks and adjustments and generally run like it’s 1996. I would say they’re asleep at the wheel, but that would suggest that they’re not being willfully ignorant, which I think they are. That’s why they deserve the L, and why they will continue to deserve the L as long as they think that just being the lesser of two evils is a good enough platform.
I don’t know if there has ever been a US election that wasn’t about change. It’s an easy thing to promise because the voter can self-insert whatever they themselves think needs to be different. The candidate doesn’t actually have to have a plan beyond that.
The problem with systems-level change is that it usually comes with unexpected consequences and that can cost lives. Small changes may be less satisfying but they can gradually get you the same changes in a slower but safer way.
I think maybe a more helpful descriptor than big or little, as it concerns change, would be ‘meaningful’. People have been yearning for meaningful change. Meaningful changes can be big, but they don’t have to be. Obamacare didn’t bring about socialized medicine, but still brought some meaningful change. That said, it was just one step in the right direction, but failed to be followed with more meaningful changes to a system that we’ve been trying to fix since Eisenhower. The more meaningful change is put off, the more desperate people become and the more urgent the problem becomes, the more people are willing to accept dramatic and unconventional changes as meaningful changes. The Democrats, to their credit, are occasionally capable of small, meaningful changes, such as investment in rail infrastructure. There’s also unfortunately a lot of parading of meaningless change as meaningful, or apologetics as to why meaningful change isn’t convenient just now. Repeat that for twenty years and you’ve basically got the post-2000s DNC platform; a few scattered, meaningful steps on disparate items, couched with a whoooooooole lot of high-octane mediocrity.
Look at the Build Back Better act. It was to be the largest investment in infrastructure, social, and environmental programs since the 1930s. It was big and meaningful.
The first part, the American Rescue Plan was enacted putting $1.9 billion in public stimulus. Republicans chiseled down the rest to a fraction of what it was supposed to be. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is $1.2 trillion. The Inflation Reduction Act spent $891 billion on energy, climate change, and a few other things.
The problem isn’t that it wasn’t big or meaningful. It was. It was too big to easily understand and necessarily slow to implement. Real change takes time. More than a 4 year presidency. Real change doesn’t fit in a campaign slogan. Trump lied about making change and that is easy to fit into a slogan.
They all deserved to lose
At least Trump had people wanting to vote for him whereas Biden/Harris was relying on people to vote against Trump instead of for them
A hard truth is always less popular than pleasant lies.
I’m truly baffled by the small but vocal set of people on Lemmy who seem unable to grasp that if the Ds lose a US election, the Rs win it. This has been going on for some time and I am no closer to understanding how they reconcile this internally
Maybe because we don’t see the Ds being any better overall. On a lot yeah, but definitely it everything
So you think the Republicans deserved to win. Got it.
They didn’t deserve to win; nobody deserved to win. They did for a myriad of reasons. The democrats did deserve to lose because they don’t run a candidate they support. They run a candidate that’s the lesser of two evils
Are you familiar with the rule of excluded middle?
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It seems this one did matter:
Asked whether there is anything she would have done differently than Biden over the past four years, Harris demurred.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact,” she said, going on to talk about the administration’s work capping the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare recipients.
She appeared to backtrack on that answer later in the show.
“You asked me what is the difference between Joe Biden and me — that will be one of the differences. I’m going to have a Republican in my Cabinet,”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/harris-biden-the-view-00182883
And they still can’t figure out why they lost its incredible!
Even if she said she was going to have all Republicans in her cabinet, she would still have been a better option than Trump and the lunatics he is hiring. Nothing the Democrats did mattered. They would have lost regardless.
Better option than this mess? Sure.
But beyond that, if you need to wallow in doomerism, suit yourself. But I roundly disagree with this fatalism. The Democrats could have actually campaigned on the left. A few years ago Joe Rogan was hosting and supporting Bernie. This cycle, he was lost to the fascists. It is very clear that the Democratic party tried a strategy based around enticing moderate Republicans. They have been doing this for years. You as a voter, need to face this reality: the Democratic party strategy …failed. They need a different one. But suit yourself with self-defeating fatalism if you want.
It’s easy to say that moving to the left would be more successful, but I doubt it would. 75 million Americans voted for blatant fascism and millions more didn’t care enough to bother voting one way or another. People have lost hope that things will ever get better.
Maybe the wouldn’t or maybe they would. The only think we know for sure is they didn’t vote for the center-right version. That failed. Time to try the other one.
They really are taking to this idea that if they beat themselves up as the idea of the voter it will somehow lessen the pain or something? It’s weird cause it’s just wallow without action to take. I’m saddened that people are still there when actions need to start happening.
“You asked me what is the difference between Joe Biden and me — that will be one of the differences. I’m going to have a Republican in my Cabinet,”
JFC That’s a real quote? She really steered full force into the ground on purpose.
Nothing the Democrats did mattered
So what we saw was what Democrats did when nothing mattered? When there were no boundaries? They supported genocide. They adopted Republican border policy. They ran anti-trans hate in their own ads. They cozied up to Dick Cheney. They showed us what they really are.
They showed us who WE really are. They simply played to the middle to try to motivate swing voters and never-Trumpers.
They played to the RIGHT. It’s all they have always been and always will be.
No, they fucked up. Exit polling showed that democrat and left leaning voters stayed home, and less than 1% of registered Republicans went for Kamala. Trying to rely on the moderate Republican vote is almost as insane a strategy as relying on the Sasquatch vote.
They underestimated the degree to which the public had been impacted by propaganda and lies. They thought the public understood the threat Trump poses but they did not.
From a millennial perspective, it honestly reminds me of the terror threat level. After 9/11, the DHS would set a daily terror threat level in one of several threatening colors and the 24/7 news channels always had it just chilling in the bottom of their broadcast for years (of course it was always at nearly maximum leading up to invading Iraq, go figure). After a few years, nobody paid any attention to it anymore.
If the only thing you’ve got to offer is fear, eventually people get numb to that message, even if they should be scared. Imo, it’s hardly surprising that the democrats lost whe coming to the table with conservatism lite, small business tax credits, and “OMG TRUMP IS SCARY WOW” while Merrick Garland slow walked the case against him. I had a feeling we were cooked when Kamala started doing appearances with A-listers; it reminded me a lot of the tone-deaf gilded campaign run by the Hillary team.
What does Trump offer but fear? The illegals are coming to steal your jobs! Muslim terrorists! Dems are DESTROYING the economy!
Joe Biden, is that you? The public didn’t love genocide.
It’s propaganda that Trump is the anti-genocide option. It’s propaganda that not voting for the Democrats will somehow stop the war. It won’t. It will make it worse.
Ah so self flagellation in hopes it shows you repentant enough to not get punished or to feel like you will accept it better when you are damned.
A bold strategy and one that normally didn’t work for the weird hyper religious pious of the day either.Don’t mistake the cries of flagellation for anything more than whimpers of pain. It does nothing to make it stop and people would say anything to make it stop if they thought it would work.
DNC is stuffed by imbeciles who sold out. They are not here to win elections, they are here to make sure that democrats never shill anything pro pedon class.
More brilliant political analysts who still haven’t managed to figure out the reason both parties near-unanimously support genocide. Have a downvote, on me.
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
And notice where your outrage is actually directed here. Not at the people who actually VOTED for Trump. It’s at the people who refused to compromise their morals AT ALL, unlike you all, who completely compromised your morals in a failing bid to elect Mrs. “Genocide With A Facelift”.
Fuck Republicans, fuck Democrats. That moral superiority you so desperately want to claim, does not exist. You are the problem. You are the driving force behind the empire. You are responsible for their deaths. Take your attempt to blame actual activists and people actually struggling to make the world a better place, and shove it right up your ass.
You got the downvotes but not from me! Fuck these people. They’re so fucking dumb it’s painful.
This logic always leads to trump.
Funny how the fuck both parties ppl always end up supporting trump / gop
No, it doesn’t. It is literally a rejection of both Trump and Biden/Harris. And if you had bothered to read my message carefully you’d have noticed:
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
That I explicitly pointed out that no, in fact, people voting third party did not even make up the difference Dems lost in votes (or lost the election by).
Then run somebody people want to vote for instead of someone who’s slightly less despicable than the opposition.
Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.
Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I’m aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.
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We have a FPTP election system. Third parties aren’t a real thing. In my 50+ years on this planet, third parties have only had a minor impact once, and it was deeply antithetical to their goal.
How the fuck is a third party strategy not “electoralism”? You must realize that both dominant parties encourage third parties when it benefits them. The greens are almost entirely funded by conservatives.
50 years is, what, 12 major election cycles. So that’s your sample size - twelve.
Here’s a larger sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election#Popular_vote_results
Let’s go back to even just 1900. 1912 our first major upset - 41.8%, 27%, 23.2%, and 6%. Looks nothing like a 50/50 split. 1920 had a huge landslide, 60%/34.2%, and 3.4% behind that. 1924? 54%, 28.8%, 16.6%. More landslides through FDR’s term. Fast forward to 1968 - American Independent party with a staggering 13.5% of the vote. 6.6% in 1980. 18.9% in 1992. Only since then - namely, since Bush v. Gore, even though Bush pretty objectively lost the election both in EC and popular (besides Supreme Court intervention), have we really settled into the “lesser of two evils” mentality and been blaming third parties for any Republican victory, with the mindset we MUST vote for Democrats. And yet our methods of popular organization have become dramatically more sophisticated! We have instantaneous global communication, social networks, you name it. So what the fuck is going on? IT’S LITERALLY THE “LESSER OF TWO EVILS” MENTALITY ITSELF.
You are shooting yourselves in the foot, voting for Democrats and ruling out any real change, when the Democrats are so openly genocidal and corrupt. Even the Republicans, for their absolute lack of insight and vision and understanding, are able to perceive something’s wrong with the Democrat politicians, and that’s why Trump is able to sweep them all up into his camp. This has literally enabled the rise of fascism and the defeat of real populism (like your Eugene Debs figures back in the early 1900s). You run something absolutely uninspiring and awful and genocidal, among a voter base that’s SUPPOSED to be the one that’s more motivated by justice and equality, and they predictably lose. I don’t particularly like Bernie Sanders, but the Dem party wouldn’t even let him run, they ran Hillary instead, and bam, Trump won. How many times do you need to see this play out?
The last time we got a shake up in the two party system was with the civil war. Even then, we didn’t get three parties, we just replaced one party with another. 1912 was a notable but unrepeatable exception, but not an “upset”. We still elected one of the two major parties, and four years later it was back to Republicans and Democrats. It’s also notable that Taft and Roosevelt were both Republicans, so Roosevelt running as a Progressive meant that they split the vote and Democrats won with only 41.8% of the vote. Republicans were the left party at the time, so the left split the vote and got a conservative. Your exception shows exactly why third party runs are boneheaded.
Any third party that had the means to run a viable third party candidate would easily be capable of running an inside strategy to replace the Democratic establishment. Unlike the fantasy of a third party approach, that strategy has worked in the past. If there aren’t enough Democratic voters who are pissed enough at the Democratic establishment to do a takeover of the party, then there definitely aren’t enough to win a third party strategy.
It’s a protest vote and not a serious one. Nobody is seriously voting for third parties. What a great democracy we have!
Fuck this country I hope it burns.
You don’t understand how the electoral college works.
That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck
Your tired analysis fails to take into account the voting behavior of the ENTIRE POPULATION. You myopically focus on a prefabricated two choices available to each individual in the society, assuming the rest of the society is a GIVEN, and then it follows from that faulty premise that one of those two choices is strategic. But you fail to take into account that the entire society is free to vote for anyone. The fact that they can demonstrates the simple fact that IT’S A BAD IDEA TO VOTE FOR A BAD CANDIDATE.
Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.
I’m just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It’s not like this is a new argument, and it’s never worked before. I’ve jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn’t interested in playing along. What changed?
Do you understand it’s a cognitive bias that you expect a third party to fight to secure every single vote, but the two primary parties just get every other vote by default? Do you understand that that cognitive bias is the reason the population is voting for those two parties, out of the self-defeating mentality that no one else better can win? Do you understand that it’s the people who have actually clearly understood this problem that refuse to keep reinforcing the problem by voting for them? Your message is basically, “we’re all doing it wrong? fine, convince 330 million people that they’re all doing it wrong.” Are you planning on helping? Or are you just going to try to shut it down? All I can do is sit here and say that that millions of people are engaging in a demonstrably irrational behavior. The ten sane people in Nazi Germany couldn’t stop the genocide, because of the millions of people who had their own stupid fucking arguments for going with the flow.
Your bipartisan support is of a genocidal empire with victims in the tens to hundreds of millions. Are the two main parties literally identical? No. Are they both so incredibly evil that you shouldn’t vote for either? Yes. You want to call it a “wasted vote” not voting for a group of terrorists holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons, well, you’re an idiot.
it’s a cognitive bias
No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.
That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
This this this…omg thank you.
This is game theory people not emotional tiddly winks.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it’s a cognitive bias, because you’re, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the “lesser of two evils” mentality, or whatever else. It’s not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It’s that it’s a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Then there is the problem of corruption
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with “representative democracy”. I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is removed and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I’m complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you’re blue in the face, but you’re literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.
I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
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Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut.
When was the last time Republicans compromised leftward in any meaningful way?
The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.
The voters? Trump’s suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.
So Republicans moved to the left by… doing what Trump wanted?
God damn, just say you can’t think of anything because it’s clear you can’t.
Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.
That’s not a compromise leftward on the part of the Republican party.
Because Republicans don’t need to compromise. They sit there and let Democrats move toward them, secure in the knowledge that Democrats will be like “Look at this glorious bipartisan compromise!”
When only one side is compromising it’s called capitulation.
Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?
On it’s face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.
I hope you’re happy with the Trump administration you helped elect. If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
Oh look it’s a mask off liberal
oh look, it’s someone who uses liberal as a slur, much like the trump people you align with
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Triggered much?
Gotta love people so politically uninformed they’d unironically say that and think they’ve made a good point
You are the one here who’s concerned with imaginary moral purity. I am the one concerned with the actual consequences of this system. I will not take lessons in morality from somebody on the wrong side of a genocide.
lol
If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
No one’s going to trust centrists with their escape plans.
I agree with everything you wrote except having a problem with happenings in Gaza. Israel isn’t being aggressive enough
Well, that is disgusting and shows the gaping hole where your conscience is supposed to be.
It’s not just them. I feel the same way about every Church in America too and cheered when Canadians were burning them down and laughed when Notre Dame caught on fire.
Start from scratch with your idea of how morality works, because what you’re working with now is fucking awful.
bLuEmAGa were the ones who skipped an election
Bruh that’s crazy about that dude’s virginity
I’m so confused, why is that there.
It looks to me like a joke about not getting laid.
But it’s extra silly because it’s a dude talking about his virginity growing back, when afaik that phrase probably referred to a woman’s hymen growing back after a long dry spell (which would also have been a joke).
I’m actually less concerned with the OP but more with how George Takei feels the need to double down on it
George Takei and his family were literally in a camp when he was a child, because all Japanese living in America were “a threat” during WWII.
He understandably has no chill when fascism is involved.
Okay but again, I’m not referring to the the white text but the part of his virginity growing back
What?
I said “I’m actually less concerned with the OP but more with how George Takei feels the need to double down on it”
This elevator is a little crowded, I see why you couldn’t hear me
I like you
I was thinking that too, but I think it’s because the og post is Twitter and George Takei is BlueSky. He just wanted to credit the original post.
Yes either way, I would like to know why Takei is thinking his virginity is growing back
I think it’s a reference about how fucked we are about to be. Like Madonna sang… like a virgin.
I think if it’s growing back that’s a sign of very little fucking going on. And I’m not sure which Madonna song you’re referring to, but if it’s American Pie by Don McLean, that song is about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.
Tankies and their fucking accelerationism.
Capitalists and their fucking accelerationism.
Why not both?
Tankies in America are inconsequential and don’t exist in real life in any kind of meaningful number. They’re online edgelords who need to touch grass.
Capitalists have all of the power.
Name one tankie
Now do capitalists.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. (1)
If they’re too insignificant to listen to, they’re too insignificant to blame.
