This meme makes me so mad. It completely misses the point that the government is supposed to be working for us. They are here to make our lives better from our collective power. The right to rule is derived from the will of the people. You are misunderstanding how government is supposed to function on an essential level.
Making it out to be the voters fault because we didn’t like the shit sandwich that the were serving us is absolutely incorrect. Harris had zero progressive ideas in her platform. She ran on basically the same platform as the GOP.
As soon as you start putting the onus on the voter, you are putting our politicians up as the aristocracy. You make them into our ruling class. This is incorrect. They are supposed to execute the will of the people.
I’m just absolutely shocked that so many people are acting like the voters failed, when the DNC has done this to us so many times lately.
When the mass deportations -Trump’s cornerstone promise- are full throttle, please come back here and tell us some more about why Harris, a normal person, was the choice to be shunned as President.
It’s more that the left never shows up. Harris ran on abortion rights and democracy, and the left can’t even show up for their own human fucking rights and for mfing democracy. If they can’t show up for that, they won’t show up for literally anything.
Why vote when you can just leave it to the idiots?
Why comment if you didn’t participate in the election?
Cause your shitshow effects the whole world.
Well that’s fair. I only aim to criticize those that had the ability to vote and chose to abstain. I’m genuinely sorry for the global repercussions of this horrific decision by the morons in my nation.
Ah, yes. All of you *checks notes* 4.5 million eligible lemmy users who abstained should be ashamed of themselves. /s
I keep reading all this finger pointing from people that actively spoke against voting for Harris.
Maybe those who didn’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to complain.
I voted for Walz.
Dems suck at winning elections because for 40 years now their strategy has been a losing one of “try being Republican-light.” They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.
No your just going to go further right as a country and all the special leftist that stayed home we’ll cry how did this happen.
They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.
And you know what’s really sad about this? They don’t even have to be! Kamala massively outspent Trump. One thing the DNC refuses to learn is that there is such a thing as saturation in campaign messaging. Past a point, past a certain number of commercials, flyers, mailer, door-hangers, text messages, and on and on? At some point it just stops working. At some point you just start annoying people. Hillary massively outspent Trump in 2016, and Kamala massively outspent Trump in 2024. It didn’t matter. Most of those dollars were completely wasted showing ads to voters that were already completely over-saturated with ads.
Maybe you need corporate money for the type of wasteful campaign Kamala ran, but it’s not like she didn’t also raise millions and millions in individual donations. Even in the era of big money politics, it is entirely possible to bring in enough small donations to run a presidential campaign. All that corporate money that Kamala sold her soul for was ultimately spent preaching to the choir or trying to reach the unreachable.
The more right the US shifts, the more it will be controlled by money over masses. Unless by “rise from the ashes” you actually expect a successful overthrow of the US government by a people’s revolution which is pretty laughable in this polarized nation.
That would be cool, but I meant more metaphorically. Other parties have come and gone in the history of the US - now is a great time for an actual populist party to rise up and win voters from all political spectra. It isn’t just Dems who are feeling disenfranchised, and a large enough movement could pierce through the media bubbles on both sides to gain momentum.
It’s feasible, albeit pretty idealistic. I’d love to see it happen, but I’m a bit skeptical that the billionaire-owned media will support honest reporting of a candidate that threatens their power.
I’m a bit skeptical that the billionaire-owned media will support honest reporting of a candidate that threatens their power.
I 100% share in your skepticism.
This is where a lot of the online talk about “the DNC” gets me. Like sure, the DNC wants their preferred candidate as an organizing body I’m sure, but the media did everything it could to keep Bernie from winning the nomination as well. I remember people on MSNBC of all places talking about how dangerous nominating Bernie Sanders would be.
They attack it in straightforward ways (calling them “communists”, “socialists”, “Marxists”) in more republican-leaning media, and they attack it in other, less straightforward means in other type of media (calling the plans “stupid”, saying that they’ll “never work” that we “don’t have the money”, or “it’ll cost more in taxes!”).
I just don’t see it at all. I wish I was more hopeful about this stuff but with the individualistic behavior of the American populace, the mass media landscape, and the way the Internet has been sculpted into something palatable or even usable by the oligarchs to get what they want (perhaps even more cheaply than it was in traditional media) I just don’t believe it is possible to win with some “better message”.
The only thing I could see saving this country is a groundswell of old-style civic behavior where people largely tune out or drop off from mass media and social media and start connecting with their neighbors and building actual community. I am not optimistic about that either.
I agree with you with the exception of Bernie’s 2016 campaign. The head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, was forced to step down after evidence was found of her deliberately favoring Hillary over Bernie prior to the primary. This came after the primary vote of course.
Definitely won’t be televised.
Hahaha good one.
The more right the US shifts, the more it will be controlled by money over masses.
I’m curious as to why did you made this statement. Like do you think the US isn’t already fully “controlled by money over masses”?
I legitimately don’t understand what people think America is as a country. All I see everywhere I go in this country is an orgiastic celebration of material wealth and those who have it over all else.
We’ve been controlled by “money over masses” my entire existence. I seriously have zero understanding of what online leftists are even talking about when they talk about solidarity and community. I’ve lived in many different places here and I felt the same sense of individualism and capital above all else everywhere I’ve been.
I’m not saying money doesn’t control politics when Democrats hold office. I’m saying Democrats do more for the masses than Republicans, especially the Republicans that are coming next year. Trump and his cronies are very vocal about having already been sold to the highest bidder.
Oh, gotcha. Well, yeah I think I agree actually.
I keep reading all this finger pointing from people that actively spoke against voting for Harris.
I think that’s just your confirmation bias talking
Maybe those who didn’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to complain.
I’ll tell all the convicts, LGBTQ children and… every non-US citizen who’s going to suffer through another Trump term.
Be realistic. I’m being critical of eligible citizens who chose not to vote.
I’m being critical of eligible citizens who chose not to vote.
That’s not what your overgeneralising comment suggests.
Excellent job modeling both gaslighting and a strawman in the same pointless criticism, btw.
I’m not sure you know what these terms mean.
Fair point. I’ve edited my initial comment to address abstainers.
As for my grasp on vocabulary:
gaslighting: to psychologically manipulate (someone) usually over time so that the victim experiences doubts about their own emotional or mental stability
Exhibited in your suggestion that conformation bias is clouding my ability to read.
strawman: an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.
Demonstrated by your argument redirecting the focus to those who are ineligible to vote.
Ready to try again? Although you may have a better chance of convincing someone less literate.
Exhibited in your suggestion that conformation bias is clouding my ability to read.
Sorry, that’s not gaslighting. I was suggesting that your confirmation bias makes you cherrypick non-voters among all the people criticizing the Dems. It’s simply absurd to claim that only abstainers criticize the Dems. I did not try to manipulate you.
Demonstrated by your argument redirecting the focus to those who are ineligible to vote.
You said that “those who didn’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to complain”. I felt included, since I didn’t -ote, but I’m not a US citizen. Refusing to steelman your point does not equal strawmanning.
Ready to try again? Although, you may have a better chance of convincing someone less literate.
I’m trembling, when thinking of your literacy. /s 🙄
Stop telling me how great your farts smell.
I see. So you believe it’s not manipulative to attempt to discredit another’s opinion by repeatedly distracting from their point using well-known bad arguments, all without supporting your own opinion?
It’s no wonder Trump won.
Give and Take. It doesn’t matter. You aren’t selling shit if you aren’t offering what the people want. They wanted a rock to throw in a glass house and Trump promised to be that rock, not the Democrats. Yet, they will never learn this lesson.
lets teach through parable.
A drifter has been walking through a desert for five days without water. if he doesn’t get water in the next hour he will die. he happens upon a small oasis.
the drifter rushes to find water and all he sees is:
- a small murky puddle covered in muck and grime
- a bucket of watery shit
- a camel
- a dried out corpse
he looks at his options and is debating which would be better. he starts to move towards the puddle to drink from it when suddenly the camel begins to relieve itself.
he stops to consider drinking the urine.
you are the drifter. the shit bucket is trump. the puddle is kamala. the piss is stein. the corpse is the abstained voter.
which would you have chosen?
The choice is obvious, we eat the sand in hopes it will quench our thirst. Thats basically what we did.
welcome to corpse town!
population, 20 million.
A murky pond of still water might not be a good choice no matter how thirsty you are. The bacteria in it could kill you. If you’re thirsty and lost at sea, I hope you won’t drink the salt water. That’s the issue with the insistance that people should vote for Harris “to stop trump”. It’s short sighted and does nothing to address the long-term problem of, election after election, being presented two shitty options and told it’s critical that you eat shit instead of voting for the person that will actually fight for your values. Sorry the Democrats keep refusing to learn this lesson, but they are just as much to blame for Trump’s victory as the people who voted for him.
Out of your options above, the camel might actually be the safest option. You’ll at least get some hydration out of it if you don’t cook it to shit.
If you’re an hour away from dying from thirst, then a murky pond of water filled with bacteria, is better than a bucket of shit or camel piss.
bacteria may kill you in days. But you will die of thirst in one hour.
You completely missed the entire point of the exercise. If I make it any dumber, I’ll have to write it in crayon.
You were so close though. Go enjoy your cup of sand.
Lol, yeah, you’re right. My bad for assuming we would have to make the decision with information that a person would likely have in that scenario, like one has to do in real life… I think you’re still wrong, both in the example you attempted and the point you’re trying to make.
Democrats will need to work on offering people something more than murky water that might kill you if they want to get people to come out and vote for them. And why would I risk a deadly bacterial infection when I have piss available that I am reasonably certain is sterile? I’m honestly not sure why you think that’s not a good course of action, though I’ll admit I’m not a scientist and would be interested to hear a scientist/doctor’s take on this survival scenario.Piss is not sterile.
That’s exactly the reason that people didn’t vote.
There’s no civilization in sight.
Your options are
-
drink the pond water and get dysentery. Struggle to find help while you are slowed down by your illness and shit yourself to death.
-
drink the bucket of shit. Same problem just much quicker
-
drink the camel piss. It’s sterile, and provides some hydration
-
just fucking give up because all these choices are dire and no matter what you’re probably going to die because there is no sign of civilization or rescue, or another clean source of water, or things getting remotely better for you.
And you’re yelling at people for not happily slurping up the pond water and subjecting themselves to dysentery. Some people are going to have the fortitude to do whatever it takes for survival. And some people in that situation just give up.
People didn’t vote because of apathy, and no hope that things will get better in the future. Yes Harris is better than Trump. But she’s still a step in the wrong direction. Just because it wasn’t a running long jump towards doom doesn’t mean it’s not making progress in the same direction. You want people to vote for you? Inspire your fucking voter base. Give them something to rally behind. Make them excited. Give them hope. Give them a reason to stand in line for hours to vote after working an 8 hour day. Have strong policies that inspire confidence in your capabilities. Don’t make a large part of your campaign ‘at least I’m better than the other person’. That’s your selling point? Not how good you are. Just how less bad you are.
Piss is not sterile.
Analogy is not good, either. But kudos to anyone still trying to make it work.
Piss is also chock full of concentrated salts and metabolic waste that hasten dehydration. Drinking piss is definitely not an option.
Now you can take the piss and use evaporative distillation to extract the water from the mess, but that takes time and skill and know-how. It’s not as easy as, ya know, drinking piss.
-
You’ll jump through any hoop to say the voters should have drank more piss instead of saying the piss should have cleaned itself up
I don’t just mean Gaza, I mean democratic candidates need to find a way to excite rural voters by giving them an actual path to financial stability
Your parable doesn’t even make sense, the election wasn’t lost by educated people refusing to drink piss, it was won by republicans by getting uneducated voters to happily eat shit thinking it’ll give them super powers. (I mean educated on the issues like “what is a tarrif”)
Don’t get pissed dude.
you’re not supposed to drink the camel piss. Hell, you weren’t even supposed to drink the bucket of shit!
You should have drank the pond scum. Would have at least bought you a few days until you get some help for dysentery.
But you decided to eat the sand. You poor dumb bastard, now you’re drier than turkey jerky.
Sorry I didn’t really read your story
You should ask the pond to be less scummier
Also I’m not American, and if I was you don’t know who I would have voted for
You poor dumb bastard
Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It’s cringe worthy.
You’re in picture whether you like it or not.
you’re going to be in this photo, you just don’t know it yet.
Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.
How can I push you when I’m in the cart with you?
“Get out of the way! Truck! Truck behind you! Run, it’s not slowing down!! For the love of god, move!”
“I think this guy wants to hit me with a truck” *wet crunching*
What a reasonable and not at all unhinged reply!
Harris ran a perfect campaign. If she was running as a (pre-Trump) republican. However, we know that:
- She isn’t a Republican
- She banked on pulling in republican voters, instead of rallying her base
- Republicans will almost always vote for the R instead of policy
- She backed off of every single progressive idea she started with
- She trotted out establishment Democrats to lecture the electorate instead of inspire them
- Tlaib pulled twice the numbers as Harris as the only anti-genocide Palestinian in Congress
It’s Harris and the Democrats. Should people have voted? Yes. Is it understandable why people didn’t want to vote for the person telling them that she’ll be a good republican and support a genocide? Also yes.
You’re only providing half of the argument. The other half of the argument is the fact that if you didn’t support her, then you supported a fascist dictatorship.
And what happened? We got a fascist dictatorship!
Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.
But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.
But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.
By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?
As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.
I think you’re wrong about how the party sees non voters. When you don’t vote, the party treats you like a non voter and moves their platform to the right to appeal to the voters. When you sit home in an election the party doesn’t go “how do we get these votes of people that only vote when the stars align perfectly”, they go, “how do we get these votes of people that always vote”. Every far left person mad about the country moving right can blame themselves just as much as the party. People who consistently participate shape the future.
Source: I’ve work for the Democratic party and have a pretty good idea how they interpret voter turnout data.
Out of curiosity, how do they interpret 3rd party left-leaning votes, particularly in swing states? Obviously those wouldn’t have decided this election, just curious since you seem to be in the know.
If I understand their outlook, first job is getting people who consistently vote for Dems to be reminded and motivated to go to the polls. 2nd is convincing consistent voters to vote for you (that includes Republicans and third party), a distant last is convincing non-voters or occasional voters. I think the problem with trying to get 3rd party voters to vote for Dems is that the type of person that votes 3rd party is very difficult to convince that you’re an ally.
They could completely realign the party platform to fit with 3rd party and non voters biggest issues and most won’t shift their vote for many reasons. Disgust for the 2 party system, distrust that the party will follow a more left wing agenda, conspiracy theories, the needs to be contrarian or protect their sense of moral purity, etc.
While I’m not sure I agree with the parties approach to disaffected voters. I do think the amount of investment needed to get those voters is possibly outweighed by the amount of voters you may lose in the process. And that sense of inherent risk is stopping the party from taking a chance. Maybe we get lucky and they no longer see an alternative, but I doubt it.
That’s because fascism has never and will never be beaten at the ballot box.
I didn’t realize a wealth tax, 25k credit for first time home buyers, support for legalized cannabis, support for trans people, etc were Republican policies.
Are there more things on my progressive checklist? Yes, definitely. Universal healthcare, for one.
Part of being an adult is not being able to get everything you want when you want it.
Part of politics in the US is understanding that some of those things that Harris supported which resulted in a candidate that was not far left enough to get progressives off the couch, are too far left for other voters.
I don’t envy whoever is picking up the pieces at the DNC and trying to determine what the precise amount of leftism is that will get those 10-15 million leftists off the couch without alienating the 60-70 million that did show up.
This is especially true for the Palestine issue. How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate? Even if it was 10 million, there would still have been more who would sit this one out or vote Trump, because they’d believe the bullshit that the Palestinians are all terrorists. I truly wish it wasn’t the case, but I fear the post-911 Islamophobia and the imperialist attitudes about support for Israel would have cost a pro-Palestine candidate more votes than they would have gained.
I’m not saying that she didn’t have any liberal centrist ideas like what you listed, but that doesn’t mean she was progressive either. A lot of the policy ideas that were actually good were once on the Republican platform before Reagan.
Don’t forget about how popular Bernie was in 2016 before he was forcibly removed from the democratic nomination by the party establishment or how popular Tlaib, AOC, and Omar have been. Don’t forget about how down-ballot races in this cycle, while brutal to Democrats, didn’t push out many progressives. Progressivism is far more popular than the democratic party is willing to admit or fight on, because the party is owned and controlled by the same class currently oppressing us; the billionaires. If a candidate like Bernie presents a real path, they will force the person out. It’s not strictly an issue with the Overton window.
Here’s the thing about the choice facing people in the election: it doesn’t matter anymore as a matter of the current political reality, because Harris gambled hard on the “good cop, bad cop” aspect of “he’s worse” and lost hard. That statement is 110% true, but it’s horribly ineffective as we saw in 2016 and again in this election. Islamophobia will absolutely increase, and Trump will fund the genocide until all of Palestine is settled by colonists. But once again, don’t forget about how successful Tlaib was in comparison to Harris. We no longer have the opportunity to find out if it would or wouldn’t have affected the campaign, but the indication is there that at least 1 swing state would have gone to Harris with an anti-genocide stance.
a wealth tax
Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.
25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.
support for legalized cannabis
You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.
support for trans people
She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.
The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.
Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.
This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.
How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?
No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.
Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.
Are we, the Democratic party out of touch?
No, it’s the electorate’s fault!
15 million Democrats, progressives, and independents condoned racism are at fault.
Democratic leadership blind and dismissive of the common worker suck and are at fault.
Both can and are true at the same damn time and Democrats and progressives all over the nation fucked us all.
Wow, that is some spectacular thinking.
Nobody is arguing the DNC isn’t out of touch.
however the electorate isn’t much better. Cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Nice try on the strawman though, better than some.
What strawman? When is it appropriate to hold DNC leadership accountable for losing the election, again?
The DNC will have its come to jesus moment and maybe come to the wrong conclusions again, but it’s still patently obvious that a massive number of people will vote against their own interests regardless of the arguments anyone made.
Yeah it’s hard to vote in an informed manner with so many obstacles to education. I suspect this problem is about to get a whole lot worse unfortunately.
Why would they? They’ve just shown their complete inability to pivot an iota, for THREE elections. That’s 12 years of nothing learned by the DNC, minimum.
Unless you consider that they don’t care to win. Unless they benefit from losing equally, or more as losers. Does Biden or Harris look particularly pained by this outcome, at all? They look pleased as punch.
Yes, the number of people on here who claim that withholding their vote to ‘punish the DNC’ and make them learn a lesson is helpful is too high. If the Democrats were going to learn their lesson, they would have done so after 2016. Believing that by not voting, they’ll affect the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t make them leftist, it makes them another flavour of liberal, who thinks establishment electoralism is a pathway to socialism.
A much more effective solution is to organize locally, educating people on real solutions and pushing for change that way, not by blindly assuming the Democrats will reflect on their loss and run a communist candidate next time.
I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.
What matters is policy. Real hard on the ground policy that real normal people can feel and see where they live.
When some wonk gets on MSNBC with a spreadsheet hooting about how much better things are with grocery prices or housing costs, that doesn’t mean anything to someone who’s begging for extra shifts at work so they can make rent. Those are aggregates and averages. If the 200k-500k bracket is doing better while the 13k-45k bracket isnt, the numbers still went up. That looks better in the data. But the people at the bottom are still suffering just as much as ever. They don’t feel or see any improvement because there wasn’t any. Not for them.
The health and performance of the stock market only matters to those on the bottom when it crashes and suddenly they’re paying more for everything. At no other point does it impact them in the slightest. Those record profits aren’t reinvested, they’re not used to reduce the strain on consumers. Its gobbled up by a few dozen shareholders. It benefits nobody else. And if an executive or CEO has the slightest semblance of a soul and wants to help consumers they’re voted out because the only responsibility is to those few dozen shareholders.
Healthcare. The ACA was a grand achievement. They took Romneycare national. Round of applause for all involved. But its still cheaper to do some form of Universal Healthcare. That would be the easiest win in history. And everyone would feel it immediately. It would help 100,000,000 people immediately. People who have been putting off medical treatment for half their lives because of the extortionist expense would immediately seek treatment. They would seek preventative treatment and raise the overall health across the country. Obesity rates drop, drug use plummets, etc.
Marijuana. Literally every person I know and interact with in my daily life uses it. Do you know the number one reason I’ve heard from all of them? Pain management. Again, another easy win that is supported by everyone except the ghouls who were alive when it was called “The Devil’s Lettuce” and propagandized into believing its this terrible thing.
Hard Policy that people can feel and see in their daily lives. You can still court the comfortable liberals who care about the stock market and all that. They’ll be fine no matter who is in office. If they need an abortion it’s a weekend vacay to Zurich or somewhere. But you’re never going to hold any meaningful power again without hard policy. Because for decades now the republicans have cornered the market on grievance politics and reaction. To break through that you need something real. No more vibes based nonsense. It will not work.
I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.
tldr
edit: for the downvoters, how can I take anyone seriously if they’re not going to sit and defend their opinion.
You’re mocking someone for posting their reasoning in detail, and then getting upset when people downvote you without giving reasons. What do you want?
after this I won’t respond to you because your opinion is meaningless and doesn’t deserve my attention.
I’m mocking them because the message they introduced their opinion with is the same one above.
I’m sorry that reading long posts is hard for you. But don’t take it out on others. You can say that it was too long without the added abrasiveness.
And here, you’re telling me that my opinion is meaningless. Why do you do that? Almost everyone here has similar values and goals; and yet you’re lashing out at everyone, creating conflict and division. Isn’t that the opposite of what you want?
He’s right. He put together a well constructed argument for his position and you simply ignored all of it.
Harris ran a failed strategy of moving to the right and ‘business as usual’ when people want actual progressive policies that will address their material needs.
Neoliberalism will always move to the right and normalize fascist ideology over improving the livelyhood of the working class. Progressive policies are popular with Republican voters too, that’s the correct way to fracture the Republican base into voting Democrat.
Conceding to right-wing policies and disinformation, like on immigration, only alienates more of the Democratic base while bolstering Republican voters support for the Republican party.
Polls on campaign messaging
How to Win a Swing Voter in Seven Days
“The View” Alternate Universe: Break From Biden in Interviews, Play the Hits in Ads
Polls on policy
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
I voted for Harris and told others to do so too. Doesn’t change the fact that it was her campaign strategy that was responsible for the loss of millions in voter turnout. All the evidence and polling show that running on popular progressive policies that represent a change and improve the material conditions of the American public was the right way to boost voter turnout, the fact that she instead went to the right was a calculated decision that completely failed.
But the left doesn’t seem to care or are not motivated. The right has their shit together and people are voting even if they don’t agree or think everything trump has said. Where the left just seem to say oh I don’t agree with x I’m not voting. Roy vs wade is a great example they kept on pecking at it till they got it and the left bever got it into law thinking this is good enough.
If by left you mean the Democratic Party I agree. It’s important to recognize that the Democratic Party is for the most part running on the platform of neoliberalism. That’s been the case since Third Way Politics. The issue is that, while the Democratic Base is progressive, the Democratic Party is instead still centered on neoliberalism.
That’s an important distinction because neoliberalism is fundamentally at odds with progressive legislation that improves the material conditions of the American public, at the expense of capital accumulation of corporations.
There are only a small amount of progressive Democrats within the Democratic Party, which include Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of The Squad. As a whole, even the Democratic Party works against progressive policy which is exactly why we’ve been seeing this disconnect between the Party and the Base.
Progressive policies and change can only be created and mobilized through grassroots movements. Republican policies, on the other hand, are entirely funded by corporate profits. That includes the entire manosphere, from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to Fix News to individual conservative content creators like Ben Shapiro.
That’s precisely why we need to organize more. Neither of the two parties have the interest of the working class at heart. Only by creating our own organization like through groups like the DSA and Unions do we have any kind of power to demand progressive policies that will improve our livelyhood and communities
At the risk of being a pedant, no reason to think that person is a man. They did articulate the argument tho, for sure. And you did too.
Honestly, if they do the same things next cycle, I’ll be more inclined to vote green.
The electorate picked the racist rapist trump, that’s what represents America.
To say that a political party should stray further from what the majority of Americans that stepped up to vote for is what is out of touch.
It represents a large portion, but progressive policies are widely popular. Even in states Trump won there were votes passed to protect abortion access and increase minimum wage.
Most people vote based on vibes, and there were no progressive or positive vibes put forward by the dems this campaign. They signaled a ‘lethal military’, tighter borders, and sought endorsements from prominent Republicans, trying to win votes that would never go to their party anyway, alienating anyone who might have believed in the genuineness of the dems as ‘progressives’.
Eh if the left are not going to bother to vote then who cares and they shouldn’t cater to them. Go more right split the vote at least those people vote. The ones who don’t don’t matter.
Way more than two options here.
I voted for Harris, and I encouraged others to as well. And I think the Democratic leadership royally fucked up here.
The polls kinda sucked in the end, and I think one reason is that folks were embarrassed to admit they were voting for Trump. That to me says that they voted for him not because he’s a racist sexist pig, but in spite of this.
But the polls did afaik get that the economy was hugely important. And the Democrats failed here both in current policy (groceries got more expensive over the course of Biden’s term), and in proposed policy messaging. No one cares about home buyer credits if you can’t afford groceries. (And no, I don’t think Trump has a plan to lower prices aside from shady back room deals that will ultimately cost us big — but voters want something new…)
To be clear, I voted for Biden, I voted for Harris, and I’m pretty scared about the future. But the Democrats need to learn something from this or it’s same story in four years. Maybe the lesson is “we can’t count on the left in this country to vote for us by default,” and maybe the lesson is, “for the love of God raise hell if the cost of living goes up, and do it in a way that appeals to the lowest common denominator.”
I agree, the Democrats should learn something. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to do anything about it again considering Trump won’t never leave office as long as he lives.
They’re screwed either way the Supreme Court is going to be so stacked on the republican side. They well control everything even if the dems have a president in.
If those 20 million voters actually voted I have the distinct feeling that we would have had a very weak, but still there, blue wave.
But we’ll never know now.
I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.
If putting a Republican administration in place that will bend over for corporations causes lower grocery prices, doesn’t that just prove that corporate greed was the main driver all along? Why can’t people who voted Trump for these reasons understand that?
If voters keep voting like this, corporations are just going to purposely raise prices whenever someone they don’t like is in power, and the sheep will just fall for it and we’ll never be able to hold these corporations accountable.
I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.
Completely agree. I think it’s a “you break it you buy it” situation with voters.
And it’s not based in reason — Biden’s administration was staring down the barrel of a recession, and yet here we are, having completely avoided it. That’s a pretty successful navigation of the economic hand that Biden was dealt, if you ask me. But at the end of the “day groceries more expensive” = “we need someone else in the white house” for a lot of voters, I guess.
I was a naysayer in 2020, I thought the DNC was repeating the mistakes of 2016 by putting up a moderate but I was wrong.
I was practically giddy when I heard that the FTC was finally going after these corporations.
I was thinking that there’s no way they can blame the Dems for what happens in the next two years, but I’m guessing the post-reality anti-facts crew will find a way.
they were wrong in 2020. there is a reason biden ‘promised to be a single term president’ initially and then immediately retracted once he won.
The problem wasnt biden’s economic policies during his term. its that he (and harris) demonstrated an profound lack of understanding of the daily experience of working americans. those 20 million people are likely individuals who have mentally checked out from politics because its not worth their time anymore due to the parties being essentially identical economically. As I’m going to do outside of my local elections going forward. its just not worth it anymore to try and support the dems.
The DNC has run the exact same playbook for 3 elections in a row. If you still think they’re coming to save us, you have more processing yet to do.
Harris was literally campaigning with the Cheney and Clinton families. She made herself the center of a Venn diagram of two of the most politically reviled characters in modern American history. A politically savvy leadership doesn’t make a shit sandwich and then expect people to want to take a bite.
What is important is the next steps. It is obvious that the left will not win unless we are unified. Go volunteer, use these next four years to try to create the Democratic party you want to see. Make them reliant on your help and use that to push the items you are passionate about. Or you can sit on the outside and watch this country fall while complaining that the people who are actually doing something aren’t doing enough.
You do, of course, understand that presenting this as a trolley problem implies not voting is a justifiable choice?
Yep, if you don’t have the courage to sacrifice something for a cause bigger than yourself, that is your choice. Just don’t shit on the people who are trying to push the USA in a better direction.
Unsurprisingly, no, that’s not what the trolley problem is about.
Yep, if you don’t have the courage to sacrifice something for a cause bigger than yourself
For example, this is fascist retoric. If you understood the trolley problem, you might realise why.
You’re asking a fish for the best way to climb a tree
I know. I normally wouldn’t, but it keeps trying to lecture others on tree climbing, so I thought I could at least try and help it get the basics right.
I hope you have a better plan for pushing the Palestine Movement than sitting on the sidelines and saying your hands are clean.
Palestine? I’m talking about philosophy of ethics.
I wish y’all luck. I’ll be way on the outside of this country watching it fall.
Understandable, tbh. It is very hard to have hope after watching so many people vote against their own interests or stand by and watch this happen. I am hoping this presidency opens the eyes of Americans to how life changing voting can be.
It’s so fun to blame one single group for a national failure. It’s fun, but it just doesn’t make any sense.
The sad thing is that we all predicted this blame game would occur. And you can use almost the same words and almost the same reasons and blame a different group, and it sounds about as convincing.
I voted for her. The Democrats are still at fault.
Yep, fuck the non voters for their ignorance, fuck the Dems for being a lesser evil in the first place.
Absolutely. It’s a two way street here.
People need to stop turning on each other though. What’s done is done. The left has always been divided but right now we really need to start pulling ourselves together.
The lesser evil is literally the better candidate.
The trump voters and the people who sat out the vote have that on their consciences.
They are still evil though, why it always a choice of “evil vs evil”? We don’t have to have this electoral system, we don’t have to have these candidates, humanity can do so much better. The only way anyone against genocide or the corporatist status quo could show disagreement is by not voting. If democrats always have the lefts vote no matter what, then they wouldn’t even have to be lesser evil.
This thinking got you a Donald Trump presidency again.
I’ve been a proud American my whole life and now I’m in the middle of a move to another country to protect my family so I’m pretty bitter about this topic right now.
This thinking is a small minority of thought among voters. Thank you for believing us leftists are such a powerful bloc though. I can’t move to protect myself and many others can’t, I’m glad you are privileged enough to escape. If the democrat establishment actually believed Trump was such a major threat to democracy and life why wouldn’t they do more to stop it? They can use the national security state to kill whoever worldwide, couldn’t they have said Trump was a threat to national security?
I’ve lost faith in this American experiment.
Too many people voted for Trump and too many people sat out a vote to keep him out of power again.
If you think the answer is to have the government kill him then I’ve lost faith in you too.
I don’t think they should do that but if they really believed he was Hitler 2.0 why wouldn’t they? They have no problem killing people everyday.
I don’t think we should lose faith in people, that’s what all those in power want. The American people are constantly propagandized, most people can’t trust what information is true or false especially when it comes to politics. I just think all the blaming of average progressive voters I’ve seen is misplaced.
Not voting does nothing. Now you have trump. And who ever else is next. If the left don’t vote nobody well care about them and they can sit in their house winning about nobody represents me.
I voted, but NGL I’m gonna say I supremely doubt his ability to pull off an actual coup for longer than like, a week, maybe. What’s the over under on whether or not some Secret Service or CIA agent claps him within 24hr? I’ll take the bet so long as “he doesn’t even get that far” is a wash.
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If your candidate loses, its the voters fault. If my candidate loses, its the candidates fault.
if orange is black and black is spaghetti, Halloween is 16 inches away.
see, I can make nonsensical arguments too.
Two things can be true at once.
Everyone who didn’t vote, voted third party or for Trump, or encouraged others to do the same, supported fascism coming into power in this country.
Harris failed her country when it needed her, specifically, most; and the Dem leadership in general failed the country grotesquely in the same manner.
Absolutely!
By your incompetence combined, we are a fascist nation!
Fuck.
Captain Planet: uh, why did you vote IN all of the people I’ve been catching and stopping?
They were convinced he was becoming the Don Cheadle version.
a) Don Cheadle is awesome
b) No capitalist would support even this version. Free human trees? Where’s the surplus value to exploit? Have you not considered next quarter’s EPS?
It would be a green washer’s wet dream. Eliminate everyone you don’t stand to turn a profit from by turning them into “ethically sourced” lumber. You get a steady source of lumber to sell to IKEA and other furniture companies with a sketchy way to control your carbon footprint offset.
And everyone who didn’t vote failed their country and should stop complaining.
The whole “Democrats are to blame” thing just seems like a continuation of the media bullshit that we saw through the entire campaign.
Harris was expected to be perfect, but Trump got a pass from the media because everyone already knew he was a shit show and was numb to it. 70+ million people voted for him, even after seeing exactly what he was like for four years and even after he ran an even nastier campaign than last time.
Am I the only one calling bullshit? Trump voters are to blame for Trump, first and foremost. Could the DNC have done better? Sure, but the armchair generals on Lemmy are making it sound like they have all the answers and if they were in charge at the DNC, surely they would have been able to run a campaign that could have beaten Trump.
Clearly it’s not that easy folks, Trump and the current anti-facts movement in the US are a huge problem that does not have an easy solution.
Oh wait, it did… the solution was to unite behind an imperfect candidate like we did in 2020, this time with a younger, better spoken and arguably more exciting candidate.
I’m not so willing to give the DNC a pass.
Is it easy? No. But it’s not like the DNC has tried numerous strategies and had brilliant plan after brilliant plan fail despite their well-considered attempts. The DNC algorithm for finding a candidate is quite simple:
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Survey the existing party ranks.
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Find the highest-ranking centrist within the party you can.
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Ideally, don’t have a primary at all. But if a primary cannot be avoided, throw the full weight of the party apparatus behind that person before the primary and do everything possible to sabotage anyone else during the primary.
2016 was a coronation, with massive numbers of superdelegates endorsing Hillary before the first primary vote was cast, putting their thumb on the scale. 2020 saw the DNC actively collude against Sanders. When it looked like he was about to win the primary, they arranged that all the centrist candidates except Biden drop out, while leaving Warren in to dilute the progressive vote. The ONLY reason Biden got the nomination was because the entire party leadership structure colluded to get the other centrists to drop out, ensuring his victory. And of course, in 2024, well you’re aware of that clusterfuck.
The lesson here really isn’t that hard. Primaries exist for a reason! Competitive primaries ensure that your candidate can handle themselves well, and that they actually have some broad support among the electorate. They’re a trial by fire that only fools skip.
I CAN do better than the DNC. I can do better than the DNC because I have some humility and realize that I have no business trying to select who the next ideal democratic candidate is. If I ran the party, I would adopt the following rules:
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Every election must have a primary. Even if an incumbent is running, a full competitive primary will still be held. The incumbent president should receive no advantage in that primary other than name recognition.
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Some process to prevent the kind of candidate collusion that occurred in 2020. Any candidate that is found to have done this should be ineligible to receive the party’s nomination.
The ONLY arbiter of who should win the nomination should be the voters. Candidates need to arise from natural political movements that arise free of central DNC influence. The party shouldn’t play favorites, and it shouldn’t nuke candidates just because party leaders don’t like them.
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