I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don’t, you weren’t paying attention.
Plenty of us were critiquing Clinton’s campaign on those merits and were consistently talked down to in shocker the same way we’re being talked down to now. Shocker, she lost. I remember saying a few weeks before the election “We’re about to get Brexited.” I put my down for Clinton, because Trump is fucking insane, and that was clear before he was President. It was clear in the fucking 1980’s.
Being able to critique our leaders is supposed to be what is the difference between us and conservative voters. They’re the cult who unquestioningly believes all the bullshit that comes out of Trump’s mouth and diapers. I find it weird that people think we should be more like them in regards to our leaders like that would be a good thing.
You must log in or register to comment.
Critiquing Biden is not an endorsement of trump
Damn if lemmy.world could read, I’d put that on a shirt 🥲
Voters =/= DNC though
We got Trump because Clinton was largely uninspiring. She made herself this bland neolib that nobody actually wanted to vote for and then mocked Trump as a non threat.
Everything you said is true but I personally think the real reason it happened was because Clinton was a bad pitch and she would’ve lost to most Republicans at the time.
They should’ve gone with Bernie just that simple
But the DNC didn’t care about the primary votes and shoved her in because “we need a female president” or some shit.
I genuinely believe your average person both wants a female president and badly does not want it to be Hillary.
She literally ran the same year as Jeb “Please Clap” Bush, and this was after a stint at Secretary of State where she had to do an “apology tour” for spying on other nations.
People were fed up with political dynasties that year, and the fact that the Democrats couldn’t read the room is why they lost.
The DNC literally hid behind being a private club to justify putting their finger on the scale for Clinton.
What’s that old saying? “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.”
https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/
But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have – and we could have voluntarily decided that, look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the COurt well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.
Here is the Democrats pounding the law that the DNC is a private club, so nobody can say their own rules are fair but them. They never argued the facts about whether or not it was rigged, because they didn’t have facts to support that.
Some More News made a really good point: If we can’t call out our own guy without being told we’re helping the other guy, how is that… good?
Who’s saying it’s good? First of all, there is no “your own guy”. You don’t have a guy. There is no “your own guy” anywhere here.
Not helping “the other guy” is an indispensable condition in maybe getting the “this guy” to acknowledge that the whole thing is not working and to stop pretending this is buisness as usual as opposed to a slow moving coup that needs deep reform to prevent.
I don’t understand how these conversations are the same as in 2016, or in 2001, for that matter. In Germany it took some minor electoral increases and a leaked mention of “mass deportations” and they set off thousands of marches country-wide, involving hundreds of thousands of people. Trump is openly talking about mass deportations to an adoring following, Stephen Miller is planning mass concentration camps and Texas is actively trying to kill migrants.
And we’re talking about whether it’s ok to be more or less rough with what you say of Biden online.
I say this from a place of profound worry and fear. What the hell, man?
I totally get it. Trump is evil and we need to elect Biden. And that being too hard on Biden or saying “I’m not gonna vote” is being incredibly risky with the lives of the most vulnerable among us.
But there is something deeply wrong with our system if it allowed things to get to this point. Ever since I became politically aware in the 90s the Republicans have been a threat to rights and life. When is that gonna end so we can have a real conversation?
It’ll probably never feel like it actually ended, the kind of tectonic shift that would feel like a concise end to the days when we have to prioritise safeguarding our rights over holding whoever’s in the watchtower accountable for their mistakes would take something like everyone currently in political leadership going thanos snap
Yes. There is.
Holy crap, are people only realizing this now? This is endtimes stuff. Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire stuff. This is the period people will read about in history books about when the era of the last Cold War superpower ended and the post-liberal democracy era started.
This ends when the US passes a new Constitution. If you’re very, very lucky there won’t be a massive violent conflict, a full-on dictatorship or a Mad Max-style postapocalypse to go through first.
It’s the boiling frog that I can’t get over. The fact that people are still talking like this is an election cycle. It’s not. You can’t have an election cycle with just one candidate when the other guy is actively running for supreme fascist ruler. There is no working democracy in the US, and given the state of the GOP there won’t be one again until the US gives itself some form of multiparty parliamentarism, or at least a heavily reformed electoral system.
If the conversation is not in these terms… well, see my “worry and fear” comment above.
I think I’m further along than you are, because I remember being terrified like that. Now I’m resigned to it, and planning for a time when I might have to feed myself and help around my community. And reading a lot of history to help with the idea of falling empires being a bad thing.
Still vote. It’s better than the alternative. But this is the end times and things are changing faster than our government is capable of dealing with.
Fucking “interesting times.”
Okay, but it’s not the fall that’s a problem. Empires end all the time.
It’s what comes in between the fall and the next thing.
Because it can be a consensus that things need to change and a rational breakdown of how. That’s more or less how it went last time for the US. That happens. That’s an option.
Or it can be a big messy fight, which is more or less how that went immediately after that for the US.
Or it can be total domination from the fascists, at which point it’s no longer a US problem and one starts wondering if there is a “next thing” at all.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news, but hitting rock bottom is a lot of work. You don’t get to relax and enjoy the ride, I’m afraid.
I’m not worried. I’m sure you’ll get there. You can’t keep this up.
Oh, you can. For decades. Because if you don’t, a time will come when you don’t get a choice at all, and that can last for decades, too.
And no, I won’t get over it. The more disinterest and lack of urgency I see from people the less I get over it, in fact.
I think there’s a lack of remembered trauma, perhaps. It certainly doesn’t sink in to many Americans. That’s why the Germans immediately went out to protest, but the American frog is calmly simmering. You do you, but I find it irresponsible to keep everybody else in the splash zone.
In any case, I think the question has been answered.
Ah, yes, the fallacy where the Republicans are the de facto winners and the election is only up to what the Democrats do.
I mean, yeah, they ran a mediocre campaign, but there is a difference between “critiquing our leaders” and literally campaigning against them, and leftist in general have a hard, hard, HARD time with that one. Critique is for when you’re in power. You analize, you apply your newfound political power to create pressure, you postmortem what went wrong. Campaigns are for winning.
And every year we’re told it’s “not the time to critique the Democrats” because its “too close to an election.”
Dude, I’m pushing fucking fifty and this has been every year of my fucking life with this “this is not the time for critique” shit. When is gonna be a good time to critique them? Because it sure fucking feels like the argument is never or this wouldn’t have been going on since fucking Bill Clinton left the Presidency.
Okay, let’s break it down.
How about first half of the Trump presidency, when the Democrats needed to regroup, take stock of just how badly they screwed up and plan how to never do that again? I’d say that was a good time.
How about the first half of the Biden presidency, when the Democrats could actually pass legislation and position themselves to brand the nature of their term? That was a good time. Happy to engage then.
I know it sucks to not have an alternative. I get it. But going after the only side that is even vaguely functional because you think you’re holding “your guys” to account is not one of the set of options you have at the moment. Spend those good times to debate lobbying for deep, profound reform that unlocks the political system for more varied options, as opposed to making every election an existential choice between actual, explicit fascism and literally anything else.
Until you do that, these are your choices. Not liking the choices doesn’t change that fact.
How about first half of the Trump presidency, when the Democrats needed to regroup, take stock of just how badly they screwed up and plan how to never do that again? I’d say that was a good time.
That’s funny, because I was berated by people online for critiquing them at the time, too. Especially critiquing Clinton, how badly she ran her campaign, and how they had destroyed goodwill of progressives by putting their finger on the scale for Clinton. Sanders is a class act, and that’s why he stood behind Clinton.
Sorry, but I was still being assaulted with “BERNIE BRO!!!” during this time period, so you can take this perspective and shove it.
It really would have been a great time for the party to consider what happened, but they were busy doubling down on it being the voters fault and doing anything they could to shift blame away from their own mistakes. They were literally arguing in court it was their right to go in back rooms to smoke cigars to choose the candidate… come on…
Literally I have been talked down to every year of my adult life about this, because every year its too close to a mid-term election or a Presidential election.
So you still didn’t really address the elephant in the room which is progressives are never actually allowed to critique the party.
??
This wasn’t even the political climate during the 2016 election. It wasn’t the political climate immediately after clinton
In fact I remember people being VERY harsh on democrats during the 2016 election.
And I remember being shat on for having those opinions? Sorry?
People are always heated for political discussions, but that was not the discussion back then.
It was literally the first election I voted in. It was mostly people making fun of trump/hillary. It was definitely not a “not the time” kindof discussion. The bleak discussion currently going on is semi-recent.
Again, by whom? I could say the same thing in different communities and some people would love it and others be enraged. I mean, criticize Trump in a conservative reddit sub in 2016 and you’d get instantly banned with a vulgar message from the mod.
MetaFilter is actually where a lot of DC DNC members have accounts and have for a long time. It’s one of the places where you can get a good eye on actual professionals and what they’re thinking.
This has been a problem on MeFi forever and continues to be, just check out thread on Jeff Sharlet’s book The Undertow. Half of it is about how Chris Hedges must be a Russian shill, despite the same people loving Hedges during the Bush administration.
https://www.metafilter.com/202246/A-slow-civil-war
So yeah, people who actually work for the DNC at the national level, that’s who. Along with every shitty redditor in every halfway political sub. And just peruse this thread (gestures wildly) for current examples, thanks.
…If they’re a DNC heavy site, then go to a normal site. Even reddit is going to be more normal. It’d be like going to truth.social and trying to argue anything about Trump.
I’ve never heard of metafilter in all my life.
But I still checked the articles in 2016 (it has an archive) and it was definitely not the discussions we’re having now.
edit: I don’t see anything like that in the 2000 elections for bush either.
Knowing how MeFi works, I have a hard time believing you read all the political threads post-2000, post-2008 and post-2016 already. They’re not neatly threaded like here, and many of them are hundreds of comments line, but sure, you “don’t see any.”
What you’re more likely to see is a message from a MeFi admin “a couple comments removed” while usually leaving the stuff that impugns progressives in the thread, removing any pushback or discussion of pushback.
I’m literally on Lemmy right now, one of the most leftist sites on the internet, and I’m still dealing with this bullshit right now.
So I don’t know where else you want me to go where I’m not overrun with it?
After an election?
Post 2016 I was absolutely berated for thinking to critique what went wrong but sure I don’t remember what happened what is this gaslighting shit.
On reddit or something? I remember a fair bit of political reporting and opinion articles discussing how badly the Clinton campaign fucked up. You have a fair point that someone could have said this before she didn’t bother to go to Michigan and so on. Talking campaign strategy before it’s too late makes sense.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was poorly run, but she didn’t invent Trump or get millions of people to vote for him. Trump was set up by 25+ years of extremist Republican media - people like Limbaugh, Murdoch, O’Reilly - and enabled by the “liberal” mainstream media, who wouldn’t stop talking about his stupid shit for the 2 years leading up to the campaign, and are doing the same thing this time.
Trump was an outsider candidate that took advantage of anti-establisment sentiment. He was barely a republican before 2016. He won because Hillary was incompetent and the DNC didn’t pick up on the anti-establishment vibes, and picked the most establishment candidate possible. Yes Republicans have been attacking Hillary since Bill got elected, but that wasn’t news to Democrats that didn’t care.
Roger stone began working on the Trump campaign in 2012.
I believe he also ran Trump’s 2000 campaign for president.
Just a reminder that Clinton had deep press connections and so acting like her elevating of Trump didn’t impact other media sources is a bit disingenuous. It was a campaign strategy to elevate Trump, and that included working with “friendly” journalists.
Did people forget that Correct the Record were literally keyboard warriors employed by the DNC to go and do exactly the kind of shit I’m complaining about online. Shitting all over progressives and forum sliding?
You forget the democratic party isn’t the progressive party. Look at New Hampshire. When Bidens not on the ballot people are writing him in. Democrats are a big tent you can’t just boot out the centrists or the neo-liberals and expect to win anything.
It sucks, and it double sucks because fascism is looming and the Dems are pretending everything is status quo. They sit in a high tower thinking progress is something serfs will win all on their on and when they do they’ll be just as protective of the status quo. It’s delusional but we need these guys or we need to turn the 50% of Americans who don’t even want to be involved.
End of day we can criticize Biden but we don’t fucking have to keep on bringing up Hillary.
Democrats are a big tent you can’t just boot out the centrists or the neo-liberals and expect to win anything.
Wrong. You can expect the neo-liberals to fall in line in the exact same way they expect progressives to fall in line.
Progressives are not uniquely enlightened, and you cannot reliably expect them to be the “bigger man” indefinitely.
Hubris may have lead to Clinton’s loss but Trump voters made him win. If the powers that be didn’t fully understand the hostility of voters that lead to Trump’s victory then maybe they are not as smart as they think they are but not actively malicious. Trump is actively malicious and surrounds himself with the same. The Democratic Party may have tipped the scales a bit for Hillary but they also must have thought she would get the most votes and was one of the most qualified candidates from either party. I’m not going to defend the two party system but only one is pushing for ranked choice voting, electing by popular vote, and reducing voting restrictions. Not voting or third party isn’t going to make this any better
Not voting or third party isn’t going to make this any better
I made this post because of bullshit ass assumptions like this. I voted for fucking Clinton with gritted teeth and the same for fucking Biden. I know the fucking stakes, I vote for fucking Democrats, but even in the response to this meme I’ve got chucklefucks assuming they know what’s on my mind or what I’m arguing here.
What do you assholes want from us, a pound of fucking flesh? You already have our fucking votes!
Really? I voted for Jill Stein, and none of the discussion on Reddit leading up to it was deterring me from doing that.
Seeing the results of the 2016 election is specifically why I won’t be voting third party again.
I’m an old, I’d been aware of Trump for a long time. I wasn’t willing to risk him trying to become a dictator, the guy had been a suck-up to dictators long before his run in 2016.
Being willing to critique the party for failing to match the wits of a fucking orange idiot didn’t set well with a lot of folks.
The conversations weren’t changing my opinions either, they were just frustrating and eye-rolling, just as they are now.
I blame the progressive who call everything they don’t agree with racist and who don’t understand there is a center that they can just force left.
We’ll turn Texas blue might have been peak.
I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don’t, you weren’t paying attention.
I wasn’t paying attention?
The structure of government in the US, federal and state, has always been unfairly tilted in favor of “land” over “people.” The electoral college is the most glaring example, but even the concept of giving each state two Senators regardless of population, and then requiring bills to pass the Senate to become law, makes everything that happens in the federal government require the approval of people who have more political power than their number warrants. State governments are organized in the exact same way. The Three-Fifths Compromise did even more, giving slave states far more representation in the House than their free citizens warranted. The power and influence that comes with wealth tips the scales, too - again, in so many places where that wealth was extracted from human bondage and handed over to the slaveowners. Sprinkle some gerrymandering on top of that.
This was all in place well before any well-organized political parties existed in the United States.
The US has always, and by design, been arranged to benefit assholes. Trump and his supporters are just today’s assholes, and nobody else in the world is responsible for that.
A valid critique, thank you.
I mean, Trump won prettily handily against the other Rupublican’s is my recollection. I can agree that Clinton and her campaign wanted to face him, and helped, but I think it still would have been Clinton vs Trump regardless. I think blaming Democrats for Trump is similar to blaming Trump for Covid: Yeah he made the US response worse, leading to unnecessary deaths, but Covid was still going to affect the nation and people were going to die regardless.
I mean there’s an increasingly muddied line between critiquing the potential president, and supporting their opponent. Russia is almost certainly trying to push the latter here in Lemmy and everywhere else. It worked amazingly well in 2016 and they’re hoping they can repeat that for this election. With so much of that propaganda they’re pushing, people do get defensive about critiquing Biden. Sometimes rightfully so (“Biden is supporting genocide in Gaza, we need to vote 3rd party or Republican so the Democrats can change”) other times its not warranted (“Biden needs to fix his response to Israel to not turn off voters to him”).
Critique all you like. You’re allowed too. But I feel a lot of people draw the line at encouraging voting 3rd party, not voting or voting for Trump for this election. There may be a D candidate that’s more favorable than Biden, but statistically, the incumbent has better odds at winning reelection than losing. I’d much rather ensure that Trump doesn’t get reelected, rather hoping a new candidate is not only better than Biden, but also able to beat Trump.
But I feel a lot of people draw the line at encouraging voting 3rd party, not voting or voting for Trump for this election.
And here’s the crux of the issue, a lot of us aren’t actually doing that but are being accused of it nonetheless. We’re often still being accused of being “Russian shills!” even if we profess our plans to vote Democratic and that we want people to vote Democrat, but we don’t want them to be thoughtless cult followers like Trump voters. We want thoughtful, engaged, educated voters. Those voters question things, even when it’s not comfortable or the best time, sorry.
I mean, you know what your are. Ignore the ignorant conversations and focus on the actually thoughtful conversations. The internet has its share of assholes or mistaken people, all you can do is try to reach out the the sensible people.
A very good perspective to have to be sure. Cheers, mate.
The dnc should have let Bernie Sanders become the nominatee like the voters wanted, instead of rigging the primary for Hillary.
It’s been adjudicated enough. Bernie was popular among the voters but Hillary moreso.
He had a second chance in 2020 and the advantages that came with being the frontrunner early on. Still lost.
Then all the selfish pieces of shit who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries can elect him in 2024 all on their own.
Yeah they’re already planning on it. They’re not gonna waste time on people who will be forever litigating something that was 3 election cycles ago. Most Bernie supporters voted for Hillary, just like he asked them to. Wonder who he’ll support this time.
Yeah they’re already planning on it.
Great. Best of luck. Don’t blame us when Biden loses.
This, NEVER rig the Primary if you can’t rig the General
I voted for Bernie in the primary, and I wanted him to win. I think the DNC was shady but I was under the impression that the voters DID choose Hillary.
I remember looking at which areas in MA went to Hillary, it was most of the non-rural ones.
The DNC favored Hillary over a guy who wasn’t even a Democrat, which shouldn’t really have been a surprise. Regardless of the DNC shenanigans the voters still could have choosen Bernie, they just didn’t.
I mean it’s fine to critique the DNC as long as we don’t ignore the current political climate. We had an insurrection, confidential documents were stolen, spies were killed.
That president worked with his party to get several justices who have caused a divisive climate over abortion, which has had several state upsets due to it being more unpopular than initially believed.
The President responsible for this is currently buried in court cases. He is the presumed frontrunner for his party despite everything listed. The most likely reason he wants it above his dictatorial speeches is that he wants a pardon for everything he’s done up until now. That at the end of the day is the problem that nothing else can really beat out, but if we really had to add anything, it’s that he hasn’t even shown to be opposed to any of the things that are negatively affecting the current President.
Like I didn’t think he was a great President, but it’s pretty much everything he did going out the door that made it clear he shouldn’t come back. For all of DNCs issues, it was absolutely the republican party at the end of the day that made the situation we have today. The DNC was just incompetent to do anything about it.
I think the general issue with a lot of anti-DNC posts lately is that they come off as “We will vote for a party that doesn’t win on any level of government, just to show our opinion”
Which…seems to ignore that one party is trying to erode voting rights, which would make it hard to fix these issues long-term, and assumes that DNC would take it they lost votes to a third party…which lets be real here, if you already think they don’t pay attention, they won’t when you do that. It also comes off as a bit insincere, since if you truly are against the DNC…you should be trying to build the 3rd parties enough to actually win in some states, before trying to take on the presidency…I there probably aren’t even enough states that know who the third parties are to possibly get them elected at this time.
So yeah, mainly my problem with a lot of anti-DNC posts isn’t so much they make the democrats to be incompetent. They honestly are. It’s that they seem to ignore the the domestic threats coming from the other party, and bury into some completely unrealistic goals currently.
And yes, I will just say it: We have failed as a civilization. No actions will prevent another genocide in the current political climate. It is supported bipartisan. It is literally one of the only things supported bipartisan.
I think the general issue with a lot of anti-DNC posts lately is that they come off as “We will vote for a party that doesn’t win on any level of government, just to show our opinion”
I think this is mostly a valid critique, but this is the part I take issue with, and why I made this post to begin with.
That we plan on not voting for Democrats seems to be the automatic assumption of anyone regarding these posts. I even agree, some of these posts come off as pretty lame and like they intend to withhold their vote. Especially when a post gets removed and they move to another instance to post the same post again. That’s just spammy and abusive and doesn’t speak to a good faith argument, so I agree, some of the people with these opinions are absolutely shitty. I’m just tired of being a target because other people are shitty.
Why not find out what people’s plans for voting are by asking them instead of making crass assumptions and gross conspiratorial comments like “Da, daddy Putin!” that come off as just as wildly unhinged as Trumpers, assuming everyone who disagrees with them is a Russian plant. It’s fucking pathetic and I see more comments like that than thoughtful ones like yours.
Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful and well considered reply.
The irony is, this would have worked if she wasn’t Hillary
The real irony is she actually won, but because of poor campaigning, lost three major Democratic strongholds in the EC vote.
We just don’t pay attention to the popular vote here in the US.
Trump won because he embraced the “fuck it all” voters.
… and there are a lot of those.
I’d like to see Biden address them, and he probably already did, we just didn’t hear about it because the media turned down his microphone years ago. He needs to show his balls on TV to get attention.
Okay. Blame them all you want, just don’t stay home on Election Day. VOTE against Donald Trump as he’s the more immediate problem, then we demand voting reform…
I mean, my post is only entirely about people who immediately make such an assumption simply because I’m bothering to criqitue.
Why don’t you get your head out of your ass and ask me, or check any number of numerous comments in here where I said I’m voting for Democrats because I literally don’t have a choice.
But sure, all you fucking idiots coming in here and saying this shit fifty times isn’t exactly what I’m talking about.
No.
You sound like a reasonable member of society…
When self proclaimed “reasonable” people insist the only way to protect democracy is to act like it’s broken I don’t think that measure is useful. If you want to claim democracy is worth defending then I should be able to exercise the benefits of that democracy. But if you’re telling me I’m a bad person for doing that I have to ask you, a “reasonable” member of society, what benefit is democracy serving?
If we keep trump out but do nothing else, we’ve only delayed a fascistic movement reaching the white house, not defeated it.
Biden needs to put forward actual policies that address the conditions that are fostering the violent fascistic rhetoric, not just so that he can win in November but so that we aren’t dealing with a growing nationalism problem for the next cycle.
The people who are criticizing Biden now desperately want him to succeed by these measures, but don’t believe he’s yet done enough. Maybe if we were having this debate a month out from election day, then we should be panicked about the electoral calculus; but he has ample (or at least some) time to address the concerns being raised here. In a non-incumbent cycle, a primary would help refine the policy agenda for the general. So far all we’ve gotten is “we have to keep trump out”.
That is not a winning agenda (no matter how true it is). It didn’t work in 2016, and it likely won’t work now. Biden needs something tangible to campaign on, and right now it’s not clear that he has one.
They plan on doing the same thing they did in 2016. Beat voters over the head with “how great of a job we’re doing” while ignoring voters real concerns, talking down to them, and generally leaning on “if you don’t vote for us, you’ll end up with a fascist who wants to kill you.” Which in itself certainly feels like a threat. “We can skip the country to escape, you can’t, better vote for us!” It’s downright abusive and it has an unfortunately good chance at catching up with them this election and the only people who will pay are the US citizens.
Still voting for Biden anway. Don’t really have a choice if I don’t want fascism. Just don’t like being bullied into it by the people I’m voting for while they smugly ignore my legitimate concerns.
