- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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To be fair, the Republicans did all these same things and won all three branches, so…
Turns out people who want those things can vote for Republicans. Who offer more of those things!
And the people who did not want those things stayed home.
It shouldn’t have to be repeated so often that maybe Republican voters aren’t who the Democratic party needs to be gearing itself to attract.
Republicans had a primary.
This point needs to be driven home over and over and over again. The democrats haven’t held a real primary where the DNC operatives weren’t interfering since 2008! which coincided with the election in a landslide of Obama after he won an extremely competitive primary.
Democrats learned the wrong lesson from that election, they thought it was identity politics that won the landslide. No idiots, it was democracy itself. Of course being the first black man to be president helped him but having an appealing platform that outcompeted everyone else’s (and a better record re Iraq war, he voted against it as senator unlike Clinton) won him the popular mandate that led to the landslide in the general. Against a formidable candidate! John McCain was no joke and I think todays democrats and even progressives would be thrilled to have him as president if he were still alive compared to our current options.
They’ve disenfranchised so many voters with their shenanigans, that it has cost them 2 out of the last 3 elections, and the person they had to beat should have been the most easily defeated candidate in the history of the United States. I would have voted for a literal dog over trump. At least a dog wouldn’t intentionally burn the country to the ground so he could rule over the ashes.
I would vote for a dog over any human let’s be real. Wouldn’t you?!
They would of lost three elections if covid never happened. Biden got in by the skin of his teeth on that one when it shouldn’t of even been close. The fact that this election is a Republican landslide is just fucking embarrassing.
most easily defeated candidate
He got 70 million votes, that’s not “easily defeated”.
Because right wingers want that and left wingers don’t, that’s some surprising maths.
Actually true. The Republican politicians at the time hated Trump in 2015
There is no single group of people on the planet Earth as adept at shitting and falling back in it as the Democrats.
They turned “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory” into an artform.
I don’t think there has ever, in history, been a group capable of doing that at this scale other than the Democratic Party. They are the greatest to ever do it.
“Voters voted for the choice furthest to the right because they wanted the choice on the left to be more left”
Yes. People want a populous movement. In the absence of left-wing populism (like socialist reforms), they will take right win populism (fascism).
Democrats campaigned on making billionaires pay their fair share and addressing health care and student loans etc so socialist reforms. But the majority of voters were still convinced that that would make them worse off unfortunately.
That might have been in the footnotes of the DNC platform, but Kamala said none of that.
Here’s a quote from Stephen Semler’s newsletter:
For example, in this video clip, Stephen Colbert asks Harris, “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?” Harris replies: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”
First, that doesn’t answer the question. Second, that description applies to literally everyone except for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. This is the quality of candidate you get when the Democratic Party chooses one for you.
When it was being discussed who would replace Biden before he dropped out, many black abd female voters were pissed it was even up for discussion considering Kamala was the vice president. They saw it as her job to be next in line after Biden.
If someone else was chosen all those votes would’ve been lost and we would still have lost.
Since we lost anyways, I would have preferred to have an actual primary process, even if it was a very abbreviated one at the convention. Destroying democracy to save democracy never made sense to me.
It’s easy to say that in hindsight.
Many many many people were saying that the entire time. It has been clear to anyone not drinking the Biden kool aid that he hasn’t been as lucid as he used to be, and many people said that if we had debates and Joe Biden won, at least we would have given others a voice. Anyone who supported Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, etc. especially was infuriated there were no debates, just a coronation. Many people were mad that certain states even canceled the democratic primaries. When Biden dropped out, it would have not been that strange for several prominent democrats to throw their hats in the ring - Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, etc. and at least have some sort of debate at the convention.
Did they? If they did, then they did a terrible job of it, since many people didn’t hear that message. The message that everyone heard over and over again is “I’m not trump”. Besides, promising to get rid of student loans as a campaign promise when you just spent 4 years proving that you can’t really deliver on that promise seems unwise.
They did and it was loud and clear and everyone I know that voted republican did so because they thought democrats were bad for the economy and polls showed that.
You’re scapegoating democrats for not doing enough when really there just wasn’t enough voters that supported them because of right wing propaganda.
And all of that populist talk came to a grinding halt once companies like Black Rock started drafting economic policy.
Biden campaigned on similar promises and ideals like resolving student debt and improving the economy. Even personally relevant promises like creating a public health jobs corps (relevant to my degree and field of study). The only thing he sufficiently accomplished were the initial vaccination efforts, but it’s as if we stopped having an actual president into and after 2022: The filthy rich managed to get exponentially richer with this war-supply economy and stock market presidency. My student debt is still a burden in the back of my mind and all of my available graduate-entry jobs are either severely underpaid or shilled out to robots that also vet my applications. Until the war profiteer and stock market billionaires actually pay their fair share (which they should have been a few years ago) or provide citizens with jobs that can sustain a healthy living, any good socialist promises that are made are flat-out lies because senility and flacid mental acuity won’t even be a valid excuse anymore.
Biden tried to do things like forgive student debt and was blocked by republicans and you scapegoat him for it? That’s a good way to make sure no one tries again. But maybe that’s your true intentions.
Biden was actually fairly committed to the student debt forgiveness, but his blind institutionalism meant he couldn’t actually achieve much. He wouldn’t push to remove the filibuster until late into his presidency and refused to discuss stacking the court. He was the wrong man to meet this moment in history, and we’ll be living with his failures for decades.
Democrats never had near enough seats in Congress to actually expand the Supreme Court or remove the filibuster. He said he would support it but if he would’ve said more than that you would be blaming him for not accomplishing that also, even though it was never possible.
There were procedural methods they could have used to eliminate the filibuster, which he refused to even consider for half his term. They would have needed the House to expand the court, but if they had the balls to do it, then they could have run on it. Instead, they tried nothing and got nothing.
All it takes to eliminate the filibuster is 51 votes. They won’t remove the filibuster because that’s one of the rotating villains they love to utilized whenever they don’t want to do something.
It was blocked by the courts because Biden was trying to use measures that were not within his authority. He was advised multiple times on the proper way to go about canceling student debt. And he never did. Pelosi instructed him that he does not have the authority to use the measures that he tried to do. He talked about student debt as a pr headline.
Key word being, “addressing.” Medicare for All? Nope. They’re going to address healthcare costs. Student loans insanely expensive for the majority of Americans? They already tried addressing it. What are they going to do? Eliminate the filibuster to pass legislation? Stack the Supreme Court?
They’ve been a little better on taxing the wealthy, but raising taxes doesn’t mean much if you believe the revenue is going towards the military industrial complex or, “woke,” agenda, based on your political leanings.
Liberal half measures aren’t going to work anymore. They need a full-blown progressive agenda and the balls to ram it through whatever institution is in their way.
If democrats try to move left and they lose because of it and then people like yourself scapegoat them for not doing enough then they will move further right next time because that’s what the voters vote for.
Your response is an example of letting perfection become the enemy of progress.
WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? We’re two days out from a centrist campaign leading to the largest fucking bloodbath in recent memory, and you’re already trying to find excuses to not try appealing to the left? Rejoin reality, dude.
Democrats moved left and there was a “blood bath”. And your take is that we should ignore the polls saying it was because of inflation and move further left. You’re the one that needs to log off lemmy for a while and rejoin reality.
The Democrats moved left? Fucking when? They’ve been moving to the right my entire life, and I’m not young. This election they campaigned with Liz Cheney on arming Isreal, a harsh border policy, and adding Republicans to their cabinet.
And yeah, it was the economy and the inflation; it’s killing the working class. So why did she tailor her message entirely to the middle class? Their economic message was, “inflation is better, the status quo is good, your wrong if you think the economy needs to change.” Then they lost, and your takeaway is, “well, changing to a left-wing economic message would obviously be bad.” Get a grip, dude.
What part of it embracing war criminals like Dick Cheney, ignoring the needs of the working class, and mirroring much of Trump’s policies is moving left?
I know someone who didn’t vote and gave this exact logic.
What logic specifically?
He wanted an actual progressive and refused to vote for a Democrat since the Democrats aren’t embracing progressivism, despite the fact that not voting for a Democrat means there’s a greater likelihood that we end up even further from progressivism.
In short: the exact logic in your comment.
I know many people that voted democrat in 2020 and switched republican this year because they thought inflation was caused by Bidens progressive policies. The polls support my experience:
Stop it Patrick, you’re scaring the liberals. Imagine how shocking it must be for reality to prove that the leftists were correct about everything this entire time. Again.
Really weird how leftists have a 100% accuracy rate about all of history going back 150 years, but I’m sure the liberals will take some Ws eventually.
Just keep barreling towards fascism, libs! I believe in you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
Primaries happened. Biden won it, Harris likely wouldn’t have, but by the time Joe dipped it was too late to do the process again.
Oh, you mean the primary where no one else had universal ballot access? Where there was only one actually viable challenger, Dean Phillips, who the Democrats drove out of politics afterwards? That primary?
Like, FFS, even the pundit class doesn’t pretend that was a serious primary. Stop pretending a ceremonial vote means something.
You really think Joe wouldn’t have won in a more crowded field? He was the incumbent. It’s practically a given they’ll get the nod with token effort. The last time the incumbent actually almost kinda sorta had a challenge was 1992, it was Bush Sr., and he still shat all over them like 75%/25%. Even Carter in 1980 got the nod and he was polling at like a 28% approval rating at times. Stop pretending that a full primary wouldn’t have just been throwing money into a dumpster.
Now if you want to say Joe should have held to what he was considering in 2019 and not running a second term then we’d be in absolute agreement. His hubris fucked all of us.
You really think Joe wouldn’t have won in a more crowded field?
In a real primary? Fucking yes, are you fucking kidding me? The man couldn’t get through a single debate against Trump without looking like a dementia patient. You think he was going to make it through the same process that got him elected in 2020? A process he only got through because the party coordinated around him to block Sanders? You’re out of your fucking mind if you think he be the nominee if he had to get on stage with a single primary opponent.
These people are fucking delusional and the gaslighting is out of control. A real primary would of produced a democrat winner in the general.
In a real primary? Fucking yes, are you fucking kidding me?
If Carter got the nod, then Biden 100% would have. Shit, Trump got the nod too in 2020 and his approval rating never broke 50% his entire disasterpiece of a presidency. The only time a elected incumbent didn’t get the nod was Franklin Pierce, in 1852.
A process he only got through because the party coordinated around him to block Sanders?
And that is exactly why he would get the nod. The big money Dem donors have made it abundantly clear that even milquetoast progressive policies simply are not in the cards. They’d do everything possibly including hired gunmen to ensure Bernie didn’t get the nomination.
OK, so, first of all, you gotta stop with the historical parallels, man. There just aren’t any. No one this old ever ran before. Carter wasn’t sundowning during Kennedy’s challenge. If there had been a real primary, then everything that happened during the Trump debate happens a little earlier; Biden shows a severe level of cognitive decline, the entire country goes, “Holy shit, this guy’s trying to sign up for another 4 years?” and we get a new candidate. We know it’s what would have happened in the primary because it’s what did happen in the general.
Second, you’re right, they never would have let Bernie win. My point wasn’t that Bernie would win, but that Biden only won his first primary because they coordinated around him to beat Bernie. They might have been able to win the general if there had been a primary challenger that could at least fake a progressive agenda like Obama did, but we’ll never know.
OK, so, first of all, you gotta stop with the historical parallels, man.
Hence why I also pointed out approval rating, and how Carter had a lower one then Biden and they still let him go again, and how Trump’s was dogshit and he still got the nod too. Unless you’re going to also say candidate approval rating somehow also “doesn’t count”, in which case we may as well stop wasting each others time because we’re clearly never going to see eye to eye on this.
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what point you’re even trying to make anymore. Your original point seemed to be, “Yes, we did have a real primary,” and when I pointed out that no one considers what happened in 2024 a legitimate primary your point became, “Well, they would have given it to him anyway, like they did for Carter.” That would seem to invalidate your original point, but it doesn’t really matter, because as I said twice, Carter wasn’t hiding severe cognitive decline from his primary opponent. Now you want to talk about approval ratings while again hiding from that fact.
So, one more time; explain to me how Biden gets through the scrutiny of a primary campaign, with real challengers, without everyone seeing his cognitive decline? Why wouldn’t the thing that forced him off the ticket at the 11th hour force him off the ticket during a primary? Explain it to me or don’t reply.
Liberals hubris has always fucked us.
And that was likely by design, or at least people think it was. Kamala wouldn’t have won the primaries, so the DNC rat fucked another primary to put their chosen candidate on the ballot.
“Primaries” where they strongly discouraged anyone from running if they wanted a future in the democrat party. A primary against someone with brain worms who’s not so secretly a trumper is not a real primary.
Snap elections get held in every civilized country
They could have called one right there
Universal healthcare exists in every civilized country too. America is special… and I don’t mean that in a good way.
Not our problem, Democrats decided to run a person no one trusted or liked and instead of listening to voters they kept him in until the donor class spoke up and said no. A real indicator of runs the country.
And it’s not like Biden could have been forced out of the race any earlier.
Those are facts. Do not use them. It makes you look like a decent person and nobody likes that.
I don’t get it. Yeah all of these things are horrible but the other choice is literally Hitler. We could say the same thing about them but we didn’t win
The term “literally Hitler” is a lot less impactful when democrats have been complicit in genocide for an entire year.
If Trump did what Biden did, I have no doubt you would have called him literally Hitler for it.
Oh I have no doubt since his plan os giving Israel everything they need to massacre every and each Palestinian. At least the Biden administration pretended to care
The other choice may have been literal Hitler, but the choice the Democrats put up was Goebbels
So did Hillary right before she went on every media talk show to talk about illegitimate elections, stolen elections, investigations, et cetera. Blue Maga, is losing their shit right now.
I just wanted to put a quote from Blackshirts and Reds here. Chapter 9 as a whole has some very prescient parts:
To the extent that class is accorded any attention in academic social science, pop sociology, and media commentary, it is as a kind of demographic trait or occupational status. So sociologists refer to “upper-middle,” “lower-middle,” and the like. Reduced to a demographic trait, one’s class affiliation certainly can seem to have relatively low political salience. Society itself becomes little more than a pluralistic configuration of status groups. Class is not a taboo subject if divorced from capitalism’s exploitative accumulation process.
Both mainstream social scientists and “left” ABC [Anything-But-Class] theorists fail to consider the dynamic interrelationship that gives classes their significance. In contrast, Marxists treat class as the key concept in an entire social order known as capitalism (or feudalism or slavery), centering around the ownership of the means of production (factories, mines, oil wells, agribusinesses, media conglomerates, and the like) and the need—if one lacks ownership—to sell one’s labor on terms that are highly favorable to the employer.
…
To support their view that class (in the Marxist sense) is passé, the ABC theorists repeatedly assert that there is not going to be a workers’ revolution in the United States in the foreseeable future. (I heard this sentiment expressed at three different panels during a “Gramsci conference” at Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 1987.) Even if we agree with this prophecy, we might still wonder how it becomes grounds for rejecting class analysis and for concluding that there is no such thing as exploitation of labor by capital and no opposition from people who work for a living.
Class has a dynamic that goes beyond its immediate visibility. Whether we are aware of it or not, class realities permeate our society, determining much about our capacity to pursue our own interests. Class power is a factor in setting the political agenda,
selecting leaders,
reporting the news, funding science and education, distributing health care, mistreating the environment, depressing wages, resisting racial and gender equality, marketing entertainment and the arts, propagating religious messages, suppressing dissidence, and defining social reality itself.
ABC theorists see the working class as not only incapable of revolution but as on the way out, declining in significance as a social formation. Anyone who still thinks that class is of primary importance is labeled a diehard Marxist, guilty of “economism” and “reductionism” and unable to keep up with the “post-Marxist,” “post-structuralist,” “post-industrialist,” “post-capitalist,” “post-modernist,” and “post-deconstructionist” times.
It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population.
This, I think, has a lot to do with Dems today, esp. with Chuck Schumer appealing to “moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”, which blatantly shows how little they understand class, even in an election–and as we’ve seen, even when a fascist could win instead. The dismantling of class conscious has been a disaster for the world. This is especially the case as people conflate hardworking intellectuals with the bourgeoise, and misconstrue legitimate protests against state greviances as a “color revolution”.
What are the odds Dems win the House?
It has always been that we could go left or we go right when things got tough for the masses. It was unlikely that USA was gonna go left, so we had to go right. Either way, capitalism wins.
How did dems abandon the working class?
Biden has been the most pro working class president since FDR.
Tell that to the rail workers
US rail companies grant paid sick days after public pressure in win for unions https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave?CMP=share_btn_url
When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation. “This is being done the right way. Each railroad is negotiating with each of its individual unions on this.”
So let’s take a step back and take in what your argument is here.
You’re implying that you can be pro worker by stripping them of their autonomy and power… then arranging for them to get whatever tiny scraps the owners decide is worth the PR
You must be some kind of black belt master in black and white thinking 🤡. Biden literally got workers their first ever paid sick days after decades of not being able to even call in sick, pressured companies to drop their draconian attendance policies, and you’re here crying about him ‘abandoning the working class’? Lmao get real
I’m pro slave. I savagely put down any attempt for them to speak for themselves but then once their movement is destroyed I give them tiny concessions to mute the agitation that led to their uprising.
black and white thinking
Thought terminating cliche for infantile minds
And it was because the public demanded the rail workers should get paid sick days after the administration shut down the strike. Showing that the Biden Administration had to walk back unpopular anti-union activities because of public outcry as evidence of Biden’s pro-union behavior is not a very strong argument.
Biden has been the most pro working class president since FDR.
That Biden is the high water mark was an alarm bell. Just ask the rail workers.
There is no such thing as a “pro-working class” president.
Can’t serve capital and labor.
I’d say most working-class since Reagan. The Dems were obviously scared of Suburban Republicans, and obviously trying to court their vote, for some reason. They were probably convinced that the United States was a “post-industrial” society, so as the logic goes, cultural issues would take precedence over class ones, and 24/7 social media users would be more valuable than blue-collar workers. There was also the idea that China is the world’s manufacturing base, most metals are mined in African countries (like how cobalt comes from the Congo), and most fruits come from Latin American countries (like bananas from Guatemala). Class, nevertheless, remains a concern, and the proletariat in the United States is not a fiction.
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Abandon the working class?
unions declining to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate.
Unpopular candidate?
15m less Democrats voted.
Which was purely political nonsense from the unions. And now a guy who held oligarchic union busting up as a good thing is in power.
It not purely political nonsense. It reflects the voter base.
The real problem is that people (like you) dismiss the workers opinion’s as “political nonsense” and subsequently lose elections.
I’m dismissing union leadership decisions as nonsense, not the workers’ issues. We actually had something similar happen in my city with this election. City needed a debt override to be popularly voted in to finance construction of a much needed new fire department HQ, but the firefighter union (and really all unions) have a terrible relationship with the mayor so they campaigned AGAINST it. It failed. Now they won’t get the new HQ unless they fire a bunch of firefighters or, i dunno, have a wicked successful bake sale or some shit. It was literally in no one’s best interest for the ballot question to fail but pure political shitassery made them campaign against their own and everyone’s interests even when significant time and even money was spent explaining in excruciating detail why there was no other choice than the debt override for it to happen.
You can only do so much to explain things to people before the burden falls on them to (a) listen in good faith, and (b) try to not be dumbshits.
Oh, look. A liberal whose liberal holy cows has predictably failed to prevent (or even slightly resist) the rise of fascism is trying to blame leftists for their holy cow’s failure.
Yawn.
Oh, Harris was actually popular? That’s good! When’s the inauguration?
She’s so popular she lost an amount of voters almost equivalent to the population of Pennsylvania when compared to Biden.
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Comment removed - Dont be a dick
Unpopular candidate? Yeah, her rallies were ghost towns.
Lmao
Crawl under the covers and scream into your pillow about Palestine or whatever unforgivable issue made you let the country down by not supporting Harris
Lmaoo
IT. WAS. YOU. Fuck y’all.
Lmaooo
The Trump campaign should pay you for all the covert advertising you do for them.
