Summary

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressed Trump’s election win, urging Democrats to move past infighting and post-election rancor to focus on preparing for potential impacts of his presidency, such as tariffs, mass deportations, and censorship.

She criticized some Democrats for blaming the loss on “identity politics,” despite Trump’s campaign centering on white racial grievance and calls for white men to turn out. Ocasio-Cortez pointed to moderate voices like Reps. Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton, who argued that supporting trans rights hurt Democrats, as misguided.

She encouraged people to engage in direct communication and join physical communities to combat despair and build resilience.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    She’s talking about “moderates” who are trying to blame it on defense of LGBTQ…

    Because surely what the Dem party needs to do is move further to the fucking right and abandon the Dem voter base.

    Despite the fact that Trump ran a campaign steeped in white racial grievance and the fact that MAGA influencers were literally calling for white men — specifically — to get out to the polls, some commentators have resorted to tired takes about Kamala Harris losing because the party leaned too much into “identity politics.”

    The Democratic ticket didn’t actually lean into identity politics, but some in the party have settled on that line of thought as well — such as Reps. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who suggested that Democrats’ support for trans people’s rights helped spell their doom this cycle.

    We can’t keep electing “moderates” just because the wealthy, corporations, and foreign governments like Israel keep giving them hundreds of millions of dollars

    Shit, if anything that should be a reason we don’t vote for them.

    This a class war going on, and the only side fighting it is the wealthy.

    • chakan2@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      abandon the Dem voter base.

      I’m Ok with that at this point. The Dem voting base is just liberal Republicans at this point. It’s time for something else.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        The Dem voting base is just liberal Republicans at this point.

        No it’s not.

        They’re a very small but vocal amount of Dem voters.

        But they’re not the problem, they voted R against Obama and Obama still flipped red states in 08.

        Not only are they not the voting base, the party literally doesn’t need them.

        The problem is those people run the freaking DNC, and are the ones that keep dragging the party right.

        The problem is party leadership and the solution is changing party leadership.

        Not doubling down on party leadership to further piss off the Dem voter base.

        • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          I don’t fully agree with this, but I agree with enough of it that it doesn’t really matter. To add to it, now is the ideal time to push for reform in party leadership, after a major loss.

    • bigmaple9@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      I’m liberal and voted blue. I think we have gone off the deep end for trans. 100% for non hate, but I would like girls to be able to play sports without allowing former boys.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        If that was a large issue you’d have a point. But it’s almost never happening. There are just very very few examples of boys transitioning to girls while being on puberty blockers long enough to compete as a girl and then dominating.

        It’s a made up problem.

        But the right won’t just stop at “girls sports” they’re going after adults who have never played a sport in their lives.

        But even tho the trans population in it’s entirety is still a small amount of people, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to abandon them.

        Start abandoning subgroups and the larger group won’t be strong enough to protect you when the fascists come for one of the subgroups you belong to.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_

        Obviously defending the innocent from fascism should be reason enough, but you’re literally saying it’s not enough, so I have to appeal to the selfish need for self preservation most humans have.

        Empathy sadly needs to be learned, so not everyone has it.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I do think a lot of liberals are spending far too much time trying to score cheap political points…That criticism actually extends to one of Ocasio-Cortez’s top allies in the Senate — Bernie Sanders — as well.

    America is silly. Because of our first-past-the-post electoral system, we are a de facto two party state. As a result, Americans have come to believe that there are only two political or ideological possibilities: liberalism and conservativism. Therefore, everyone is either a liberal or a conservative, and everyone who isn’t a conservative must necessarily be a liberal, and vice versa.

    I am not a conservative, but I am also not a liberal. I don’t agree with either ideology. Yes, generally, I might agree more with the liberals than the conservatives, but that doesn’t make me a liberal. It doesn’t even necessarily make me a liberal ally. Stop calling us liberals. We are not liberals, stop trying to make us part of your group. Stop with the, “hey, we’re all liberals, guys,” no, we’re not.

    Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. If he were a liberal, he would be a part of the liberal, Democrat party. He is not, he’s an independent. He often joins with the liberals, because, again, the liberals are nearer to him than the only other party, the conservative Republicans, but he nonetheless remains an independent. Stop calling us liberals.

  • zenitsu@sh.itjust.works
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    8 days ago

    Guys guys, I know the country is getting taken over by criminal fascist scumbags, but let’s please tone it down online.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    “You go high, we go low”

    There’s a reason why the right manages to spread its message, it’s because they know the left won’t do shit about it.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      Going low doesn’t accomplish shit - the problem is that previous the strategy wasn’t “they go low, we go high” - previously the strategy was “we fail to deliver any change that impacts everyday Americans”.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Going low doesn’t accomplish shit

        Ahh. A statement in direct contradiction of the evidence.

        Most recent data demonstrates that going low gets you the Whitehouse, the Senate, and the House. And going low for long enough gets you the judiciary as well.

        I’m not saying there aren’t other ways to succeed: but going low is clearly an extremely viable strategy. It would seem to me that when you are losing as completely as Democrats have been for 30 years, you aren’t in a position to leave options that are shown to work on the table.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Really? Because when it comes to the right putting minorities lives in danger by going low, minorities might be morally dead right by going high, dead right is still dead.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      We don’t need a new party to begin with. Just start by going independent.

      It’s the same thing that we needed to be employed this election cycle, but at a larger scale. The Blue MAGA/ Any blue will do/ “Trump bad, you have to vote Blue” is the precise reason we lost this election, because the gave the did not ask anything of the candidate, which gave the candidate cover to not have to shift to more generally popular positions that would get them elected. Blue MAGA threw the opportunity, when Kamala was on a trajectory to be in the mid to high 50’s in October, by effectively making the argument that we can’t demand anything if this candidate because Trump is too great a threat. But the reality of that is that the demands laid down on a candidate serve the important function that they drag a candidate into more generally popular positions.

      Kamala had no real economic plan, and when she said “I would do nothing differently”, she’s telling Americans, 60% of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, that this is what her policy is going to be.

      So if we’re going to blame voters for a failure this election cycle, we need to be clear that the voters to blame are the ones who accepted less and little, and who abused and defeated those who wanted the candidate to move on specific policy positions. It was rampant and structural on Lemmy, and I’ve heard that it was similarly bad on Reddit. Extremely biased moderation here turned communities like c/News, c/Political_Memes, and c/politics into echo chambers where any pushback against an obviously failing and now obviously failed political rhetoric was basically site sponsored. And that needs to be called out and addressed. It literally cost the Democrats this election, and some of the most prominent names in Lemmy were responsible for it. Now obviously Lemmy is tiny and the impact was microscopic, but the same pattern was repeated for much larger platforms like reddit.

      It started a couple months before with a tiktok video that got basically repeated regarding “strategic voting”. The problem, however, is that the strategy outlined is completely half baked. It doesn’t actually work because it keeps candidates unaccountable for having to “go to where their voters are” and get their votes. The result is that the candidate is afforded the opportunity to maintain policy positions that are broadly unpopular because they don’t think they need to move to get voters. It’s not good strategy, and both 2016, and 2024 offer direct evidence for this, while 2020 offers the counterfactual (Biden did shift in policy, effectively handing over the platform to Bernie, and he gathered the necessary coalition of voters to win as a result).

      Going independent is what Democratic voters needed to do in this election to force Kamala into more popular positions. She didn’t feel the pressure to do so and lost in a frankly, almost unmitigated disaster of a campaign. And she was afforded the opportunity to do so by voters who demanded nothing for their votes. Going independent takes those votes of the table and makes it beyond clear that they are simply not yours to begin with.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    What does that preparation look like? Ocasio-Cortez said she’s still taking a moment to process her plan. But she said she’ll personally be “doing a lot more direct communication” — i.e., methods other than social media, which can be overrun with unverified claims and outright propaganda.

    “I think I’ll be planning on using my email list to give a lot more thorough and specific things about what’s on my mind and how to prepare for things,” she said. And she encouraged her followers to get out of their online bubbles:

    I was going to point out that nobody reads those, but then I realized I’m a fucking weirdo who blocks all that shit with extreme prejudice. So maybe it’ll work because normal people apparently read every email they get in detail.

    • ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Most people I know either obsessively filter and delete junk like this so their inbox is always empty, or they have 30k emails, all unread, and this’ll just go in the pile.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I am definitely the former. Having an unread email in my inbox drives me nuts. So I basically never sign up for email newsletters.

        • gmgmgm@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          I unsubscribed from all my newsletters and subscribed to them through RSS where I could. That way I don’t have to be bothered unless i specifically want to read any updates!

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            7 days ago

            I used to do RSS but I would forget about looking at the feed for so long that there wasn’t much of a point unfortunately.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    I will never vote for a democrat who opposes trans rights. I’ll encourage my friends not to as well. They want these stupid games they can have the prizes that come with

  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Democrats once again focused on taking the high road after losing one of the most consequential elections in history. I mean I like AOC but calling for people not to be hostile or divisive towards voters who believe in dragging immigrants from their homes, putting them in camps, and then deporting them to their potential deaths is just not it.

    You can call for unity all you want to but you won’t ever hear those same words from the mouths of republicans.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago
      1. This wasn’t taking the “high road” it was four years of Biden/Kamala and party leaders not taking the threat of fascism seriously.

      2. If you read the article, she’s talking about “moderates” who are saying we need to abandon LGBTQ and become more conservative.

      3. She’s trying to unify the Dem voter base in preparation of 2028, what does anything Republicans have to say matter?

      Question:

      If you read a headline and get upset, why not click the article first to see if you even understand what is happening?

      *Especially" when the headline makes you mad at a progressive, and the owner of the “news website” is a shitty billion dollar corporation like fucking Comcast.

      You think Comcast wouldn’t lie to people to ensure the only political options are fascists who are pro-business, or neo liberals that are pro business?

      • NABDad@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        She’s trying to unify the Dem voter base in preparation of 2028

        Hopefully she’s trying to unify the base in preparation for 2026. However, we’d probably all be better off if we abandoned the Democratic party in favor of a real progressive party that puts the needs of individuals over the desires of corporations and billionaires.

  • AidsKitty@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    So now it’s racist for white men to vote? Unless they vote for who AOC approves of? It’s BS like this that lost you the election. Elitist snob.