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Political Memes @lemmy.world
GreenKnight23 @lemmy.world

well at least the cycle has stopped

368 comments
  • Harris ran a perfect campaign. If she was running as a (pre-Trump) republican. However, we know that:

    1. She isn't a Republican
    2. She banked on pulling in republican voters, instead of rallying her base
    3. Republicans will almost always vote for the R instead of policy
    4. She backed off of every single progressive idea she started with
    5. She trotted out establishment Democrats to lecture the electorate instead of inspire them
    6. 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

    • 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!

  • 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:

      1. Survey the existing party ranks.
      2. Find the highest-ranking centrist within the party you can.
      3. 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:

      1. 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.
      2. 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.

  • "A jewish black trans woman would have won Alabama in a landslide, but only if she was a really outspoken socialist" - Half of Lemmy users

    I think a lot of left-oriented people are in denial that Trump made no secret of who he was the past eight years, and Americans got exactly what a majority of them legitimately wanted. Trump voters know he is a bigot and that is why they chose him. There is no degree of populist social welfare rhetoric Kamala or the Democrats could have said that would have moved the needle when for most voters, electing a bigot was the priority over all other issues.

    • I mean, nearly half the country just didn't vote. Had Kamala actually offered good policy it probably would've mobilized a lot more people. Voting against someone doesn't feel as good as voting for someone. Kamala never offered many reasons to vote for her. Trump just offered a lot of reasons to vote against him.

      That was enough for me to vote against Trump. But then again I'm in a group that's in Republicans' cross hairs.

      This "both sides are the same" bullshit took root too hard. And now, due to voter apathy, the biggest military in the world is about to be in the hands of an outright fascist dictatorship.

      I feel like there's enough blame to go around. Fuck the Republicans for a laundry list of things. Fuck the Democrats for letting this happen. Fuck the non voters for their apathy. Fuck all the dipshits who voted for the orange fascist.

    • Some people are trying their best to avoid politics outside of election season, and a lot of them are taking them in good faith.

      When I first voted for Fidesz in 2009 and 2010, I didn't know about the "Székház ügy" (Hall Controversy - Fidesz sold a hall given to them for crazy amounts of money, which they dumped into media to attack the MSZP government of 1994-1998), and my mother to this day does not want to acknowledge it. People just saw that the MSZP-SZDSZ didn't do a lot of good, tried to sell our hospitals to for-profit corporations, etc.

      Most voters aren't politically savvy terminally online weirdos, but weirdos that want to hear a story, a narrative.

      We need a left-wing populist narrative! Not economic jargon, and also not the kind of leftist rhetoric that terminally online tankies on lemmygrad and hexbear are spouting (most destructive thing that can happen to leftism), but someone who will translate it to the language of the common people.

368 comments