this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Look, the Democrats are not good at running campaigns, but I will never let that obscure the fact that OVER 75 MILLION Americans were ready, willing, and able to vote for a proven rapist, convicted criminal, openly racist, riot-starting adult crybaby. Not grudgingly -- they went to the polls with a song in their hearts and blood in their eyes! The fucking Democrats didn't cause that -- 12 years of Fox News telling people that DJT was God, and four years of blaming COVID and inflation on desperate economic migrants did that.
Even IF the Democrats have enough of a base to overwhelm those +75m hateboner-stroking bigots, well they knew what's at stake and STILL stayed home. (No doubt smirking at how cleverly they avoided any moral contagion via the brilliant gambit of continuing to pay taxes but not casting a vote π .) Regardless of all that, I don't blame them for Trump's win either, because there shouldn't have been +75 million Trump-lovers to overwhelm in the first fucking place.
Yeah, but that's democracy. Those 75+ million people wanted something, and they voted for it, and they got it. Anything else is irrelevant. There's no asterisk in the Constitution with a footnote that says the election is invalid if one side consists of hateboner-stroking bigots. If Democrats want something different, then they have to convince enough people to show up and vote for something different. They have to get good at public messaging and at running campaigns. Righteous indignation changes nothing whatsoever.
Democrats would have benefitted greatly from reining in the corporate profiteering that happened from the pandemic onwards.
They needed to be the anti greed party or the wealth redistribution party or something. Something different, not more of the same.
It was hard to hear everytime they said "Actually, the economy is doing marvelous."
Democrats would have benefited greatly from telling the public that they were going to do anything at all about 30+y of neoliberal policy that benefits Wall St at the expense of the bottom 80%. This election (and every election since Obama left office) was a referendum on business as usual neoliberal policy at the working class's expense. You could get away with that in the 90s, but when the working class can't earn enough to rent their own apartment or start a life they'll vote for literally anything else, including a convicted rapist and con man.
What people miss about Fascism is that it actually does, at least in the short term, help working-class people. If Trump manages to actually deport 20 million illegal immigrants? That will, in the short term, actually lower the cost of rent. Longer term, you have to start having conversations about the supply of housing and the labor to build and maintain that housing. But in the short term, kicking 5-10% of the population out of the country will actually improve the budgets of millions of rent-burdened households. As long as you personally aren't on the right's current extermination list, you actually benefit from conservative crimes against humanity.
People are hurting. The amounts of people rent-burdened and accessing food banks are at levels not seen in generations. And the Democrats offered NOTHING of substance to help these people. Kamala offered grants to help cities amend their zoning codes...which might bear fruit 20 years from now. Kamala offered first-time homeowner assistance, but it was a neo-liberals wet dream of a policy, filled with provisos and qualifiers to make sure only just the most-deserving people qualify. She should have been out there campaigning for a huge social housing project - direct federal construction of millions of homes, coupled with a jobs-training program to quickly train thousands of new high school graduates how to be framers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
She should have also come down like the wrath of god upon landlords. She was literally running against a slimy and corrupt landlord, yet she never once made that a center focus of her campaign. She should have been promising to lock up and throw away the key of any landlord, big or small, that used software like realpage. She shouldn't have had a stump speech where she didn't call for the complete breakup of Walmart and Amazon.
Those were things she actually could have done to tell people she was actually going to do something about just one issue, the cost of housing. But of course that didn't happen.
Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like "what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?" and she replied with a canned "We're very proud of Bidenomics" and no further elaboration π€·ββοΈ
Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who's had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.
Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It's condescending and treats people like children.
The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, "yes, I know inflation is bad. And we're doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering..." And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, "sorry, but we're going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic." If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.
Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was "transitory." Then they just repeated "inflation adjusted wages" until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don't really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.
Yeah, our inflation metrics (mostly the CPI) have been juiced and jury rigged to hell and back so that on paper "inflation" remained perpetually low for 30y and capital wasn't pressed to raise wages. This has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s but really, really, became a core issue in the last 15y as energy prices, healthcare and housing costs ballooned while wages stayed relatively low or fell.
The economic growth of the last 30y has almost entirely funnelled to the top 15% and while there are plenty of jobs available to everyday folks they're almost exclusively McJobs or gig work that don't pay enough to support living independently much less actually doing anything other than working and sleeping. So when Democrats talk about "the economy" they might as well just say "rich people's money" instead because they don't seem to understand the distinction between those two phrases.
You'd think Bernie's widespread support from the working class and Trump's win in 2016 would have clued them in that they're missing something but they pointed the finger at literally everyone else ("Bernie bros," "low information voters," misogyny, every *ism under the sun) instead of asking where they went wrong in their candidate selection and messaging.
I don't even think they have anyone who represents (or is even willing to act like they care about, even if they're simply manipulating) a low income working person and it shows.
I'm sure we'll see plenty of opinion and "think pieces" in the Atlantic and NYT pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat in the next couple of weeks, surely that'll solve the problem.
But Trumpnisnt going to do any of this either.
He rambled at great length about making America great again and bringing back jobs and Kamala told folks that nothing will change. If you're struggling to understand why things went this way I'm not sure I can help.
At the very least Democrats probably should have told people they'd do something to help them instead of just assuming that people would intuit that over the long term Democrat economic policy would be more stable and provide better net growth.
People in the US are dumb as shit, you have to explain things to them and make them feel like you're paying attention. This is something Democrats have utterly failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 or Obama and it's why they lose elections. They're quite literally out of touch and don't realize it's not the 70s or 90s when blue collar workers would reliably back them because they'd (relatively recently) supported the labor movement and life was, overall, pretty good for everyone. You can't run on a policy of inclusion and civil rights for marginalized groups when the main voting group is struggling to make their own lives work.
Agreed, just a little left-wing populism would've gone a long way. I'm cynical, so I see it as that the Democrats can't be or do those things, because the need for campaign donations has turned them into a fundamentally neo-liberal party that stands for wealth and corporate greed. Like the GOP used to be, before it departed for Crazy Town in a lifted pickup truck.
See also: Joe Biden breaking the rail strike. (Before somebody points he followed up by getting some of the unions some of what they wanted, eroding union power generally was the headline news.) Can we imagine him nationalizing the rails and forcing the companies to strike a deal with the unions in exchange for using them? It would have been a stunning political sensation, but would've crossed Democrats' corporate benefactors.
Tim Walz could have afforded the campaign this rhetoric.
But they locked my boy up to where he couldn't show his true colors.
Well of course the election was still valid. Brainwashed Fox News/X misinformation junkies' votes count just as much as a good person's does. More actually, thanks to the high concentration of fools in low-population states and with too many electoral votes. My issue is that a massive propaganda machine is permitted to exist, such that +75 million walking dildos are now convinced that Biden created greedflation and gave all their tax money to dog-eating immigrants, and Fauci should be executed for treason because he forced children to get vaxxed(?).
Dismantling that machine should be job #1 -- it should have been since Al Franken wrote Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. But I guess it's fucking impossible to shut off the machine that keeps stamping out Republican and IINO voters. And with at least a hundred years of MAGA rule ahead of us, I suppose it always will be.
Yes, totally agreed, and I feel this discussion circling straight back to the OP point: Whose job is it to dismantle the machine, and counter the misinformation? It's us; there's no global referee that we can appeal to. How do we do it? Through the political process, because we don't want violence and civil war. Since the winner-take-all voting system mathematically leads to two parties, our agent in the political process is the Democratic Party.
So, it's not the DNC's fault that the misinformation machine exists, but it is their responsibility to fix it, and we can certainly blame them because they're really bad at it.
And that is why the right always wins. The left are lazy and take the high ground and think themselves above it. And the right just does shit. And keeps at it till they get it.
That's not new information. We learned that the first time Trump was elected. We learned it again when Biden was elected, even if Biden managed to narrowly outperform Trump. We've known what we were up against. Stop pearl clutching and acting surprised and start being more pragmatic. The Democrats are the one with a platform at the national level, it's on them to get out their vote and they utterly failed to do that.
That's exactly it. It's hard to admit that almost half the voting population is totally on board with trump--his "flaws" are not a bug, they're a feature. He increased the size of his base, bringing in millions of Latinos, Gen Z men, and men of all races. It's not that they simply hate the Dems, it's that they love what trump is offering. In spite of that it there did exist enough more voters that don't like trump (it would have taken 5 million more) to stop him, but they either didn't give a shit or they wanted it to happen (to "punish" the dems). That's the reality.
And now the Democrats will remain powerless forever. I guess single issue voters can take solace in that little victory. Sadly, they will probably not be replaced by a more progressive party rising up from their ashes, but rather by an emergent faction formed via Republican in-fighting. They will still be conservative, but they'll wear different colored ties.
Yes they well once the supreme court is stacked 7 to 2 they well never have the power to do anything even if elected.
The supreme court is already stacked! Biden could have added more justices and pushed for impeachment of the obviously corrupt ones. He chose to not even try or so much as get out the message that it needs to happen, so as to not appear "partisan", as if any of their voters actually care about partisanship at this point when it comes at the cost of getting shit done.
So everything will be exactly the same as it is now except libs might be slightly less charitable to the new party?
werenβt we as well vilifying anyone who criticised her stance on genocide and the brutal genocide in gaza rates much higher than anything you said about trump. add that to her history of being cosy with lobbyists, her controversial career as prosecutor and she will be the classic pro-war neocon we all hate. but majority of us still voted her in name of lesser evil.
in the same way i think a significant chunk of those 75 million think they are voting for lesser evil in name of god, increased crime and inflation.
plus the absolute cringe and elitist approach of dnc to label anyone not unconditionally supporting them as super racist sexist nazi.
even now every left sub on .world and reddit is making fun of working class by mocking egg prices and even wishing for trump to deport the muslims and nuke gaza.
Oh no. I can assure you they were very deliberately voting for the largest evil they could find.
sigh, if dnc sees this then they will try to hire you as campaign advisor.
this is exactly what the cronies of both parties want, for us to think that other side is pure evil so that they can continue exploiting us while doing all the evil they want.
does this look humane to you ? https://youtu.be/jRQGMJZKjAU
are we really the saint we pretend to be ?