this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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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 🤷♂️
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.