BrainWorms

yeah but also let's not forget that the DNC has funded far right extremest candidates in the past thinking that they could get an easy win. that didn't pan out

Looks like the headline is just clickbait anyways, author doesn't make any suggestions to hold anybody accountable. I've got a plan: lets get as many primary voters as we do general election voters.

You seem to be suggesting that the American public are fools who were tricked, rather than the Democratic party being genuinely unpopular.

The Democrats were in power for 4 years and accomplished almost nothing while the lives of ordinary people got worse. They never forgave student loads, they didn't legalize weed, the 2k stimulus check was cut to 1.4k, they never raised the minimum wage, they never rolled back abortion bans, they continued putting kids in cages, they backed a genocide, and inflation was worse than it's been in a long time. And this campaign their whole message was "what are you going to do, vote trump?".

The republicans didn't gain any votes this election, the democrats just lost millions.

The items you bring up are outside the control of the DNC and its members. How can the DNC change media ownership or block Russian astroturfing?

The press is motivated both by its oligarchic owners and also by popularity. We can't change the former (certainly whole out of power), but we can make policy and targeting changes that make Democrats popular, and it follows that what the news reports will change.

I remember journalists writing formal apology letters in 2016 for the reasons you just mentioned. Then they went and did the exact same thing again. I knew we were in trouble as soon as that started again. What's more disheartening than that to me though, is that apparently a huge swath of Americans don't have the capacity to think about anything beyond what they're shown on TV.

You're not wrong, but the DNC pushing relatively right-wing corpo candidates is just as much at fault as the media. When will the DNC actually listen to the base? Same thing happened when they disregarded votes for Bernie Sanders.

Behind the Bastards did a good one two-parter recently on liberal media which helped the rise of the NSDAP party, and how that compares with US politics today. Even Jewish owned newspapers identified more with elites than Jewish commoners, and so were happy to underreport the violence and hate rhetoric of the National Socialist German Workers Party, even when they were literally gunning down communists and labor unionists.

The media agencies do not identify with the common public even today, which is why we still rely on blogs and curators, and have to cross reference news stories to see what the common reported facts are, and if they're consistent from different primary sources. This process is a necessary artifact from the George W. Bush administration and the international war on terror, which was already a foray by the US into fascist rhetoric and autocracy. From then it's been Secret Hitlers all the way down.

So this is to say this is totally on brand for the media. And as the election has now shown us (hindsight being 20/20) this is totally on brand for the US public.

Orange Julius

Also known as the Mandarin Chief XD

This argument here, folks. This is neoliberalism fighting against its inevitable end. If the democrats can't put forward a coherent plan for the future outside of "the other people are worse, but we have to keep them around as friends." I voted blue and wish others did as well, but we can't force them to vote or vote for who we want. It is the job of the political class to earn votes, and sadly, the dems just didn't pull out the win, and we are all worse for it

It's a failure on multiple levels. We'd do history a disservice if we don't examine them all and look for ways to fix them.

Voter disillusionment is a thing, and the Democrats failed to properly engage enough voters. The worsening economic situation the Democrats failed to do enough about created an environment known to foster nationalist and supremacist ideologies.

Disinformation campaigns make it worse. All the "vote third party" spoiler advocates and "don't vote for genocide" anti-electionists didn't help. The electorate system making third parties spoilers in the first place hamstrung actual democratic representation. The corporate controlled media bias and refusal to call the fash out for what they are legitimised them.

Free Speech apologists defended the right to spew anti-democratic rhetorics. The "high road" numbskulls left the field to the dirty, but effective tactics of those willing to sacrifice all decency for power. A failure to clearly and understandably communicate the intention of complex proposals favoured the simple, emotionally appealing talking points of the right.

Yes, the voters bear blame too: Republican voters for actively enabling fascism, complacent non-/third-party-voters for failing to effectively and strategically oppose them (moral opposition is good and right, but it doesn't win wars - strategy and cohesion do). But only attacking the symptoms of a fucked up accumulation of problems doesn't solve the root causes.

Because democrats aren't the left party and moved even further right in this election

It’s both. Both groups should act as though the other is as much of an unreasonable jackass as they tend to be

A party that can’t win has no value.

The party’s job is to articulate a platform that appeals to apathetic voters.

The party’s job is to articulate a platform that energizes a large enough part of the population to vote them in.

If a party advances positions that can’t win elections, then the party has failed in its primary purpose.

Classic