scarabine

Okay, cool. I'm glad I asked, instead of assuming it wasn't genuine!

I'm not pointing the finger specifically at Biden, but I know there's some debatable space even regarding him. I also think the rail strike is an example of bad publicity more than anything else. Biden actually intervened to stop the strike AND then pressed the rail companies to concede to the unions. It was actually a pretty big win, but it looked horrible to anyone who didn't do the work to pay attention to the whole thing (which is damn near everyone).

The things I'm thinking about are party-wide, and they aren't all recent. Some of it is clumsy communication, though that's bad because it's usually due to a big disconnect between policy-makers and regular folk. But, some of it is actual screw-ups that we never even tried to stop or reverse, or even admit was a mistake in the first place.

The Economy vs the economy (recent): Democrats are really proud of themselves for their stock market performance, and all signs point to them actually fixing up the capital-E Economy quite a lot from the devastation (and time bomb legislation) of Trump's term. But most of us are actually concerned with the lower-case-e economy, which sucks right now.

• Grocery prices shot through the roof. My bill went from $800 to $2k/mo over the last few years. We aggressively cut back but things are much leaner now. We can't eat out anymore. Most of this isn't inflation, it's just people charging more, but it's gone completely unmentioned for years.
• Housing prices also shot through the roof. Again, because of megacorporate bad behavior, with giant companies buying up billions in houses and just... raising the prices. Things were already bad here, but this has been a catastrophe.

This and a bunch of other stuff collaborates to create an impression to folks that inflation is high and the economy sucks. But, technically, those cost of living setbacks aren't actually due to inflation, and technically they aren't "the economy". So the Democrat message of "the economy is great!" has a lot of people pretty angry and frustrated.

NAFTA, and the globalization trend (decades of bad policy, here): Huge swaths of legislation which directly resulted in the loss of domestic industry and handouts to megacorporate / Wall St. bodies can be directly traced to Democrat policies. Seriously. It's not like all policy can be predictably good or bad over a long period of time, but this specifically has never seemed good. Factories began to close domestically the instant NAFTA passed legislation, and we've never really recovered.

The problem here is that this is largely due to the Neoliberal / Third Way movement of Democrats. This is a pseudo-conservative corporation-friendly movement that led to Clinton's huge sweeps in the 90s, and because of that dramatic success, Democrats see corporate lobby/donors as a core pillar of the party now. In fact, the same folks that pushed Harris' incredibly disappointing play for "swing voter" Republicans are part of this pillar. They aren't "borderline" conservatives, they are literal conservatives.

Fundamentally, I'm not saying "Democrats are BAD!", I'm saying that these disconnects and pro-corporate stances are real. To look at the Democrats and feel like they aren't sticking up for workers isn't irrational. It makes a lot of sense.

To see what a pro-worker party might be like, think about Bernie (who seems real damn frustrated with the party right now) - as an independent, he establishes a firm coalition with Democrats in order to serve the purpose of mitigating Republican harm, but his entire slate of concerns are so completely different from Democrats writ large that they seem like totally different platforms. And, well, honestly, they are.

Yes, I can. Is that something that you would earnestly want me to do, or are you just curious if it’s something that I’m able to do?

I don’t think this was the decider. I may think their vote was unfortunate, and probably very unfortunate for them specifically, but the truth of the matter is that the abandonment of the working class in the Rust Belt is what swing the election. This would have been a safe protest vote in a world where the Democrats openly and unashamedly courted workers.

The real irony is that if they had courted workers, they would have been able to support a bolder stance against the genocide as well, and thus not lost these votes.

It’s the same thing but (and I may be mistaken on this) I think Romneycare is actually a little better? They weren’t able to implement a single payer option on the ACA because Joe Lieberman sabotaged it, but I assume he wasn’t able to sabotage it on the original draft Romney put through in his version

You are a troll and we’ve endured weeks of your bad faith reply barrages and even seen you bragging about downvotes. I don’t see any excuse for you that holds water.

It was real fun for you up until everyone quit asking you to stop and simply removed you, huh?

It may stun you to realize this, but you worked hard and earned this reputation and now you own it. It’s yours. It’s no one’s fault but your own. You had ample time and chance to contribute in earnest.

He made sure the strike succeeded, and ended the strike as well. It’s a pure optics fail, which does not contradict your point at all, but does make it more poignant.

As for the groceries: that’s a genuine failure of Biden’s administration. He kept going for student loans but he should have gone for the grocers raising egg and dairy prices - no Republican court in the world would have survived the fallout from blocking that.

Yes, it was extremely Trump’s win. His first legitimate full win. There’s no EC shenanigans. Simply a majority of the votes and in a majority of the states.

😂 sure

gr8 b8 m8

So weird! I love it

This seems to me like a signal that Democrats are formally cementing as a conservative / neoliberal party. Which makes sense. I guess maybe the upside is that maybe it will carve out room for an adjacent political body to the left as well, sort of like what happened with the tea party.

I think it’s pretty clear that the people who wanted Trump never really changed or decreased much, and that now they’re calling the shots.

I don’t think there’s any value in going much deeper than that. They seem to have done it fair and square. There just weren’t as many people who supported Harris.

Not that many of their reasons are genuine, of course. The economy? Please. He’s awful for that, he swore he’d make things worse. We know what that looks like.

But they’re the majority this time. It’s almost a Reagan level victory. It’s exactly what he always wanted. And part of our system is this: if you get the votes then you’re allowed to dismantle things. Because you convinced enough of us to go along with it.

I’m not sure what the next steps are, really. It won’t be pretty. But blame doesn’t seem appropriate, and neither does any effort to “do the work” and learn to try harder next time. The system will not be the same and the tactics we’re familiar with are no longer relevant. Change is here and it’s the bad kind.

So what we need to figure out is how to adapt to whatever that change ushers in. We’ll have to acquire new ideals that fit within the new constraints and we’ll need to do what we can in the service of those, and we’ll have to accept the diminished nature of some of our ambitions.

What are our new values? What does it mean to throw away so much that we’ve made? Who are we going to become? Who will we be able to keep at our side? Who will we lose? Who will we betray?

We’ll find out.