The leaders of the Democratic National Committee announced they plan to learn absolutely nothing from their embarrassing loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
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 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.
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 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 failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 and 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.
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.
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.
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 🤷♂️
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.
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 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 failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 and 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.
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.