I literally see voters saying the Democrats were too left leaning, jfc.
With parties like this, painful collapse is the only way to avoid multigenerational destitution.
There is no saving the United States as a framework. It is far too compromised, with too many methods installed to keep the people willfully ignorant and infighting as the owners suck their life forces dry for profit.
We can limp along and pretend that isn’t the case, but climate change, aka the reality that doesn’t give a shit about our self-delusion and greed worship, will force that collapse sooner rather than later. Reality can’t be bribed, deluded, disappeared, or discredited.
Enjoy living in delusion that a society can function in capitalist competition against itself, the ability to do so is coming to an end.
“To all those growing skeptical of this party’s strategies and overall agenda, let me just say we hear you loud and clear. Rest assured we will be doing everything short of interpreting that sound into words and responding to those words in any way shape or form.”
This is an all-timer.
And remember, you gotta start repaying the student loans you never used!
100% Spot-On article. The Hard Times nails it again.
Pffft!!! If your idea of “learning” is to copy any of the fascist ideas of trump, then yes, they should NOT learn anything. Did Jews after Hitler go fascist… Oh wait.
I love how the left has adopted casual racism and anti Semitism from the right. Way to go
The electoral college did a great job once again. Everyone please raise your butts as they come out fucking. We want them to enjoy this moment. And let’s all look and act terrified as they penetrate us once more. Let’s trust that they will vote for the candidate they think we need next time too.
What should they really learn? I’m sick of the blame being placed on decent people not doing enough.
How about we blame the pieces of crap that support Trump who has too many disgusting qualities to list.
Blaming them does nothing to help us.
I mean, we can blame the DNC some. But we should definitely be blaming Trump voters and non-voters.
The reverse side of this (that the Onion should do next) is:
“Oh yeah. I didn’t go out and vote. Surely the 30th time in a row means the DNC will learn their lesson and then promote leftist policy like I want!”
The blame still stops at the leading Democrats.
Consider this. How could so many people vote for someone who is such a clear threat to democracy?
Simple. Because despite everything they said, his opponents never actually treated him as a threat to democracy.
Biden appointed a Republican to run the Department of Justice, and that Republican sat on his hands, refusing to do any investigation of Trump until he was forced to do so by House investigative committees. It took TWO YEARS before an investigation even began. This delay allowed Trump to eventually run out the clock.
Trump should have been in chains on the day Biden took office. He should have faced trial in a military tribunal. Any attempt by SCOTUS to protect him should have been declared “a coup from the bench” and seen those justices charged as accomplices after the fact.
THAT is how you need to handle an actual threat to democracy. Trump should have been put on trial, through whatever means necessary. Hell, ideally he should have received a capital sentence for his crimes against the republic. He betrayed his country. He is guilty of treason. The man should have hanged for his crimes.
But that wasn’t how Biden treated it. Trump was an EPOCHAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, but not enough to risk angering conservative white voters in suburban Philadelphia. He was THE NEXT INCARNATION OF HITLER, but not so Hitlerian as to justify any kind of dubious legal maneuvers that a fascist like Trump would have no problem pulling off.
Biden and co have been shouting that Trump is a threat do democracy for the better part of a decade at this point. But they never actually treated him like one. Actions speak louder than words. Democrats said Trump was a threat to democracy, but they never actually treated him like one. The Democrats, through their actions, made it clear that they didn’t think Trump was a real threat to democracy, so the voters acted accordingly.
If Democrats were actually serious about the threat, Trump would have been tried by military tribunal, sentenced, and been locked away or put in the ground two years ago.
They should learn how to win, for one.
You know what they need more of? Bernie’s populist rhetoric. A promise that something will actually be different. Obama won on that promise, and then did nothing with it.
15 million people don’t go missing unless your party is dead.
And bare in mind, I’m not saying anyone should have voted 3rd party; we can’t do that without at least RCV. But something needs to reanimate the Democrats’ corpse or we will all die at the hands of the next Mussolini.
TBH I’d be afraid of them learning anything with headlines telling them to blame Palestine supporters and Minorities.
It’s the same picture
I don’t think thats a very accurate assessment to say that all Palestine supporters are minorities or vice versa.
I mean the “left” msm and the DNC lol
The only “The Onion” rather than “Not The Onion” part of this is the idea that they would announce it.
Also the idea of future free and fair elections appears unlikely.
I’d say “The Onion” part of this is that the democratic party doesn’t need to learn any lessons because it’s doing exactly what they want to do. The people who will refuse to learn from this are the people who still put faith in them and the democratic system in general.
Sure democrats would prefer to win but the most important thing to them is making sure that policies to the left of the republican party are never a serious threat to the donors they both share. That’s pretty obvious at this point, right?
Ding ding ding
Local opinion piece:
https://www.startribune.com/brehm-democrats-have-themselves-to-blame-for-trumps-election/601176736
I read it because of the title, but it’s just some shithead that wants them to move further right:
This red wave wasn’t as much about embracing Donald Trump as it was repudiating far-left progressivism.
[…], and then foisted upon us an equally unqualified and unpalatable hard left alternative.
They are already creating the groundwork for sucking more corporate dick.
Wait, there was nothing progressive about this campaign except for paying a little lip service to legalizing weed.
Holy shit. They really think Harris was “far left”??
Reminds me of that joke about how there are only two races: White, and political. It’s disheartening to see folks (some here on Lemmy) confusing listening to the concerns of brown-skinned people with leftism. The Arab-Americans in Michigan, for a relevant example, are just people with a range of political opinions like the rest of us.
No war but class war, buddy
Hardly surprising coming from the Star Trib these days… I knew it was bad when they refused to even endorse a candidate.
wouldnt matter if they did learn from it if the crap trump campaigned on goes through and he becomes a “king” in this country
Oh they learned their lessons:
- blame minorities
- shift further right
Oh they know how to win. They just don’t want to. The policy decisions that would lock in Dem control for generations to come run counter to the goals of DNC Services Corp. Because they’re a corp.
This is unironically true, unfortunately.
The funniest part of this is the idea that there will be an opposition party in anything but a token way after this.
…was there one before?..
Was there a party that did not install SCOTUS justices that were so ideologically conservative that they did things like end national legal abortion and gut the ability of government regulation agencies to regulate?
Yes there was. But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote.
But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote
“The party didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to listen to their voters”
FTFY
Nope. They can’t force anyone to vote for them. People thought not voting was a better plan than stopping the rapist fascist dictator when they only had two possible choices.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster. They didn’t vote anyway because they knew they weren’t going to get a pony.
Voting for people in a two-party system is the stupidest thing you can do because you will never get your way with any one politician. So you vote against and keep voting against until you get closer and closer to what you want.
Just not voting or voting for third party candidates that will clearly lose against someone who has an automatic 30% of the vote doesn’t stop the worst possible thing from happening and it never will.
If you didn’t vote to stop Trump from getting into office, I blame you. You had warning after warning and your idealism was more important to you.
I agree with Flying Squid. It’s bizarre to think any sane person would now decide that the right strategy is to hate on minorities, or ditch all pretty normal behaviour such as adhere to the FUCKING LAW, NOT LIE (and spare me the #FalseEquivalence, it’s jaywalking Dems vs serial rapist Trump) and listen to effing EXPERTS. Dems should stick to their principles and await the serious shit show which is gonna happen with mass deportations, tariffs and even MORE INFLATION.
They can’t force anyone to vote for them.
Yup, which is why you need to give them reason to vote.
Democrats have been parading around “most important election of our lifetime” for fucking years - don’t be surprised that it didn’t work yet again.
The reason why Trump is popular is because there is legitimate pain and struggle in the working class, and he affirmed that pain and struggle (even if he was misidentifying the source of that pain). Telling voters “things are good, actually, and the other guy is gonna ruin it” is just dumb.
Democrats didn’t run on popular policy and they got destroyed because of it.
Your post is CLASSIC misdirection and misrepresenting what the Dems actually did. IF these elections were fair, and I’ve reason to think they were not, then they got lost on higher gas prices. Which is A PRETTY STUPID AND SELFISH reason to vote for/not care about mass deportations. And they lost it on not attacking trump on the border and on the economy.
Who said “things are good actually”?? Seems to me that Harris had plenty of policy proposals that would have resulted in a meaningful improvement to the bottom line of the average American.
Biden has also been better for the average American than trump was. For fucks sake, Trump actually got away with raising taxes on all of us to support his tax cut for the rich, simply because the average person is too low information to grasp the idea of a tax cut that expires!
So yeah, plenty of actual reasons to say that one candidate is better than the other, without needing to be wowed by an actual messiah who can dismantle our fucked up system and solve everybody’s problems.
They repeatedly touted our economic recovery was ‘the best in the G6’.
Even when our economy is ‘good’ it’s shit for most people. That’s the problem with being a neoliberal status quo party: it doesn’t help most of the people they need to vote for them
Biden did very early and then learned to not say that again.
They had a reason to vote.
Their reason was that a rapist fascist who quoted Hitler and clearly has dementia that promised to deport millions of people and be a dictator on day one only had a 50/50 chance of being president.
And they didn’t care because they didn’t like Kamala Harris much. Was she any of those things? No. But her boss is funding the same genocide in Israel that Trump said to Netanyahu “finish the job” about on national television, so no one better vote for her either!
Sorry, not a good enough reason to not stop Trump. Not a good enough reason to refuse to vote. Not a good enough reason to vote third party.
For fuck’s sake, do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
they voted for Biden because he made meaningful concessions to the progressive caucus. He gave Bernie a prominent roll in his campaign and made promises about student loan forgiveness and raising the minimum wage, on top of affirming people’s anxiety about covid and a pledge to address it.
Harris had none of that. She didn’t primary against progressive candidates, didn’t have to address progressive concerns, and when there was vocal opposition to any of her policies she said “excuse me, i’m speaking”. She was more right-moderate than Biden was, even if only because she didn’t face the progressive primary he did.
They ran Harris thinking she would win based on her demographics. The DNC needs to learn that not everyone wants a black/LGBTQ/woman/etc candidate that just runs on their race/gender/sexuality.
They want someone that’s competent that will campaign on policies that will make their lives better. The DNC has moved so far away from the working class that the RNC, the party of wealthy creeps, has them.
They ran Harris because she was the only candidate they could justify shoehorning in without a primary, since she’s VP.
Why they didn’t want to run a primary is a great question. Probably cost and time, and name recognition. Studies show that often the candidate with the most name recognition wins. There’s wasn’t enough time to tell every person in America a brand new person’s name.
But usually VPs don’t do well when they run as president. Imo Dems are just trying to avoid another Bernie Sanders situation - a leftist with an authentic campaign and people who genuinely like them. More than anything, they gotta stop real progress in this country.
Imo Dems are just trying to avoid another Bernie Sanders situation - a leftist with an authentic campaign and people who genuinely like them
100% this is why. They didn’t want any internal pressure for progressive policies or a public platform to voice them.
They lost the general because they refused to hold a legitimate primary. This wouldn’t of happened. They haven’t run a real primary since 2008 and look at how hard Obama won in a landslide after competing in a deep field of qualified and competent candidates.
running token candidates beholden to them is very shady but brilliant strategy by the superpacs :
if they loose: blame it on sexism, racism bigotry to divert the attention from reforms in dnc for progressive leadership. and even if they pretend to be sad about it, the megarich elites and donors get taxcuts and endless price gouging from republicans.
if they win: token candidate passes some token laws which gets either blocked in senate or so poorly implemented that they actually end up giving billions to megacorps for no visible benefit to people. case in point: https://www.atr.org/kamalas-broadband-bust-42-billion-996-days-zero-homes-connected/
They had no platform other than fear mongering about Trump.
The difference between Harris and Obama was that while Obama was biracial that wasn’t the focus of his campaign, his platform was, and he articulated it well. That’s the real lesson to take away from Obama’s success at the polls not let’s run a black person and hope we win.
Obama also competed against a deep field of qualified candidates in 2008. He went into the general with momentum of a popular mandate and then won in a landslide.
He would of done nearly as good if he was a white man.
On the flip side, when the republicans lost with Romney in 2012 they did a whole lot of soul searching (rather than blaming the electorate and moving closer to the center to court mythical ‘moderates’ which is the ongoing failed strategy of the democrats), and in 2016 they had an extremely competitive primary where trump came out on top with a mandate as popular with the base as Obama in 2008.
rather than … moving closer to the center to court mythical ‘moderate
Looking back at 2016 I think Trump won exactly because he went for the middle: middle working class. I know we all thought he was going hard right (and he did appeal to them for certain reasons), but he campaigned to the middle class and won them.
Primaries also benefit from the same effect that makes every movie and TV show a reboot: Name recognition. The long primary cycle keeps their name in the news so people get familiar with it so they’re more likely to vote for them.
They ran Harris because she was the only viable option when it was clear that Biden was not. They did not run Harris thinking she would win at all, they ran her out of desperation because the incumbent was flatlining. It was not a choice, and it certainly was not one based on demographics. It was a “Hail Mary” and it failed as it was likely to do from the outset, and everyone who was paying attention knew that, yet had no choice but to hope for the best.
lol, you believe this? I don’t find it hard to believe that they put Biden though a primary, just to have him drop out…
IMO running Harris was the plan from the beginning. You know, which was kind of the problem, hijacking the primary.
To use your own words, you believe that?
This was not a grand conspiracy geez. Biden’s “primary” was perfunctory because we learned you never primary the incumbent. If he didn’t perform badly at the debate he probably wouldn’t have dropped out.
She quite specifically DIDNT run on those things, like Hillary did…so…
So every racist and misogynist will say she did anyways.
Including the ones on Lemmy.
I think she, and to a greater extent the policies of the Democratic Party since Carter just cost America the Republic but there is literally nothing a black woman could do to convince some people she’s competent in her own right.
Competent at neoliberal corporate cronyism, mind you. But Harris’s qualifications by herself are rock solid.
She quite specifically DIDNT run on those things, like Hillary did…so…
We also want to congratulate our friends in the Republican party, they played a great game and we can’t wait to work with them more.
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley is excited to see his colleagues at the DNC make the same mistakes over and over.
This is amazing.
“I saw how the DNC ignored voters, I saw how they talked down to people, and that just made my job easy. I go in and say ‘Democrats think you’re dumb, but Republicans think you’re a genius’ and these dopes eat it up like the slop they feed their pigs.
Holy fuck is this even satire anymore? I can literally see a GOP campaign official say that in private.
In private? I can see them saying it on TV and the rubes still voting for them since all they watch is Fox News and they’d never run it.
