Shielding the Democrats from the pressure to adopt more popular positions lost this election.
Comment on fuck this asshole
ceenote@lemmy.world 1 week agoI swallowed my misgivings and voted Democrat, just like I’ve done st each election since I turned 18, but handwaving away valid criticisms is not how you get people to side with you. Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
No, they were never going to do that. They’ve already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they’re gonna double down on the losing strategy that they’ve been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn’t exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting. If you want change, it’s only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won’t have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A few things.
Firstly, we can dismiss the notion that the candidate can’t be moved. The citation for that is Biden in 2020, who effectively campaigned during the primary as a moderate Republican, and until the southern states which we’re never going to go blue anyways weighed in, was getting his ass handed to him. The Sunday before Super Tuesday, the rat-fuckening, Oblivious Warren. All that old history.
And then something remarkable happened. Biden opened the doors to the tent and invited the progressive wing of the party in. He handed the Bernie-crats the platform and said “have at it hoss”. And it worked. Instead of disenfranchising the activist base, he embraced them, or at least, extended an olive branch by giving them the platform, without which he assuredly would have lost.
So: Candidates can be moved.
Second:
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting.
Again. And I’m singling you out because you responded and well, here we are. This is an obtuse, bordering on bad faith interpretation of the argument being made. You aren’t arguing with me. You are arguing with the millions of voters who stayed home for Kamala but showed up for Biden. And you moralizing about an objectively misguided application of strategic voting didn’t/ doesn’t/ won’t/ change their votes. When your “strategic voting” strategy results in losing you the election, explain to me how and why its strategic?
You don’t/ can’t move millions of voters to a new position. Or at least it hasn’t been shown to be possible (2016, 2024). Asking voters to “vote against” instead of “voting for” doesn’t work and we now have so many receipts, that they will write text books on the matter. What can be done, is that the candidate can be moved. Its also been shown through an evidentiary process to work.
To summarize, candidates can be moved. Biden moved and won an election because of it. When you moralize about your own, demonstrated-to-be-wrong conception of strategic voting, you aren’t arguing with me, you are arguing with the literally millions of people left on the table by the Democrats. A strategy that when examined before hand will clearly lose, the insistence of then implementing it becomes a “burn the world down” moralization to wash your own hands: Democratic voters who reliably show up, but did not, because the DNC got a hall pass from those making the exact arguments you are making here. They did not need to respond to criticism because this argument you are making shielded them. And it cost us all, practically everything.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Further evidence that the democrats can be moved if we don’t let them maintain the delusion they can win while trying to be republicans: The entire party told Biden to drop out when it was clear he had no pathway to victory.
Sadly Kamala was allowed to believe she could win while embracing the same policies and messaging that killed the Biden campaign. Instead of screaming at the party to campaign on overwhelmingly popular left policy necessary to win the election, blue MAGA told anyone pointing out that we’re headed back towards the waterfall to shut up and paddle harder.
thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 1 week ago
Not voting for them has never once, in the history of history, gotten them to change. It actually causes them to pull further right.
lobut@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Yeah, they probably think, well the right is doing so well so that’s probably what the country wants. We need to move further right!
leadore@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Exactly.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Yep. Every time they’ve pulled farther right and lost, they’ve blamed the leftists for it for being too extremist in their policy demands or claiming that their issues aren’t as important, like in the case with Millennials and housing costs, student debt, climate change, etc. Despite trying to make some headway on those issues, they’ve always refused to campaign on them.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yep, I voted D like I always did…
But I spent a lot of time ringing any alarm bell coupd find that all of Joe and Kamal’s moves to the right was gonna cost us the election, and that the victory fund would lose the House and Senate.
I was right on all counts, but the people I was trying to explain it won’t admit that reality proved them wrong.
There’s no criticism for what the party did wrong, only anger at anyone with higher standards than the letter by the name.
Neoliberals want nothing as much as they want blindly loyal Dem voters, it’s the only way most people ever hold their noses and vote for one. But rather than have a candidate dem voters want, they’d rather risk trump.
When they shut on voters like in that meme, they’re telling us they have zero problem watching the country burn. They’d rather have trump than a Dem who agrees with Dem voters.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No one is hand waving away anything by asking people to vote
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
handwaving away valid criticisms
If you look carefully, you’ll find statements about how “neither option affects [this particular thing] but we have the best chance of fixing it after the election if we still have a country”.
It was never handwaved. It was the least-worse option with some kind of hope given that issue and a thousand others. How many times this has fucking been fucking explained and not fucking understood.
YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Uh yes it was definitely hand-waved away by some “if you look carefully”. It was only the “least-worse option” because so many were successfully manipulated by the system into being placated with crumbs so they wouldn’t revolt at the thousands of other reasons we’ve had for years to fight back against this shit, pushing the Overton window to the right in increments and leading folks to not use or even possess or be taught in the first place the critical thinking skills required to inform oneself and take steps to make positive change, in this system designed to intentionally misinform and mislead us and pit us against each other so we vote for the same rich white men responsible for perpetuating this system and the harm it brings to all of us, especially marginalized communities.
I would recommend to you (and anyone who is interested in informing themselves on what is being done to us) to read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. It details this process of incremental change, and some of the strategies and parties previously and currently involved in taking control of our government (or at this point more like what’s left of it).
(For clarity: I’m not saying both parties are the same, although their goals, tactics, and policies seem less different to me as time passes; I’m not making any general statement passing blame to any group of voters or non-voters in this comment, because I believe the bulk of the responsibility lies on the system and those who hold sway over large parts of it in the form of currency or legislation, for example; and I’m not denying or invalidating that you may feel this way and/or believe it is true, I’m taking issue with your statement that “it was never handwaved”, because I most certainly saw that happen and know people who to this day are clinging to that sentiment)
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
They’re already 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x better than Republicans. So someone would have to be pretty goddamn stupid not to vote for them when the options are them or Republicans.
The majority of the fault isn’t on Democrats. It’s on goddamn stupid braindead asshole American voters for being goddamn stupid braindead assholes.
nsrxn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
They’re already 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x better than Republicans. So
how can this be quantified?
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The argument, was the least bad between two bads. This is way worse than the alternative would ever get
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I’m 100% for valid criticisms—I don’t even consider myself a Democrat and I have no compunctions about criticizing them when I think they are wrong. But I’m pretty sure that meme is directed at those who withheld their vote.
Addv4@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It would be in theory, but mostly it’s just spread around as how any protest against Israel cost the democrats the US election (despite how it was considered widely unpopular to support Israel’s genocide by most democrats).
RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com 1 week ago
Unfortunately it may have.
A lot of voters are stupid. They see Israel=Bad, Biden/Kamala = pro-Israel, they stay home.
Addv4@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Then maybe Harris and her team should have listened to some feedback about their widely unpopular stance that seemed to somewhat equate them with the Republicans during an election which they absolutely couldn’t afford to be seen as remotely similar to republicans.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I don’t think so. Not that I have anything better to offer. My wife thinks Biden would’ve won because too many people stayed home, refusing to vote for a black woman. I, frankly, think the election was about the economy. If you look back over the elections, they are almost always about how people are doing financially. If they are scared or hurting, they will vote for change. If they are happy, they vote for the incumbent. My honest opinion is that there wasn’t a scenario or candidate that would’ve changed Trump’s victory.
What I am sure of is that in all of the states where Trump won (even Michigan), if every single person who withheld their vote due to Israel/Gaza had voted for Kamala, that wouldn’t have been enough by itself to change the outcome. Certainly, that issue had an effect, but it didn’t change the outcome by itself. We have to look beyond that.
But, still, if you did withhold your vote thinking you were fighting for Gaza, yeah I think you deserve to have your nose rubbed in that shit.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
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