Comment on Elections Have Consequences
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 day agoThat’s completely shifting the goalposts. Whether Republicans viewed the Democrats as being woke is an entirely different question from whether the Democrats actually were woke. Republicans believed Democrats for reasons I already explained, in my first reply and elsewhere in this thread.
The reality is that the Republican perception of the Democrats had more to do with their own minds and their own circles and their own conditions, rather than what Democrats actually said or did. Many of these people are just diehard reactionaries and unreachable.
Also, Democrats won midterm races regardless of what their stance on trans rights was. El-Sayed for example did not (to my knowledge) adopt any anti-trans positions, and politicians like Talarico and Hamilton (Kansas) conceded on sports but overall had positive messaging.
This is exactly why it’s important to ground your narratives in hard facts rather than vague memories, because if you compare politicians’ rhetoric then to now, how much has it actually shifted? It’s more that Republicans overplayed their hand on the issue, while also fucking up in other, bigger ways, like in Iran. So the rhetoric that’s remembered as being “too extreme” and the rhetoric that’s seen as “reasonable” could be the exact same words, and what’s actually changed is people’s perception of that rhetoric. Which is meaningless for the conclusions and narratives you’re drawing.
danc4498@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I definitely don’t have time to go through a decade of social media posts and news articles, so the best your going to get from me right now is my memory.
Fact that candidates like Talarico and Hamilton were able to say they didn’t support trans people on the issue of sports without the wrath of the left ending their career is evidence the Democrats are no longer “all in” on woke. Newsom said exactly as much 2 yeas ago and was branded a transphobic bigot immediately. Even though he also said very supportive things of the Trans community in the exact same podcast and has done supportive things. To me, this reaction from the community was a problem. It didn’t help that he sucks in other ways, so nobody really wanted to defend him.
Perception was based on comments by many people on the left supporting this idea. Both politicians and the community. No actual legislation came from this, but the stigma was left behind as a result.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I think you’ve blindly accepted this narrative as dogma without any real evidence and anything that happens you could just twist into supporting the narrative. If Talarico and Hamilton had lost, you’d just say that it shows they were too supportive of trans rights, since they won, you say it’s because they weren’t fully supportive of them. Meanwhile, the example of El-Sayed is just written off because he doesn’t fit the narrative you already decided on. It’s nonsense.
Ah, see, there you have it. The community. When people talk about the left going too far, what they mean is almost always like some random Tumblr blog with 10 followers.
Guess what? There are still random Tumblr blogs with 10 followers saying all sorts of crazy things, wielding zero political influence just as they did back then. Fucking, saying crazy shit is part of growing up, part of sorting out ideas, and some of the “crazy shit” that’s taken to represent “the left” is literally just some 15 year old. You’re never going to enforce any kind of “party discipline” across everyone in the country.
What’s changed is not that teenagers suddenly stopped saying crazy shit, or lost the power they never had in the first place, but that the Republicans fucked shit up badly enough that people started having better things to worry about. And to some extent, people have just become more accustomed to the internet and the fact that there are always people saying all kinds of shit and it doesn’t fucking matter. And frankly, the most woke shit by the edgiest teen could barely compete with the shit Elon Musk tweets out regularly to huge audiences anyway.
So, in my opinion, this whole narrative is bullshit based on nothing but memories of perceptions.
danc4498@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lol, now you’re just making shit up.
As for El Sayed, I’m not saying everybody has gone full anti-woke. I’m just saying the Democratic party has chilled out in general. There’s gonna be exceptions.
Ok
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
The point is with this sort of narrative that isn’t really based on hard evidence in the first place, virtually anything that happens can be spun to support it, and the inconvenient parts just glossed over.
So what you are saying then is that everybody had been woke. Because otherwise, if it’s just that there are some politicians that are woke and some that are anti-woke, and it was like that before, then nothing’s really changed.
But that’s the thing. Not everybody in the party was woke. And if you relied on actual evidence instead of memories and feelings, you’d see that that’s obviously true. If everyone had been woke, that raises the question of why wasn’t there legislation that you can actually point to?
If anything, politicians generally didn’t really talk about trans people or have clearly defined stances, until Republicans decided to make it a central issue of their campaign.