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Late Stage Capitalism
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People didn't vote. Significantly less turnout this year than 2020. Further left is more exciting than an idiot chasing endorsement from Republicans.
It's stupid, but if people weren't stupid Trump wouldn't have been a candidate.
Then compare it to 2016 - it was practically the same campaign strategy, only this time it lost the popular vote on top of the electoral collage.
Trying to flip people at the margin is not a winning strategy. Obama won in '08 by campaigning to the left and promising meaningful change -- it got people who normally don't vote to engage. Why is that strategy so anathema now?
Yes. People want a populous movement. In the absence of left-wing populism (like socialist reforms), they will take right win populism (fascism).
That might have been in the footnotes of the DNC platform, but Kamala said none of that.
Here's a quote from Stephen Semler's newsletter:
https://www.stephensemler.com/p/a-couple-charts-to-explain-a-harris?publication_id=37298&post_id=151256232>>
Since we lost anyways, I would have preferred to have an actual primary process, even if it was a very abbreviated one at the convention. Destroying democracy to save democracy never made sense to me.
Many many many people were saying that the entire time. It has been clear to anyone not drinking the Biden kool aid that he hasn't been as lucid as he used to be, and many people said that if we had debates and Joe Biden won, at least we would have given others a voice. Anyone who supported Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, etc. especially was infuriated there were no debates, just a coronation. Many people were mad that certain states even canceled the democratic primaries. When Biden dropped out, it would have not been that strange for several prominent democrats to throw their hats in the ring - Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, etc. and at least have some sort of debate at the convention.
Key word being, "addressing." Medicare for All? Nope. They're going to address healthcare costs. Student loans insanely expensive for the majority of Americans? They already tried addressing it. What are they going to do? Eliminate the filibuster to pass legislation? Stack the Supreme Court?
They've been a little better on taxing the wealthy, but raising taxes doesn't mean much if you believe the revenue is going towards the military industrial complex or, "woke," agenda, based on your political leanings.
Liberal half measures aren't going to work anymore. They need a full-blown progressive agenda and the balls to ram it through whatever institution is in their way.
WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? We're two days out from a centrist campaign leading to the largest fucking bloodbath in recent memory, and you're already trying to find excuses to not try appealing to the left? Rejoin reality, dude.
Democrats moved left and there was a “blood bath”. And your take is that we should ignore the polls saying it was because of inflation and move further left. You’re the one that needs to log off lemmy for a while and rejoin reality.
The Democrats moved left? Fucking when? They've been moving to the right my entire life, and I'm not young. This election they campaigned with Liz Cheney on arming Isreal, a harsh border policy, and adding Republicans to their cabinet.
And yeah, it was the economy and the inflation; it's killing the working class. So why did she tailor her message entirely to the middle class? Their economic message was, "inflation is better, the status quo is good, your wrong if you think the economy needs to change." Then they lost, and your takeaway is, "well, changing to a left-wing economic message would obviously be bad." Get a grip, dude.
Thank you, this was the most quintessential liberal answer I've ever seen. You display a complete ignorance on how the Democrats drifted from their New Deal roots in the 80s and the Third-Way's pivot to neoliberalism in the 90s, then attempt to frame my knowledge as foreign propaganda. You obviously never even listened to Harris stump speeches, but you feel confident in correcting me on how many times she brought up the working class vs. the middle-class. Then you follow it up by parroting the campaign's talking point on inflation with no understanding of why it didn't resonate with voters (inflation is down; that doesn't mean prices go down; so what do you tell people other than, "inflation is better now, you're fine"?) and trying to blame that failure on,, "bad actors," and people ignorant of macroeconomics (turns out people understand when their groceries cost more!). And then you top it off by blaming billionaires for buying the election, ignoring that Harris out-spent Trump 4 to 1. Seriously, thank you, I have the beginnings of a liberal-denial bingo card with this comment alone.
What part of it embracing war criminals like Dick Cheney, ignoring the needs of the working class, and mirroring much of Trump's policies is moving left?
Their cognitive dissonance in these threads is just astounding
Astounding but not unexpected.
Biden campaigned on similar promises and ideals like resolving student debt and improving the economy. Even personally relevant promises like creating a public health jobs corps (relevant to my degree and field of study). The only thing he sufficiently accomplished were the initial vaccination efforts, but it's as if we stopped having an actual president into and after 2022: The filthy rich managed to get exponentially richer with this war-supply economy and stock market presidency. My student debt is still a burden in the back of my mind and all of my available graduate-entry jobs are either severely underpaid or shilled out to robots that also vet my applications. Until the war profiteer and stock market billionaires actually pay their fair share (which they should have been a few years ago) or provide citizens with jobs that can sustain a healthy living, any good socialist promises that are made are flat-out lies because senility and flacid mental acuity won't even be a valid excuse anymore.
Biden was actually fairly committed to the student debt forgiveness, but his blind institutionalism meant he couldn't actually achieve much. He wouldn't push to remove the filibuster until late into his presidency and refused to discuss stacking the court. He was the wrong man to meet this moment in history, and we'll be living with his failures for decades.
There were procedural methods they could have used to eliminate the filibuster, which he refused to even consider for half his term. They would have needed the House to expand the court, but if they had the balls to do it, then they could have run on it. Instead, they tried nothing and got nothing.
And all of that populist talk came to a grinding halt once companies like Black Rock started drafting economic policy.
Less people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020. It is not that Trump won, it is that Biden/Harris lost hard.
Trump: 74 Mio. in 2020, 73 Mio. in 2024
Biden/Harris: 81 Mio. in 2020, 69 Mio. in 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election