1369
Punish the Democrats, she says
(discuss.online)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
1369 points (100.0% liked)
Leopards Ate My Face
9708 readers
406 users here now
Rules:
- The mods are fallible; if you've been banned or had a post/comment removed, please appeal.
- Off-topic posts will be removed. If you don't know what "Leopards ate my Face" is, try reading this post.
- If the reason your post meets Rule 1 isn't in the source, you must add a source in the post body (not the comments) to explain this.
- Posts should use high-quality sources, and posts about an article should have the same headline as that article. You may edit your post if the source changes the headline. For a rough idea, check out this list.
- For accessibility reasons, an image of text must either have alt text or a transcription in the post body.
- Reposts within 1 year or the Top 100 of all time are subject to removal.
- This is not exclusively a US politics community. You're encouraged to post stories about anyone from any place in the world at any point in history as long as you meet the other rules.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service apply.
Also feel free to check out:
Icon credit C. Brück on Wikimedia Commons.
_portrait.jpg){kind=link}
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I remember arguing for days, in 2024, that the whole "Democrats are bad because Palestine" thing was clearly a psyop by Russian bots trying to mess with the election. I really need to improve my persuasion skills. Like by a lot.
Pretty sure Democrats doing nothing to stop the genocide in gaza was a factor to their detriment in the election, bots aside
Even knowing that Trump was going to actively help Bibi? That's the thing I didn't understand: sure, the Democrats were not doing much to stop the slaughter, but from the previous Trump administration we knew Trump was going to actively help.
The demorcrats would also have gone to war with Iran, if Israel wanted it. Notice how almost none of the majour dems have really condemned the war in Iran, even though it would have been massively electorally advantageous for them?
Maybe they would have done the war more carefully / competently, but they are slaves to the exact same forces of capital, that pushed Trump towards the war.
in the recent election for MJTs seat, the D candidate lost. One of the reasons given for WHY was because he actively opposed the war, the winning R was all Fir the war.
looking at that, when offered a chance voters sided with the pro war ideologue. They don't have to vote D next time but they could have this time.
Fundamentally a politician wants to win. As a voter, I get people being despondent when there's no real choice but here voters had a choice. Democrat politicians would be stupid not to pay attention.
Ok, but you see how massively demoralizing this conversation is, right?
Making logical points weighing up two distinct yet similar stances on genocide is only going to suppress voter turnout.
It shouldn't. It's basic harm reduction.
One side probably won't stop it, but they're on our side so there's a sliver of a cintilla of a chance we could pressure them into it.
The other side absolutely would not, vocally stated he would help accelerate it, and would laugh in our faces and do even more to accelerate it for no other reason than it made us mad.
The choice should have been obvious, even if I and everyone else would have preferred better options.
See people aren't exclusively machines.
I know people who felt that both sides at least tacitly supporting the genocide was so depressing that for their mental health they basically checked out of politics.
No, that response isn't helpful, but it's a very real thing that happens to real people. They needed a candidate that cared that people's lives were ending across the sea, and neither side offered that.
That hurt Kamala's chances in a very real way, and might even be the deciding factor for Trump's second term.
While you and I can look at this and go "Wow, that's not logical, she's way better than Trump", the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would've cost money.
So while it's true that the choice was still objectively obvious, it's also completely true that the Democratic campaign absolutely mishandled it, because this isn't some new phenomenon, and group human psychology isn't unpredictable. It's also not the fault of those who didn't vote because of that.
to do that in a democracy is beyond shameful.
You don't have to be invested at the grass roots or debating magats but you can still turn up at a polling station on election day, or do a fucking postal vote
D and R parties both need independent voters to win any election. For example, even if every D voted for a D, they would lose without independents voting for them in significant numbers. This has been a political fact for many years.
So... why did the Harris campaign target REPUBLICAN voters (instead of Ds and independents)? They wasted a lot of vital time on that ("He doesn't need to know who you voted for" etc), and they knew that they would lose if they did so.
She knew it too, Harris isn't stupid. She took a knee.
yep, and the Dem leadership still support israel no matter what they do. They learned nothing and will try to set up the same voter hostage situation in every vote from now on.
If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn't actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.
We don't live in a world of "should", in the real world of course it is demoralizing and affects the vote turnout.
We all know the US government will back Israel no matter what... and the voters can only punish the incumbent party for doing so.
65% of Democrats don't want to finance Israel. Two thirds of their own party, that's massive!
Voter turnout will continue to fall; D and R parties will continue to lose voters (now down to 30% registered voters each) and the Independents will continue to grow (now up to 40% of voters).
Why? Because our major parties ignore what their constituents actually want, and we can only punish one party every term.
It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
The very fact that the Trolley Problem exists as a thought experiment and there is still active discourse over the correct solution should tell you why people didn't all feel that they had a responsibility to vote for harm reduction. You can't expect an election that resembles a famously divisive philosophical thought experiment to turn out with everyone arriving at the same conclusion, and it's pointless to dwell on the fact that everyone didn't fall in line with what you think is obvious rather than adjusting to the reality and acting accordingly. That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren't going to put us in the same trolley problem come time for the general.
Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense, and the Palestinian Americans who voted 'undetermined' en masse during the Democratic primaries to send a message to Biden/Harris knew it too. The party made their choice between the people and an unpopular genocide. They chose genocide.
What is more the "Democrat are bad because Palestine" was the opposition's framing. The argumeny was pretty unanimous that the policy on Palestine was going to cost the Democrats the election. The Democrats were bad because they knew full well they were going to choose to lose over changing that policy.
And that's just tunnel visioning at only the Israeli policy.
They were selling weapons to enable the genocide you're downplaying by refusing to call it a genocide.
Not doing much to stop it is a weird way of saying actively helping it.
Imagine being so disingenuous that you actually believe (or at least want others to think you do) that we just didn't know whether Trump would be worse than Harris on Palestine, Iran, and every other fucking thing possible for that matter. I never used to hold much creedence with the whole paid russian or chinese actors angle, even back in 2016. It is becoming more and more difficult to rationally explain how anybody actually living in the US could, with a straight face, make equivalency arguments between Trump and Clinton, Biden, or Harris. It does, however, seem like a perfectly rational act for foreign actors who just want to accelerate their replacement of the US as hegemon to take.
The US was doing it anyway before Trump2.0
Doing nothing to stop it, cheering on Universities and police that beat and punished protesters, refusing to let Ruwa Romman or anyone else anti-genocide speak at their convention, etc.
Their policy was bad and they were assholes about it at every opportunity. It's honestly amazing she got as many votes as she did.
I mean, the democrats ARE bad because Palestine. But the Republicans are worse, by A LOT.
If more people could know more than one thing can be true like you do, we'd probably have the energy crisis solved and relative peace globally...
Is there any possible way to disagree with you that you won't read as a Russian bot trying to undermine democracy?
It's such a thought-terminating cliche that anyone can use to dismiss any criticism. I could just as easily say that you're a DNC bot. Like, fuck critical thinking, I guess.
"People who oppose genocide can't possibly be human: they must be foreigners"
You guys I just as fascist as MAGA you know
Liberals: I can fix that voter, I just need to find the right logic combo in my persuasion.
Also Liberals: if voters were rational they would vote for the lesser evil.
Keep lecturing people, I am sure it will work this time around.
Or maybe we should demand politicians who aren't genocidal? I'm not a Russian bot, I just refuse to follow the same bullshit "vote blue no matter who" harm reduction narrative that just leads to infinitely more harm in the long run.
By "Palestine" do you mean "supporting genocide in Palestine"?
I can’t fathom how any of those people thought Trump would consider Palestine anything but a future golf course. It’s been annihilated as a country and a people under Trump.
Most of the genocide and leveling of Gaza happened under Biden. But yes it continued under trump. Israel owns both US political parties.
So I dont know why you say "under Trump" -- its the exact same thing under both Trump and Biden. We let Israel do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, to whoever they want, funded by us.
Seems you want to pretend Dems are better about it but I dont see how you can contrive any difference between 100% enablement and support.
I was fighting that battle right there alongside you, but yes the astroturfing was enormous. Sometimes I felt like I was the only sane person out there.
It helps to remember that there were hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars going specifically to shilling for trump and putin and disparaging the democrats.
Or maybe I just don’t like genocide.