But I was told it was just that our policy proposals weren’t left enough?
Unironically, you’re right. Most voters don’t vote based on any kind of coherent ideology. They vote on feels.
God help us all.
If the policy proposals were far left enough they’d start to look a helluva lot more like a vision.
(I wasn’t sure whether to edit my comment or reply to your first post, so I’m putting this here)
As for people voting on feels: I think that’s always been the case for most people. Most people are of average intelligence, with an average education and average interest in politics. They’re gonna vote based on vibes, so you have to get the vibes right or the average person won’t vote for you.
And you can’t fake vibes by having a bunch of celebrities around.
I want a country where everyone pays less for healthcare. If it can be done for seniors, why not everyone else?
I want a country where everyone’s private medical decisions remain between them and their doctor, without being cleared by your local, state, or federal representative or by a judge.
I want a country where everyone who works, pays taxes, and does not commit violent crime or property theft can stay and keep working without having to look over their shoulder.
I want a country where if you work full time, you can afford your rent/mortgage, put food on the table, start a family, and still be able to retire.
There’s a vision. Apparently all of these things have become radically progressive leftist positions and are attacked as such by the media and conservatives alike.
See, the problem with all of these ideas is that they’re at odds with the billionaires’ vision that you slave away in servitude to them, while their imaginary worth line goes up to infinity.
It’s really nothing more complex than that. And, as soon as the non-billionaire conservatives—your neighbors, your coworkers, the people you pass by every day—wake up and understand that they’re covered by that vision, too, the sooner things get better for all of us.
All of these social programs suddenly become much more popular when they are restricted to the majority population. There have been surveys demonstrating this. Another way to see it is to point to places with a lot of those policies, one of the first rebuttals you will receive is a yarn about the homogeneous population, or at least one far more so, in those places.
So, it isn’t that they think they won’t be covered, it is because so many think it will cover people they don’t want it to.
With capitalism, a middle class does not occur organically, it is created by the governing body through subsidies. If you do not subsidize a middle class there can be no middle class. This is fundamental. We really started to feel it in 2015 or so. I called it the squeeze. This tightening grip of not subsidies but further attempts to squeeze more and more blood from rocks.
Why? Our government has been subsidizing the wrong class for a while now. Trump did kick that up a notch the first time. The data is in. Trickle down economics doesn’t work.
As with a middle class, health care has to be subsidized. The governing body won’t allow richer people to pay the same taxes as the poorest of us so that will never happen.
And now Elon Musk is promising “hardship” going forward, as opposed to whatever this is the last 4 yrs, on us, the poorest, rather than paying mor taxes himself. Like that would impact his alien ass at all (he’s weirdly shaped, looks like a slightly melted wax museum figure, and was born into so much money he has no idea how humans live, that’s what I mean by alien). So don’t count on it ever happening going forward.
If you have preexisting conditions expect loss of coverage. And as a fallout from that expect the healthcare system to get slammed with much sicker people trying to find loopholes and other diagnoses so they can actually keep living and working.
The data is in. Trickle down economics doesn’t work.
It works for the rich. Relatedly, shitty economies where the government pumps tons of cash into rich people’s pockets also work for the rich. They inflate their assets with their additional government handouts and use those inflated asset prices to get loans to buy more mega yachts.
