The Democrats threw it away.
For several races now they’ve been told by many actual progressives, they need to embrace economic-populism. They refused to. Instead embracing the Cheneys. They got out played by a convicted felon, who’s older than his IQ (thanks to another lemmon for that line. I love it).

Something I haven’t seen discussed is that Kamala is a woman. There are a lot of misogynistic voters who will refuse to vote for a woman.

Republicans are nazis. Nazis are a cancer on society. In civilization, life is based on cooperating, and in the jungle, life is based on you doing whatever you can physically pull off. Nazis bring the law of the jungle into civilization, with no regard for the things they destroy. They boldly gamble that the people they plan to murder will continue trying to cooperate with them, and leverage it at every turn to grab more and more power.

The Democrats’ playbook assumes cooperation from everyone. As it turns out, so much so that, as an organization, they literally cannot conceive of an opponent who, at the end of the day, won’t cooperate. That blind spot is where nazis strike. They’re the one opponent where you put your ordinary playbook away, and play dirty until there’s no more nazis, either because they’re dead, jailed, scattered, or they chose cut the crap for good. Then you go back to cooperating with those who will cooperate back.

“But then we’re no better than them” is the rallying cry of the Democrats. And–this is super important–when you aren’t dealing with nazis specifically, that’s absolutely how you should think. It’s how any decent person thinks, because a world where people don’t is a world that fucking sucks. So people do. It becomes the law of the land: sacred, normal, assumed.

Which makes it unchanging. And if you’re a nazi, that is, someone who is short-sighted enough to think that grabbing power by literally any means necessary is a good idea, and dedicate yourself to doing it with no regard for the fact that you’re ruining everything, then you can attack. Your chances of success spring from the flexibility of your own soullessness, and your opponents’ refusal to acknowledge that you’re actually that horrible.

Add in first past the post and you have two giant funnels labeled “Democrat” and “Republican” into which all political efforts ultimately fall. Biggest pile wins. People understandably don’t know about those metaphorical funnels, so they do what would be smart in another system–vote third party. But under first past the post, a third party is just a hole in the side of your funnel feeding into the other one. It just adds to the other pile. It’s the false dichotomy that was actually a true dichotomy.

So really there are two things that could have worked. One, progressive takeover of the Democratic party, and deal with the nazis properly instead of being that which they can leverage. Two, get nazis to think through their end game, and realize that they themselves do not want what they’re fighting for. When they say “yes we do!”, that’s just a refusal to think it through the rest of the way:

Ok, you want power. What does that get you? “Dead enemies”. Ok, what does that get you? “Victory!” Ok, what does that get you? “Security and strength.” Ok, what does that get you? “Peace”. Ok, what does that get you? “… I guess then I could relax and just enjoy my life?” Ok, what does that get you? “Then I would be ok inside”. Only a friend and a sage can guide someone through this, because it requires cooperation and introspection. It’ll just trigger an attack if an opponent does it to them.

You can see how unlikely those both are, but they would both work like fuckin bangers if they got off the ground. But those are the two ways you fundamentally change that dynamic. Play dirtier than the people who play dirty and win so you can restore cooperation, or get them to realize that playing dirty isn’t actually what they want anyway.

This time? There was no real opportunity for meaningful change. The Democratic party is far right economically, and they depend on the donations of plutocrats and megacorps. Regardless of either Democrats or Republicans getting elected, the donor class wins and working Americans lose. Some will say Harris attempt to appeal to the right wing is what made her lose, and perhaps there is an element of truth to that. Its unlikely that the Republican base she attempted to woo would actually vote for a Black woman running as a Democrat over the old, rich White guy running as a Republican. However, the owners of the Democratic party - the ones who immediately had millions of dollars to donate the day Biden dropped out - they didn’t lose. The only way the owners could lose is by appealing to progressives and winning an election.

The time to begin doing something differently was decades ago, building power and organizing from the bottom up. Socialists need to begin running in and winning local elections, and pushing hard against First Past The Post elections.

I feel like a superstitious loon for saying this, but what I think should have happened differently is the universe should have worked like we rationally understand it instead like a glitched-up Matrix.

Trump’s offensive, obnoxious, criminal behavior is too extensive to even list without being tedious. He had almost zero platform except that immigrants are bad. Somehow more than half the voters in America picked him over a scandal-free, criminal-conviction-free opponent pushing optimism and making strongly positive proposals. The universe shouldn’t work that way. I really feel like this supports the theory that we are living in a simulation. It feels like somebody put their thumb on the scale to see what will happen.