Having spent some time to consider the question, heres my thoughts. I think one of the biggest issues is that the DNC and the left leaning social+idealogical groups which support it are openly antagonizing a majority. Which to be clear is white, hetero, male voters.
Theres a vocal large part of the DNC supporters that are angry and want to hurt straight white males systemically while proping their own prefered groups up.
So, theres an unaddressed self righteous hatred towards the majority burning in the hearts of many of the left. Only the left refuses to adknowledge it openly because it advertises itself as the morally superior party above things like sexism or xenophobia.
The dems need publically excuse or masquerade their instinctual hatreds and biases. Wanting certain groups of race, sex, and gender to have more privilege and oppertunity than others need to be carefully twisted into false-positive language like restorative justice.
The right are honest about their biases and hatreds. They know what theye’re about and dont need to morally justify it beyond God and Country.
A lot of people backing the DNC feel wronged by the majority and seek either vengeance and or for the system to be rigged in their favor instead of true equality. This attitude creeps up in advertised policy. If you want to actually win, stop attacking the majority and put some incentives for them in your policy too. Simple as.
If youre offering economic incentives, dont have it be just for people of a certain race. Have it be for all people of a financial class. “B-but the statistics show its X minority class that suffers the most from economic unfairness so don’t they deserve special focus/treatment?” No. No they dont. Give everyone poor and suffering under the system the same opportunities/handouts regardless of their skin color or your just trying to rig systemic privilege towards your prefered kinds of people and excuse it as a “necessary handicap”.
I’m a poor working class joe. I like weed. I would like to be a weed shop owner. Kamala is supporting weed and promises incentives for those trying to start up a business? Great! Where can I sign u- its only for black people because historically they were most effected by weed discrimination -oh, nevermind. See it’s shit like that that looses you voters.
Its hypocritical to want equality and opportunity, but only for certain groups of people and not others. Thats not equality nor is it solving the problem.
If you want to advertise your party as the one for equality, real honest to god equality, your economic and social policies needs to benefit everyone equally. Every person, every race, every gender, every personality type. Anything else is just hypocritical vengeance or trying to use systemic inequality in your favor wearing the skin of restorative justice. If your policies impliment selective privilege based on race and gender it hasn’t solved anything.
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).
Just bafflingly long chain of poor choices dating all the way back to RBG.
Obama shoulda made her step down to replace.
Obama (or whoever has the power) shoulda told Joe he was sticking to one term after the 2022 midterms, and REALLY prepared for 2024 in earnest. They run the best primary they’ve ever ran. They do a non traditional media strategy.
But they did the opposite. Year after year. And then panic with a billion dollars and no path two months before an election that Trump has already been running for 2-4 years.
It goes back farther, to Bill Clinton embracing Neo-Conservitive economic principals.
That was the beginning of the end of the Democrats.
Thank you. The most damage Dems ever did to most working class white folks in this country to prep them for despair, misery and authoritarianism was NAFTA. Couple that with not raising federal minimum wage when they had power. They want to keep billionaires happy though so no progressive candidates. Submarine Bernie. Annoint Hillary even though she was the most pro-war candidate in the primaries, she said she’d bomb Iran! This was after we’d barely finished the illegal disaster of fraudulent WMDs in Iraq and had begun slimming out of Afghanistan.
The fact they lost minorities like Hispanics to vote for them when Trump is pitching hate and deportation…the measure of failure is impossible to put into words.
Man… don’t take this language personally. It’s just the only way I know how to speak right now.
In what fucking world do you think a more progressive candidate would’ve turned Michigan and Pennsylvania blue?
Christ. I hope I’m fucking wrong. Because I do believe in a more progressive agenda. And I’m in Michigan. But this takeaway is absolutely fucking nuts to me.
The last thing we need is for the hardcore blue states to be even bluer while the battleground states are all red.
I don’t know, man. Explain your math to me. Because I can’t wrap my head around it. But I haven’t slept in like 36 hours, either, so maybe it’s just me.
I didn’t say progressive. Progressive is a very broad term that can apply to all sorts of things.
I said economic-populist. One of the few things nearly all of us agree on in this country, is that the corporations and the ownership class have too much power in politics, and they’re getting that power by stealing money from the working class. Trump was good at speaking to that, without actually doing much to help. The Democrats did some to help. But not enough, and they didn’t want to sell it much for fear of scaring off the ownership/donor class.
Leave behind all the racial, sexual, social justice progressive stuff. It’s divisive and won’t help you win. Helping the poor generally, will disproportionately help those people more anyway. Just without putting them in the spot light.
Trump was good at speaking to that
I don’t understand this, he campaigned with Musk, flaunted the idea of offering him a cabinet position and Musk stated the people would suffer under his policies. That’s about as pro corporate as it gets.
Harris lost Michigan by fewer votes than the number of people who voted “uncommitted” in the primary.
I don’t think the lesson here is to be more moderate or more conservative.
You know, uncommitted doesn’t really bother me. Had I bothered voting in the primary, I’d probably have voted uncommitted, too. Because I’m not really happy about the administration’s handling of the Israel-Gaza situation.
But I damn sure voted for Kamala yesterday. I hope the Jill Stein voters feel really fucking smug about teaching Democrats a lesson when Trump tells Netanyahu to just push all the Muslims into the fucking ocean, and sells them the bulldozers to do it. I hope they all fucking cheer when they watch it livestreamed, Xclusively on X.
Because I assume that’s what they wanted out of this election, and by gum, they fucking got it.
That was entirely about Israel and Gaza. The Democrats refused to distance themselves from the Republicans on that. Both sides were all in on the genocide. So yah people who felt it was the number one issue, had little reason to vote for Democrats over Republicans.
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.
That explanation drives you away from the problems Democratic Party has. If people want to cast their vote, they will, if they are sexists or racists they vote for the other party. In this election we saw that a lot of people from both sides that voted in the previous election who didn’t want to vote now. It was much more people for the Democrats likely because they voted last time and were disillusioned in the democratic process.
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.
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.
