Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.

What a reasonable and not at all unhinged reply!

Absolutely. It’s a two way street here.

People need to stop turning on each other though. What’s done is done. The left has always been divided but right now we really need to start pulling ourselves together.

The lesser evil is literally the better candidate.

The trump voters and the people who sat out the vote have that on their consciences.

I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.

What matters is policy. Real hard on the ground policy that real normal people can feel and see where they live.

When some wonk gets on MSNBC with a spreadsheet hooting about how much better things are with grocery prices or housing costs, that doesn’t mean anything to someone who’s begging for extra shifts at work so they can make rent. Those are aggregates and averages. If the 200k-500k bracket is doing better while the 13k-45k bracket isnt, the numbers still went up. That looks better in the data. But the people at the bottom are still suffering just as much as ever. They don’t feel or see any improvement because there wasn’t any. Not for them.

The health and performance of the stock market only matters to those on the bottom when it crashes and suddenly they’re paying more for everything. At no other point does it impact them in the slightest. Those record profits aren’t reinvested, they’re not used to reduce the strain on consumers. Its gobbled up by a few dozen shareholders. It benefits nobody else. And if an executive or CEO has the slightest semblance of a soul and wants to help consumers they’re voted out because the only responsibility is to those few dozen shareholders.

Healthcare. The ACA was a grand achievement. They took Romneycare national. Round of applause for all involved. But its still cheaper to do some form of Universal Healthcare. That would be the easiest win in history. And everyone would feel it immediately. It would help 100,000,000 people immediately. People who have been putting off medical treatment for half their lives because of the extortionist expense would immediately seek treatment. They would seek preventative treatment and raise the overall health across the country. Obesity rates drop, drug use plummets, etc.

Marijuana. Literally every person I know and interact with in my daily life uses it. Do you know the number one reason I’ve heard from all of them? Pain management. Again, another easy win that is supported by everyone except the ghouls who were alive when it was called “The Devil’s Lettuce” and propagandized into believing its this terrible thing.

Hard Policy that people can feel and see in their daily lives. You can still court the comfortable liberals who care about the stock market and all that. They’ll be fine no matter who is in office. If they need an abortion it’s a weekend vacay to Zurich or somewhere. But you’re never going to hold any meaningful power again without hard policy. Because for decades now the republicans have cornered the market on grievance politics and reaction. To break through that you need something real. No more vibes based nonsense. It will not work.

What strawman? When is it appropriate to hold DNC leadership accountable for losing the election, again?

Yes, the number of people on here who claim that withholding their vote to ‘punish the DNC’ and make them learn a lesson is helpful is too high. If the Democrats were going to learn their lesson, they would have done so after 2016. Believing that by not voting, they’ll affect the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t make them leftist, it makes them another flavour of liberal, who thinks establishment electoralism is a pathway to socialism.

A much more effective solution is to organize locally, educating people on real solutions and pushing for change that way, not by blindly assuming the Democrats will reflect on their loss and run a communist candidate next time.

It represents a large portion, but progressive policies are widely popular. Even in states Trump won there were votes passed to protect abortion access and increase minimum wage.

Most people vote based on vibes, and there were no progressive or positive vibes put forward by the dems this campaign. They signaled a ‘lethal military’, tighter borders, and sought endorsements from prominent Republicans, trying to win votes that would never go to their party anyway, alienating anyone who might have believed in the genuineness of the dems as ‘progressives’.

Wow, that is some spectacular thinking.

Yeah, and your comment is a great example of the Democrats 2024 outreach strategy: a smug, self-righteous attitude that failed to get you any votes.

a wealth tax

Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.

25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.

support for legalized cannabis

You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.

support for trans people

She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.

The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.

Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.

This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.

How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?

No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.

Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.

I’m not saying that she didn’t have any liberal centrist ideas like what you listed, but that doesn’t mean she was progressive either. A lot of the policy ideas that were actually good were once on the Republican platform before Reagan.

Don’t forget about how popular Bernie was in 2016 before he was forcibly removed from the democratic nomination by the party establishment or how popular Tlaib, AOC, and Omar have been. Don’t forget about how down-ballot races in this cycle, while brutal to Democrats, didn’t push out many progressives. Progressivism is far more popular than the democratic party is willing to admit or fight on, because the party is owned and controlled by the same class currently oppressing us; the billionaires. If a candidate like Bernie presents a real path, they will force the person out. It’s not strictly an issue with the Overton window.

Here’s the thing about the choice facing people in the election: it doesn’t matter anymore as a matter of the current political reality, because Harris gambled hard on the “good cop, bad cop” aspect of “he’s worse” and lost hard. That statement is 110% true, but it’s horribly ineffective as we saw in 2016 and again in this election. Islamophobia will absolutely increase, and Trump will fund the genocide until all of Palestine is settled by colonists. But once again, don’t forget about how successful Tlaib was in comparison to Harris. We no longer have the opportunity to find out if it would or wouldn’t have affected the campaign, but the indication is there that at least 1 swing state would have gone to Harris with an anti-genocide stance.

Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.

But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.

But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.

By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?

As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.

That’s because fascism has never and will never be beaten at the ballot box.