ID: ally @missmayn posted: “the democrats were more energized and organized against campus protests than the current authoritarian takeover.”
ID: ally @missmayn posted: “the democrats were more energized and organized against campus protests than the current authoritarian takeover.”
Can’t escape the braindead c/Politics users even in this comments thread bruh.
People out here still blaming voters as if it isn’t the literal textbook definition of a politician to meet consituent demands for their vote.
Not only was the DNC content in allowing Trump to win, they were content in losing just to protect Israel. a
There’s a lot of unease about this, because some people believe everyone should just vote for the better of the two options; whereas other people believe the option needs to be good before they will vote for it.
Americans were given a choice between two options. One option was clearly better than the other, but the poorer option won, because the better option wasn’t good enough.
It reminds me a bit of the game-theory around the game ‘ultimatum’. Should we just accept whatever is offered, since it is still better than the alternative? Or should we sacrifice our meager reward to spite the person who offered an unfair split?
The way I look at it, it’s not about spite, it’s about not contributing to the problem. If this was a choice made entirely in a vacuum where the choices were dropped from the sky with no history and there were no future elections, and you could absolutely only choose between them and nothing else, then fine, choose the dems since I guess they will technically be “less bad.”
The problem is the choice isn’t made in a vacuum. There’s a reason we have the choices that are presented to us in elections because this is a repeated game where past results affect later games. We keep getting worse and worse options from either party because they know people don’t have a real choice. As long as the dems are anywhere before the line, even if they’re shockingly close, then people will have to pick them. So they move right up to that line because they won’t be punished for it. In turn, Republicans have the space to move further right now that the overton window has shifted.
The DNC feels free to rig primaries, which are supposedly where we’re allowed to have input without risking a Republican winning, because they know that the outcome won’t change people’s votes, or even if it does, they don’t seem to care THAT much about winning as long as actual leftists lose.
Repeat until we have Democrats who are anti-immigration, pro-war, pro-police, pro-surveillance, and pro-corporate and Republicans who have just taken their mask off. And this even trickles down to the base somewhat. How the hell does California vote to keep literal slavery around and still conceive of itself as liberal?
Also, this is less a strategic point and more of a moral one, but I take issue with the idea of the Dems being “better” as a given. Better for who? They’re not better for the people they’re helping to bomb. Why should their priorities not matter? How can you quantify their suffering against different kinds of suffering for other groups? “But the Republicans will do the same, so it’s a wash, you shouldn’t consider that.” Meaning we’ve taken their issue off the table. It’s no longer in the realm of politics because we’ve just accepted that it’s fated to happen. It shouldn’t matter to us.
“But you can apply pressure once they’re in office, the Dems will be more receptive.” How exactly will you pressure people who you’ve told you will unconditionally vote for and won’t act against outside the system? And are they more receptive? They didn’t stop supplying Israel. They never raised the minimum wage or got people healthcare. They never did anything to codify Roe V Wade or to sure up the courts against corruption. Plus once you spent all this political capital putting them in power, how many liberals or even progressives are going to meaningfully push back against them? Libs will go back to thinking everything is fine and a lot of progressives will just think they should try to “hold them accountable.” Whatever that means.
Of course, merely not voting isn’t sufficient to affect change, but I think putting all this emphasis on voting is doing harm to the effort to get people to get organized in other ways. It distracts them and it makes it seem like your principles don’t really matter. “If you are so adamant about supporting the people working against my interests, can you really be by ally? Do you really care about me?”
I think there is solid reasoning in most of what you said. But there is a key point that I don’t agree with…
You say “people will have to pick them”; but that’s obviously not the case - otherwise they would have won.
One could choose to reverse your reasoning to say that the Republicans are free to become more and more progressive without being punished, because there is no other real option. … Clearly that doesn’t seem to be happening; but why not?
There’s are a lot of different reasons why the window might shift left or right… but one fairly simple force is that it will tend to shift towards the party that is winning. Right now, the Republicans are winning, and so the Democrat tries to be just a bit more like them in the hope of capturing enough for the ‘middle ground’ to win. It is pretty natural to think that the middle is somewhere between the two parties, rather than further to the left. I think if the Dems were actually winning elections then they would not be sliding towards the other party. It would be the other way around.
What’s missing from your analysis is the material backing of the parties. The Democrats and Republicans, with the backing of their corporate donors, both represent the interests of the capitalist class. They have their differences in some areas, but neither is interested in disrupting the fundamental relationship between classes and the means of production, which is what grants capitalists their power. So winning or losing elections is less important to them than winning while compromising on that core class interest.
Two things: Why would they? If they want to serve capitalists and they can get away with doing so, they’re gonna do it. Second, in a superficial rhetorical way, they have made appeals to progressives. They use some of the language of economic populism talking about elites controlling you, or the economy giving you a hard time, corporate censorship of media, failures of institutions, and the way we spend money on awful foreign adventurism instead of on helping people at home.
Of course this is all for show and for the things they don’t just straight up lie about, they subtly twist the messaging to play to the same feelings while turning the attention to things that aren’t the problem. Failings of institutions becomes anti-intellectualism. Economic worries get directed to competition with immigrants and foreigners instead of the capitalists exploiting all of them. Corporate censorship gets turned away from the influence corporations have over our communications to just being about crazy woke people who “don’t understand how things work” and can’t handle people “telling it like it is.” Isolationist isn’t about being anti-war or anti-multinational corporations, it’s about how wars don’t benefit Americans enough and how outside influences from scary foreigners is corrupting the country.
Post Clinton and Obama, the Democrats became the party of “everything is fine except for those dumb dumb bigots.” And after Bush, the Republicans pivoted to the counter-narrative of that while still maintaining their priority towards the interests of the capitalist class. So neither party is really addressing your concerns, but one seems to be at least acknowledging the problems you have and telling you you’re a super special person and the other party seems to be ignoring your pain and kicking you while you’re down.
And of course with Republicans in power, I’d expect these roles to flip again. Once Trump does enough of his bullshit he’s gonna say everything is great except for those whinny wokes and the Democrats are playing opposition to that, even against policies they supported while in power like deportation, but only go so far as saying that things were better before Trump ruined everything. If we could just go back to before that everything would be fine. Even more specifically, post Trump there has been an effort to pin things all on specific people rather than any structural critique or even going to far as to broaden it to the party as a whole. “There are good, honest Republicans I might disagree with, but respect, but Trump is pure evil and everything bad that’s happening is specifically because of him” or some other rotating cast of figureheads like Musk, Desantis, etc. even though all of these policies are things Republicans have been working towards for decades, sometimes with the help of Democrats.
So no, I don’t think the stances of the political parties ever really ebbs left based on who wins elections. We had 8 years of “Hope and Change” Obama and the party completely balked at Bernie for actually wanting to follow through on the empty rhetoric of Obama.
To a point we can blame voters. What do you think Trump is doing right now? He’s supporting Israel. It’s just that his campaign was full of lies. I’ve seen small debates between people where the Harris voters would try to argue that Trump was pro-Israel, showing tweets from before his campagn that clearly conveyed his political views. Of course the other side was too adamant.
We can also blame American education. Thankfully, I grew up in a good area, so I was taught proper civics in high-school, and taught about political policies and propaganda at my University (it was a GE, I was an engineering major).
Unfortunately the whole Israel situation is a lost cause anyways as both parties will never give it up. It’s an asset for the US in the middle east.
Sorry the system we’ve been abused by for the last 100 years didn’t change over night because you had a thought about it.
Are you?
I am, I want a system that is responsive to the voters needs and isn’t constantly gamed. At the same time, you can’t pretend that is the system we have. We need to acknowledge how it works and work within that framework to get an outcome that is closer to what we want. Outside of that, you’re talking about mobilizing millions of people who don’t want to mobilize. You do both, you don’t just pretend that if you, as an individual, act in a way that aligns with your idealistic view of the world that you will see results. You work within the system to send it in the direction you want while also acting outside of the system to force changes we actually need.
I could go on, but won’t bother if this is all lost on you.
Those textbooks didn’t have one option being a fascist takeover of the country.
What’s so hard to understand that both Biden and the voters are at fault
No, not Biden. First of all, he wasn’t running. It was the party more broadly. By just saying Biden, the party doesn’t have to change, but the voters are naturally expected to change and be more willing to vote for whatever genocidal shit demon the party demands unquestioning fealty to in 4 years.
You can’t absolve Biden’s part in this though, if his administration hadn’t hid how he was just not in a condition for another years of the presidency (I believe even Biden has admitted this now) then an actual primary could have happened. Instead it was swept under the rug until the last second, then they scrambled to get a non-geriatric candidate that was a good pick for the situation but wasn’t picked by voters.
I’m not. I’m just not about to let party leadership off the hook by acting like Biden did this all by his lonesome.