“To all those growing skeptical of this party’s strategies and overall agenda, let me just say we hear you loud and clear. Rest assured we will be doing everything short of interpreting that sound into words and responding to those words in any way shape or form.”
The best line in the whole article
sounds a lot like the same thing they said in 2016 and now that we know that they’re doubling down on their stubbornness here and in other examples; we should expect a repeat of 2016 & 2024 in 2028.
I think after 4 years of Trump, if there are still elections in 2028, we’ll see a Democrat elected president simply because of the fact that how bad it is under Trump will be right in people’s faces. In 2032, however, we’ll definitely see the Dems lose to somebody even worse than Trump for exactly why they lost in 2016 and 2024.
The Dems don’t learn anything and lose, then 4 years later they win because the Republicans made things worse, and then they learn nothing, double down, and lose again, starting the cycle all over again.
This is how it goes. People are uninformed when it comes to politics and generally stupid as fuck. Biden dealt with Trump’s terrible policies and the aftermath of the pandemic. Prices went up. Biden bad. Elect Trump. Unimaginable terror but good economy. Elect Trump’s kid or some other dipshit. Economy goes to shit in a way fucksticks can understand. But now it’s too late.
Democrats: “Moving right a little didn’t work this time. Next time let’s try moving a little more to the right.”
“Clearly we didn’t move right far enough. We should have moved right further. It is what the voter wanted”.
No way to prevent this, says only party where this regularly happens.
No will to prevent this. The DNC would like you to quietly believe that they are a progressive party. They wear the costume (and have a few truly progressive players), but the party is not as progressive as they’d have you believe. Their elite are beholden to lobbying, grift, and self enrichment just like the republicans. Progressive democratic socialist policies always hurt someone’s profits, so the DNC can’t move too far left. They can’t move too far right either without alienating their base. So they attempt to do very little.
This is why they purposely fucked Bernie out of his nomination.
That’s funny, but I don’t think it’s quite right.
Establishment parties across the EU and OECD countries (mostly liberal democracies) all had their incumbent parties lose ground in 2024, for the first time in history.
Graph of EU/OECD election changes
People know they want something to change, but right now it’s only the fascists promising to do so.
The Democratic party isn’t a viable alternative to the Republican party. They’re too friendly to corporations, not doing enough to show teeth or enthusiasm, and definitely not explaining why Republicans are the worst option. Let’s assume that D is politically bankrupt after taking right wing medias beating for the last 40 years. SO HOW DO WE FIND A NEW ALTERNATIVE TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? And how do we get everyone to migrate?
First get rid of FPTP.
THEN and only then can we form a new progressive party.
Or, and hear me out - stop desperately trying to reform an unreformable system and ignoring that it is working exactly as it was designed to, abolish it, and build something better instead.
I think we’d all love to. The constitution is fundamentally broken and should be completely rewritten. It’s founded on ideas that just aren’t true now, if they ever were. The idea that the states are more like countries than counties is the biggest one. The idea that we can and should protect ourselves from the tyrrany of the majority by having independent branches of government and countless ways to stop and stall things is another huge one.
But here’s the biggest problem, not enough of the country agrees that the system is broken, and even smaller portion of those who do can agree on how it’s broken or what changes to make. So no, we can’t just abolish it. We can either (1) fix it enough to get to the point that we may be able to have the stability it would require to safely transition to a new constitution or (2) see things get so bad that enough of the country is on board for revolution. Both options suck, but option (2) has a pretty bad record compared to option (1) in my view.
In other words, “no, I won’t stop desperately trying to reform an unreformable system and ignoring that it is working exactly as it was designed to, instead, I’m just going to insist on playing by the rules of this system that was designed to work against me over and over and over again expecting a different result to magically manifest in to reality”
In other words, “no, I won’t stop desperately trying to abolish an nationally popular system and ignoring that it hasn’t been possible for centuries even after a civil war, instead, I’m just going to refuse to do anything to help within the rules of this system that might be able to improve life for people care about over and over and over again eve though history shows us things can be made better”
Ok, how do you propose doing that? A violent revolution?
Only one thing could have broken our movement—if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement. -Adolf Hitler
And quite frankly, we’re long past that point.
If you think there is any other way to fight fascism, you’ve not been paying any attention, and clearly don’t have a fucking clue what fascism actually entails and how it functions.
ETA: moreover, fascists, who are the actual terrorists literally holding the world ransom and exploiting us all and destroying our habitat for their own gain, count on people like you to turn on people like me and call us the terrorists to ensure they maintain their power. You have a choice to make.
The right believes that the 2nd amendment exists so that the public can overthrow a corrupt government, in this faulty logic they believe that some normies with AR-15s can overcome the US military. Unlike January 6th the current political right also wouldn’t hesitate to use that military might to crush a violent revolution. At best what you are talking about would result in a civil war, assuming the military splits evenly as well, and at worst would result in the obliteration of the rebels. Given the number of Punisher symbols I see on military persons I wouldn’t bet on them supporting leftist revolutionaries.
We have seen revolutions in many places where the military had the force to kill everyone.
The military relies on a functional society to fund it. Guerilla wars are not winnable for the military. Some soldiers do have a conciousness and given how racialized people often join the military for educational opportunities, i dont think they are too keen on slaughtering their own people in the streets.
It will be bloody. But it is winnable. And if the alternative truly is Trump putting people in camps, like many liberals claimed, the rational choice is fighting and risking to die fighting than dieing without even trying.
The military may well be on our side, even if Trump decides to schedule-F all the top brass and replace them with loyalists, the officers that follow them are likely to have differing opinions of what constitutes a legal order.
From the top of the GOP down, Trump is a useful idiot, but difficult to handle. As I noted on NCD ( Sorry about the dumb link ) Trump is actually eager to nuke the snot out of someone, unable to regard the consequences. (He may be unable to consider the consequences, but I can’t make that assessment.) It’s going to be up to the commanders down the chain to find a way to ignore those orders, or delay them until someone up the chain of command comes to their senses.
That said, I suspect they might run out of patience, especially if they’re sent to attack Americans (we’re still wary after the anti-riot deployments during the civil rights movement). While I can’t expect US armed forces to take sides in a civil war, they can certainly intervene to stop smaller military units from engaging.
Go on then
And if neither party supports that reform, do we just keep voting Democrat until the end of time?
Every part of it needs to be destroyed and replaced. Trump took over and completely transformed Republicans.
While I’m mostly sure it parody, its gotten really hard to tell lately.
I think they just got stuck in a rut. They have been dealing with an all-obstructionist Republican party for nearly 16 years now, ever since Obama was elected, if not before.
They stopped promising the moon because they became policy wonks and focused on what was realistically achievable, only making promises they thought they could turn into reality with an obstructionist party blocking them.
They stopped being dreamers, started being policy wonks, and were unwilling to make promises they didn’t think they could keep. Think about the amount of messaging in the last few elections about how progressives were asking too much because we have to be realistic about what we can pass with only a sliver of a majority. People rightly view that as starting from a point of compromise and thus as weak.
Trump promised to smash norms and ignore laws to get his promises done, which people wrongly view as strong. When Republicans like Trump make promises, they are completely unburdened by whether they can accomplish them or not: make the promise, follow through be damned.
Nobody wants a policy wonk telling them they need to wait until their kids are middle aged for things to get better for their family, and the Democrats somehow failed to realize this in 16 years.
Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system. Everyone else has been Bush-era-style “Stay the course” status-quo enabling.
you’re right, they make an outlandish promise (build a wall, mexico to pay) and then blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. The agenda-setting aspect you’re mentioning is also something that caused everyone in the democratic party to snipe Bernie since his whole thing was talking about what must happen and not getting bogged down in the endless details (though I think he could have also done that at that level too).
They are going to get change now. Especially if they are deported or jailed.
Right, they don’t seem to understand the kind of change they’ve chosen here. If they were actually upset about corruption, they picked the wrong team.
It’s over.
Yeah, the presidential election is a circus and only a performer can be an effective candidate. Ever since 2016, the DNC just runs these duds who focus more on extending an olive branch to the GOP than championing solutions to anything voters actually care about, no matter how realistic. Whether the solutions can actually be achieved is irrelevant; what matters is that you’re willing to shoot for the moon on important issues and not weaken your position before you’ve even started negotiating. Without that, how can you possibly expect voters (particularly, typical low-information voters) to show up for you?
Honestly, Tim Walz would have been a better presidential candidate. At least he has a personality.
I assume, and many others will, that you’re a millennial lawyer. You should change your name if you want to be taken seriously as a critic of the system. You ARE the system, just in a low tier role.
I’m not criticizing anything except for the DNC’s strategy for the past eight years. Love your handle btw
Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system
And, even then, he enacted a shockingly small amount of actual change.
He had the majority long enough that he could have codified Roe V. Wade, and increased the minimum wage, and done UHC and all sorts of shit, but he wanted to policy wonk both-sides across the aisle cooperation shit, and well, ended up passing the Republican version of UHC and bailing out billionaires, which really doesn’t exactly reflect hope and/or change.
I’m not saying he didn’t have problems, or that he had an endless mandate, or that he did nothing, but mostly that the “best” democratic president in damn near 30 years who had the biggest mandate you’re probably going to find in modern politics still did a shockingly little amount of anything to improve or harden the government against clear nutters - the Tea Party was showing up, so it was or should have been blindingly obvious where that was going to end up eventually going.
I don’t buy the ® “do nothing democrats” line, but boy, they certainly make it hard to refute that claim in any form that’s not a 1000 word essay which is why it plays so very well on TV/news/Twitter.
This article is a parody but it’s also on the nose
Democrats are afraid of there not being elections in 2028. What they should be afraid of is the DNC moving even further right as they are planning to do right now.
Lest we all forget, Trump took the well considered Romney post mortem, threw it in the trash, pissed on it, then gradually built a coalition of, checks notes… White women and men of color. For fucks sake.
Are you shitting me? I know it was a small margin but women voted for Harris. Black people voted overwhelmingly for Harris. Yeah Trump got some black people to vote for him and Latinos shifted. You’re going to pin this disaster on white women and black men?
That’s not the point of my argument. My point is that Republicans warned themselves they would lose MORE women and minorities if they didn’t move away from harsh immigration discussions and conservative social policies.
And then Trump did the opposite and made gains with those voters.
53% of white women voted for Trump.
The DNC often deals with this, because the nature of federal politics in the US requires them to appeal to the general public, which has left-leaning interests, and then businesses and oligarchs for sponsorship which have right-leaning interests.
Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.
So no, those of us on the left have no candidates. And since its a two-party FPTP system, we only can vote against the worse popular guy by voting for the slightly better other popular guy.
In this case, assuming the election went down as it appeared, the majority of the US voted for the racist autocratic dictator rather than another neolib. (Granted, Biden went further left than we expected and I had hope Harris would as well. Walz certainly seems to understand the US public, but none of them are without ties to industrial interests. We’d still only be able to expect a couple of scraps.)
What this tells me is that most Americans don’t get it. They think they have a choice. And now they’re going to endure the consequences of their folly.
Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.
It’s amazing that a naval officer/peanut entrepreneur/devout Christian was “too left wing”, especially since he got beat by a Hollywood union boss from California.
Mind you, we just had an anti-elite rebellion led by a thrice-divorced billionaire failson of a New York City real estate magnate.
What would it look like if they “got it”? They’d still have chosen one or the other, I don’t know how I’d distinguish between this outcome that indicates they don’t get it and one where they apparently do.
As best as we understand the motivation of the constituency, they felt the economy was bad under Biden, that immigrants were increasing crime, weighing down our social programs and taking our jobs, and that Trump will fix everything with his concept of a plan.
In reality, Biden was dealing with the after-effects of Trump’s economy, plus the COVID-19 epidemic, and while prices did increase, the US has recovered better than any other nation, so he can’t really be faulted on the economy, especially after Trump’s initial response to the epidemic of pretending like it’s not already in the community, and politicizing mitigation efforts like masks and social distancing.
Then, immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don’t want, are paying taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the general population. So all of our concerns about immigrants are demonstrably false.
And if Trump’s previous methods of fixing the United States is consistent, then he’s only going to break things. An example would be his efforts to repeal the ACA, which turned into the skinny repeal that is, killing the program without a replacement, because making a better healthcare program was too hard for the GOP.
I remember all this, and it’s troubling the short memories of the American electorate. It’s not the first time, though. They should have remember not just how bad it was under George W. Bush, but how awful Republicans became during that time. Street Republicans were outwardly endorsing torture and suggesting that waterboarding wasn’t really torture. It’s like they lost all moral direction or even basic sense in favor of party loyalty.
Now as more votes are processed, and as we’re able to see how demographics voted, our review of the 2024 election might change, but right now it looks like huge chunks of the electorate are just forgetful and completely daft. More likely they’re just racist and bigoted more than they care about their own self interests.
If they got it they’d know that putting a Democrat in office and then pressuring them can get results, which is how we ended DADT and DoMA. The GOP doesn’t care what the public thinks.
It’s worth tapping the quote (accredited) from Linden Baines Johnson:
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
Biden was the first president to turn away from neoliberalism this century and the fact that no one really recognized that is alarming.
Unlike prior revolutions in which the new regime was established after the old, we should write a new constitution in advance.
Start with a framework. Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes (getting rid of the EC, say. Or election by ranked choice)
And then, we develop it. Run clauses by legal scholars, hold town halls. Get it on the web. Debate about the benefits of competing clause versions.
So that when there is a movement, a resistance (and there will be) an organized rebellion, the people will not just have an enemy to fight against but something to fight for.
Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes
Or take one that already works well for centuries. Scandinavian countries, Austria, Swiss, are generally good at this.
Sure!
So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all† the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all† languages.
Then there’d be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they’d be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they’re ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)
The point of all this when the world isn’t on the precipice of despair is twofold:
1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d’etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And…
2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don’t receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.
Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.
I don’t have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.
For now it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn’t have any idea how to begin it.
† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.
We already did these things eighty years ago. But, you forgot why we’ve an EC. Admitting you’re powerless over your chronic ignorance and apathy is step 1.
Maybe don’t be a dick
Our issues are so bad we’ve back to back hurricanes in Florida and the White House. But, you’re more concerned with feelings. Eighty years of your ideology hasn’t worked so well. Perhaps you should reconsider.
It’s The Onion all the way down
This is a satirical source. Haven’t seen one comment that didn’t take it seriously.
Bernie Sanders reflected on it stating that it was the Democrats failing the working class that won Trump the election, and people in the Democratic Party denounced him for it.
Yep. They all got got lmfao
They already learned nothing from 2016. If they didn’t learn before why would you believe they’ve learned this time. It’s a situation where satire runs too close to reality so of course people take it seriously. In fact the “she didn’t get elected because she’s black/woman” reasoning already shows they don’t plan to learn from this time either. The answer to dems losing isn’t “we weren’t racist/sexist enough”.
I’m kind of amazed that more politicians don’t just promise to try to implement all the highest polling ideas. (Spoiler: Most are progressive and socialist policies.) Especially presidential candidates running against potentially catastrophic fascists.
Because they exist to protect their corporate benefactors and popular policies don’t allow for that
And why do they serve them: All points back to the insane amount of money necessary to run a campaign (esp. at higher levels, vs billionaires, etc).
Can you believe the democrats spent this much money and still lost as badly as they did?! It blows the mind!
I’m sure the totals are so absurd that I can’t really comprehend the numbers. But Citizens United set the rules of the game. And Democrats don’t have that sweet cult advantage.
Embarrassing, but so is Trump and Vance winning so many working class votes, while being extremely wealthy anti-labor anti-union cunts, backed by world’s loudest and richest dipshit, which will demand more tax cuts (for them), tariffs and austerity (for us). “But Biden prices went up!” SMFH.
Don’t downplay inflation. That’s how Harris lost in the first place.
Sure. Costs are too high. People are angry. But angry people are not very reasonable or logical, and easier to manipulate. They just voted against any helpful progressive policies, in favor of tariffs, austerity, oligarchs, fascism, chaos, etc. This was very dumb.
To me, the core problem is that Democrats lost the information war, esp. with the average low info voters (“I get my news from Facebook/TikTok”). It didn’t help that Biden funded genocide and Harris ignored progressives.
As my straight white female 30s friend (were in vermont so it’s inconsequential) said: “I can’t afford another four years of this. I did better under the other guy although I hate him.” When I asked her about reproductive rights since she’s a straight woman of childbearing age she said “we’re protected in vermont. If that changes I’ll change.” (We have a state constitutional right to abortion here)
This woman doesn’t hate queers, she doesn’t hate minorities, the only thing she hates is inflation making her work harder for less and less.
And then there’s the wars. Biden/Harris royally fucked up. the billions we send to Ukraine and Israel are deeply unpopular with average people who see rising homelessness and increased natural disasters and shitty government response to it (we’ve been hit hard in vermont with massive flash floods and landslides from rain bombs, it barely makes the national news). The American people are hurting and our government is pissing away money on foreign forever wars. Even with all the insane pro Israel propaganda to the point that our free speech rights are threatened over it, people still don’t support it.
Part of the problem is that polling has been fundamentally flawed for a while now. Polling in 2016, 2020, and 2024 all showed Trump as losing and the polling agencies had to artificially weigh pro Trump supporters higher in the polls because they weren’t being adequately represented. It seems that a major portion of the problem is that some number of liberal/socialist poll respondents don’t end up actually voting and some number of conservative voters don’t end up responding to polls.
What is the lesson they are supposed to learn? Stop running women candidates?
Harris’ loss wasn’t some Electoral College bullshit, or 3rd party spoiler. Maybe the Palestinian vote cost her Dearborn, but it can’t explain the numbers throughout Michigan, much less Georgia and North Carolina.
I’m skeptical that leftest policy would save the Democrats when the country just roundly rejected liberalism.
The lesson is they shouldn’t have abandoned the working class. Instead of listening to working class concerns, they told the working class they were wrong. For example, they waited way too long to care about immigration even after Bill Clinton tried to do something about it in the 90s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
Trump has the same number of popular votes as last election
The democrats didn’t convince people to go out and vote
I didn’t hear much of anything about social spending, creating a ton of jobs or any plan at all for the federal govt to help the bottom 80% outside of “we’ll help families buy their first house” from the Kamala campaign. When we rolled into the last month and I still hadn’t heard about the big economic plan I knew we were cooked.
First houses are great and all but what about people who can’t afford their own place to live, or healthcare, or enough food? Folks have been living with parents since the pandemic, food banks are seeing record use right now and they campaigned on neoliberal business as usual with more growth for Wall St? “We’re very proud of Bidenomics”? Bidenomics did great pulling us out of the pandemic slump but then inflation happened and we never pivoted to giving folks any help getting back to where they were before the pandemic happened. Nor did we make a show of going after corporate profiteering, we just let that happen without a peep. What about mass layoffs over the last couple of years followed by record setting stock buybacks, dividend payouts and corporate profits?!
Your usual base of well off educated voters who see the long term stability and overall growth benefit Dems bring showed up of course but everyone else stayed home because more neoliberalism after 30y of that plan leaving 80% of us behind simply doesn’t inspire hope or excitement. Meanwhile you had the other guy shouting “I’ll break laws to change things!” Guess which of those is more popular right now?
The left rejected the Democrats’ corporate neoliberalism. Some held their nose and voted for the lesser evil despite loathing them, but too many couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
The lessons to be learned:
- Nominate Bernie Sanders when you have one. Be popular with the working class.
- Get rid of the shitty FPTP voting (= two party system) despite Democrats benefiting from it, because Republicans benefit even more now that they don’t have any spoilers or single-issue nonvoters.
How about “make some fucking enemies”. Of course no one likes liberal positions - we’re living it and it sucks.
The people want change, not to carefully untangle the neo from the liberal over the course of decades to avoid stepping on any toes
They made a ton of promises those last couple weeks in 2020 to flip Georgia and kept none of them
We will find out when they pick a house and senate minority. If they are older that 38 in the house and 45 in the senate, then they learned nothing.
I’m surprised at how many Gen z kids are trump fanatics, I didn’t expect the level of support from that base. So I don’t know how much age is in play here now.
Future prospects for those kids aren’t great and there are right-wing grifters targeting the disenfranchised youth. Fascism is a tempting ideology for those who are scared about the future and feel they deserve better opportunities in life. Also being an edgy teen is a right of passage. I’ve also seen that many many gen z kids care about Palestine, and Kamala told them to fuck off so they did. The ones that see a genocide and don’t care tend to lean right.
If the democrats could show a plan to fight climate change, reduce wealth inequality, and stop arming genocide, youth support would slam left like a screen door in the wind. With a broad brush, the older members of the caucus don’t see that or don’t care.
Young men in particular are annoyed with all the “wokeness” and to be honest, so am I. Not because I disagree with what’s being said but because Democrats let Republicans control the narrative every time they engage in it. Republicans bitch about trans people in boxing matches and instead of redirecting to an actually important topic like healthcare or income inequality they just start debating about testosterone levels and in so doing legitimize the complaint.
I’ve got nothing against trans boxers but let’s have some perspective. I doubt anyone reading this even knows a trans boxer. Stop getting lost in the weeds and focus on the stuff that matters to everyone. That trans boxer is having trouble affording their healthcare too. Let’s deal with that first. I bet you’ll find people willing to listen if you’ll talk about stuff that actually makes a difference in their lives.
There weren’t trans boxers in the 2024 Women’s Olympics, but many far-right commenters accused two boxers of being trans.
It shows us it’s not really about trans people at all, but anyone for whom they can gin up contempt for, among their followers.
Wokeness is about people understanding power structures like these. If you’re not woke, you don’t get how systemic stratification assures that those born in privilege stay in privilege, and those who aren’t are thwarted by more than luck.
Wokeness also includes understanding that in hyperconformist societies such as the US under the MAGA culture war, out-groups expand while mainstream in-groups contract.
It means unless you are a billionaire or providing irreplaceable service for one, you’re going to end up amobg the out-groups. And once the purge effort gets underway, it can be very dangerous for you and for anyone who knows you.
My nephew who is 21 explained horseshoe theory to me a few months ago. He wouldn’t listen to why it was bullshit. He has grown up in a right wing government and he likes the “center”. I doubt he voted but if he did it would be for Trump.
Youth will help two was, less time for total corruption and new ideas. I’m tired of status quo.
Can you repeat that in English?
