Missed the point again award. If people want to vote for conservatives, they’re going to vote for conservatives, not conservatives lite. If people want to vote for leftists, they’re going to vote third party, vote for the dipshit threatening to tear it all down, or stay home, not vote for conservatives lite. If you’d take a few seconds to really use your noggin, you’d understand that people are fucking drowning and desperate for a change. Not “lol the guys at the Goldman Sachs fundraiser said we should think about a 1% COLA for social security”, I’m talking burn the house down and start over change. There’s a reason why there’s the phenomenon of the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter or Bernie-Trump voter. It’s not the sexism, it’s the promise of change. Obama failed to deliver, and Bernie didn’t happen, which just leaves us with that fucking guy. The democrats miscalculated twice and thought that voters surely wouldn’t vote for that fucking guy over their promise of change so mild that even fox news would get bored. It’s not the voter’s fault that the democrats failed to put forward a good platform. To the Democratic party and the people towing this line, I say: voters don’t owe you victory. In fact, voters don’t owe you a goddamn thing. Stop blaming them and get your shit together or get out of the way.
When Democrats move to the right in order to capture conservative votes, conservatives don’t believe they’re sincere. But the left does.
Probably still would’ve been less bad if people voted for the lesser of two evils though
Maybe. There’s an argument for accelerationism. I’m not convinced of it yet, but clearly the system has entrenched interests that benefit from things being awful for everyone else, and the majority power in the Democratic party has showed that it’s all too willing to roll up its sleeves and make minor adjustments. Most folks don’t have 3000 years to wait for the democrats to finally adjust things to where they need to be, and in the case of climate change, we certainly don’t have that time. Yes, pushing the system to collapse is going to be fucking awful, but I actually wonder if the net suffering will be less than waiting however long it takes for the lesser evil to turn good.
The argument against is that people like me need healthcare and are about to get fucked.
I guess. I worked in EMS for fifteen years and saw my fair share of the system exploiting, abusing, and killing (yeah, I’ll stand by that one) people for profit. We’ve also had major medical events in the family, and had to deal with the insurance fucking with us to try and get out of paying. It only ever seems to move in one direction, which is towards fucking people harder. A system like that deserves a swift kick in the pants, not a gentle polishing.
Democracies that fall to fascism can take decades to recover and end up weaker even if they win. I have no reason to believe that this will end up positively
Biden did more to battle climate change than any president in living memory. Trump has done the opposite, we don’t have another four years of runway to speed the collapse, the time for revolution was when Bush stole the election.
Dude, we’re just not going to meet the climate goals we need to. Not with Biden, not with Trump. We need someone that’s not afraid of the owner class bitching and moaning and withholding donations, and our system simply isn’t wired that way.
But I’ll bite, what did Biden do to address climate change, and what’s the tangible impact?
Removed by mod
Biden did more to battle climate change than any president in living memory.
You know what causes ungodly amounts of pollution? war. Blowing up and burning whole cities. Biden sent the bombs that blew up all of the west bank and Gaza, and ensured the war would continue. Dont lecture us about how great an environmental president he was. Biden also set up drilling and mineral exploitation everywhere. He was no environmentalist.
As opposed to all the presidents we’ve had who didn’t send bombs to Israel or set up drilling and mineral exploitation?
We need to invest in renewable energy production if we are going to survive the next century, Biden invested more than any president in my lifetime.
I don’t even want the democrats to get their shit together. I want them to get the fuck out of the way. That party needs to go the way of the fucking whigs.
Yes to all of this. Neolibs in this thread are really pressed.
BlueMAGA is literally Russian propaganda. Anyone who uses the term unironically is a troll.
Liz Cheney
Neither blue or MAGA tbh
Do tell how she ended up on a stage next to Kamala if she was not Blue.
The MAGA part is the denialism from Democrats about it.
Didn’t realize Liz Cheney called herself a democrat
Watch your tone Liz Cheney is a national hero for Democrats https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-award-liz-cheney-others-with-presidential-citizens-medal-2025-01-02/
I use it unironically and just think you’re an idiot.
More brilliant political analysts who still haven’t managed to figure out the reason both parties near-unanimously support genocide. Have a downvote, on me.
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
And notice where your outrage is actually directed here. Not at the people who actually VOTED for Trump. It’s at the people who refused to compromise their morals AT ALL, unlike you all, who completely compromised your morals in a failing bid to elect Mrs. “Genocide With A Facelift”.
Fuck Republicans, fuck Democrats. That moral superiority you so desperately want to claim, does not exist. You are the problem. You are the driving force behind the empire. You are responsible for their deaths. Take your attempt to blame actual activists and people actually struggling to make the world a better place, and shove it right up your ass.
Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.
Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I’m aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.
That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck
Your tired analysis fails to take into account the voting behavior of the ENTIRE POPULATION. You myopically focus on a prefabricated two choices available to each individual in the society, assuming the rest of the society is a GIVEN, and then it follows from that faulty premise that one of those two choices is strategic. But you fail to take into account that the entire society is free to vote for anyone. The fact that they can demonstrates the simple fact that IT’S A BAD IDEA TO VOTE FOR A BAD CANDIDATE.
Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.
I’m just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It’s not like this is a new argument, and it’s never worked before. I’ve jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn’t interested in playing along. What changed?
Do you understand it’s a cognitive bias that you expect a third party to fight to secure every single vote, but the two primary parties just get every other vote by default? Do you understand that that cognitive bias is the reason the population is voting for those two parties, out of the self-defeating mentality that no one else better can win? Do you understand that it’s the people who have actually clearly understood this problem that refuse to keep reinforcing the problem by voting for them? Your message is basically, “we’re all doing it wrong? fine, convince 330 million people that they’re all doing it wrong.” Are you planning on helping? Or are you just going to try to shut it down? All I can do is sit here and say that that millions of people are engaging in a demonstrably irrational behavior. The ten sane people in Nazi Germany couldn’t stop the genocide, because of the millions of people who had their own stupid fucking arguments for going with the flow.
Your bipartisan support is of a genocidal empire with victims in the tens to hundreds of millions. Are the two main parties literally identical? No. Are they both so incredibly evil that you shouldn’t vote for either? Yes. You want to call it a “wasted vote” not voting for a group of terrorists holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons, well, you’re an idiot.
it’s a cognitive bias
No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.
That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it’s a cognitive bias, because you’re, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the “lesser of two evils” mentality, or whatever else. It’s not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It’s that it’s a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Then there is the problem of corruption
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with “representative democracy”. I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I’m complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you’re blue in the face, but you’re literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.
I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut.
When was the last time Republicans compromised leftward in any meaningful way?
The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.
The voters? Trump’s suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.
So Republicans moved to the left by… doing what Trump wanted?
God damn, just say you can’t think of anything because it’s clear you can’t.
Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.
That’s not a compromise leftward on the part of the Republican party.
Because Republicans don’t need to compromise. They sit there and let Democrats move toward them, secure in the knowledge that Democrats will be like “Look at this glorious bipartisan compromise!”
When only one side is compromising it’s called capitulation.
Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?
On it’s face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.
At least centrists didn’t have to move left.
Yes, they got to maintain their rightwing purity.
Tankies and their fucking accelerationism.
Capitalists and their fucking accelerationism.
Why not both?
I was also on the side of vote for Kamala fix it after because with Trump fixing is impossible with Kamala maybe. But whenever I see stuff like
45 Democrats Vote With GOP to Pass Bill Sanctioning ICC Over Netanyahu Warrant
Senate Overwhelmingly Rejects Sanders Resolutions to Block Arms Sales to Israel
it makes me doubt how feasible this approach would be too. Sure Kamala is factors of magnitude better than Trump for the USA, for Ukraine, for LGBTQ people, for women etc. But I can understand a US citizen with roots in the middle east etc not voting for Democrats after seeing disgusting stuff like this.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans. This means that the crazy option is wildly unpopular and would never pass under a democrat. I’m not seeing the problem here.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans.
21% of Democratic voters voting for Republican candidates would be completely unacceptable. Why is it ok for 21% of our representatives to vote for genocide?
Oh right. It’s ok when it’s the only thing centrists actually want.
45 democrats didn’t vote the way you want? And how many republicans didn’t? Are you really saying both sides are the same?
No they are not but I am convinced that about 2/3 of the democrats don’t give a shit about the party they are a member of nor its voters. If their only opportunity was to be a republican candidate they would jump at that opportunity without any internal moral conflicts. And I understand how frustrating it must be when a majority of a party that you are told to vote for has no moral issues with bombing a country where your relatives live to the ground.
There are 215 Democrats currently serving in the house. The 45 that voted with Republicans don’t even make up a quarter let alone 2/3.
If Trump is a conman, rapist, fascist, etc. & Democrats still lost to him, says a lot about how shitty & out of touch Democrats have been, maybe you should focus on that?
Or it shows that when you are truly awful, racist, homophobic, transphobic, idiots, your children move away from you to the cities where they don’t have to talk or interact with you, which concentrates the intelligent and worthwhile portion of the population into blue centers that aren’t evenly distributed across the electoral college?
Which is generally true, but he also won the popular vote. That’s an indication that being awful is less important to most voters than being entertaining. The lesson I see here is Dems need to focus more on engaging rhetoric than silly trivialities like “competence” and “beneficial policy”
Trump’s narrative, despite being just a makeover of the political establishment, is that he’s anti-establishment. Democrats are just nakedly the political establishment with clown makeup pretending to be “progressive”. Trump’s message resonated with his audience, the Democrats’ message didn’t. Both of them are genocidal maniacs that are using nuclear weapons to hold the entire world hostage. Let’s keep our eyes on the target here.
He isn’t anti-establishment though, except that he’s more concerned with self aggrandizement than practical policy. Democrats are establishment that occasionally align with voter needs, Trump is 100% aligned with his own needs, which occasionally defy the establishment when there’s a conflict with his interests.
Again, this comes down to messaging, i.e. rhetoric. Not in content, but in vibes. The Democrats need to pay more attention to vibes, rhetoric, than content. You’re just repeating what I said with different words.
He isn’t anti-establishment though
He’s not, but that’s his brand. And one of the few things he’s good at is selling his brand.
What you’ve got is a bunch of people fed up with the system in some pretty fundamental ways, many of which don’t even know how to voice their problems accurately. One side sells itself as anti-establishment (even though it’s not) and the other side is nakedly as establishment as can be (to the point that they’ll ratfuck primaries against anyone who rocks the boat even a little) but is very vocally progressive when they don’t have to actually do anything about it or when doing so won’t rock the boat even a little.
Correct, because, again, they are better at rhetoric/messaging/branding. Again, that’s what we need to be doing.
So you’re content with democrats just lying to get elected instead of making material changes in their policy that make people want to vote for them? You want them to be the better option than Republicans… by acting like Republicans, with the exact same policy, but it’s a woman or a POC doing the policy??
Nothing the Democrats did mattered because the truth didn’t matter. Propaganda, lies, and foreign interference lost the election.
Nothing the Democrats did mattered
So what we saw was what Democrats did when nothing mattered? When there were no boundaries? They supported genocide. They adopted Republican border policy. They ran anti-trans hate in their own ads. They cozied up to Dick Cheney. They showed us what they really are.
They showed us who WE really are. They simply played to the middle to try to motivate swing voters and never-Trumpers.
No, they fucked up. Exit polling showed that democrat and left leaning voters stayed home, and less than 1% of registered Republicans went for Kamala. Trying to rely on the moderate Republican vote is almost as insane a strategy as relying on the Sasquatch vote.
They underestimated the degree to which the public had been impacted by propaganda and lies. They thought the public understood the threat Trump poses but they did not.
From a millennial perspective, it honestly reminds me of the terror threat level. After 9/11, the DHS would set a daily terror threat level in one of several threatening colors and the 24/7 news channels always had it just chilling in the bottom of their broadcast for years (of course it was always at nearly maximum leading up to invading Iraq, go figure). After a few years, nobody paid any attention to it anymore.
If the only thing you’ve got to offer is fear, eventually people get numb to that message, even if they should be scared. Imo, it’s hardly surprising that the democrats lost whe coming to the table with conservatism lite, small business tax credits, and “OMG TRUMP IS SCARY WOW” while Merrick Garland slow walked the case against him. I had a feeling we were cooked when Kamala started doing appearances with A-listers; it reminded me a lot of the tone-deaf gilded campaign run by the Hillary team.
What does Trump offer but fear? The illegals are coming to steal your jobs! Muslim terrorists! Dems are DESTROYING the economy!
Joe Biden, is that you? The public didn’t love genocide.
