Say it then. We’re in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I’m trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I’m seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you’re upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.

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Except money evidently doesn’t buy it by itself. If it did Harris would have won. Effective messaging (Where is the Dem Joe Rogan? They kicked the closest thing they have out of the DNC for expressing broadly popular opinions) and playing to the base of people willing to vote for you (Dems will never get those Republican voters no matter how many immigrants they promise to stop at the border) wins elections.

Well 71 million Trump voters over 244 million eligible voters is 29%.

This is spectacular to hear. I have to wonder if the shift in control will exacerbate the issues that prevented the passing of a budget, however. I haven’t thought it through fully yet, but whatever the make up of the senate and house are, passing a budget is priority #1, and how that shakes out is going to be one of, if not the most significant short term effect on the economic situation of regular people.

As much as I hate to admit it, Newsom has the right plan here. Democrats in power need to erect as many institutional barriers to Trump implementing his own policy, and doing it at the State level disrupts their route of attack significantly. The danger is that shielding blue state Republicans from the worst effects of Trump’s economic policy might erode their potential support base, but they have to either take the risk, or carve out exceptions to their own policy that disproportionatly allow blue state Republicans to feel the sting (maybe, for instance, avoiding protections for small businesses). I doubt Democrats have the stomach for the latter option, so Newsom is making the correct play, and others should follow suit.

Liberalism is the political project which gave us the 18th century liberal revolutions of for instance, the US and France. It centers invidivual freedoms like free speech, association, and the right to own and use private property without interference from the government. It can be seen as a reaction by the land owning middle classes of the 17th and 18th centuries to the power of divine right monarchs, and is the founding principal of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It centralizes human rationality and debate of ideas as means of finding true paths to the future.

Leftism is an umbrella term which holds a few groups in it (Most notably Social democrats, Communist Socialist, and Communist Anarchist ideologies). It can be traced back through history to many times and places, but modern forms of it originate in the utopian socialism of post-revolution France. Leftism promotes the primacy of human well being and equality (or at least more equally distributed material wealth) over property rights. Generally this takes the form of support for the abolition of class society (owner class vs worker class), belief in worker-centered policy, trade unionism, worker cooperativity, and internationalism… but again, it is a big umbrella, and there is a lot of deviation from this formula. In place of rationalism and debate of ideas, Leftism generally centers material conditions and material outcomes of policy.

If that is really the path forward the y’all need to peel off almost a sixth about a tenth (Math is hard) of the Republican’s Presidential election year voting base while simultaneously not losing any additional support on the social democratic left wing of their own party. I’m not sure that’s realistic.

This is a weird meme. The Democrats actively tried to court suburban white voters and other traditionally right-Leaning demographics. They tried to peel Republicans off. The democrats never offered socialists a cup labeled “liberalism”, they offered “moderate republicans” a cup labeled “Border Control and Bush era political icons” and they said “Bro. I already told you I will only ever vote for Republicans”.

Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you’re pretending don’t exist with this meme.

1. Tremendous dislike of Trump… which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.

2. Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.

3. A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said “This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President”. It wasn’t 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC’s treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn’t 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was “single term president”, then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.

2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn’t actually been on the Democrat’s side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It’s not even necessarily that she needed to be “more left”. It’s that she needed to reflect the public’s distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn’t even ready to say she’d break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.

I really, really wish y’all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y’all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.

I was kind of Lukewarm on Walz initially, but he was super endearing. He was cooking there for a minute and then the DNC muzzled him. I remember the moment he got shut up about the electoral college I thought to myself “annnnd now all of his appeal is gone and he’s just another boring politician”. It was really startling to see how little he actually had to do to get the leash tugged.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I think people, especially very politically-minded people tend to imagine their fellow citizens as has much more inflexible political views than they really do.

Most Americans are pretty ignorant of politics in general, and we get fed what is essential political theater in place of political news. I think those of us sitting online vigorously discussing politics tend to overestimate the political convictions of the average voter.

Most American voters, outside of those who are extremely entrenched in their parties, seem to me, to be pretty protean and contridictory in their views. I think it’s not unlikely that a self-described “conservative” would in fact support a lot of progressive policies as long as they were presented in a way that Tucker Carlson hasn’t pre-provided a talking point for.

Don’t forget that Trump was *against the discriminatory trans bathroom bills" in 2015, and all the same people who are now ready to organize pogroms against trans teenagers voted for him either way.

It’s also important to note than depending on how we define “income”, many of the richest have no “income” or a misleading small income (Zukerburg has, like, a 1$ salary or something) because they don’t their money from a wage… they get it from returns on investment. This is also why income tax is a misguided policy goal a lot of the time. We need to tax the investment income of the rich, not their salary.

This is actually how chromatography works. The mobile phase is 0.1% formic acid and 0.3% blood of the innocent.

Cheney almost certainly is concerned about Trump mismanaging US foreign policy, not his fashiness.

People don’t vote because politicians don’t materially benefit them. When politicians provide significant support to regular ass people in way that materially benefit them you will see more voters turn out, not when you whine to them about them not voting. If politicians wanted this to occur, our state reps and their staffers would be in our work places, talking to people, giving them reasons to be involved with the political party apparatus, and providing material aid to the poorest and least represented among us with their own hands. We have bad voter turn out because shitty, myopic politics breeds political disinvestment. This post has it pretty much exactly backwards.

Anecdotally, I have friends from MA who don’t give one fuck about politics. Haven’t voted in years despite me telling them, messaging them with voter registration status, and locations, giving them every resource they need to make it as easy as possible. None of it mattered. Two of these friends in the last year have told me they want to vote for Governor Healy because they intend to use the free community college program, unprompted. Went out of their way to tell me. Another friend told me they like their state rep because they showed up at a union rally for their union and my friend realized from talking to the politician personally that the rep was a socialist who just happened to have a D next to their name.

George Bush Jr. has the most impressive ability to sound like the dumbest motherfucker in the room always. He should also be tried as a war criminal.

Because it’s slightly tricky to replace the post master general: https://www.federaltimes.com/federal-oversight/2022/08/24/can-biden-fire-us-postmaster-general-louis-dejoy/

Liberals should be careful with this. Y’all want them to feel like Trump did alright. We can’t have him being switched out at the 11th hour for a more competent candidate

If I, as a teacher, responded to a less-than-compliant, and upset student by even lightly putting my hand on them I would be fired and charged that day. Police, if we are going to have them at all, need to be able to handle this kind of situation without resorting to violence. Period.