this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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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'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??
That's just objectively false. No, their policy isn't good enough, but to pretend that it's exactly the same is disingenuous.
The Democrats are always going to be controlled opposition, I just care about them beating MAGA long enough to develop an alternative that can actually replace them. I don't vote for representation, the ones who represent me don't have enough support to win yet. I'm voting for the easier-to-defeat enemy.
This is so self defeating. If every person that said this just voted their beliefs instead of spreading this ideology like a cancer, if the Democrats even have a party left after that, you would be able to use your bloc to pressure them into being everything you say they are.
They said the same shit when Bernie ran in the primaries "oh, he's too old, he's not electable!!" until they realized that Bernie was too popular and just rat fucked the primary instead. He wasn't even running on the date of the primary and he still got half the votes that Biden did!!
You realize there are republicans that think this way too? It doesn't only benefit democrats. Not all Republicans are fully behind Trump, but they'll be damned if they vote for a democrat.
Parties win when people vote for them. That includes you. Stop spreading this self defeating, voter shaming ideology just to fucking lose elections because the democratic platform is hollow ineffective bullshit that the dems served up knowing you'll fucking vote for it anyways.
So if every person just spontaneously decided to ignore history, human nature, and the mechanics of a first past the post election system, and each of their beliefs aligned perfectly to rally behind the same candidate? That stresses even the wildest suspension of disbelief.
What exactly do I say they are?
And when has that ever happened? You can't get a roomful of Leftists to agree on what the Left is, much less a national population of Leftists to agree on a specific course of action.
And that's why your course of action can't work. The right wing is authoritarian, they unify behind a figurehead. Every Leftist voting their beliefs leads to dozens of uncoordinated splinter groups, too busy in-fighting to unify behind anyone who could defeat the lockstep of right wing voters. They don't spend time fantasizing about impossible hypotheticals, they learn the mechanics of the game and play to win. They make concessions, choose a horse that can win, and unify.
Leftists are a minority. They don't have to be, if they could focus on winning rhetoric to pull voters instead of hoping everyone just spontaneously agrees with them, but they're too busy criticizing the ones who try to develop winning strategies because they fail all the Leftist purity tests. Republicans win because they vote for candidates they disagree with, because splitting the vote loses FPTP elections.
When the Left votes their beliefs, the right sweeps them every time. The Democrats don't cave to pressure to move their platform to the fractured left, they go hunting for "moderates". This is how we get Democrats catering to Cheney. Leftist appeal to ideological purity.
Parties win when enough people vote for them. You can't beat propaganda with purity. You beat propaganda with propaganda.
Leftist candidates can't even get their rhetoric in front of people to convince them, because of actions by the Democrats. They block the left from debates and ballot access, and they claim to speak for them so don't even bother looking at what they have to say as we backpedal and freely allow republican attacks on anything that even resembles leftism. All the rhetoric you are repeating here, is precisely how they sell it to you as to not damage the illusion of democracy that keeps you playing their game.
How is any of what you said of Republicans, untrue for Democrats? We are all fundamentally no different from each other, we are all seeking security and stability in our lives. The mainstream parties just make it impossible to cut through their propaganda, on both sides, because they both play for the same class of people. They both suppress and deny platforms for the truth because the truth is a threat to them and their system.
That is why it is on us to reject that system, seek out the truth anyways, and spread it far and wide among the working class, to release the working class from the cognitively dissonant narratives of the capitalist class. It happened to end slavery and jim crow and to win the new deal that ended the great depression. Nothing was ever achieved by waiting for a politician to do the right thing.
The working class must win power because capitalists will always grab it back when our backs are turned and demoralize us by making it seem impossible to win any more than what keeps their machine turning. The least you can do is stop helping this process.
Yet you claim they are the easier party to move, even as this strategy causes them to bleed voters and lose elections that they claim are so important to "preserving democracy". Sure, the right sweeps the Democrats every single time, because Democrats are just as uninterested in inconvenient objective realities as the Republicans, so all it amounts to is whichever team speaks more strongly to a voters' preconceived identity, which the capitalist class is able to define to some extent, and which team is able to sound like they have solutions. Of course, how do you expect to convert Republicans to a party whose contradictions lie just as bare naked as theirs??
Cope harder. Don't get mad at leftists because you fell for this utter bullshit and we didn't.
I very much did not claim that. I said they are the easier enemy to fight. That is a very, very different thing.
Nothing the Democrats did mattered because the truth didn't matter. Propaganda, lies, and foreign interference lost the election.
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!
Yeah, but it's a new fear or a new spin on some old one every other week. Conservative media tries out a new panic pretty regularly to see what gets bites. The democrats have basically been on "Trump is our Hitler" for more or less eight years. At least, that's what they say with their mouths, though not with their actions. It might have had a little more sticking power of they'd showed that they took at serious as they want us to, but as it stands, that car is pretty much out of gas.
So the problem is that Democrats have had a consistent message? Right...
What do you want from me, exactly? You just can't keep people afraid of the same thing forever. People stopped paying attention to the terror threat level just three years after 9/11, which the entire country agreed was bad. That's why their secret sauce is to keep rotating in new panics.
I would like it if you acknowledged that Republicans are the root of the problem and not Democrats. Sure, the Dems have a lot of room to improve, but there is no comparison! Republicans are fucking insane!
The root of what problem, exactly? Yes, republicans are insane, I hate everything about their entire platform and I hate that they're in power. I want a real left party that will kick these stupid Nazis' asses, which is why I'm not afraid of being critical of the democrats. Now's the time. We've just been punched in the head and it's time to decide how to proceed. Do we get our shit together and start swinging for the fences, or do we pout and blame the voters because we really deserved this win and they just didn't understand that?
Okay, we agree that Republicans are insane Nazis. Good.
What could the Democrats have done that is so bad that insane Nazis sound like the better option? What makes that a rational choice?
I don't think there is one. I don't think anything the Democrats did mattered because voters weren't voting based on reality.
There is no democracy without an educated populace. We have something worse than that: a miseducated populace. The apathy towards voting and the hatred of the current administration are intentionally engineered by bad actors.
I think that it's pretty simple. Tl;Dr, Trump campaigns 1, 2, and 3 were each the democrats' race to lose, and they rose to the occasion. The data shows that most Trump voters don't sincerely believe his most insane promises, and they're desperate for big changes (thus, the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter). Where the democrats are falling on their face is thinking that just showing up and putting a body in a seat is good enough to beat Trump. It's obvious to them (and us) that he's bad, and they're betting that a policy plank of "not Trump" and a bunch of pretty meh proposals otherwise will be enough to get voters to turn out. Twice, they've been wrong. A lot of people feel like they/we never really emerged from the great recession, and the order of the day is big dramatic changes. Trump promises that, regardless of whether he can deliver or whether it will actually help. In this last election, I distinctly remember that the Democratic messaging was that everything is fine, actually, and the economy has really never been better. If you're drowning, you'll take what you can get, and someone patting you on the head and telling you everything is fine, actually, doesn't help.
If the democrats want to start winning, and I hope they do, they need to realize that just existing as not Trump isn't enough. They need to come out fighting like they came here to do universal healthcare and cocaine, and they're all out of cocaine.
So basically the Democrats need to lie big like Trump and promise things they can't deliver. Sadly, you might be right.
Here's the secret that my boy Montesquieu knew way back in the day: government rules by the consent of the governed. The constitution is a scrap of paper and only holds the power we believe it does. Trump gets away with his blatantly unconstitutional bullshit because of the consent of the governed; he tries it, whether he knows he can get away with it or not, and often succeeds. The democrats need to get with the times. High roading is over, become difficult.
While they probably would have disagreed about everything else, I think Montesquieu would have agreed with Mao's statement that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. In Montesquieu 's day the numbers of armed civilians would have easily eclipsed any slight edge in technology and tactics that the military would have. Today however, even if we had every citizen pick up an AR-15, it would be insignificant to the bombs and missiles and artillery the military could field. The consent of the governed is no longer needed.
[gestures vaguely at Afghanistan]
Joe Biden, is that you? The public didn't love genocide.