For the previous 8 years, instead of fighting fascism and white nationalism, the Democrats have made their enemy the populists within their own party.

It ended expectedly.

Coward

I mean look around you. For years’ we’ve been shoulder to shoulder with apologists who claim to be on the supposed “left” but keep making excuses to defending the indefensible.

You can’t have bipartisan ship with fascism: thats just more fascism.

You can’t expect people to support the lessor two evils: its just more evil.

Policies that only ever do half of the job of fixing the problem never results in the problems being solved.

What we’re experiencing is the true cost of the half-a-loaf politics of the liberal, NPR, Pod-Save-America, Democrat. Obama-era nothing burger chickens come home to roost.

Get ahead of the curve and give yourself worms now.

I’ve said this before, but I think it needs to be repeated:

The populist, anti-elitist lane on the left is wide open. I don’t know that a mainstream “Democratic” party can take that lane, and I don’t know if we should bother trying to drag them there. However, what I can say is that there is going to be some significant hay to make in that field.

I think Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Delia Ramirez, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Cori Bush, Katie Porter, anyone who has been rat-fucked by Democrats should all abandon their identification with the Democratic party and become independents. And in the time that he has left, at their lead, should be Bernie Sanders, who never needed to be told about the consequences of running with milquetoast policies.

Even if they caucus with Democrats, true progressives need to show them that their votes aren’t a given, and if they want them, they need to take a step towards their legislative priorities. Giving up our votes without leverage, giving in to the Washington groupthink: THIS LOSES ELECTIONS!

We shouldn’t focus on redeeming the Democratic party. Let them sink. Focus on getting good quality, reliable progressive populists elected. The Democratic party is a fucking anchor and we’re better off without it. Let those unwilling to let go of that Washington groupthink sink with it.

Only a small portion of GenZ was incentivized to show up this election. Interpreting the fact that only right wing GenZ showed up shouldn’t be treated as a condemnation of a generation. White women didn’t show up for Harris either. Would we make the same condemnation?

It all comes down to the fact that Democrats offered little and less in the four years where they could have accomplished something, and when called out for that, those critical were told to shut the fuck up.

What the Democrats offered was right wing politics: their base won’t vote for it. Which isn’t to say that groups like GenZ or women won’t show up if you actually offer them something they want to vote for.

This loss can be dropped squarely on the shoulders of the deeply toxic “Blue No Matter Who/ Blue MAGA/ You can’t be critical of Democrats because you only have two choices” philosophy. It was seriously at work here on Lemmy, and moderation and prominent posters here (and across the internet) did real damage filtering down forums like c/Politics, r/Poltiics, etc to select for a narrow and now very proven wrong approach to electoralism.

it was a political lie.

Not too dissimilar how the administration handled holding Trump accountable for his crimes. Too little, too late, and clearly just for show in an election year.

If you don’t see the direct connection between how Biden has governed and how that set up Trump to win, I don’t know that you can be helped.

Its beyond the scope of my comprehension, how you can call Trump a fascist one week, and then congratulate him winning the next.

Legacy?

This is his and the parties legacy. They made this. it’s a direct result of how first the governed, and then campaigned.

Bipartisanship with a Nazi party means you just have two Nazi parties.

Duh. We said that on day 0 of it happening.

Granted, when saying that we were all down-voted to oblivion by Blue MAGA apologists who “knew better” and were telling us that voters just needed accept what the Democrats were serving, but then, here we are. Living the outcome of a strategy that directly contributed to the downfall of the idea of western Liberal Democracy.

The brain worm that ate NPR liberals brains on the issue of “strategic voting”, as if they had a strategic thought in their head, needs to routed out and crushed in the dirt.

She should have gotten the fuck out before super Tuesday.

Too little too late.

and my axe!

Jesus fucking christ.

seems to me that they got every thing they paid for them and it was a good price to pay.

not sure what meaning, if any, being “85% down”, has in that context.

What I see in this meme:

We don’t need a new party to begin with. Just start by going independent.

It’s the same thing that we needed to be employed this election cycle, but at a larger scale. The Blue MAGA/ Any blue will do/ “Trump bad, you have to vote Blue” is the precise reason we lost this election, because the gave the did not ask anything of the candidate, which gave the candidate cover to not have to shift to more generally popular positions that would get them elected. Blue MAGA threw the opportunity, when Kamala was on a trajectory to be in the mid to high 50’s in October, by effectively making the argument that we can’t demand anything if this candidate because Trump is too great a threat. But the reality of that is that the demands laid down on a candidate serve the important function that they drag a candidate into more generally popular positions.

Kamala had no real economic plan, and when she said “I would do nothing differently”, she’s telling Americans, 60% of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, that this is what her policy is going to be.

So if we’re going to blame voters for a failure this election cycle, we need to be clear that the voters to blame are the ones who accepted less and little, and who abused and defeated those who wanted the candidate to move on specific policy positions. It was rampant and structural on Lemmy, and I’ve heard that it was similarly bad on Reddit. Extremely biased moderation here turned communities like c/News, c/Political_Memes, and c/politics into echo chambers where any pushback against an obviously failing and now obviously failed political rhetoric was basically site sponsored. And that needs to be called out and addressed. It literally cost the Democrats this election, and some of the most prominent names in Lemmy were responsible for it. Now obviously Lemmy is tiny and the impact was microscopic, but the same pattern was repeated for much larger platforms like reddit.

It started a couple months before with a tiktok video that got basically repeated regarding “strategic voting”. The problem, however, is that the strategy outlined is completely half baked. It doesn’t actually work because it keeps candidates unaccountable for having to “go to where their voters are” and get their votes. The result is that the candidate is afforded the opportunity to maintain policy positions that are broadly unpopular because they don’t think they need to move to get voters. It’s not good strategy, and both 2016, and 2024 offer direct evidence for this, while 2020 offers the counterfactual (Biden did shift in policy, effectively handing over the platform to Bernie, and he gathered the necessary coalition of voters to win as a result).

Going independent is what Democratic voters needed to do in this election to force Kamala into more popular positions. She didn’t feel the pressure to do so and lost in a frankly, almost unmitigated disaster of a campaign. And she was afforded the opportunity to do so by voters who demanded nothing for their votes. Going independent takes those votes of the table and makes it beyond clear that they are simply not yours to begin with.