Democrats bet on appeals to neoconservatives — including war criminals like Dick Cheney — and touted harsh border policies, bolstering rather than challenging Republican anti-immigrant frameworks.
Kamala Harris may have relied on women to vote for abortion rights, but she promised little more than a potential return to the flawed and insufficient norm of Roe v. Wade, at best. Like President Joe Biden, she supported a genocide and failed to distinguish herself from extremist Zionists like Trump.
For Democrats, appealing to the right has been a disaster of realpolitik, especially in an electoral system that structurally favors Republicans anyway. But what’s worse, Democratic strategies have failed and harmed the most vulnerable communities both in the U.S. and those who suffer under the yoke of U.S.-backed wars.
There is an urgent need for social justice movement organizing, growing unions and union power, antagonism rather than acquiescence to existing power structures, and expansive networks of care and support. The most powerful social movements of the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Nor did they collapse during Trump’s first tenure.
Radical bitching is what North American born young people are good at. They grew up in comfort and only have this vague, passing knowledge of real oppression. I feel like for years, no matter how hard you try to push them into action they just wanna talk. They wanna complain online or hold up signs, but that’s as far as they’ll ever go. Their life is too comfortable to actually risk
Not for nothing but the American voter spoke pretty strongly maybe they want tougher immigration policies.
Also not for nothing but Joe Biden describes himself as a Zionist as well.
But they got tougher immigration policies under Biden, he supported them and signed them into law.
He also put back the Obama Era criminal only ICE focus that resulted in more deportations than the Trump era.
Trump is weak on Immigration, he just ends up wasting border security money on indefinitely detaining women and children, and ineffective walls.
Not Tough Enough apparently, and more importantly, not advertised enough. There’s a post somewhere on here about exit polling data that showed that immigration was the second largest issue for voters and that it was more than five times more important than it was in 2020. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what actual numbers are it just matters what voters think they are. We can bemoan that all we want but it’s what elections are made on. Elections are about selling yourself and selling your vision. Certainly I can’t say that I found a coherent Vision being sold to me by democrats when it came to immigration.
For sure it was a major motivator, but also anybody motivated by it was an absolute moron.
As a foreigner looking in, I’m worried about how things like widespread protest suppression and union-busting will affect the called-for attempts at change. Some of that stuff was bipartisan, and it’s unlikely to get better now that the far right has control of the Presidency, Senate, SCOTUS, and perhaps the House.
Oh it’s 100% going to suck for sure. It will be hard and difficult and painful. But our ancestors fought for unions when unions were illegal, and union busting didn’t just mean saying “stop” or “you’re all fired”, it meant hiring private mercenaries to spray bullets into crowds and beat unarmed people with sticks. Women got the right to vote with protests and were often arrested for vandalism, arson, and all sorts of shit they did during them (and for prohibition, which I know didn’t really work, but hey, they got that amendment in anyway).
And I don’t even mean ancient ancestors, I mean like great grandparents. If they did it, so can we.
Less surveillance and death machines back then. Resistance will be harder.
True. Paying attention to our online footprint, keeping privacy technology and encryption available will be a huge part of it. No more “if you aren’t doing something wrong then you don’t need to worry about it” or whatever people said that Snowden tried to point out was dumb.
My GG grandfather was killed when soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd that was protesting for basic human rights. This was in Marineo, Sicily, on 3 January 1894. His widow had to flee to the NYC tenements with their 6 children to start fresh - as progressive sympathizers were not safe.
She was poor in Sicily, she was destitute when she arrived in the US. Like many others, she did garment piece work to get by. Other Sicilian immigrants arrived in a wave and they made a new community.
When the Triangle Fire happened, real labor reform began to happen through the work of the ILGWU and others. They did not stop protesting until they got results.
Yes. Hard times ahead. Hard times behind may show us the way forward. Ad astra per áspera.
Oh it’s 100% going to suck for sure. It will be hard and difficult and painful. But our ancestors fought for unions when unions were illegal, and union busting didn’t just mean saying “stop” or “you’re all fired”, it meant hiring private mercenaries to spray bullets into crowds and beat unarmed people with sticks. Women got the right to vote with protests and were often arrested for vandalism, arson, and all sorts of shit they did during them (and for prohibition, which I know didn’t really work, but hey, they got that amendment in anyway).
And I don’t even mean ancient ancestors, I mean like great grandparents. If they did it, so can we.
Need more options. Ranked Choice Voting.
We had it on the ballot here in Oregon, and it got rejected. It probably didn’t help that I didn’t see a single bit of outreach from state Dems who’ve been controlling the state for the past 40 years, but that’s probably because they’re more concerned about retaining power for the party than actually fixing things, so they didn’t want it to pass.
We tried in Oregon. The real problem is that both Democrat establishment and Republican establishment hate RCV because it diminishes their power. It may be time for progressives to separate from Dems a bit more at local and state levels. Look at Osborn in NE
RCV was also on the ballot in Colorado, but for some reason they bundled it with a “jungle primary” for governor and a bunch of other seats, where the four choices on the ballot for governor in the general election would be the top four from the ranked choice primaries, regardless of party (so you could end up with four options from the same party in theory). The latter addition was pretty unpopular with both parties, who put out tons of messaging against it and especially conflated it with RCV. It got voted down with a significant margin.
I’m not opposed to either measure, but I’m really struggling to understand why they rolled the two together into one ballot initiative instead of separating it. Alas, I’m just a lowly voter not privy to such advanced political reasoning. Fortunately most of Colorado’s other ballot initiatives went well, at least according to my preferences.
Jungle primaries are great to reduce the power of nonmajority parties. If you have a primary with 4 Democrat and 4 Republican candidates, the winners will tend to be the 4 from the majority party as all votes get split relatively even. This leaves the minority party with no candidate in the general election.
I’m not opposed to either measure, but I’m really struggling to understand why they rolled the two together into one ballot initiative instead of separating it.
It was backed and bankrolled by some local rich fuck and “adjusted” to benefit the rich ofc. It’s good that it failed IMO, unsure what Oregon’s deal about it was though
This is the breaking point where the Dems are going to have to collectively realize and commit to learning from their mistakes.
That Trump was successfull is an indictment of their approach that failed with Clinton and failed again with Harris. They need to invert, maybe they need to start campaigning on fear and hate (of fascism and what it does to the average person and how it sows the seeds of the nation’s destruction including gas prices and bread but also the circuses and people we all love that are no less parts of human life itself.
Maybe start getting their hands a little dirtier. This is an existential war at this point, gloves need to come off and the old guard probably needs to fuck off like forever.
They’ve been campaigning on fear. The Democratic party is not going to save you. They never were. Their empty promises are carrots they dangle to get your votes. They haven’t tried hatred yet, but I think that’s reserved for the uneducated.
Aside from the abomination that is the two party system and electoral college, the real problem is that we are trying to set the same rules across a country that is too big and too divisive to possibly work for everybody. I think it’s time for liberal bubbles to actually secede.
CA and NY make up about 21% of GDP and they contain about 18% of population. Other states are welcome to join. They’d be fine on their own and they’d have land on either coast.
That, or implement tariffs between blue and red states.
Liberals could also leave their bubbles and move to swing states.
Hyperbolic, but in actuality it’s the only way to get what you want, else half of the country is always going to be feeling how everybody on Lemmy is feeling today.
I hate to say it, because being together makes us stronger and I’d hate to need a passport to visit my friends in other states, but I think I might be with you. It’s not like we’ve ever done anything good with our united strength anyway except for stomp around the world taking resources and sparking coups (except once in WW2). Our empire needs to crumble, like England, France, Spain, and Portgual’s. It’s too big, too unwieldy, too hard to make change or improve things and get consensus from this wide area. Plus, it’s a lot easier to fight for our rights if we just need to travel a couple hundred miles to a state capital rather than across the country to Washington, DC or to convince Southern and Midwestern rural voters.
When you say get our hands dirtier or gloves coming off, what do you mean?
You’re never going to vote on a national level again, what use is ranked at this point?
He literally said they’re going to fix the elections.
We’ll see if any of that comes to fruition, or is allowed to do so by the fascists just put into power, unlike the last thousand times the far-right in a country has won elections.
