good post imo
Thank you!
Another pair of articles making the same points:
And this other Tweet from Torres:
…the Republicans are going to control the White House and Congress for the foreseeable future, no matter what the Democrats do.
Thats it. Its over. They’ve got the Senate, the Executive, the Supremes and probably the House. They’ve got the police forces, many of the States, the courts, the school boards.
And they are going to do everything they can to keep it that way. They will lie, they will cheat, they will gerrymander, they will “lock them up.” And probably much, much worse.
And the people that ran this abysmal campaign for Harris don’t have a clue. What happened this election completely blindsided them. They played by the old play book. They abandoned the base. And they aren’t going to get any better. They are already talking about “pivoting to the right”, abandoning trans people and “identity politics.”
The so-called left are going to have to split. Because the Democrats are captured by the donor class. And somebody will have to take a stand to protect immigrants, to protect LGBQT people, to protect the marginalised and its not going to be the party that promised a Republican in the cabinet, touted the support of the Cheney’s, and sent Bill Clinton to give a “motivational speech” to Michigan.
I don’t think that there is a gameplan to win back the House, the Senate, the Executive, the Supremes. The Democrats will simply go through the motions and lose, over and over again.
And that’s the salient point here. Trump-round-one exposed just how weak “democracy” in America really was. The Democrats needed a focused, united strategy to not only win the Presidency, but to win down-ballot. To fight every election. They had to go all in. Hold the Senate. Win the House. Expand the supremes. Win the school boards.
It would be an on-going fight. You could never let up. Because if you did…well thats where you are at right now. America sleepwalked right into this. The amount of complacency that I saw, not only in the news coverage but here on the boards a few months ago, it was all hopes and vibes.
So who, in the next few months, is actually going to stand up and fight for the marginalised? I think the Dems are going to pivot right. They will throw immigrants, trans people, Muslims, marginalised folk all under the bus. They practically did that this election. So the left will have to split. Because the “big tent” was always a fantasy anyway.
This was the exact focus of the Harris campaign. And how well did that work out?
It was a fucking disaster. They lost everything. They shunned progressive voices. Didn’t allow vetted Palestinian voices to speak at the convention and only said the word “trans” twice. Turned a blind eye to campus protesters getting smashed, ignored polling that said Democrats overwhelmingly supported a ceasefire, touted a hardline immigration policy. They wanted the Republican vote so bad.
But they should have focused on the margins. Every single election tells the same story: it comes down to a statistical handful of voters in a handful of swing states. But the Democrats forgot about that. Again. They seemingly forgot about the race for the Senate and the House.
I don’t think its going to be up to us. If the Democrats pivot right, the left won’t follow along. There are many on the left who are utterly disgusted with the Biden administration, and that carried over to Harris. I’m not American and I don’t get a vote. But if I were, I would have struggled to vote for Harris. I likely, like millions of others, would have sat the election out. I doubt that the Democrats will ever fully understand why that happened. Which is why I think a split is inevitable.
…and people like Rashida Tlaibi Ihan Omar who also won their races because they understood their constituency and stood up for their principals and their values.
And this is exactly why there is going to be a split.
How’d their buddies Cory Booker and Jamaal Bowman do?
Yeah, people running in individual districts that are incredibly blue, like Tlaib or Omar, are still there. Meanwhile, AOC moderated her views to the point that Progressives are getting out their “Liberal Fascist” brush. And people running in statewide elections don’t embrace whackadoodle policies and win.
Thank God. Fuck illiberalism.
…example C and D of why there is going to be a split.
Thanks for proving my point.
This was my post 4 years ago.
As you can expect, now that Sanders and the rest of the Dems are on the losing end of the election to Trump the feelings are diametrically opposite this time around.
There needs to be a reckoning. The election is over, that fight is lost. Done and dusted. The future direction of the Democratic party is what is being decided now.
*was a hijack, so moved this post here.
A party wants to survive, and - from the perspective of the party’s leadership - survival is more important than principles & ideals. Over the next few years I predict the Democratic Party is going to abandon (or greatly deemphasize) leftist/woke/progressive principles and focus on the real concerns of the working class. Will it work? Not sure, because it may be “too little, too late.” They will also have to contend with all the progressives who will split from the party.
The Dems really messed up here. And not just this election; this is a long time in the making. They messed up years ago.
The only hope they have at this point is a Trump administration that is so bad that Repubs will flock to the Democrats. Good luck with that.
Abandoning liberal/progressive values isn’t the pivot that I expect of the Democratic Party (you could be right thou). I don’t think Dems will win the working class if they pivot towards the way you describe.
I hope the Democratic party will instead embrace leftist values and champion working class struggles in health care, economics, and education by introducing grand government schemes for cheap Pharmaceuticals, cheap available housing, and massively increasing access to Certification/Trade programs.
This working class revolution shouldn’t be embracing silly propaganda issues (anti-woke bullshit), but real life improvement causes.
Also give it flashy names with simple slogans.
What can I do? My vote didn’t count. I can’t force people to think and act my way. Being antagonistic toward Trump supporters will just reinforce their opinions of the “woke.”
I’ll just adopt the Buddhist principles that things are going to suck, and the best thing I can do is minimize my suffering. Besides ,the SDMB was all gloom and doom when Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump’s first term were determined, and we’re still around.
Let technology and new medical research find a way around abortion. Let market demands determine the economy as it always has, even if Trump takes credit or whines and complains if the economy goes sour. Down is the new up. The majority of Americans find an 800-lb crybaby in charge delightful. Trump’s past failures don’t matter, because he refuses to step down. The assassination attempts made him a hero. The 34 felonies will go the way of Jack Smith’s efforts because a sitting president can’t be criminally liable. We can’t convince the Trumpists the error of their ways. They have to learn their lesson the hard way.
Something I can’t figure out is:
For decades, people had said the Republican Party must increase its vote among women, minorities, etc. if it wanted to have any future at all. Normal and decent politicians like McCain and Romney tried but failed. The minority vote only further dwindled for the GOP in the pre-Trump era.
Then here comes the odious jerk liar crazy Trump, and he makes substantial gains among women and minorities. How! IIRC, even gay and lesbian people voted more R than before.
And why was the political left able to retain women and minorities when going up against decent men like McCain and Romney, but not against Trump?
Appeal to hatred, bigotry, ignorance and cruelty, Americas core values. Demonstrably.
Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a working-class-focused Democrat in a Republican-leaning district in Washington State.
Could Democratic lawmakers like her place the party on a new path?
I’m not so sure. In this New York Times interview, she not only avoids getting drawn into the culture wars, but she actually says, “Weighing in on national politics is not my focus and not my job” [!].
She still made some points that I think are very relevant to this thread.
I saw this headline this morning and chose not to click on it for my sanity.
We need to stop demonizing others?! WE need to stop demonizing others?!? WE need to stop demonizing others?!?!?!? Christ on a [checks forum] BLOODY cracker!
The cities did not burn down in 2020. The Haitian refugees in Springfield are legal refugees with work permits who, umm, don’t eat cats and dogs. No Democratic politician is a communist, few are socialists, and I doubt many are pedophiles. Especially not in basements of pizza places that have no basement. No school is setting up litter boxes in the washrooms. Drag-queen story time is not a grooming campaign.
Meanwhile Trump really did talk about Revolutionary War airfields, really did mock a disabled reporter, really did say he’d be dictator on day one, really did shuffle-dance for a half-hour in front of a crowd who came to hear him speak, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The Trumpists who took it as a personal insult when people called out their idol for things he said and did can go take a long walk off a short pier!
Replying to my own post to say I did click on the article now. My blood pressure didn’t go up quite as much as I feared, but I’m still not happy and don’t think this person’s advice is the panacea for the Democrats.
she voted with Republicans to repeal President Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative. She argued that it didn’t do much for her district, where most people don’t have college degrees.
Congressmen from metropolitan areas vote for farm bills, and state legislators from metro areas vote for rural roads, even if they don’t do much for their district. Unless Gluesenkamp-Perez thought it was going to raise her constituents’ taxes, why vote this way?
It’s Republicans who consider everything that doesn’t benefit them personally to be a boondoggle. It’s Republicans who say “hurricane relief for Texas and Florida, but no hurricane relief for New York or New Jersey!” It’s Republicans who want public education funding for their kid’s private school (“school choice”) and vote down bonds for the actual public schools. And it’s Republicans whose state budget is buoyed by metro-area tax revenues but are convinced they’re paying for the metro areas and babble about secession.
I’m not saying Gluesenkamp-Perez is doing those things. But voting down student loan forgiveness because your district doesn’t have many college graduates sounds more like a Republican than a Democratic thing to do. And I am saying that cities have gotten a lot more crap from rural people than the cities have given crap to the countryside. In that vein, Gluesenkamp-Perez seems to read a lot into Harris decorating her Christmas party with plastic garlands and not picking up on “Madam Vice President, we grow those where I live” as an invitation to debate the matter.
What on Earth does she know? It’s not like she won an election in one of the reddest counties there are.
If she did it by acting like a Republican what’s the point? Turning into your enemy is losing, not winning.
I’ve seen this movie three times already - 2000, 2004, and 2016. Got any new storylines?
She didn’t, though.