Once again, that isn’t what is being said.
The point is, I asked you a direct question.
America is not going to change.
If the Dems want to be a viable party, the Dems much change. It’s as simple as that.
And I answered your question. You are using a republican tactic. Asking a question that requires pages to answer properly.
I answered you with as much effort as you gave in asking (a little more actually).
Then everyone but the Nazis might as well lay down and die. There’s no benefit to the Democrats also becoming Nazis.
America has changed, and that’s why a normal, grown-up political party cannot win.
If the Dems want to get back in power any time soon, they will need to engage in the same dirty tricks as their opponents.
The only other option I see is everything goes to shit in the next few years and, despite conservative media’s best efforts, the average person starts to think “maybe things weren’t so bad under Biden…”
Sorry, but in the long term this might be the least bad option.
I see this as the only road out too but, if we take Project 2025 seriously (and we should), republicans mean to consolidate power and make it near impossible for anyone to challenge them in the future. I believe they will try. This is the best chance they will ever get to do so and they know it and have a plan for it.
Pointing out the truth when others ignore it and push feelings instead is not a Republican tactic.
Yep, no argument from me.
When I talk about how bad things could get, I’m not just limiting it to a recession or high unemployment or whatever. How bad things can get is basically unbounded at this point. The absolute worst people have been granted absolute power.
In one use of the word “simple,” I agree with you.
But I will – as I often do – raise the Third Wave Experiment as an important ‘Yeahbut:’
Did a History Teacher’s ‘Third Wave’ Nazi Social Experiment Go Too Far?
The parallels between this and Trump’s political strategy are innumerable and undeniable.
I’ve also posted this before (so I’m ‘hiding’ it), but it goes to the same fundamental point – if the only change that really works is ‘going nuclear,’ then how can we reasonably expect the Democrats to follow suit and leave us with a country worth living in?
Thanks, Newt :frowning:
Having two political parties isn’t inherently, or doesn’t automatically have to be, the problem (though I would prefer more viable parties).
Everything really did get dramatically worse when Newt Gingrich brazenly announced that the other side wasn’t a group of colleagues to be negotiated with and have dinner and drinks with; they were enemies to be treated as enemies, stopped at every opportunity, and crushed whenever possible. They were to be painted as evil and an existential threat to all that we hold sacred and the lives of ourselves and our children.
They do that through horrid straw man arguments and dramatic, hyperbolic exaggerations of the other side’s positions. Because their audience lives in a nearly perfect information silo, they are vulnerable to this kind of misinformation and demagoguery. They literally don’t know any better.
They take fearful people, make them ever more afraid, and then give them a laundry list of Bad Things That Democrats Do, and make them thoroughly terrified. And they’re totally made up.
Then, they send their candidate out to say, “I, alone, can fix it.”
It was a very long run of political Mutually Assured Destruction before that, but Newt … went nuclear when nobody else really had.
He’s still doing it today, and his followers have taken pages straight out of his playbook.
I’ve been a registered Independent for decades, but today’s Republican party is pretty damned disgusting.
That is the problem. The Democratic party has failed the country again.
I need to verify these numbers but if they are correct it is not Trump voters who betrayed us. Trump got 3 million less votes than he did in 2020, but Harris got 12 million less votes than Biden did in 2020. It was voters who didn’t come out to support the Democratic candidate that made the difference. I think it is clear they were given no positive reason to vote this time.
Concur on all of this.
However, Whack-a-Mole does have a point that over the past several decades, Democrats have lost a lot of the trust that working-class voters used to feel in them.
Yes, that was partly about Democrats in the 1960s supporting civil rights, and a lot of working-class white (racist) voters feeling betrayed in consequence. But no, it’s not solely about that.
And yes, the loss of trust is hugely exacerbated by the slanderous dishonesty of mainstream conservative media, which cannot effectively sell its candidates and its policies without incessantly outright lying about Democrat candidates and policies. But no, it’s not solely about that.
Democrats for over a quarter-century, starting in the Reagan years of backlash, have climbed onto the neoliberal policy bandwagon that has brought a lot of pain to a lot of working-class Americans. Offshoring, union-busting, deregulation, all sorts of policies that have been great for the well-to-do and the stock market, but have increased the precariousness of ordinary people’s working lives.
Yes, the Obama and Biden administrations were beginning to take steps to turn that around. And yes, it’s true that the years of neoliberalism were also accompanied by a number of other things that improved the lives of many working-class people. But the betrayal (so perceived) was a real thing, and rebuilding that kind of trust takes more than a few years.
No, they just need to understand the real desires, concerns, and needs of most people.
David Axelrod said it best (today):
The Democratic Party is losing the working class by becoming a ‘smarty pants, suburban, college-educated party’.
Other in the party leadership are saying the same thing; they recognize they have become a party for elitists.
“Kill everyone who isn’t us! And that’s negotiable!”
But if:
- Democrats tout reasonable and understandable economic policies that seem highly likely to improve the fortunes of working-class people, while
- Republicans give a laundry list of bullshit claims that stoke existential fear into the hearts of working-class people (eg, they’re eating the pets … of the people … that live there, they’re grooming/performing surgery on your kids, they’re making your kid ashamed to be white, they’ll end your guns and your religion, your cities will be dystopian hellscapes, we’ll be living in a Communist, Marxist, Socialist shithole, illegal immigrants will rape your kids, etc., etc.)
Who wins?
I have a problem with this phrasing. When almost half of Trump voters don’t recognize white nationalism as a problem, it’s not a fringe issue. Actual membership in explicitly white supremacist groups like the Patriot Front is incredibly fringe. But shrugging it off as a problem is not fringe at all, it’s a major problem in perception and it encourages a more casual racism (including anti-Semitism) to spread in the guise of jingoism. Which does indeed feed directly into anti-immigration rhetoric and increasing hate.
Explicit white supremacist ideology may not drive a majority of Republican voters. But tacit tolerance and even dog whistle encouragement of racism by some Republicans as a “big tent” vote getter is not a small problem. It’s a very, very big problem. Labeling all Republican voters as racist is a loser of a rallying call, because not all Republican voters are even Republicans and not all Republicans as individuals are racists. But the racism loosely tolerated and occasionally encouraged by the Republican Party as a whole cannot be left unaddressed.
And it is here where the “traitorous black male” will probably reconsider who they voted for in 2024 but it will be far too late for them (and so many others).
The voters keep doing that. All that we are arguing is that we need to recognize this and act accordingly to win elections anyways, not whine about how unfair it is.
This.
If we want America to change, we need to win, so we can pass policies that will lead to that change.
The problem is, the real desires and concerns of the American people are based now on unreal things.