Allow me to clarify. I have missed literally and without exaggeration one election since I turned eighteen. The highest office on the ballot was county coroner. There were no ballot questions. I had a really bad flu. Every other election I have gone to the polling place and voted.
A friend works at Wawa ( a convenience store chain). Every receipt printed there has a web address. If you go to that site entand fill out a quick customer survey, you are entered into a monthly lottery. The winner gets $1000. She told me that one month, nobody entered at all. If a single person had filled out the survey, they would have automatically won.
Remember when Bart ran for class president?
Everybody was behind Bart. He was going to win in a landslide. He was too busy celebrating his impending victory to actually vote. So was almost everybody else. Martin, the nerd who was running against Bart, voted for himself. Wendell, who gets motion sickness a lot, also voted for Martin. Nobody else voted. Martin won.
The nice things about being a human being is that I have plenty of emotions to spread around. Most of my anger is directed at those who voted for Trump. Either they’re malignantly stupid, evil, or completely unaware. A good amount of my anger is also directed at those who choose to vote Green or some other third party to teach the Democrats a lesson. Even the ones who voted in good faith should have known better. For those who didn’t vote at all, I’m mostly just disappointed.
You’ve highlighted the crux of the problem, @Stranger_On_A_Train. The Democrats have done little to create a real alternative position that would win broad support. They are, for the most part, loathe to because you can’t make Goldman Sachs (put in your own favourite corporation if you prefer) and working people, unemployed people, and others happy at the same time, and Democrats have been siding with the rich for a long time. And gain as you post notes, that’s just part of the problem. Build a democratic, more egalitarian vision that isn’t committed to empire and war, build a movement around it, then Democrats can bitch about the people who didn’t vote for them.
The Democrats have also swum into a permanent eddy that they either don’t recognize or don’t know how to get out of: for a long stretch they were associated with including more and more people, more and more fairly, in the political process.
But once the sub-portion of that that was mostly about people who had been categorically barred from participation had been tapped, they kind of stopped making any major progress. There are things that COULD be done that would make the overall political decision-making process more inclusive and democratic… but they don’t do those things. I think they tend to view the voting masses as politically uneducated folks who would do stupid things. I think they, like the Republicans, embraced a cynical attitude that “we just have to be better at manipulating the stupid sheep into voting for our side, then we can do what really needs doing”. Their notion of “what really needs doing” may be a lot more idealistic and responsible but the cynicism is palpable.
Over time, the electorate felt, with good reason, that the Democrats were just shooting off oversimplified soundbites and bumper-sticker sentiments instead of really laying out what they wanted to do and why. It’s not that the Republicans weren’t also doing that, but the Democrats were supposed to be the good guys, the folks who empower the average citizen, and yet here they are talking down to us, insulting our intelligence, thinking they know what’s best for the country and don’t need anything from us except show up with a “hooray for our team” willingness to vote for the candidates with the “D” next to their names.
There’s where it starts looking like “there’s no difference between them” even though there’s an enormous amount of difference between the parties.
Trump gave ByteDance a reprieve because their CEO visited and - by direct quote of Donald J Trump - showed him numbers proving that they’d been a positive to his campaign.
A lot of younger people skipped the election because they were siding with Palestine after seeing lots of Israeli violence against the people of Gaza. Where did they see it and why were they seeing it? Why were they so strongly and politically animated against Kamala Harris, the lady who refused to talk to Netanyahu?
So… Not proof positive, but that does potentially redirect a bit of your anger.
Well, if the driving issue of the day is partisanship and the politicization of everything and the remedy is…investigating grocery markets to see if they should be making 3% profit instead of 4% profit…that does seem to say that there’s no one on the podium with an actual plan to fix anything.
Personally, I’m not seeing the argument that the grocery store thing is the bigger issue. I mean, if you even just want sane health care, you’re not getting that until the partisanship and politicization goes away. If you want healthy meals in schools, you’re not getting that until the partisanship and politicization goes away.
You get nothing, so long as your priority is partisan agendas and not systemic fixes.
There’s the game of politics and there’s the reality of politics. Apparently, until the partisans come to experience the reality, they’re more excited by more of the game than in bringing the game to an end. The game needs to come to an end, and the first person to put that forward has my vote at least.
Much more likely “Steve” just doesn’t know what was addressed or not because he’s either not paying attention, or listens only to right wing propaganda.
Harry Truman noted that if you only give people a choice between real Republicans and fake Republicans, they will pick the real Republicans. The hypocrisy of the Democrats just doesn’t inspire a lot of people. Also, these days, rage passes for conviction, and people want politicians who have convictions (not those kind, Felon in Chief!). Bland assurances are not convincing, but again, the powerbrokers in the Democratic Party do not want to upset the rich, so they cannot sound sincere.
So until Democrats figure out a way to reach and move people who cannot see a compelling reason even to vote, they’re doomed. That requires a shift of practically Bernie proportions.
But that means that the lying hypocritic assholes they elected are the real Republicans? I really don’t think that what Truman said in the middle of the previous century about two very different parties pertains very much (if at all) to what is happening today.
Again, that presumes he has some idea of what is actually going on. It’s a standard pattern that the Democrats “address problems”, try as hard as they can to pander to the swing voters, and are totally ignored. Steve isn’t being dismissed, he’s being pandered to while listening to rightwingers tell him he’s been dismissed.
I think the point of his remark is a Democratic Party that does not offer a genuine platform of reform significantly different from the Republicans runs the very real risk of seeming like a fake Republican Party and thus appealing to hardly anyone.
Or more likely he just won’t hear about it. People don’t listen or pay attention to the Democrats, they listen and pay attention to the Republicans. Most people don’t vote or not vote because of what the Democrats actually say or do, but because of what the Republicans have told them about the Democrats.
Steve, the overnight Wawa guy can’t tell the difference between the party that’s been fighting for years to get his wages increased and the party that 's been fighting for years to stop that from happening, can’t find anything in the election to care about?
Steve can go wallow in his own filth. In a month, everything he buys at Walmart will be 5-10% more expensive because the guy who promised to make everything at Walmart 5-10% more expensive, has gone ahead and done it. Anything there you care about Steve?