Roughly 1/4-1/3 of the population everywhere support an authoritarian leader.
Afd in Germany, le Pen in France, PISS in Poland, Putin in Russia, Bolsenaro, Orban, Erdogan, Trump.
They are just a fact of life.
The trick is to organize the other 3/4 so that they (the authoritarian fraction) don’t matter. They are a minority everywhere. The problems start when the “good” guys run too mediocre candidates that are too deep in the pockets of their sponsors. You need to make clear that there is a marked difference between the authoritarian side and your guy. Something Hillary and Harris couldn’t. (Hillary always was Wallstreet’s woman and Harris climbed on stage with Cheney).
You are berating me because I am telling the dripping wet people they should have brought an umbrella.
I’m not berating you in the slightest. I pointed out that your analysis is unserious and unsound.
Yes, we’ve all heard it all before, the very touching concern about what the Dems need to do to “earn your vote”. I don’t even know what to say to someone who trots out the unserious fluff line that Harris was in bed with Cheney simply because Cheney made a point of rejecting the authoritarian. It’s just a fundamental failure of analysis, or some unnamed axe being ground (Jill Stein voters, hello).
They look for the candidate who fights the hardest.
For me, having a President who is NOT a strongman type is critical. I want a President dedicated to restoring Congressional control over the executive. But in a poll of what issues voters think are the most important, this would be way down the list.
Many Democrats want a strong President because how else can you reverse the policies of the prior strongman. There is no easy answer as to what is more important, policy preferences or limited balanced government.
LOL do you ever read what you write?
You called it “victim blaming“.
Blaming the other people for doing exactly what they want to do is not a strategy that will win anyone an election.
What wins elections is running a more popular candidate than the other guy.
If your “serious“ and “sound“ analysis doesn’t see that running a losing candidate is how you lose elections, you are analysing the wrong thing.
I agree that Trump is a symptom, not the disease, but I disagree that it’s somehow the progressives fault. The fact is, about 45% of Americans are fascists. I think Reagan’s conscious undermining of the legitimacy of the government is more to blame. The GOP has been marching towards this reality since the 80s.
I’m a very sympathetic person. Very. When my cousin was down and out I gave her 10k. Gave, not a loan. I gave up every other weekend to help my mother for 10 years. We have two rescued dogs.
I cannot feel sorry for Trump and his supporters though. They are abusers, and desire to be abusers. How else could you ever admire an abuser if you don’t want to be one yourself?
No one is suggesting Democrats run on a “look at what you did, you stupid intolerant bastards!” platform.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Republican voters are to blame for voting for a fascist who didn’t even pretend to have a solution to their problems.
Oh come on. That’s all they do. Pretend to have solutions.
I am a government worker, and I do actually fix things. Mostly, we prevent them from breaking in the first place. That’s job one. “Don’t try to balance marbles on one another.” Yet people still think that’s a solution.
Cool, thanks for that. So if your faction has the bulletproof formula for winning elections, why are you sitting on the sidelines litigating what happened in the general election? Why aren’t you running your idealized candidates to sweep primaries nationwide? Why do you keep choosing losers like Jill Stein who do no groundwork and pop up every 4 years to split the Democrat vote?
And don’t even try with the conspiracy theories about how it’s all rigged, that’s just cope.
But he didn’t even do that. He didn’t even give them the courtesy of pretending to empathize with the poor downtrodden working white man and his problems and come up with some bullshit about how he was going to solve them all. He just said he was going to bad things to brown people.
And he just keeps getting worse! Bombing boats, threatening wars and allowing his ICE goons to operate anonymous and out of control. Ignoring court orders. The open bribery. The love for this slovenly old con man is inexplicable.
Congress isn’t supposed to control the Executive, they’re supposed to check the Executive’s powers. While Congress has abrogated their duties by placing too much power in the Executive’s hands, they currently have the power to check the Executive at any time they’d like. They choose not to.
Oh, come on. They want to be just like him. Fall back asswards into a shit ton of money, cheat on your wife with porn stars, break the law left and right etc. They want to BE him.
I think what is confusing is that to the untrained observer, our current President appears to be the worst human on Earth. And it’s not like he surprised us. Everyone has known who Donald Trump was since he first appeared in the public spotlight in the 80s where his name became synonymous with greed, corruption, and questionable business practices. Now some of this may have been distorted by both the Liberal and Regular Media by constantly reporting on what the “Teflon Don” does and says and promises to do if only someone were insane enough to give him the power to do it.
So I think the question is why do so many people bend themselves over backwards through mental gymnastics justifying voting for Trump. Because what it sounds like to me is “we can’t vote for Kamala, she has a weird laugh” or “we can’t vote for that candidate, his distant relative did this, that, or the other thing”, or “that candidate suggested policies to help with the cost of rent, education, medial and all these other problems I’ve been complaining about…he must be a fucking Communist!” and so because no candidate meets these high standards, they have no choice to vote for the worst possible candidate on Earth.
Sorry, but I just don’t really understand how conservatives and MAGA folk think, such that they “think” at all. I believe they “feel”:
I have a conservative couple I’ve been friends with for probably 20 years. They lived in NYC for a long time and moved to a more conservative more rural red state around COVID. You should hear them go on about Zohran Mamdani’s election. You would think it’s the end of the world. And all of their Facebook friends who either never lived anywhere near NYC or have and since moved to some affluent suburb are all chiming in providing a perfect echo chamber reinforcing my friend’s wife’s suddenly irrational fears of her or her daughter being raped and murdered (even though they are like a 8 hour drive from NYC).
My wife’s family has a similar mindset of rural isolation combined with an irrational fear of immigrants, criminals, and degenerates destroying their vision of a perfect America. They have very strong opinions for people who have only been further than 30 miles from home a handful of times.
If Liberals or Independents have a fault it’s that they try to reason with these sort of people. And you can’t. Because they don’t reason. They will rebut you with platitudes like “well I suppose they’re all crooked” or “well at least he’s doing SOMETHING” or non sequiturs like “well they should help those people out” (except that costs money in taxes…which you don’t want to pay) or simply dismiss you with arguments like “you have no idea what it’s like!” (to what? be a SAHM living off your husband’s income while you pursue your interests and hobbies and get terrified by the news…I kind of know a bit what it’s like thanks to Trumps economy).
The point being is that Trump, Republicans and Fox News and the whole right wing propaganda machine has done a great job of “othering” various fringe groups while blaming them for all the problems that are plaguing Middle Americas while feeding on their fears and xenophobia.
So saying “Democrats should do this or that” is disingenuous because there is no candidate so perfect that they can compete with the Pavlovian response MAGA supporters have been trained on.
You really are claiming the DNC couldn’t do any better than Hillary or that VP lady of that poor senile old man?
How about the DNC take some responsibility for their actions?
They made Garland AG. nuff said.
They kept claiming everything was fine with Biden long after it was clear to everyone the old man was gone. This kind of Politburo crap will not fly in the US. And that fucked up Harris’ chances. You should look up the threads about that on this message board. People got mad! How dare you damage Dear Leader like that! The left likes to ridicule the tribal politics of the right, but that was something else. It completely validated a lot of peoples “both sides“ ideas.
The enormous inflation during Bidens administration was the result of policy. Failing to accept that simple fact made the whole DNC look untrustworthy.
I could go on. There was a lot of crap going on and a lot of heavy handed denial of that crap. Even if it was absolutely clear to anyone paying attention. (look up the early parts of threads about Garland, the condescension was dripping of my screen)
All these points were effectively capitalised on by Trump. Harris never had a chance of winning voters outside of the group that will always vote (D).
Imagine a campaign where all the mistakes had already been addressed, where the old man had stepped back the first time he had a senior moment. A campaign where the DNC didn’t have to worry about what damaging factoid would be dug up today, where they could spend every moment relentlessly attacking Trump. Hell, imagine a campaign where Trump was behind bars. (they seem to manage it in Brazil and France).
The idea that you shouldn’t blame the DNC for Trump is ridiculous to me.
[disclaimer: I live in Holland, I vote for people who are so far left there is no real equivalent in US politics]
That was definitely a big screwup on their part. I can’t be the only one here who tuned into the Biden-Trump debate and their heart sank the first time Biden stumbled. I was a little optimistic in the days after Harris was nominated, but you’re right, the DNC should have pivoted from Biden earlier.