anarchiddy

I wouldn't fault you for being ESL, but I'd be impressed if you could clip enough consecutive words from that comment that supports what you're saying.

I think I'm done with this

I don’t consider the core issues of that failure to be ‘pet issues’

They’re definitely not. They are foundational to the problems in America today.

Addressing the economic and democratic crisis is the only way they could possibly win, and the only way to (maybe) fix some of the failures people are feeling.

Agreed.

That's not what I was getting from your other comments:

• I think asking the center-right party we call “Democrats” to start losing elections from now on so that everyone on the left can feel better about the Democratic party positions is probably not the answer to that.

• I think the election took place almost entirely in fantasy-land.

• The far left (tiny in American politics) thought that Kamala Harris was responsible for 100% of Biden’s Israel policy, but also more mainstream people thought that Biden had accomplished nothing of value on climate change or for working people in the US, other people thought Trump was a genius at business who would bring inflation back down, and so on. It was propagandized to the point that it almost doesn’t matter that the Democrats’ messaging was bad.

You have a lot of theories about why the dems lost, but none of them seem to be touching the point I was making. I was being more pointed with identifying where the electoral shortfall was. But i'm glad you agree.

You were the one that invented the idea that we had to “blame.”

Yea, maybe I interpreted some of your characterization of the election as attributing blame, and I don't really think that's an unfair interpretation:

I get why people aren’t that excited about voting for them, in the same way I am not excited about paying taxes or working a job I hate to get to the one I actually want. However, failing to do those things in this election was a catastrophic tactical blunder which has already produced massive human suffering and promises much more to come.

I think you and I disagree on what the most important takeaways from this election are, but I'm fine with letting it lie.

Look man, I think I've covered this pretty well, I'm not sure I want to keep beating a dead horse. MLK and any other agitator for justice can pick their own timeline for justice. Telling someone else that now is not the time is what MLK is criticizing. You're free to withhold your own agitation to the proper time but you can't tell someone else to wait. I feel like that's pretty clear.

I’m not grasping the point and just raising the volume of your messages until the speakers are rattling, pretending that I am not. Why are you doing that?

I was obviously getting worked up, because i'm 90% sure you were saying something completely different, but I'm fine with leaving it at tentative agreement at this point. I do not think voters should take any blame for an electoral system that has completely failed them, and I was very passionately making that case. Maybe I misunderstood your first comment, but:

This is what I was reacting to. The idea that the rise of the NSDAP is entirely the fault of the KPD for 'splitting the ticket' in a country boiling over with populist sentiment due to the long deteriorating economic conditions and rife with division for more than 20 years. To say that the German population was feeling desperate and angry is a massive understatement, and while it's fair to point out the clear miscalculation of the KPD in hindsight, it flies completely in the face of what the sentiment and conditions in the country were at the time, and where the sentiment is here right now.

I only railed on this so hard because it's clear, to me at least, that democrats are losing -not due to an environment of propaganda- but because the political center is hollowing out due to a similar deterioration of economic conditions and a failing democratic system. I don't consider the core issues of that failure to be 'pet issues', and I think by addressing them as such is a big part of the reason democrats find themselves increasingly alone in the center right. Far from 'asking them to lose', begging them to come to the left is the only way I think they will be able to win without trying to capture the reactionary sentiment of the right. Addressing the economic and democratic crisis is the only way they could possibly win, and the only way to (maybe) fix some of the failures people are feeling.

Biden improved the share of profit that goes to labor.

A blip on a shear cliff, and pales in comparison to the immense growth of wealth in the form of capital. Musk didn't buy twitter with a pile of cash from years of profit.

Lmaooooooooo

Nope. MLK is saying it doesn't matter what strategy you think is best, because the privileged and the unaffected cannot dictate to the oppressed and the dis-privileged what strategy they ought to take to achieve justice owed to them.

The people who agitate are the sole arbiters on what strategy is justified and what timeline is acceptable in the pursuit of justice. If you find that to be inconvenient and ill-timed, that is the entire point.

Lol "Oh, so you agree with me then?!?" lmfao get out of here

Oh, fuck me this one is long. But I'm so worked up about this.

You can insist that’s not true, but it is.

I'm not denying that truth. I'm saying it literally does not matter.

You are saying the American people are having an understandable reaction to three decades (at least) of Democratic fuckery when they fucked up this election so badly. Yes, I agree. As I keep saying. That’s pretty sensible.

Nono, i'm not pointing to democrats. I'm pointing to almost 80 years of an american ecomonic ideology that has finally resulted in the failure of democracy (not hyperbole). Ask any non-voter why they decided not to vote, and probably 80% of them will tell you that their vote wouldn't matter, anyway. Not because both candidates cause the same amount of harm, or even that their vote is literally not counted, but because they have so little faith in the democratic system that they think voting is a fake steering wheel on a trolley with no lever. People don't suddenly turn into fascists and authoritarians out of thin-air, people resort to those when they feel there's no other way to change things, and that same (IRRATIONAL) feeling that drives people to vote for a fascist is also what drives people to chose not to vote at all out of hopelessness.

Go back and read my message. It says 100% the opposite of that.

No, it doesn't, you just misunderstood what I was saying. Look:

The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and also the electorate can be so addled by propaganda that they missed noticing that Biden did absolutely historic things to help the working class, address climate change, basically all the core issues except for Israel and even his Israel atrocity didn’t apply to Kamala Harris except in people’s minds

Ignoring the hand-waving about Israel as an issue (it doesn't matter to my point anyway). I'm not even trying to put everyone in a bucket and generalize about everyone who didn't vote (i know you're saying it's probably a MIX of things), but it's incredibly important to understand this sentiment because of what the implications are for how we rationalize our losses. The point is that even if the voters were completely in-tune with reality - hell, even if they were completely propagandized for the democratic message - that would still not change the feeling of despair about our democratic system. Just try to understand what I'm saying - it's not because Biden didn't deliver on incredibly valuable things, even popular things. It's not even because people didn't know about them or how impactful they were. It's because those things do not change the way they feel about how our democracy represents their interests. All the people I know who were passionately in favor of voting have said that, yea, those were great policies and amazing in our current climate, but the problem is so much bigger than a few trillion dollars of infrastructure improvements that it still feels depressing to even be excited about them. That, and Biden being a ardent capitalist (and zionist) robs us of even the fantasy of this being progress toward a democratic socialist economy, since most of those funds will likely still contribute to the accelerating accumulation of wealth.

Biden passing MASSIVE climate and infrastructure initiatives does fuck all about wealth accumulating to such an extent that a single $50mil contribution to the next campaign can completely undo any progress made after years of dedicated grassroots organizing and fundraising. Biden presiding over the best-functioning economy in 20 years does nothing to improve the share of profit that goes to labor. Literally everything people feel desperate about only gets worse when the economy is doing well, because it accelerates a wealth disparity that makes it even less affordable to buy a house or groceries, let alone have time or money to contribute to a political project to make things better. The hole we feel we are in is so deep that leaps and bounds feel like tiny shuffling steps by comparison.

Democrats are simply not acknowledging the severity of the crisis we were already in. THAT'S why it wasn't enough that Harris wasn't a fascist dictator - because people had already lost hope that she could do anything to change what they feel is already hopeless. Her not selling her own vision of progress really only served as confirmation of what people already felt, which is that even if she wanted to make fundamental change, too, it was clear she couldn't (or wouldn't, out of political expedience) walk out and say so because there's a mountain-sized pile of wealth and power poised to wash her and the democratic party away if she did. This is what a failure of democracy means - not that the totality of the votes resulted in something terrible happening, but the totality of the votes are no longer enough to fix what's broken.

It could have been Christ incarnate vs Trump the antichrist - unless she gave people any hope of fixing a broken system, millions of people would still be in such despair and feel so jaded by past inadequacies that they likely would have stayed home anyway.

And it was still the second-highest turnout of any election on record.

The point isn't that we must always chose agitation, the point is that you cannot blame the presence of tension on those who agitate for justice, because the tension was already present. Those who agitate against injustice are merely bringing that tension into the light.

You cannot set the timeline for another's liberation.

You seem like you’re spending incredible words lecturing me on the first thing. Yes. I agree with you. Two things can be true.

It might seem like i'm lecturing you because I don't think you're grasping what I'm saying. There being an objective better choice in an election has no bearing on if that's a sufficient platform to get the votes you need. Insisting that 'it should have been enough that she wasn't trump' while also insisting that the base doesn't have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation to vote is nothing more than sticking your fingers in your ears. Claiming that, instead of having legitimate grievances with democratic governance, voters didn't turn out in enough numbers for Harris because they were too propagandized (i'm trying so hard not to use the word 'dumb') to know what was good for them is paternalistic bullshit.

Anything to avoid having to consider the possibility that the moderate approach to governance is what created the populist radicalization we're now having to deal with.

Like I say, I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie

We are so far beyond the problems with the 2016 election, it's almost not even worth talking about it. The democrats have a far, far deeper problem with their organization that is clearly not limited to one or two high-ranking chairmen putting their fingers on the scale.

“I’m not planning to kill you and the other guy is and I can win” should be a winning electoral platform whatever else is in it.

"Should be", maybe, but it wasn't. Maybe a hyperbolic example: people are driven to suicide everyday, but debating the calculus of what's worthy of ending your life over doesn't help those people who are in crisis. It's a failure of understanding to demand that people ignore their own suffering, or accept their own injustice, because you've made the calculus for them that some alternative is worse. If you refuse to ask yourself what motivates those people to abandon hope in democracy then you've shut yourself off from learning from historical atrocity. It's insufficient to use hindsight to say 'they should have chosen the lesser evil', because then you'll never be able to recognize the crisis until it's already happening.

I get why people aren’t that excited about voting for them, in the same way I am not excited about paying taxes or working a job I hate to get to the one I actually want

Then you understand why the democrats failed their own cause, because unless democrats can waive a magic wand and force people to choose an evil (lesser or greater), those people will not be showing up for them. Call it a tactical error of the voter if you want, I don't care. No liberation or civil rights movement has ever been judged on the merits of their cause - if it were simply a matter of lesser or greater morals there would be no need for struggle - the effectiveness of any fight for liberation can only ever be judged by its ability to stir action against injustice from the un-moving.

It was propagandized to the point that it almost doesn’t matter that the Democrats’ messaging was bad.

It's also possible that those accomplishments, as much as we'd like to celebrate them, weren't addressing the core popular discontent of the voters. It could be a matter of messaging or propaganda, true, but it would be irresponsible to have this conversation and not point out that the current popular messaging in the democratic base isn't related to infrastructure spending, inflation, or climate initiatives - it's an expression of frustration about a system that's rendered ineffective against oligarchs who use their immense wealth to undermine and frustrate all attempts at democratic reform. There's an implicit assumption from moderates that our capitalist system can be managed with incremental reforms, but there's no allowance for the possibility that we may eventually cross a threshold of inequality that cannot be managed with incremental progress anymore, especially when that inequality is being allowed to express itself in the democratic process itself. Even if we're not yet at that point, dismissing those concerns as "fantasies and misdirection" is a surefire way of losing those voters to apathy, spoiler candidates, or violent resistance.

People in overwhelming numbers thought various imaginary things about her which made her “bad,” although the question of what was up with Trump didn’t really factor into it except among the very deeply confused.

Because Harris didn't have a message to deliver for herself, except that she wasn't Trump. It's entirely possible (if not 100% certain) that people are reacting to an extreme level of distress and confusion that exists completely separate from Trump, and by not giving them a clear theory about what is causing it and what to do about it, it created a vacuum for people to pick whatever issue they were feeling the most in that moment and accuse/notice a lack of platform to address it. Democrats desperately want to occupy a middle ground of 'nothing fundamental will change', while seemingly not noticing that voters are increasingly desperate for fundamental change. Yes, Trump is a fascist, but at least he's acknowledging the alarm his base is feeling and offering them an explanation and all the reactionary change they could ever want. That's why his base showed up, and the ours didn't. The people the democrats are losing aren't the people who don't see the danger in Trump, they're loosing the people who might think Trump is a bit radical but think the democrats are actively protecting a status quo that they're completely miserable with. I cannot stress enough how much democrats are fucking themselves next cycle by blaming those people who are already pissed off about a lack of meaningful action for their suffering, past and present. That's how you turn apathetic non-voters into violent reactionaries.

Lmao, sorry, FD's writing is so loud I can't hear your sealioning over the sound of his righteous fury

The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

I have no idea how the groups you’re talking about here map onto the groups I am talking about. But, to me, the problem of splintered opposition to Hitler was 100% a far-left-created problem, which would be an incredibly apt comparison as regards the most recent US election if the election had happened on Lemmy or if the US as a whole had any kind of far-left representation that went above low single digits.

Sure, but this assumes that the KPD and NSDAP weren't both reacting to a popular sentiment that the SPD wasn't. I think a good analogy for this is to consider fight or flight in mammal behavior as two extremes of a political spectrum, and an absence of stimulus response representative of 'status quo' centrism. A nervous system that is inadequately responding to threatening stimuli risks being eaten/killed by the threat, but a NS that's too sensitive is prone to overreaction.

There are a lot of ways to flesh out that analogy, but I think the popularity of the NSDAP and the momentum of the KPD (as small as you'd like to see it as) is a missed hormone signal by the SPD that some kind of movement was needed to address the underlying current of populism. Assuming that the KPD ought to have joined the SPD against the Nazis simply because they were the smaller party (without addressing their concerns) completely disregards the political context of the moment.

I think a similar critique of Democrats applies to 2024 (and to an extent 2016 and 2020, with con-founders). Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause, but I think there's more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling. I think dems miscalculated because they assumed they could meet more voters in the middle like they always had, but didn't realize that all those people aren't there anymore. Instead of meeting people in the middle, they were yelling at people on the ends to meet them in the middle, like over-administering an SSRI to someone reacting appropriately to a life-and-death situation.

Any response to fascism is going to need a mixed response to address it - you can't simply plant yourself in the middle and cross your fingers people will meet you there. Even as a way just to buy time, by not offering any solutions to the issues that created the popular fascist sentiment you'll end up loosing those voters who can very clearly see them while they grow hopeless/disillusioned that democracy can solve the problems at all.

We can wring our hands all day about far-left and far-right movements being too extreme and demanding perfection all we want, but the truth is that there were simply not enough people in the middle for democrats to overcome the populist motion on the right, and choosing to steer to the middle (and throw a tantrum when people didn't follow) is a clear cut miscalculation on their part. Especially when it seems pretty clear that most democrats agree on the basic grievances of the left-of-center part of the party.

Right, and my point is that even while MLK and FD both made their own strategic choices for advancing their causes, both have pointed out repeatedly that those who do not feel the burn of justice denied cannot set the timeline for those who do. It's the actual point MLK was making when he said:

and Frederick Douglass, who said:

Even if there is some objective measure for when it is time for radical justice and when it is not, that determination can't be imposed by those who are unaffected by the injustice of inequality. To them, there will always be a 'more convenient season' for justice. Those who profess to seek the same justice as those who cry out but refuse to stand with them can complain all they want about the methods designed to agitate them into action, but (by MLK's estimation), righteousness is always on the side of those fighting for justice.