Comment by palmotea
12 hours ago
> If half the voting population elects a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power, that's not the fault of the opposition.
Don't let the opposition off the hook: as you said they lost to "a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power." How does someone fuck up an election like that so badly? It should have been a slam dunk.
It's the fault of the opposition for not doing a better job (at all manner of political competencies). One thing I've noticed over the last ten or so years, is that Democrats/Liberals/Progressives are very averse to admitting to and learning from their own mistakes. They'd much rather focus on blaming someone else for their own incompetence.
This is still unbelievable to me, up to this day. If the opposition choses to run for office with a moron, couldn't you at least find a candidate that is not demented.. You can't make this up..
You sure are letting the U.S. voter off the hook here…
> You sure are letting the U.S. voter off the hook here…
Because blaming the voters for not supporting you is foolish and stupid.
Not only do they have far less room to maneuver to express themselves (essentially through a single, unclear multiple-choice question), but blaming them prevents actual political actors from doing needed self-reflection and adjustments needed to win.
It's like if you had a failing business selling poop-in-a-bag, and focused on blaming your potential customers being too dumb to see how superior and high-quality your poop is. You think it's awesome, so they must be idiots! Stop wasting your time doing that, and re-evaluate the products you're selling. Maybe no one wants to buy poop?
Your comparison rests on the idea that politics is an elastic marketplace where people are not bringing in priors when deciding on who to vote for. It completely ignores that at least part of that market is propagandized to the point where no matter how you sell you will not make the sale. Voters overwhelmingly support policies that Democrats support when polled. You can blame Democrats for not finding an effective way to sell those policies. I think your comparison is far too simplistic to be useful.
When the history of this time is written I believe it will be exceedingly obvious that the MAGA and the Republican Party were an incurable cancer and there was nothing that the Democratic Party could have done within the context of the existing political structure to stop it from spreading. They might have had one opportunity to avoid it by focusing more on supporting individuals and less on supporting financial institutions in 2008, but the political context of that time was entirely different. At some point it is worthless to blame one political party for another driving the country off a cliff. Yes, they should have done things differently in hindsight, but there is little value in holding them accountable for information they did not have at the time.
1 reply →
But I'm not blaming the voter for not supporting me. I'm blaming the voter for supporting the person that they supported.
Sure, I might be selling poop in a bag, and maybe nobody wants that. I can't blame people for not buying things they don't want. But the guy next to me is selling the Handmaid's Tale But In Real Life, and people are queuing up round the block to buy it. Those people looked at all the options -including abstaining and not buying anything at all - and still made a decision. They have to take ownership of that decision.
From the perspective of the Democrats, sure, self-reflection is necessary to figure out what went wrong. They should go and do that. But from the perspective of someone voting for Trump, no, you don't get to use that excuse. You looked at an admittedly very limited field of options and voted for the guy who was backed by a group who had literally written a manifesto on overturning the US constitution, the guy who boasted about his ability to sexually assault women, the guy who had already had a full term and caused tremendous damage with it, the guy who had spent four years complaining about rigged elections and threatening to do something about it, the guy who supported an attempted insurrection and promised to pardon the people who were involved, etc etc etc.
Stop blaming other people here - if you voted for Trump, it was perfectly clear what you were getting, and you still made that decision. That's on you.
1 reply →
You're kinda correct but making the mistake that the democratic party is a uni-party and not a vibrant political group made up of hundreds of different vying interests.
There is only one group to blame and it's the same group that has controlled the party since the 90s: neoliberals. Neoliberals do not have a vision of the future worth fighting for, more corporate control, so it's not hard to see when other opposing forces can simply offer something different.
It's the same problem we saw in the 1920s that lead to growing fascism: pushing for austerity, more corporate control over society, and deregulation are all things that help fascists and authoritarians thrive.
I agree neoliberals are a very big part of the problem (and giving them the finger was one of Trump's trump cards, pardon the pun), but I don't think it stops there.
Another aspect, which applies to neoliberals and many other groups in the Democratic coalition, is the seeming abandonment the idea of representing voters (in a district) in favor of persuading/lecturing them. That really appeals to the true-believer partisans (who are getting represented), but alienates everyone else.
I'm pretty sure the Democrats would have at least 5 more Senate seats if they consistently ran candidates that focused on representing the state they're running in as a whole (and continued to do that after the election was over).
Factually, Harris as a candidate was orders of magnitude better than Trump: a boring, competent, left-leaning centrist. In a functioning society, a reactionary revolutionary like Trump -- complete with Project 2025 manifesto -- should have scraped off maybe 5-to-10% of the vote, almost regardless of his competition.
The problem wasn't really Harris, who got very close to half the vote. The problem is that half the voting population does not think that electing a fascist demagogue is that big of a deal, or compares favorably to electing a boring centrist. This suggests that our civic culture is fundamentally broken at the moment. You can't run a society like this!
> Factually, Harris as a candidate was orders of magnitude better than Trump: a boring, competent, left-leaning centrist.
OK, so now we know how you voted. What fraction of the electorate are you?
> The problem wasn't really Harris, who got very close to half the vote.
Which in this case is called "losing." Trump even won the popular vote that time.
> The problem is that half the voting population does not think that electing a fascist demagogue is that big of a deal, or compares favorably to electing a boring centrist.
IMHO, one of the Democrats' many fuck-ups was they overdid the "fascist demagogue" line of attack, basically neutering it.
It's pretty clear roughly what your political views are, but let me hazard a guess that you're far away from being a swing voter. IMHO, another one of the Democrats' fuck-ups was being unwilling to make their most loyal voters uncomfortable, and instead demanding that persuadable voters tolerate discomfort, which is a tough sell.
> This suggests that our civic culture is fundamentally broken at the moment. You can't run a society like this!
How very convenient! Doesn't that mean you don't have to adapt in any way that's uncomfortable to you?
The most common vote in any presidential is an (implicit) abstention.
It's very important to try to persuade centrists that you're a better candidate than the opposition, but it's also very important to persuade your voters that you're worth going to the polls for. The latter requires making your loyal voters comfortable at the expense of the swing voters.
This entire comment is a giant strawman that fails to address the point I was making.
Half the voting population elected a fascist demagogue. Fundamentally, swing state voters are not the issue: that's just a weird artifact of our electoral system. The issue is that something like 40-45% of the population will literally vote for *anyone* in the Republican party, even if they're "America's Hitler". Project 2025 made it blatantly obvious what they were voting for.
Even if the Democratic party better adapts to swing voters' needs -- even if they win! -- that 40-45% remains a ticking time bomb. A democracy can't survive when close to half the voting population values party victory over democracy.
3 replies →