You seem well-meaning, but the racism/sexism card is way overplayed at this point in the game. The two examples DNC sympathisers point to for why an AOC run is a bad idea both lost not because they were women, but because they were utterly terrible politicians. I wasn’t around for Hillary so I can’t go into too much detail, but Harris specifically did her utmost best to destroy every single ounce of goodwill she had. And as for the racism, well, America did overwhelmingly elect Obama in 2008. Even on the far right you see MAGA elect women and minority politicians they agree with (see: MTG), so there’s no way the everyone left of Reagan coalition wouldn’t be able to elect AOC due to sexism. It’s just a complete and utter non-issue.
But the right wing media would come out along with the Russian/ Chinese manipulators and convince too many leftists that there’s something wrong with her for some reason. Leftists are such suckers to this manipulation. I mean do you even have reasons for thinking Harris was so bad?
I mean do you even have reasons for thinking Harris was so bad?
Multiple endorsements of Israeli genocide.
A couple million dollars from AIPAC, and that’s before her VP run. We don’t know how many digits above 8 she received from israel to ‘promise no change from the Biden administration.’
Absolutely no acknowledgement of the failures of the Biden admin. Every single demographic under 400k income was worse off under Biden. Every single one. White, black, high school dropouts, PhD holders in the middle class, all of them were objectively worse off.
Absolutely no foreign policy experience besides the Biden admin, who also had no foreign policy experience and soft launched the war in Iran. There was no world where we didn’t enter a war with Iran with either candidate, hence why every single DNC power player has endorsed Trump’s war, but ‘has issues with how it was done.’
Her entire political career prior to her VP, including the entirety of her time as California AG.
So you don’t like her Israel stance. Understandable. But there are big forces at play here - she simply couldn’t turn her back on Isreal, it would be the end of her career and possibly life. She said some bad comments of Isreal but she also made some moderate comments, and had a little push back; times were a bit different then, that was before Isreal just started to murder civilians blatantly en mass. I think most of those metrics are a bit unfair due to Covid effects.
And no, the war in Iran wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Yes military action was likely due to trump fucking up the agreements and the desire not to let Iran get nukes.
Your points are valid to some degree but I think you are being overly critical. And I wonder why?
Because neoliberalism cannot improve things. The US has two effective choices because Americans are too stupid and too lazy to vote third party; if one is a fascist, and the other is the reason fascism flourishes, one will be ‘overly critical’ of both possible choices.
People will not vote for more of the same when they’ve been suffering. People will vote for change and chaos long before they vote for ‘hurr durr every thing’s fine the fact your life is worse is fox news misinformation your experiences don’t matter I will just keep doing what’s made your life this way.’
This means, if you run a campaign like that, you are implicitly supporting fascism. This isn’t a surprising or new strategy, it’s the exclusive reason why Obama, a junior senator with a conservative if not far-right voting track record, was able to win the presidency under the democratic ticket. He promised change. It is why Trump won. It is every single analysts’ reason for why Trump won. He promised change. He promised to be an outsider. He promised to not do the same thing as any of his predecessors.
It is why Biden won, on the campaign promise of changing from Trump’s nonsense.
Harris lost for the same reason Clinton lost for the same reason Romney lost for the same reason Kerry lost for the same reason Gore lost for the same reason… you get where I’m going with this.
If the next democratic presidential candidate promises to “return to normalcy” or “return to the biden era” or “bring back civility to politics” or anything that suggests they are not going to bring radical change, they will lose. It does not matter if they have tits or not. It does not matter if they are Chinese Black Mixed with a cock on their forehead and a literal conjoined twin that looks like a demon baby growing out of their stomach. It does not matter if they are a white rich peodphile (gavin Newsom).
Every single honest political analyst has been screaming at the democratic party since before Clinton became the nominee in 2015. Just promise change and be as visible as possible in trying to follow through. Do not pretend things are fine when they’re not. Do not cater to culture war nonsense. Mention how fucked people are economically, and how you’re going to fix it, and why you ARE NOT A “NORMAL” POLITICIAN. If ANY candidate does that this next election, D or R, they will win. Period. Regardless of race, religion, sex, or whether or not they ‘appeal’ to voters tastes.
Yes, I see that. I think people voted for trump the first time because they thought it would be interesting. And his ‘drain the swamp’ would be good to get back at the elite. I can’t believe they fell for it the second time. I don’t think he even coherently promised change the second time, it was more that it was his reputation already, and even though the changes he made before were demonstrably worse, people still supported him. I guess trump is interesting but in the way a car accident is interesting. If that’s all the U.S. electorate wants, we are so fucked. How can you battle that idiocy without just doing the same?
It’s not ‘interesting,’ it is change. Yes Trump 2 also promised change and proved himself to somewhat be an agent of chaos. When people experienced the Biden years and their lives just kept getting worse by ‘returning to normal politics,’ they were willing to burn down the US instead of dealing with normal politics again.
People largely didn’t support Trump because he is racist or interesting or what have you; but simply because the worst case scenario is the destruction of the US government, and the best case scenario is something that is not the same shit that has crushed them, their parents, and their grand parents for as long as they’ve been alive.
Trump correctly identified ‘the swamp,’ or the ‘deep state,’ or the idea that there is an embedded rot that exists in the US ruling class that exists solely to crush the working class. That there are people and groups explicitly working to make sure the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and that the law binds the latter and is disregarded by the former without consequence. He literally told on himself and his homies, but attributed it to just the government instead of the entirety of capital.
This resonates with people. Even if he is also a part of capital, he is at worst incompetent and will do enough damage to capital that the average worker might end up better. At the very least Capital would be hurt like the working class has been hurt.
That is an objectively better outcome than returning to normal politics. That is objectively better for most people than ‘we’d be at brunch.’
times were a bit different then, that was before Isreal just started to murder civilians blatantly en mass.
No, it’s just before liberals started admitting that Israel was blatantly murdering civilians en masse. This had a lot more to do with a Republican being in charge than the actual blatant mass murder of civilians, which had been going on since October 2023.
And I wonder why?
Because you like Harris and don’t want to accept that someone can have a valid reason to hate her guts.
It’s not a matter of liberals admitting it, it’s that Isreal ramped up and ran out of targets with any military association but kept bombing. And they did this because trump encouraged them to do so. Harris would have kept arming them but would have continued to push the message that Isreal should respect human rights while defending itself. It matters and it’s different. All the while that Hammas kept firing rockets into Isreal, which it was doing daily before the election, Isreal had cover to bomb things even remotely like a military resource. There were so many obvious lies being pushed by both sides that even the extent of Isreal’s atrocities was questionable back then. And by your own assertion above, liberals and democrats have now recognized that Hamas is essentially disarmed now and Isreal’s continued attacks on civilians are unacceptable. The dnc is shifting now, but there is a powerful isreali lobby and some die hards in the party. Now is the time to push and people are doing that. But once we are in the election, we need to cool off and help democrats win as much as possible. Otherwise any shift is wasted and we have more years of the US blindly encouraging and paying for Isreal to do what it wants with absolutely no restrictions.
It’s not a matter of liberals admitting it, it’s that Isreal ramped up and ran out of targets with any military association but kept bombing.
See, you’re proving my point. That’s exactly what was happening under Biden. The UN was warning of a famine as early as mid-2024. Biden himself said Rafah was a humanitarian red line and proceeded to do nothing when Israel took it. If your point is that Israel was engaging in legitimate self-defense until November, then kindly fuck off.
There were so many obvious lies being pushed by both sides that even the extent of Isreal’s atrocities was questionable back then.
No it fucking wasn’t. People were yelling as loud as they could that Israel’s conduct was genocidal as early as October 9th 2023.
Yes, Biden was weak. But he was at least doing some push back, unlike trump. Maybe ineffective, but I don’t think so - the violence certainly ramped up under trump’s encouragement.
Yes, people were yelling about Isreal’s response to the Oct attacks - before it even started, which it rather telling. And there were videos showing Isreali bombing of hospitals that were then clearly shown to be from misfired Hamas rockets. The entire Oct attacks could never have militarily achieved any success especially as they targeted civilians, so it was clear from the start that it was all about purposefully triggering a response and then getting it on video to gain sympathy. They literally did the Oct attacks to get tic toc views of their children getting killed.
As horrific as that is, of course it doesn’t excuse Israel’s actions - I’m not defending them. But it does explain a lot of the distrust of the reports of what Isreal was doing - ie if the point was to generate sympathetic media, then it seems likely that Hamas would fabricate it and spin it, and of course they did. Just as Isreal spun their bombing as defence against Hamas resources. When Hamas was firing rockets at Isreal daily, it was easy cover for Isreal to do what they wanted because people see that if someone is shooting at you, you need to shoot back. Of course it also works the other way, and that’s why wars are so horrible.
Again, I am not defending Isreal; they have had horrific policy for decades and their disregard for civilian safety is unacceptable and their expansionist actions and attacks on infrastructure should not be tolerated.
But we can’t stop them at all under trump or maga. Trump is not just letting red lines be crossed, he is not just allowing Isreal to have US weapons - he is actively supporting the aggression with the U.S. military. The ‘weak’ democrats are clearly better than this. I don’t know exactly what Harris would have done if she had been president; I’m sure not enough, but I do believe all the ‘red line’ talk would have lead to more and more push back on the atrocities. We’ll never know because since she wasn’t as strongly against Isreal as we might like, too many eligible voters stayed home and we got Trump and the worst ever carnage in Gaza, and now Lebanon. We can’t make that mistake again.
convince too many leftists that there’s something wrong with her for some reason.
I mean there is plenty wrong with her (TropicalDingdong makes a good case in that regard), but she’s the best realistic option barring a new national-scale Mamdani.
I mean do you even have reasons for thinking Harris was so bad?
You seem well-meaning, but the racism/sexism card is way overplayed at this point in the game. The two examples DNC sympathisers point to for why an AOC run is a bad idea both lost not because they were women, but because they were utterly terrible politicians. I wasn’t around for Hillary so I can’t go into too much detail, but Harris specifically did her utmost best to destroy every single ounce of goodwill she had. And as for the racism, well, America did overwhelmingly elect Obama in 2008. Even on the far right you see MAGA elect women and minority politicians they agree with (see: MTG), so there’s no way the everyone left of Reagan coalition wouldn’t be able to elect AOC due to sexism. It’s just a complete and utter non-issue.
But the right wing media would come out along with the Russian/ Chinese manipulators and convince too many leftists that there’s something wrong with her for some reason. Leftists are such suckers to this manipulation. I mean do you even have reasons for thinking Harris was so bad?
The left has no obligation to join your shitty cults
Yes, you can support maga if you wish, just try to understand that’s what you are doing.
Cult in plural
Supporting genocide is bad. Get that through your head and shut the fuck up already.
So you support the orange moron who calls for the eradication of Palestinians from Gaza so he can build a casino strip there? Brilliant.
Multiple endorsements of Israeli genocide.
A couple million dollars from AIPAC, and that’s before her VP run. We don’t know how many digits above 8 she received from israel to ‘promise no change from the Biden administration.’
Absolutely no acknowledgement of the failures of the Biden admin. Every single demographic under 400k income was worse off under Biden. Every single one. White, black, high school dropouts, PhD holders in the middle class, all of them were objectively worse off.
Absolutely no foreign policy experience besides the Biden admin, who also had no foreign policy experience and soft launched the war in Iran. There was no world where we didn’t enter a war with Iran with either candidate, hence why every single DNC power player has endorsed Trump’s war, but ‘has issues with how it was done.’
Her entire political career prior to her VP, including the entirety of her time as California AG.
So you don’t like her Israel stance. Understandable. But there are big forces at play here - she simply couldn’t turn her back on Isreal, it would be the end of her career and possibly life. She said some bad comments of Isreal but she also made some moderate comments, and had a little push back; times were a bit different then, that was before Isreal just started to murder civilians blatantly en mass. I think most of those metrics are a bit unfair due to Covid effects.
And no, the war in Iran wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Yes military action was likely due to trump fucking up the agreements and the desire not to let Iran get nukes.
Your points are valid to some degree but I think you are being overly critical. And I wonder why?
Because neoliberalism cannot improve things. The US has two effective choices because Americans are too stupid and too lazy to vote third party; if one is a fascist, and the other is the reason fascism flourishes, one will be ‘overly critical’ of both possible choices.
People will not vote for more of the same when they’ve been suffering. People will vote for change and chaos long before they vote for ‘hurr durr every thing’s fine the fact your life is worse is fox news misinformation your experiences don’t matter I will just keep doing what’s made your life this way.’
This means, if you run a campaign like that, you are implicitly supporting fascism. This isn’t a surprising or new strategy, it’s the exclusive reason why Obama, a junior senator with a conservative if not far-right voting track record, was able to win the presidency under the democratic ticket. He promised change. It is why Trump won. It is every single analysts’ reason for why Trump won. He promised change. He promised to be an outsider. He promised to not do the same thing as any of his predecessors.
It is why Biden won, on the campaign promise of changing from Trump’s nonsense.
Harris lost for the same reason Clinton lost for the same reason Romney lost for the same reason Kerry lost for the same reason Gore lost for the same reason… you get where I’m going with this.
If the next democratic presidential candidate promises to “return to normalcy” or “return to the biden era” or “bring back civility to politics” or anything that suggests they are not going to bring radical change, they will lose. It does not matter if they have tits or not. It does not matter if they are Chinese Black Mixed with a cock on their forehead and a literal conjoined twin that looks like a demon baby growing out of their stomach. It does not matter if they are a white rich peodphile (gavin Newsom).
Every single honest political analyst has been screaming at the democratic party since before Clinton became the nominee in 2015. Just promise change and be as visible as possible in trying to follow through. Do not pretend things are fine when they’re not. Do not cater to culture war nonsense. Mention how fucked people are economically, and how you’re going to fix it, and why you ARE NOT A “NORMAL” POLITICIAN. If ANY candidate does that this next election, D or R, they will win. Period. Regardless of race, religion, sex, or whether or not they ‘appeal’ to voters tastes.
Yes, I see that. I think people voted for trump the first time because they thought it would be interesting. And his ‘drain the swamp’ would be good to get back at the elite. I can’t believe they fell for it the second time. I don’t think he even coherently promised change the second time, it was more that it was his reputation already, and even though the changes he made before were demonstrably worse, people still supported him. I guess trump is interesting but in the way a car accident is interesting. If that’s all the U.S. electorate wants, we are so fucked. How can you battle that idiocy without just doing the same?
It’s not ‘interesting,’ it is change. Yes Trump 2 also promised change and proved himself to somewhat be an agent of chaos. When people experienced the Biden years and their lives just kept getting worse by ‘returning to normal politics,’ they were willing to burn down the US instead of dealing with normal politics again.
People largely didn’t support Trump because he is racist or interesting or what have you; but simply because the worst case scenario is the destruction of the US government, and the best case scenario is something that is not the same shit that has crushed them, their parents, and their grand parents for as long as they’ve been alive.
Trump correctly identified ‘the swamp,’ or the ‘deep state,’ or the idea that there is an embedded rot that exists in the US ruling class that exists solely to crush the working class. That there are people and groups explicitly working to make sure the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and that the law binds the latter and is disregarded by the former without consequence. He literally told on himself and his homies, but attributed it to just the government instead of the entirety of capital.
This resonates with people. Even if he is also a part of capital, he is at worst incompetent and will do enough damage to capital that the average worker might end up better. At the very least Capital would be hurt like the working class has been hurt.
That is an objectively better outcome than returning to normal politics. That is objectively better for most people than ‘we’d be at brunch.’
No, it’s just before liberals started admitting that Israel was blatantly murdering civilians en masse. This had a lot more to do with a Republican being in charge than the actual blatant mass murder of civilians, which had been going on since October 2023.
Because you like Harris and don’t want to accept that someone can have a valid reason to hate her guts.
It’s not a matter of liberals admitting it, it’s that Isreal ramped up and ran out of targets with any military association but kept bombing. And they did this because trump encouraged them to do so. Harris would have kept arming them but would have continued to push the message that Isreal should respect human rights while defending itself. It matters and it’s different. All the while that Hammas kept firing rockets into Isreal, which it was doing daily before the election, Isreal had cover to bomb things even remotely like a military resource. There were so many obvious lies being pushed by both sides that even the extent of Isreal’s atrocities was questionable back then. And by your own assertion above, liberals and democrats have now recognized that Hamas is essentially disarmed now and Isreal’s continued attacks on civilians are unacceptable. The dnc is shifting now, but there is a powerful isreali lobby and some die hards in the party. Now is the time to push and people are doing that. But once we are in the election, we need to cool off and help democrats win as much as possible. Otherwise any shift is wasted and we have more years of the US blindly encouraging and paying for Isreal to do what it wants with absolutely no restrictions.
See, you’re proving my point. That’s exactly what was happening under Biden. The UN was warning of a famine as early as mid-2024. Biden himself said Rafah was a humanitarian red line and proceeded to do nothing when Israel took it. If your point is that Israel was engaging in legitimate self-defense until November, then kindly fuck off.
No it fucking wasn’t. People were yelling as loud as they could that Israel’s conduct was genocidal as early as October 9th 2023.
Yes, Biden was weak. But he was at least doing some push back, unlike trump. Maybe ineffective, but I don’t think so - the violence certainly ramped up under trump’s encouragement.
Yes, people were yelling about Isreal’s response to the Oct attacks - before it even started, which it rather telling. And there were videos showing Isreali bombing of hospitals that were then clearly shown to be from misfired Hamas rockets. The entire Oct attacks could never have militarily achieved any success especially as they targeted civilians, so it was clear from the start that it was all about purposefully triggering a response and then getting it on video to gain sympathy. They literally did the Oct attacks to get tic toc views of their children getting killed.
As horrific as that is, of course it doesn’t excuse Israel’s actions - I’m not defending them. But it does explain a lot of the distrust of the reports of what Isreal was doing - ie if the point was to generate sympathetic media, then it seems likely that Hamas would fabricate it and spin it, and of course they did. Just as Isreal spun their bombing as defence against Hamas resources. When Hamas was firing rockets at Isreal daily, it was easy cover for Isreal to do what they wanted because people see that if someone is shooting at you, you need to shoot back. Of course it also works the other way, and that’s why wars are so horrible.
Again, I am not defending Isreal; they have had horrific policy for decades and their disregard for civilian safety is unacceptable and their expansionist actions and attacks on infrastructure should not be tolerated.
But we can’t stop them at all under trump or maga. Trump is not just letting red lines be crossed, he is not just allowing Isreal to have US weapons - he is actively supporting the aggression with the U.S. military. The ‘weak’ democrats are clearly better than this. I don’t know exactly what Harris would have done if she had been president; I’m sure not enough, but I do believe all the ‘red line’ talk would have lead to more and more push back on the atrocities. We’ll never know because since she wasn’t as strongly against Isreal as we might like, too many eligible voters stayed home and we got Trump and the worst ever carnage in Gaza, and now Lebanon. We can’t make that mistake again.
I generally agree with you, but I thought real wages went up under Biden for low income earners? What metric are you using here?
I mean there is plenty wrong with her (TropicalDingdong makes a good case in that regard), but she’s the best realistic option barring a new national-scale Mamdani.
Yes, plenty in fact.
Yes, she’s the best realistic option. Just like Harris was in the last cycle.