• chaonaut@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Well, what’s important is that Harris never listened to people who care about Palestinians. Surely, we will all be better off that the Harris campaign decided to hew closely to Biden’s policies, court Republicans for her cabinet and chase suburban Trump voters. Clearly, this is entirely the fault of individual voters, and we all agree that the campaign, corporate media organizations and monied interests bear no responsibility for this whatsoever.

    • ObliviousEnlightenment@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Whats important is the outcome of policy. Frankly, Gaza is a fucking excuse. You didnt wanna show up, whatever the reason, and you were perfectly happy to sell all the women and non-whites and lgbt folks and everyone else outside of the Aryan Murican master race up the river. Including the fucking Palestinians. Trump will be worse for them. We all know this, it is not up for debate. Yet instead of try ro mitigate this genocide you care so much about, you use them as a shield to justify your inaction. Every single Harris voter was willing to do more for Palestine than you are ever going to be capable of.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        18 days ago

        Well we know that’s not true. Harris herself was in fact a Harris voter, she had so many chances to take a clear stance on Palestine, and she waited until the very end to even try.

        And you have no idea what the previous commenter has done with their life. It’s easy to say that someone on the internet never did anything other than vote third party or stay home, but you just don’t know. There are many wonderful human beings who don’t vote how we might appreciate but actually are working hard to make their community a better place.

      • chaonaut@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Weird, seems like it’s been the repeated denial of progressive issues while courting further and further right that has cost the Democrats the four of the past seven elections, no matter how much we beg for the slightest crumb of civil rights.

        I remember how much we had to fight Democrats to get Gay Marriage and LGBT rights in general, and have seen how far they have fled from unions and healthcare. And I say this as someone who has actually done phone banking for the Dems, and has been telling people who are personally invested in what happens to people in Palestine that Harris is the best option on the ballot.

        But, yeah, I guess individual voters are the best people to blame, and complaining that people cared enough about an issue to get out and do political action are the problem, and we should smugly congratulate ourselves that they should have just shut up and got with the program, their friends and family members be damned.

        • Floon@lemmy.ml
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          18 days ago

          So full of shit. The Dems have been robustly defending your civil rights this whole fucking time. Go check the ACLU’s legislative scorecards: you’ll find virtually every Dem rep and senator with a 100% voting record aligned with the ACLU, and almost zero GOP pols with a 100% grade (I found one senator on the 2020 scorecard at 100%). Some GOP pols, like Josh Hawley, score 0%.

          The Dems do the damned work, quietly and diligently. Unions saw their biggest gains in decades under Biden. Real wages rose under Biden, more than inflation, and rose highest for the bottom quintile. There hasn’t been an administration in my lifetime (I’m 56) that has come close.

          Young progressives are, for the most part, self-important shits that care more about posturing than actually knowing who is doing the most good for the most people, without conducting destructive purity tests on them. Young Progs don’t show up for midterm votes, and didn’t show up on Tuesday. Thanks for showing up in 2020, but what have you done for the world lately? Old fucks like me show up every goddamned time. Voting is a fucking duty, a bare minimum of effort that young progressives have to be wooed with flowers and candy into exerting. Go skip classes in a tent on the school quad without resulting in ANY CHANGE AT ALL, and preen for your Insta friends.

          • orcrist@lemm.ee
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            18 days ago

            You’re not a very good troll are you. It’s well established that there are large numbers of corporate Democrats who will float social issues as important but tend to follow through very weakly.

            You know, what happened to abortion? That’s an issue that we knew was coming 30 years ago. We were discussing it in the '90s. We knew that the Republicans were trying to poison the Supreme Court, and the Democrats just went along with it, pretending they were helpless when they had enough power to stop it.

            And I could bring up other issues where the progressive stance was just ignored by the majority of Washington Democrats. There are so many major issues. Wars, banks, unions, monopolies, etc. But I don’t think you’re interested. I think you’d rather just do a little bit of name calling. Maybe I’m wrong, though. It’s happened before, happens all the time.

            • Floon@lemmy.ml
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              17 days ago

              You’re thinking like one level deep, but the real issues are much more difficult.

              Everything the GOP does makes them stronger, and everything the Democrats do makes them weaker. This is because exploiting things makes money, and defending things costs money. There’s almost nothing the Democrats can do about any progressive issue that doesn’t also create huge numbers of Republicans, so pleasing progressives is generally not the winning strategy you think it is.

              I’m more interested in solving these problems than I could adequately explain, but you, like most progressives, think about goals and not strategies or ancillary outcomes.

          • chaonaut@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            As a fellow old fuck, surely you must remember Obama publicly opposing gay marriage to win voters, no? And, surely, of like me, you’ve been voting in primaries and “off-year” elections for decades like I have, you must remember the various progressives running for the Dem nomination only to have people like John Kerry and Al Gore be the “exciting, energetic” candidates. Sure, we can point to Clinton, but his strategy involved being conservative enough to pull in Reagan Dems and middle class Republicans, as well as the usual Democratic mainstays. You know, the play the Dems keep running while not having someone with Bill’s “good ole boy” personality to pull it off.

            And, yeah, it’s been a breath of fresh air seeing unions do as well as they have recently, after being pounded into the dirt for decades. And, yeah, the economy is doing better, but people still struggle to pay for groceries and housing. Do you remember when George Bush couldn’t answer what the price of milk was, and how hard he got beat up over that? Did you vote in '92? I was too young, but I still remember hearing about the price of milk everywhere for a long stretch there.

            I dunno, I’m just kind of tired of voting Blue election after election while getting told the issues that are important to me just can’t be done right now, because we need to appeal enough to Republicans again. Having to fight tooth and nail to get whatever issues some ground, be it civil rights, the environment or social services, and then see it up on the chopping block the moment Dems need to “compromise” with Republicans to not tear up a different right. And we still lose, or win just enough to not have enough of a majority to get anything done. The closest I’ve seen to Dems doing well while I’ve been able to vote? When they embraced the possibility of change and getting things done with Obama’s Hope campaign.

            And, again, this is coming from someone who has voted for Harris, votes in primaries and off-year elections, who has done phone banking for the Dems, been involved in local orgs, has advocated to disillusioned voters to get out to the polls to vote because of how awful the alternative for not voting is.

            But, you tell me: how successful was the Dem’s strategy this cycle? Did they manage to pick up votes on their right flank? What was the gain in conservative Dem voters vs. the loss in progressives? How does the gap compare to previous elections? What sort of voters did their appeal to “the middle” yield? I’m something of a numbers wonk at the end of the day and tend to be more receptive to the analysis instead of what I see as knee-jerk scapegoating, so tell me what went well this time around.

            • Floon@lemmy.ml
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              17 days ago

              There was nothing successful about this cycle. We live in a post-truth world, and it may be unfixable.

              But pleasing the bulk of progressives (meaning idiot hippies who have nothing going on but attention for temporary media outrage) is not going to repair the Democrats. The Democrats can only succeed if there is a consensus reality, and there is no longer one.

      • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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        18 days ago

        They are completely right, and the only thing the Dems know to do after such a failure is to blame the disenfranchised left, as they continue to court conservative voters who hate liberals and would never vote for a black woman.