They didn't ignore this reality. They tried to move to the right, and woo right wing voters, trotting out Liz Cheney, acting and talking like Republicans. And it accomplished nothing: R's voted with their party. It was a total failure.
Liz Cheney was a great get on their part. It's the rest of it that was the issue. They should have gone hard left and still had Liz up there, for the full-spectrum effect. "Even this crazy conservative woman thinks Kamala's great" but then everything else: left left left.
Unless anyone here has spent time on other social media platforms that are unfiltered you really don't have a clue what a cesspool of troll farm propaganda that has been pouring out for the last several months.
And it all stopped last night.
Non-stop made-up bullshit blaming Harris for the last four years for some completely undefined fault, high fuel prices even though they're down, grocery prices, inflation, cost of housing, etc. etc. Just a steady sewer pipe drain of dreck for months. I bet Putin got his money's worth.
but it's not.
its about 20 million voters throwing a tantrum and fucking us.
For a second time!
Bold of them to assume there's going to be a Democratic party.
The Democratic party is stuck on this idealistic platform of unity and appealing broadly to the American people. The Left, however, recognizes the fact that the Right has forsaken unity and is more than willing to irradiate the Left in pursuit of its own goals.
The Democratic party is stuck on this idealistic platform of unity and appealing broadly to the American people.
That's the marketing for "moving right every chance they get."
Okay. Am I to assume this means they have to do interviews on fox News? What the fuck are they supposed to do about this? They clearly know it
They need to come to terms!!
I've been coming to terms and I never see them there!
If only they had compromised more and reached across the aisle harder. That will surely fix it next time.
"meet me in the middle", says the unjust man.
you take a step towards him. he takes a step back.
"meet me in the middle", says the unjust man.
This is such a good way to put it.
And they're both dumb enough to scowl at you for pointing it out.
It's obvious that Liz Cheney wasn't enough. Next time we must revive Henry Kissenger to get his endorsement. Surely that'll win the moderates
And an AI clone of Ronald Reagan, just to be sure.
It is also time for the Democratic Party to genuinely embrace progressive policies. It is evident that not many people were enthusiastic about Harris’s moderate campaign policies.
It would have been. Now it's going to be...something else. Not something fundamentally similar to before. Not fun to think about.
It was time in 2016. Biden barely won in 2020 and somehow Dems took that as a mandate to be even more conservative. At this point I have no idea how progressive ideas ever get implemented.
I mean, in the US, the archetype of progressive policy success, the New Deal, was only possible because of labor militancy and the threat of systemic collapse. That should give an idea
They do!
In... Other countries?
So Dems don't turnout to vote and this is the Republican propaganda machines fault? The day the Dems actually take accountability for their continual fuckups is the day I might vote for them again.
People act where they think their actions will do something. The fact that you intuitively channel your rage at the democrats is a kind of proof that you understand the republicans are beyond hope and infinitely, infinitely more at fault.
This is something the left has to start getting right. Pointing the rage at the right place. It starts here.
it's too late for all this dialog
I dont think it is. If I understand the American election process right, the next step is in January, when democrats are allowed to violently assault their elected government, but I'm really not sure if the plan at that stage is supposed to be for Harris to move in or for Biden to stick around. How exactly does that part work again? I don't think other countries do this part.
As long as it’s referred to as an official act by Biden the rest doesn’t really matter, right SCOTUS?
I've heard so many contradictory explanations today. And thought more still. I guess the idea that Kamala and/or Biden and/or Democrats in general didn't engage enough with media (didn't sit to be interviewed by Joe Rogan or whatever) is as good a theory as any. But I don't think anyone knows WTF just happened.
I am 35.
My entire lifetime, the way Dems run presidential campaigns, the way they push the message is heavily, heavily reliant on mainstream legacy media outfits talking about and repeating their announcements and rallies.
Meanwhile, the Republicans do the same... but they also control the vast majority of talk radio stations, and since the internet came into wide use, the number of popular internet figures with overt right wing tendencies just vastly, vaaaastly outstrips similar figures on the left, in terms of viewership and funding.
Basically, the Dems still think that dying legacy media, with fewer and fewer readers/viewers, that increasingly has to sell out by running more bombastic, shocking news, and/or cowtowing to the whims of their corpo owners...
... they still think that this nearly dead legacy media will give them the same treatment as in the 70s, when there were only 3 fucking TV news channels and newspapers op eds were far more influential.
They should have learned that they needed a real way of pushing their message after 2015/16.
Trump dominated the media without paying anything for it simply by being bombastic and saying insane shit.
That should have set off a whole bunch of alarm bells that ... Dems can't rely on news stations giving roughly equal air time to them.
But it did not.
The Republicans, through their various think tanks and foundations, funded the hell out of every one willing to repeat their message on any medium for 35 years.
Dems have never had anything like this, even though the average Republican thinks George Soros is doing something like that.
Now, combine all of the above with another trend the Republicans have manifested into reality over 35 years:
Public Education has been decimated. The average American now has critical reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th grader.
So even if huge numbers of people were still reading Op-Eds in papers... they would not understand any moderately complex discussions of policies, or history, or economics or anything anyway.
... And this is all just a critique of how the Democrats have been at distributing their messages.
The actual content of those messages is an entirely different failure.
So what's the solution? What should the Democrats have done? Pay Mark Zuckerberg to run left wing propaganda? Prop up a bunch of am radio talk shows?
I don't have answers, but it's hard to imagine what specifically they did wrong. This might have been inevitable, maybe they screwed this country up to the point where there is no winning move.
I mean... basically yes?
They could prop up AM radio talk shows.
Thom (sp?) Hartmann and Sam Seder are ... basically the only two left wing, 'big name' radio talk shows that still even exist post the 00's.
They exist almost entirely off of small individual donations...
Do the same thing for left wing youtubers/twitch streamers.
Almost all left wing people like that with any name recognition are doing it without any big name donors, as opposed to the Republicans who have a myriad network of wealthy donors basically bankrolling them.
... and that would just be mirroring the Republican strategy.
Maybe they could actually innovate too?
But yeah, this would be like ... 30 years too late.
What did the Dems do wrong?
Be unimaginably complacent by placing their faith in the integrity of norms and institutions that the Republicans have very obviously been trying to destroy for about 20 years.
Its the primary problem of being a liberal.
You just assume the rules and norms you follow apply to everyone.
It is not part if their worldview that those rules and norms can be destroyed by cleverly manipulating them against themselves.
What should they do now?
Pff, I dunno, its too late, we have now arrived at fascism.
I've been saying this (along with actually shift your platform to the left instead of to the right) to every mainline, Obama will save us all and everything is fixed now, standard liberal Democrat for almost 20 years.
They have all acted like I am a hyperbolic delusional nutjob when I explain that the status quo trajectory will sooner than later lead the country further and further to the right untill we end up with corporate theocratic fascism.
Well now we have that.
Its... kinda like the climate, or preventative medicine and a base healthy lifestyle vs checking into the ER as an overweight smoker who broke their leg from the pain of trying to pass a kidney stone.
Fixing the mess is orders of magnitude more costly and difficult than preventing it.
The error would be expecting it to be any one thing. It’s a large large large combination of various factors.
lol
Isn't this how every other authoritarian regime on the planet operates? Control all the main media sources, promote only the main messages and propaganda that you want people to see and listen to, repeat it all endlessly, repeat it everywhere, fund it so that this media machine has all the resources it needs to maintain everyone's attention all the time.
Then when someone on the outside looks in .... everyone inside will think they are weird because they exist in their own reality.
We have always been at war with Eastasia
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