Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
What’s the answer to that? On the face of it, this says that the electorate don’t want public money spent on helping other people who need help. How do you achieve anything other than conservatism with such an electorate? The only thing I can think is that you have to promise to help more of the electorate, and that the money will be come from the very rich. In other words, the only counter to conservatism is a commitment to actual wealth redistribution, and to going up against the selfish interests of the super-rich. That’s not yet even socialism, but it’s still further to the left that the Democratic Party is willing to go. For now, its leadership would rather lose elections to fascists than challenge billionaires.
Giving everyone 25K means housing prices go up by 25K. It was a very bad idea and would benefit the billionaire class.
What should have been done was capping rent and building more houses.
It wasn’t “give everyone 25k”
Be more disingenuous.
Indeed only people who use it to buy a house. If everyone has 25K more, then housing prices go up by 25K.
Capping rent makes more housing less likely. Are you suggesting government built housing?
Not allowing one or two private equity firms to own a lions share of the market would help.
Government built housing is how the UK solved the problem last time. Then Thatcher sold it off and there hasn’t been any real interest in doing it again despite all the same problems coming back.
Non profit housing, be it through companies owjed by the municipality or cooperatives who provide housing to their members are very effective means to limit rents and provide housing.
In many European countries it used to be normal for a large part of the rental market to be in the hand of such entities or even housing built to be buyed to own by lower middle class families.
Incidently rents started exploding after a lot of these got privatized in the 80s to 00s.