Hell, just imagine if Democrats hadn’t let the parliamentarian stand in their way on the minimum wage. Just that by itself would have made it a lot harder for Republicans to claim that Democrats don’t give a shit if their voters can pay for food.

Sinema’s thumbs down remains Democrats’ last word on the subject. And it’s not like she was the lone obstructionist in the party. She was one of EIGHT Democrats who voted against raising the minimum wage.

Talk is cheap. She won’t learn from this. If she did she would be fighting the shit out of him taking office.

Instead they’re happily handing over the vulnerable of this country to Nazis.

the police have no choice. They are owned by the billionaire and exist to protect wealth and privilege.

I want to be hopeful but I can’t find a logical progression to that stage knowing what the Republicans plan to do and their stranglehold on popular social media. The population will continue to be brainwashed into thinking Trump gives a shit and see him helping while also being told right wing Democrats are communists…

No one else stands a chance when we have corporate media or right wing social media as our options. I know there was a socialist candidate this cycle and Lemmy was literally the only place I saw her.

2028, I’ll be campaigning on Squeeze the Billionaires Until the Pips Squeak.

She didn’t even really have a plan to build more houses, just some subsidies that wouldn’t put a dent in the problem. She should have proposed something ambitious that people could get excited about. The crazy thing is Biden had some big ambitious policies that he actudlly enacted like the Inflation Reduction Act that dwarf anything Kamala campaigned on. It’s the opposite of a winning approach that sells the stars and delivers the moon.

There are plenty of houses. Repossess then from Blackrock and sell them at normal rates

Building houses and giving out money WOULD have helped the housing problem. WTF?

My feeling is that once the DNC starts to acknowledge the progressive ideas then they open the flood gates to challengers to their (limited) power.

I was kind of Lukewarm on Walz initially, but he was super endearing. He was cooking there for a minute and then the DNC muzzled him. I remember the moment he got shut up about the electoral college I thought to myself “annnnd now all of his appeal is gone and he’s just another boring politician”. It was really startling to see how little he actually had to do to get the leash tugged.

And to think it might have worked if she just went on Joe Rogan

Biden got people excited about student debt relief.

This is not why Biden got elected. Trump so badly mishandled Covid that everyone left of center demanded change.

Student debt was not a campaign platform he ran on, it was something he did during his presidency.

He did run on Green New Deal and the original proposal that later became the $2 trillion Infrastructure investment/bill/plan.

But to your point, yes he ran on platforms that people got excited. Both of those platforms were new economic opportunities for people in a time when people when much of the labor class was jobless from COVID.

Monopolistic competition makes a lot of wild assumptions that can result in such ideas.

There’s people saying anyone saying dems need to move left are just spreading Russian propaganda

The best way to do that is with some sort of ranked preference voting system. The sooner first past the post is replaced with a ranked choice system, the better.

and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy

… and you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to fuck that up

FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class

And he only did all that to head off a socialist revolution.

And in 2020. I think I can count on one hand the policies he ran on getting put into place, and I lost track of how many some Boogeyman kept it from happening.

But we always gave more weapons to Israel without question or congressional approval.

Saw a brazen example yesterday about how social media is the fault of it all. It was an article like this one https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/07/10-democratic-thinkers-on-what-the-party-needs-right-now-00187993

What we’ve seen is that tens of millions have opted into a right-wing information bubble, largely online, that has grown to eclipse almost the entire traditional media infrastructure. Often, in that bubble, they’ve become the willing consumers of lies and outrage. Trump’s real misdeeds are whitewashed while audiences are encouraged to embrace cathartic rage against rotating groups of enemies — many of which seem to suspiciously mirror historically unpopular minorities. In this fractured information environment, clownish strongmen thrive, their meme-like public personas enrapturing otherwise disengaged voters — a trend we’ve seen across the globe, as social media increasingly displaces traditional media.

Democrats need to recognize that it is impossible to win votes by improving voters’ lives, when your opponent has a national rage machine it can toggle on or off at will. We will see the next iteration of this game soon enough, when the right switches to praising the precise economy they blasted for years, likely spiking economic satisfaction through the roof. This capacity — dominating media and social media, and its power to shape public opinion — has been the obsessive focus of the right for years. Democrats have almost completely ignored these questions in favor of wonky policy and kitchen-table economics. If the party continues to ignore this problem, it courts oblivion. Democrats must find a way to make headway in modern media, and wrest more control of the national information environment from Trump and his band of thugs.

My favorite line

Let’s start with where Democrats should NOT go. We should not blame Vice President Kamala Harris or her campaign.

And normal media does not? The propaganda storm from newspapers in favor of Israel is beyond obvious. It is easy to explain why boomers love Israel and zoomers do not. One of them watches CNN or Fox.

“I do not think that liberals understand the difference between influence and power, and the liberals get confused seeking influence rather than power. The conservatives on the right wing, or the fascists, understand power, though, and they move to consolidate power while the liberal pushes for influence.”

Thanks for sharing that link. It unfortunately still shows to be true even today. :(

Of course, they also said that you would be gone as soon as the election was over, since they couldn’t accept that anyone who deviated from their pro-genocide orthodoxy could be an actual person and not a Russian bot.

There will be no apologies from any of them for their disgusting near-constant libel that only stopped once there was a rule against calling people Russian bots. They just switched to calling anyone who saw what was going to happen a Trump supporter instead.

They’re too busy trying to figure out how to justify how this loss means they need to move to the right.

Yep. Sorry you got shit on for being right. I don’t think I’ve ever downvoted you.

I mean, he’s an ex-pat who was living in Hong Kong, S Korea, and Vietnam for most of Trumps first term… so I’m sure he didn’t feel it as hard as most of us who were here for it.

So the thought is that Trump will stop the genocide.

Yeah, I am definitely in the camp that Trump part 2 will be worse…. but we don’t know for sure yet

So not voting for genocidal candidates now make genocide support? stop projecting.

The Dems were hellbent on supporting gneocide. People chose to be fine with it, even attacking people who called it out.

The flak we got here for saying for months the Dems need to stop the genocide support to win the election now raises the question whether they were just tactically wrong, or whether they werent really into the genocide themselves. That would explain why now there is efforts to project it on the other people.

At every turn we were told that supporting genocide is better than supporting genocide and homophobia. Saying we should push for a non genocidal candidate, for which there was plenty of time at first, got immediately shut down.

The most consistent position of the Biden/Harris fans was to accept genocide, because that was the strongest criticism raised consistently against them. Now you end up not only having lost the election but having lost the election because you were in support of genocide.

It is no wonder that Trump managed to win, when the center is so morally bankrupt. It is no wonder that there was no way to inspire people to vote for Harris and Biden if the messaging constantly was “yeah we are morally bankrupt and we are also genociders and racists, but we are less than the other side. This is as good as we allow to happen”.

This is on the Democrat elites and their supporters. Own up to it instead of projecting the blame.