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This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe
(www.thenation.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Yeah, no. Let's hold the media accountable. For treating Trump like a serious candidate in the first place and giving him all the air time, the jester that he is. For harping on every single thing the Dem candidate did wrong while apologizing and making excuses for Orange Julius at every turn. Going on and on about Biden's age and then never bringing up age again once Biden dropped out of the race. Let's hold the oligarchs accountable for doing their best to stifle free speech, welcoming Russian and GOP astroturfing of the internet, and the last hundred years of slowly breaking down our democracy so they can have more money when they already have so much more than enough. No it's all the Dems fault π
yeah but also let's not forget that the DNC has funded far right extremest candidates in the past thinking that they could get an easy win. that didn't pan out
They did that this year too! It's not just something they've done in the past. They gave millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the primaries, hoping that the candidate would knock the serious contender out of the race, and then they could beat the far-right candidate in the final election. It's devious, and apparently sometimes effective, but does raise a lot of questions and kind of overshadows this whole "we only take the high road" image they've tried to cultivate.
Looks like the headline is just clickbait anyways, author doesn't make any suggestions to hold anybody accountable. I've got a plan: lets get as many primary voters as we do general election voters.
Uh, how are you going to get primary voters when there's no primary?
The one silver lining here is that there will be a primary in 2028. And in 2026.
Get ready now. If youβre in a closed primary state, you need to register as a democrat to participate. If you donβt like voting for the lesser evil, getting off your ass and voting in every primary is the bare minimum you can do. You can do more by phone banking, volunteering, and educating your peers in real time as shit spirals in tangible ways over the next 2 years.
Biden in 2020 pledged to be a one-term president so there could be an open primary in 2024. The argument was beating Trump was more important than any given policy.
So he got that. And then decided to run again and the DNC essentially skipped their primaries. So that silver lining for 2026 and 2028 should be compared with the argument in 2020 being 'wait to primary in 2024'.
You seem to be suggesting that the American public are fools who were tricked, rather than the Democratic party being genuinely unpopular.
The Democrats were in power for 4 years and accomplished almost nothing while the lives of ordinary people got worse. They never forgave student loads, they didn't legalize weed, the 2k stimulus check was cut to 1.4k, they never raised the minimum wage, they never rolled back abortion bans, they continued putting kids in cages, they backed a genocide, and inflation was worse than it's been in a long time. And this campaign their whole message was "what are you going to do, vote trump?".
The republicans didn't gain any votes this election, the democrats just lost millions.
As much as I don't like the dems, this is too harsh on Biden. Biden inherited a weak economy from Trump, which saw worldwide inflation. That inflation is now back down to normal levels. Biden also repeatedly forgave tranches of student loans, started the process to declassify marijuana, tried to increase minimum wage but was blocked by DINOs, did roll back several abortion bans and managed to constitutionally protect the right to abortion in several states.
Biden wasn't close to perfect. He wasn't hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US. And he started claiming victory once inflation was back down, but well before people were compensated for their loss in purchasing power.
Biden was an OK president. Better than Trump anyway. But their election strategy was terrible and they really should have focused on what they could offer the working class rather than focus on what Trump would offer.
IMO most of what was going on with inflation going up and down was because of Jerome Powell anyway, it's not like either Trump or Biden have a problem with him. The only candidate in recent memory to even acknowledge rising wealth inequality as an issue was Bernie Sanders. Resolving the country's financial problems with endless corporate welfare is just the standard bipartisan consensus.
The Democratic Party clearly does have a lot of work to do. They lost because over 10 million people stayed home.
But letβs not pretend that the fools who were tricked arenβt a humongous issue. Trump had about the same level of support despite literally everything that happened on every single day between November 2020 and November 2024.
Both things very much can be, and very much are, factors. And maybe it also falls on the democrats to try to reach the tricked fools, but probably not until after they convince the non-trumpers to get off their asses first.
The items you bring up are outside the control of the DNC and its members. How can the DNC change media ownership or block Russian astroturfing?
The press is motivated both by its oligarchic owners and also by popularity. We can't change the former (certainly whole out of power), but we can make policy and targeting changes that make Democrats popular, and it follows that what the news reports will change.
My point, exactly.
I remember journalists writing formal apology letters in 2016 for the reasons you just mentioned. Then they went and did the exact same thing again. I knew we were in trouble as soon as that started again. What's more disheartening than that to me though, is that apparently a huge swath of Americans don't have the capacity to think about anything beyond what they're shown on TV.
Behind the Bastards did a good one two-parter recently on liberal media which helped the rise of the NSDAP party, and how that compares with US politics today. Even Jewish owned newspapers identified more with elites than Jewish commoners, and so were happy to underreport the violence and hate rhetoric of the National Socialist German Workers Party, even when they were literally gunning down communists and labor unionists.
The media agencies do not identify with the common public even today, which is why we still rely on blogs and curators, and have to cross reference news stories to see what the common reported facts are, and if they're consistent from different primary sources. This process is a necessary artifact from the George W. Bush administration and the international war on terror, which was already a foray by the US into fascist rhetoric and autocracy. From then it's been Secret Hitlers all the way down.
So this is to say this is totally on brand for the media. And as the election has now shown us (hindsight being 20/20) this is totally on brand for the US public.
You're not wrong, but the DNC pushing relatively right-wing corpo candidates is just as much at fault as the media. When will the DNC actually listen to the base? Same thing happened when they disregarded votes for Bernie Sanders.
I don't necessarily disagree, I caucused for Bernie, but I understand why they were trying to poach those falling off the republican party. When the country has swung so far to the right we don't get a left and right party anymore, we get the slide into fascism and maintain the status quo parties. At least until we can get ranked choice voting. Defeating Fascism was supposed to be a step back towards the left, but some leftists couldn't handle not getting everything they wanted right away, so instead we get to slide into fascism.
Except you would never get republicans falling off, or rather those numbers are extremely small. So now you get a situation where a large part of your voterbase goes "ewwww" when you tall about "the Wall". And you lose votes from progressives. Remember - Trump got the same amount of votes he did in 2016. Dems lost like 6 milion of them.
You don't "step back towards the left" by promising right wing policies. Especially comming off of a 4 year period of a democrat being the president. You don't talk about your opponent "having good ideas".
A correct move to the left would involve a "Biden is Biden, that old grandpa, he does stuff that I, the hip new gal in town will change!". It would involve an immediate hard stance on Gaza. It would involve a shitload of other leftwing policies. Instead you got the "status quo" as you put it which obviously sucks and people don't like it. You can promise anything you want during the lead up to the election. Don't promise republican shit though because why would people vote for a "republican with no sugar".
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