cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22407219
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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I don't share their ideology. They tend to be a bit more hyperbolic, calling Democrats and Republicans the same, which they aren't. I would much rather have a Democrat in charge right now, because that's a much safer environment from which to enact the sort of progressive change I personally want. Plus, Ukraine would stand an obviously better chance.
But my critique still stands. Some Democrats would rather become Conservative than do the work to convince people to join them on the left. They're gonna chase a vanishingly small number of people and just expect the rest of us to fall in line, and this last election very clearly demonstrated that that's not a viable strategy, despite everyone I know voting for them.
I am usually an optimist, but I do not have faith that people will come to their senses and realize that voting for the least-objectionable candidate is in their best interest. If Democrats don't start running progressive populists, they're gonna continue to lose, and Republicans are going to continue gerrymandering and changing the rules to the point that Democrats' efforts become just for show.
I would also like our politicians to be more progressive but I can understand why politicians try to be moderate. I live in a blue part of a red state and everyone I know has a mixed ideology. A progressive politician wouldn’t stand a chance of winning in my part of the country.
Also, with all the money that is now in politics because of citizens united it becomes much more difficult for someone to win when they are open about fixing income inequality. For that reason, I don’t think Bernie would stand a chance. I think a Trojan horse approach would work better.
I’m not an optimist but I’m confident that Trump won because of the inflation experienced during Biden’s term as a result of the pandemic. I’m hoping Trumps tariffs make things worse or there’s another crisis like the pandemic and it causes more people to vote blue next election the same way the pandemic got Biden elected.
I think in practice they need to have some moderation (because there's a lot of different kinds of people they would govern), but that's not how they should run their campaigns. People want change, they know things are broken, and they voted upon that vibe which gave Republicans a three branch majority. Republicans promised that giving them the reigns will provide the antidote to people's anxieties, and since the Democrats were mainly only running on the idea of, "Vote for us, because Trump is going to be terrible," people had the choice between "change" and "more of the same."
People don't realize that more of the same is the better choice in this case, but that's the fault of Democrats for not conveying to the public why people should want that over "change" ~~that's definitely not going to exacerbate the wealth divide~~.
In the context of the 2024 election, the change voters wanted was cheaper cost of living.
I see this sentiment a lot on lemmy also and it isn’t my experience irl. Democrats campaigned on taxing billionaires, addressing cost of living for the working class and rescheduling marijuana to name a few things.
Unfortunately all the inflation happened under Bidens term so it was easy to convince voters that progressive policies from Democrats were to blame for inflation. And that is still what a lot of voters think.
That’s not a message anyone would use during a campaign because it can easily be spun against them by the opposition. I don’t fault democrats for not sending that message. That just seems like common sense.
Sorry, I should have clarified that what Democrats were running on in reality versus the zeitgeist weren't the same. That's my bad.
The problem with their actual campaign promises is they weren't always self-evident to the average person why they were the things they'd want, which you touched on. "How does taxing billionaires deal with greedflation? I don't smoke weed—why should I care about that? Why are my groceries so damn expensive, now‽ I remember when gas was cheap. What were the promises, again?"
Meanwhile, Trump stayed on message. He brought out the pitchforks and torches for minorities, and he promised to deal with "government weaponization" (by weaponizing the government and which has that useful quality of meaning different things for different people), he promised to fix inflation by applying tariffs to every blessed thing (which we all know is a truly unhinged plan). Most importantly, he made the headlines.
Democrats can't play it safe the next time. They're playing ball with a cult leader, and if they want to stand any chance at midterms, they need to realize they're up against an adversary who is more than happy to twist and shape the rules to favor them.
I agree that the issue they had is their campaign promises weren’t self evident to the average person. It seems they had to choose to either A) give all of America an economics lesson so they understand their goals, or B) lie like the GOP does and make up a scapegoat to blame inflation on. A) isn’t feasible and B) makes them look untrustworthy to anyone who understands the situation enough to see they are scapegoating.
I think the real problem the Democratic Party faces is beating the GOP without becoming the GOP. There’s a lot of voices online pushing for Biden to execute Trump and do things that we would only expect Trump/GOP to do. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out those voices are bad actors trying to normalize Trumps behavior.