Democrats bet on appeals to neoconservatives — including war criminals like Dick Cheney — and touted harsh border policies, bolstering rather than challenging Republican anti-immigrant frameworks.
Kamala Harris may have relied on women to vote for abortion rights, but she promised little more than a potential return to the flawed and insufficient norm of Roe v. Wade, at best. Like President Joe Biden, she supported a genocide and failed to distinguish herself from extremist Zionists like Trump.
For Democrats, appealing to the right has been a disaster of realpolitik, especially in an electoral system that structurally favors Republicans anyway. But what’s worse, Democratic strategies have failed and harmed the most vulnerable communities both in the U.S. and those who suffer under the yoke of U.S.-backed wars.
There is an urgent need for social justice movement organizing, growing unions and union power, antagonism rather than acquiescence to existing power structures, and expansive networks of care and support. The most powerful social movements of the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Nor did they collapse during Trump’s first tenure.
This is the breaking point where the Dems are going to have to collectively realize and commit to learning from their mistakes.
That Trump was successfull is an indictment of their approach that failed with Clinton and failed again with Harris. They need to invert, maybe they need to start campaigning on fear and hate (of fascism and what it does to the average person and how it sows the seeds of the nation’s destruction including gas prices and bread but also the circuses and people we all love that are no less parts of human life itself.
Maybe start getting their hands a little dirtier. This is an existential war at this point, gloves need to come off and the old guard probably needs to fuck off like forever.
They’ve been campaigning on fear. The Democratic party is not going to save you. They never were. Their empty promises are carrots they dangle to get your votes. They haven’t tried hatred yet, but I think that’s reserved for the uneducated.
Aside from the abomination that is the two party system and electoral college, the real problem is that we are trying to set the same rules across a country that is too big and too divisive to possibly work for everybody. I think it’s time for liberal bubbles to actually secede.
CA and NY make up about 21% of GDP and they contain about 18% of population. Other states are welcome to join. They’d be fine on their own and they’d have land on either coast.
That, or implement tariffs between blue and red states.
Liberals could also leave their bubbles and move to swing states.
Hyperbolic, but in actuality it’s the only way to get what you want, else half of the country is always going to be feeling how everybody on Lemmy is feeling today.
I hate to say it, because being together makes us stronger and I’d hate to need a passport to visit my friends in other states, but I think I might be with you. It’s not like we’ve ever done anything good with our united strength anyway except for stomp around the world taking resources and sparking coups (except once in WW2). Our empire needs to crumble, like England, France, Spain, and Portgual’s. It’s too big, too unwieldy, too hard to make change or improve things and get consensus from this wide area. Plus, it’s a lot easier to fight for our rights if we just need to travel a couple hundred miles to a state capital rather than across the country to Washington, DC or to convince Southern and Midwestern rural voters.
Yeah we’re such a young nation. We’re destined to experience the changes that other nations have.
The other option is to dilute swing states with an influx of liberals, but doesn’t solve the problem of half the country feeling unrepresented.
As if they’d let you secede.
Another solution would be liberals leaving their bubbles and moving to swing states.
When you say get our hands dirtier or gloves coming off, what do you mean?
They mean triggering a Civil War that will likely kill millions of people, but they aren’t going to come out and say it.