this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Again, Biden's position on Israel is central to this. Democrats have been consistently more interested in eradicating progressives from their party than resisting conservatives. If Biden had the same stance as Bowman on Israel (you know, the moral one to have), Bowman wins that primary.
Its over for the Democrats. They've lost this election and lost the future of the party to I don't know what. They've at least one entire generation of voters on this issue, and maybe as much as 40-60% of Z and millennials. They are dead as a party at this point and there is no point arguing about them because they'll never hold power again.
And its because of this issue. Its because of Gaza. Its because they are not interested in the priorities of their base, and have been telling us exactly this since the year 2000. We should listen to them.
That doesn't explain why people don't know about things that Biden has actually done on other issues though.
Humans have limited bandwidth for keeping active "issues" in their brains. We prioritize somethings over others. There has been plenty of press on Biden's climate "wins". But they are irrelevant because he's supporting a genocide.
Say a human can have maybe 5 priorities at a given moment. Anything that drops out of those five priorities means we don't "know" about it (its not at the front of our mind).
For likely Biden independents it goes:
1: Genocide in Gaza
2: Stopping Trump
3: The economy
4: The rise of christian fascism (nationally & globally)
5: The rise of authoritarianism
Climate can't get to the top of the heap because there are other issues, more prescient, are way way way more relevant in near-time. And this has always been the issue with Climate as politics. The costs to doing anything (with time as the x-axis) are always high (on the left side of the x axis, near time) while the benefits are low (in near time). The benefits are all extremely delayed. Humans didn't evolved to deal with this kind of shit. Historically when a population of humans fucked up their environment beyond the point we could survive (its happened a bunch of times), those humans just fucking die and whatever left of their diaspora get picked up by other human populations. We evolved to rank and prioritize issues for survival now, a little bit for 5 years from now, and basically not at all for 20 years from now. And practically 0 for issues 100 years from now.
So its not that people don't know about these W's; its just that they don't care. They can't. They have other shit they need to care about because its blowing up in their faces right now.