Political Discussion and Commentary

I feel like a superstitious loon for saying this, but what I think should have happened differently is the universe should have worked like we rationally understand it instead like a glitched-up Matrix.

Trump's offensive, obnoxious, criminal behavior is too extensive to even list without being tedious. He had almost zero platform except that immigrants are bad. Somehow more than half the voters in America picked him over a scandal-free, criminal-conviction-free opponent pushing optimism and making strongly positive proposals. The universe shouldn't work that way. I really feel like this supports the theory that we are living in a simulation. It feels like somebody put their thumb on the scale to see what will happen.

Not surprised. The Harris campaign ran on the status quo, which many people are dissatisfied with, and pivoted to the right on various policy, when the people who like right-wing policies already have a party catering just to them - and that can come at the cost of alienating their own base or fracturing the coalition. For instance, many Latinos trend conservative in their values, but they voted Dem in the past because of all the "Build the wall" stuff. But then the Democrats said, "Trump's just using it to posture, we're the ones who are actually going to build the wall," and they lost a bunch of Latinos and didn't win over Republicans.

Promoting the Dick Cheney endorsement was an obvious unforced error, not even Republicans like him. Honestly a lot of their attempts to "reach across the aisle" seem more like patting themselves on the back for being "reasonable" than genuine attempts to understand and appeal to actual human beings. Like, generally, I think it's a better strategy to accept that most of them are unreachable and focus on mobilizing your base, but if you are going to commit to that approach and make it the whole backbone of your campaign, then you actually have to understand who you're trying to reach and how they think and why they do the things they do. Like, there are genuine ideological rifts on the right that are exploitable, like nationalism vs libertarianism, but Cheney and Bush tried to do something that both sides of that hate and it was a colossal failure, so bringing him on board just papers over those disagreements and makes it easier for them to consolidate around Trump.

A major problem that liberals have is that they're attached to this idea of "reasonableness" where the best ideas will just naturally win out in the marketplace of ideas, and when the world doesn't actually work like that they just can't accept it. The right isn't reasonable, they are (at least sometimes) proud of not being reasonable, because reason is the tool of the educated elite. And that actually almost makes a weird kind of sense, it's like, imagine arguing that the earth is flat against a five year old - you could probably "win," right? You have way more information in your repertoire and more experience with debate than they do, so you could selectively pick-and-choose things to support your point. So imagine being that five year old, having the sense that the adult is taking you for a ride, but knowing that you can't debate or reason well enough to win on their terms. That's the kind of psychology that we're dealing with.

There are three ways you can respond to that situation. Either you say, "OK, these people are crazy and unreachable, let's focus on mobilizing our own base," or you say, "OK, we can work with that, we just have to go beyond reason and try to build trust or reach them on an emotional level," (good luck with that, since that emotional level includes absolutely despising establishment career politicians, along with a substantial number of people who make up the dem coalition), or, lastly, you can keep trying to reason with them, and you will lose. Like, you could legitimate run a candidate who policy-wise is to the right of the Republican candidate on every issue and right-wingers still wouldn't vote for them if they looked and sounded like a typical Democrat. You just have to wrap your head around that concept.

Not really, if you look at the megaposts I put up in Politics, it pretty much broke exactly how I predicted (down to calling each of the Senate races so far... we still don't know AZ, NV, ME and PA).

Biden was never going to win, not after that disaster of a debate, and there wasn't time for a proper primary. Harris suffered from being the annointed candidate rather than the appointed one.

The only thing that could have been done differently would have been for Biden to announce he wasn't running following the 2022 election.

That would have given time for a proper primary process and a decent candidate selection.

Something I haven't seen discussed is that Kamala is a woman. There are a lot of misogynistic voters who will refuse to vote for a woman.

The Democrats threw it away.
For several races now they've been told by many actual progressives, they need to embrace economic-populism. They refused to. Instead embracing the Cheneys. They got out played by a convicted felon, who's older than his IQ (thanks to another lemmon for that line. I love it).

Republicans are nazis. Nazis are a cancer on society. In civilization, life is based on cooperating, and in the jungle, life is based on you doing whatever you can physically pull off. Nazis bring the law of the jungle into civilization, with no regard for the things they destroy. They boldly gamble that the people they plan to murder will continue trying to cooperate with them, and leverage it at every turn to grab more and more power.

The Democrats' playbook assumes cooperation from everyone. As it turns out, so much so that, as an organization, they literally cannot conceive of an opponent who, at the end of the day, won't cooperate. That blind spot is where nazis strike. They're the one opponent where you put your ordinary playbook away, and play dirty until there's no more nazis, either because they're dead, jailed, scattered, or they chose cut the crap for good. Then you go back to cooperating with those who will cooperate back.

"But then we're no better than them" is the rallying cry of the Democrats. And--this is super important--when you aren't dealing with nazis specifically, that's absolutely how you should think. It's how any decent person thinks, because a world where people don't is a world that fucking sucks. So people do. It becomes the law of the land: sacred, normal, assumed.

Which makes it unchanging. And if you're a nazi, that is, someone who is short-sighted enough to think that grabbing power by literally any means necessary is a good idea, and dedicate yourself to doing it with no regard for the fact that you're ruining everything, then you can attack. Your chances of success spring from the flexibility of your own soullessness, and your opponents' refusal to acknowledge that you're actually that horrible.

Add in first past the post and you have two giant funnels labeled "Democrat" and "Republican" into which all political efforts ultimately fall. Biggest pile wins. People understandably don't know about those metaphorical funnels, so they do what would be smart in another system--vote third party. But under first past the post, a third party is just a hole in the side of your funnel feeding into the other one. It just adds to the other pile. It's the false dichotomy that was actually a true dichotomy.

So really there are two things that could have worked. One, progressive takeover of the Democratic party, and deal with the nazis properly instead of being that which they can leverage. Two, get nazis to think through their end game, and realize that they themselves do not want what they're fighting for. When they say "yes we do!", that's just a refusal to think it through the rest of the way:

Ok, you want power. What does that get you? "Dead enemies". Ok, what does that get you? "Victory!" Ok, what does that get you? "Security and strength." Ok, what does that get you? "Peace". Ok, what does that get you? "....... I guess then I could relax and just enjoy my life?" Ok, what does that get you? "Then I would be ok inside". Only a friend and a sage can guide someone through this, because it requires cooperation and introspection. It'll just trigger an attack if an opponent does it to them.

You can see how unlikely those both are, but they would both work like fuckin bangers if they got off the ground. But those are the two ways you fundamentally change that dynamic. Play dirtier than the people who play dirty and win so you can restore cooperation, or get them to realize that playing dirty isn't actually what they want anyway.

As someone from Europe who only has Lemmy.world account: i am surprised, i thought you guys were handling it lol good job in keeping the façade tho, it was convincing

This time? There was no real opportunity for meaningful change. The Democratic party is far right economically, and they depend on the donations of plutocrats and megacorps. Regardless of either Democrats or Republicans getting elected, the donor class wins and working Americans lose. Some will say Harris attempt to appeal to the right wing is what made her lose, and perhaps there is an element of truth to that. Its unlikely that the Republican base she attempted to woo would actually vote for a Black woman running as a Democrat over the old, rich White guy running as a Republican. However, the owners of the Democratic party - the ones who immediately had millions of dollars to donate the day Biden dropped out - they didn't lose. The only way the owners could lose is by appealing to progressives and winning an election.

The time to begin doing something differently was decades ago, building power and organizing from the bottom up. Socialists need to begin running in and winning local elections, and pushing hard against First Past The Post elections.

Not really surprised. I've been feeling this is the way it would go since the convention. They trotted out the Clintons yet again, indicating they were going to try to run the same failed campaign again. Everything since has felt like being on a nightmare carnival ride. You know a lot of what to expect, but you can't stop the car or influence things. Someone else's hand is on the lever, and you're at their mercy

Not surprised, just disappointed... A lot.

Should have reformed how voting happens to get rid of first past the post, winner takes all.

The US should have dedicated around 10% of the defense budget to a defense against Russian bot-farms.
X, Facebook, Google and Microsoft should have been seized by the state, turned into publically owned utilities, and run by a committee.

Getting peoples votes not to be counted is a form of election fraud and Trump and his team pulled out all the stops and stole this election with such tactics.

Trump is a felon, fraud and a liar

It was probably a bad idea to run a candidate that they all knew was cognitively-impaired, and an even worse one to put him in situations where he couldn't be stage-managed.