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Summary
Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration.
Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East.
However, concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.
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I voted for Harris. I voted for Biden. I voted for Clinton.
I still wouldn’t warn a single one of them if they were about to get hit by a bus.
Its harm reduction. They don’t solve anything. They just keep us treading water sinking slowly whereas Republicans start taking a hammer to the hull to open up new holes.
I voted for Harris. I voted for Biden. I voted for Clinton.
I still wouldn’t warn a single one of them if they were about to get hit by a bus.
American Democracy in a nutshell. You get two choices, they’re both awful for different reasons. One of them wants to see you executed for your religious beliefs/sexual preferences/nation of origin. The other is continent to sell bunker buster bombs to some raving psychotic mass murderers overseas. Nobody is going to do shit about climate change, though, so we’re all on the clock in the long run.
Its harm reduction.
It increasingly feels like the closest thing to harm reduction the US achieved was the time Trump fucked up his COVID response and a bunch of his senior leadership choked to death on their own lung fluid.
I generally agree with your point, but the MIC is a bad example; both parties are equally happy selling bombs to murderers.
It increasingly feels like the closest thing to harm reduction the US achieved was the time Trump fucked up his COVID response and a bunch of his senior leadership choked to death on their own lung fluid.
Herman Cain approves this message.
There’s only one man who’s done any meaningful harm reduction in your country and your judicial system is charging him with terrorism.
There was roughly 20 different elected positions on my ballot.
The real problem with American politics is everyone is so focused on the POTUS that they ignore the politicians who have an actual measurable effect on their quality of life.
I challenge anyone to look up your local town hall and see when the next city council meeting is. Go to it and see what they talk about and vote on. Notice the other people who go.
Many cities have public meetings for police oversite too. They’re even less attended than city council meetings
I challenge anyone to look up your local town hall and see when the next city council meeting is. Go to it and see what they talk about and vote on. Notice the other people who go.
I’ve been to a few city council meetings. When you’re there as part of an organization lobbying for a particular policy, you can at least see the terms of the debate and understand who to lobby, what the blockades are, and why a seemingly good-idea isn’t getting through. But if you’re just sitting in on meetings, its like tuning into CSPAN at a random point in the day. You’ve got no historical context. You don’t know who you’re listening to or why they’re talking. And there’s a ton of maneuvering going on behind the scenes that you can’t glimpse because you’re not really a part of it.
Add to the problem, a lot of people aren’t really wedded to their communities. I live in a neighborhood in which people move in and out every five years or so, chasing a better job or looking for better schools or trying to find more garage space for their giant cars or cashing out on a sudden jump in their home price. Trying to get them engaged in a fight over the ten-year-plan for mass transit is basically impossible because most of them won’t be here in ten years.
I don’t say this to discourage anyone from going. But this isn’t something you can just bootstrap your way into. You really need a community of more knowledgeable and engaged people to introduce you to what is going on and why. Otherwise, you’re just listening to a couple of people argue over the preferred way to renovate municipal drainage on the opposite side of town for an hour.
I gotta keep moving because my rent keeps going up. Let’s hope I find that cheaper basement
Another massive problem is the voting system which could barely be designed better for forcing a two party system on you. There is no room for someone getting 30% of the vote and of course they should then have about that much influence.
American Democracy in a nutshell. You get two choices, they’re both awful…
The democratic process doesn’t start on election day.
Liberal democracy starts with the donors in a smoke-filled room and ends with one side complaining that the election was rigged.
It started well into the election cycle after Biden refused to honor his one term pledge.
No time for a primary now! Oops didn’t mean to! /$
First Past The Post voting has got to go, or else the USA is toast. A shame the democratic party believes themselves to be more important then the country itself.
Yeah, it starts when someone has a billion dollars and wants to influence government.
10 million Democrats x $100/each - $1 billion
People are more powerful than they think.
I’m not giving another dime to the Democratic Party so it’s more like 9,999,999 Democrats.
I wouldn’t even be in the party if we didn’t have closed primaries in my state.
fair enough.
1 million American leftists x $100 to Bernie Sanders or AOC in the primaries = $100 million
and
1 million American leftists x $100 to Green party = $100 million
I already donated a hundred bucks to Bernie.
It didn’t work.
Yes give them more money, they’re doing such great things with the money that’s already given to them.
bunch of his senior leadership choked to death on their own lung fluid.
Harm reduction is bad?
Obviously, it’s not ideal, but one has to act according to the real life conditions… And in 2024, our only two options were “harm reduction,” and literal fascism with literal concentration camps.
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
voting is not harm reduction.
It is when both parties get the same orders from the same bribers on economic policy and merely war on how to or if to address some of the social issue symptoms, the ones that don’t effect their briber’s quarterly results.
Example: they war over forced births, but abortion is often an ECONOMIC decision, and the markets have demanded 2 breadwinners the last few decades to make moar from themselves, which is antisocial and antifuture. You won’t hear either party calling for a single income for most to all being able to support a family. That’s a matter of economic policy. That’s a choice. There would objectively, naturally be fewer abortions without coersion if economic desperation wasn’t defended here by both parties, no threat of state violence required.
No, our choice is on the social issue of forced births? No forced births? Your choice lol… Then get back to work, battery.
There are tons of ways to reduce abortion and, typically, those are supported by Democratic politicians and opposed by Republicans. The concern is not to reduce abortion, there’s actually very little concern about the actual number of abortions that happen by its opponents. The concern is that the opponents want an opportunity for themselves to take a “strong moral stance” against abortion. They prefer a world of more abortions which are illegal to a world of fewer abortions which are legal.
Agreed, but once again, the elephant in the room is not being able to afford to have children. Neoliberals stand in the way with Republicans on human citizens being able to afford a family with one child.
It’s an important social issue, what I’m saying is almost all social issues are heavily informed by and often exacerbated by economic policy that ALEC had more say in than the American people.
I think “one income families” would be a winner if you could convince people it was even possible. I think it’d be a hard sell in the modern culture.
I think the United States, culturally, is on track to have about as much hope in positive change as your average Russian.
That’s what happens when you have a supposed generational leader calling for an age of positive progressive change culminating in… a heritage foundation conceived plan to further enshrine private insurers and the profit motive, the core blight, into our broken healthcare system. Then have his party never stop bragging about doing so. The DNC still acts like we should be thanking them for using their super majority to do… That.
Yeah, at this point, this government is too captured to hope for anything but pain rationally, at least on the timescale of human lifespans.
Unfortunately many don’t take the next step, look at nations that do serve their people like the Nordic model, and revolt for a government that serves them in similar fashion.
Because you do have to be a completely blind, willfully ignorant sucker to still believe our vote can do more than let us tread water.
none of this makes voting harm reduction.
Got it, no one is receiving literal methadone so it it can’t be. /s
Language evolves.
no one was saved from the horrors of the capitalist system by your vote
Agreed, but no one would be threatening to annex Canada or abolish income derived repayment for student loans either.
Even one being slightly less harmful is harm reduction. Both are taking us on a train ride to hell, and one going 65 is still harm reduction when the only other choice is a train ride to hell at 75.
Harm reduction means there’s no good option. You can argue accelerating towards collapse with Trump will make things better faster than limping along until capitalist climate change forces it in 20 years or so, but you never know what you’ll get on the other side, could be an iron fisted military dictatorship with Don Jr. As the permanent figurehead.
Sometimes, providing clean needles so the heroin user doesn’t ALSO get HIV is better than not. Something that works as a metaphor, and also a social policy position our two capitalist owned parties do disagree on in practice. That’s something the owners allow us to have an opinion on, as thats a poorie problem that doesn’t meaningfully effect their profit expectations. No skin off their nose.
Neoliberalism and harm reduction wont work anymore. What the fuck do you think America has been doing the past three decades? If you want to beat republicans, you need to elect progressives, otherwise fascism will keep on rising.
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
…thirty years of choosing harm reduction brought us to this point…
…i held my nose and voted against fascism, but if you want to blame someone, blame the f*cking fascists and blame the thirty years of harm reduction which enabled them: pluralities win, that’s how american democracy works…
I blame both.
This is such a dumb take. You can’t say “thirty years of harm reduction brought us here” with the implication that if Republicans won every election in the time frame things would somehow be better, unless you’re actually just a right wing voter.
I’ll say it for the thousandth time: voting in national elections in no way affects your ability to do other activism. If your argument is along the lines of “voting for the worst option will unite the resistance and we’ll make real change”, well, I hope you realize that that “real change” is bloody revolution with an uncertain result.
For years I’ve seen leftists complaining about ‘harm reduction’ and ‘lesser evil’ and how the dems are ignoring their vote. But all we ever do is bicker with ourselves. We don’t have a united front. We don’t have any reliable voting bloc.
They literally don’t care about us because there is nothing to care about. If Dems court one leftist group they risk alienating another because of our unnecessary purity tests and virtue signaling. It’s so much easier and more reliable to get votes if you tack to the center so that’s what they do.
Meanwhile we don’t do any meaningful activism or organizing. We don’t vote practically and only get excited about voting when we have an exciting candidate. Leftists seem to expect their vote to have power but it doesn’t have any. And it’s entirely our own fault because you have to actually do the work to get the power.
do the work
What work is this? Writing your representatives? Voting in primaries? Voting every year there’s an election no matter how local? Knocking on doors and phone banking? Donating to campaigns?
And if that’s not the work, please tell me what the work actually is because I’ve done all those things and have no power to show for it.
Mad respect to you for the effort you put into it - all those things matter. Problem is we don’t do it as a community. Most leftists think their vote is the be-all end-all if they even vote at all, so of course not enough of us are doing what you’re doing.
Beyond that, getting involved locally and/or running for office would be powerful too. Grassroots movements have been shown to work and we don’t have anything remotely like it.
Harm reduction and neoliberalism just wont work, end of discussion. Its fucking 2024, if you want to beat republicans you need to elect progressives
Clinton Clinton Bush 2 Bush 2 Obama Obama Fuckface Biden Fuckface
Its as even as you can get over 9 terms (4:5)
Let’s not forget how much absolute harm Bush and Fuckface caused, and I’m not even counting Fuckface’s homicidal COVID response.
The US would have universal healthcare and a sane supreme Court if it wasn’t for Republicans.
If you’re only voting for harm reduction year after year and doing nothing to try and organize grassroots opposition to the lesser evil, yes constantly voting harm reduction is bad. It’s how you allow lesser evils to grow into the larger evils of the current DNC, who care more about fundraising than winning.
That been my realization. I voted for harm reduction for what 12 year now like a lot of us and have little to show for it if not less. Yes the other side is a factor but they also seem more successful in their braindead idiot agenda too.
You clearly just weren’t voting hard enough.
Yes the other side is a factor but they also seem more successful in their braindead idiot agenda too.
The inability to acknowledge the appeal of the opposition and the persistent reliance on “my enemies are only strong because they are dumber than me” have lead to some really depressing political decisions by the Democrats. The Biden/Harris campaign in 2024 really seemed to boil down to saying “If you don’t vote for us, democracy is going away” and “Even Republicans from the Bush-Era like us, so you have to vote for us too”.
And then they lost in a popular landslide, suggesting that (a) democracy is alive and well and (b) neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to like you.
What if its not Republican voters who are stupid for supporting Trump? What if its Democrats who are stupid for supporting candidates lamer and more disappointing than Trump?
I mean I consider myself a progressive so yeah that’s pretty well on mark.
To the lame point, I think a large part of not most Americans think knowledge is lame regardless so arguing things seriously is just dismissed as well.
Le sigh.
I think a large part of not most Americans think knowledge is lame
People spend a lot of their younger years building an understanding of the world, then become cemented in a particular worldview as they get old.
Trying to introduce new ideas to an old crowd is much more difficult than appealing to an audience of young people without any preexisting priors.
If you’re only voting for harm reduction year after year and doing nothing to try and organize grassroots opposition to the lesser evil, yes constantly voting harm reduction is bad.
The thing is that this is everyone in America. The left has practically no grassroots organization and expects online complaints about the DNC to magically accomplish something, and the right has astroturfed horse shit that that is on board with whatever the corporatist GOP wants to do.
The left has practically no grassroots organization
The left literally took over the Nevada Dem committee a few years ago.
What have you done?
Oh, that’s right, I forgot it was my personal responsibility to organize the left. /s
Not everyone can be or wants to be a full-time activist.
To be fair to them, we’re just delaying collapse. It is a choice.
I agree with them that there’s no saving this constitutional structure. In one sense it’s cowardly, because there’s no escape from this capitalist slaughterhouse hellscape without collapse. Collapse is necessary. Trump will certainly usher that in faster.
But Im too much of a softy to let the blood that always has to spill be on my hands.
This country was irreparable since Reagan, a zombie nation oligarch piggie bank. My vote was a cowardly one for a few more years of quiet orderly slaughter, NOT peace.
But we lost, so the slaughter will be loud and bigger than it’s ever been, so maybe it’s time for revolution if we want our kids to have anything left.
Because in 4 years the DNC WILL anoint someone to meet Trump’s economy in the middle, and even I may not be able to stomach voting for that.
Kamala was in a weird place as well.
Normally it’s easy for people to hold their noses for an incumbent. But if Kamala won. Shed run again in 2028.
Which would mean from 2012 to 2032, there wouldn’t have been a fair Dem primary.
20 fucking years…
Party leaders don’t understand that when you take primaries away, it hurts general turnout. Because regardless of who wins, the primary is the time for the eventual candidate to get their finger on the pulse and see what voters want.
Which is reliably that the Dem candidate moves left.
Without a primary they move right and turnout goes down.
We have literally decades of data that shows this, but it’s not what the donors want and the present DNC wants donations more than votes.
Hopefully Winkler gets chair in a few months and that changes.
The DNC would rather have Trump as POTUS than Sanders or AOC.
With Trump, the bribe money keeps flowing to both party machines, They are both paid to keep this sociopath owned economy safe from the people.
The DNC would rather have Trump as POTUS than Sanders or AOC.
Always have…
Which is the problem, and we have zero control over what the DNC does, literally the only leverage is not voting for them, which obviously is a huge risk with potentially disastrous results.
Which is why now is the time to pressure the DNC and make noise.
If Ben Winkler wins DNC chair because Kamala lost, it might actually be a net positive.
If Kamala had won, we’d be stuck with Jamie Harrison again. A guy with little political experience whose only notable accomplishment was being “the only other option” to Lindsey Graham and raising an insane amount of money on that fact alone then losing the election.
I don’t know why people are surprised with the 2024 result of they had any clue who was running the DNC…
Raising money and losing elections is all Jaimie knows. And that’s what the DNC did under his leadership
Which is why now is the time to pressure the DNC and make noise.
How would one pressure the DNC or make a noise they’re able to hear? And will it involve putting clamps on sensitive body parts and 150dB train horns?
AOC voted to protect the rail corporations from a union strike.
Some More News did a good summary of how the Democrats win when they have a primary - and move to the left - but lose when they don’t.
Realistically they weren’t gonna hold a fair primary anyway. If they held one we would’ve gotten candidate Shapiro, who would have been stomped into dust by Trump.
In large part because Jaimie Harrison was the DNC chair.
There’s an upcoming vote for chair, and there’s some standouts and one crazy with no chance.
But from what I know about them (not everything) we’re almost guaranteed a good chair with a very good chance of getting an amazing one.
I’m no fan of the DNC, but there’s a real chance to turn everything around and it’s barely a month away
Here’s hoping, though remember the people who voted for Harrison are still the ones voting. I remember we did get Howard Dean after his campaign, so hopefully there’s a similar thing that happens.
Jaimie got it because Biden appointed him…
He was the only option for DNC members to vote for, it’s a rubber stamp process when a Dem wins the presidential.
The only time they really vote is when a Dem president doesn’t win, or the chair resigns early (I think).
I think there’s some truth in thinking that continuing to elect milquetoast corporatist neoliberal candidates just builds up more extremism and discontent as people continue to suffer under option A of 2 - so when eventually a neocon breaks through they tend to be bonkers. It’s why I’m so fucking disappointed in Starmier as he’s clearly going to do fuck all and likely hand the next election to the torries.
That said, that’s a pretty fucking abstract view and there’s always a chance we get lucky. I voted for Harris but I was really hoping we’d get Senator Harris who actually gave a shit and, even if I knew for certain she’d be underwhelming I’d still fucking vote for her because Trump was worse on every issue and would directly cause a lot of additional human suffering. Women would be forced into unwanted pregnancies, trans people would be suppressed or worse - deaths would come from increased incidents of suicide and self-medication, and, lastly, (and I know a fuck ton of pushback on this point here) more Palestinians would die as Trump accelerated genocide.
So yea, I really regret that we are constantly dealt such bad hands but harm reduction is always a good thing to pursue in the absence of better actions.
Seriously though, when Biden dropped out fuck absolutely everyone who defended the DNC anointing Harris instead of running a snap primary.
Democrats going the full Florida route and just nominating Mitt Romney for President in 2028.
At which point, I will roll my eyes, tear up my ballot, and go home. 24 years of voting for least worst, and phone banking for a primary candidate I actually liked in two campaigns to no avail will have been enough for me if the 2028 candidate isn’t an economic leftist, because I already feel like a sucker and capitalism enabler.
The oligarchs were never not going to shoot the hostages for a tidy profit.
It doesn’t have to be a total waste, you can still chip your vote towards a third party to help them get that 5% that gets them ballot access and federal campaign funding.
If your friend is an alcoholic getting wasted on a bottle of vodka every night, switching them to beer because it has less alcohol is not harm reduction. Rescuing a young woman from Jack The Ripper and giving her to Jeffrey Epstein “for her safety” is not harm reduction. A professional fighter concerned about CTE switching to football is not harm reduction. The lesser of two evils is very much still evil.
Those are all literally harm reduction buddy. If those are the only options available you’d take them because they all mean a better chance of better results in the future. Of course, in these situations you would definitely have better options, but you’re deliberately framing it like there are no others. So are you comfortable saying you’d leave your friend alone with the bottle of vodka, let the woman get disemboweled, and not recommend the sport with helmets?
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
With caveats.
A lot of people who chose to just not vote were given a choice between two people who want to genocide their family… Harm reduction wasn’t offered to them.
two people who want to genocide their family
Want vs will. There’s a small difference in that binary choice that you don’t need to both-sides it.
Correct, but likely not how you like it…
Harris WAS engaged in genocide of their families. Trump wanted to.
So, yes, both-sidesing it is very applicable in this case.
harm reduction has a specific meaning…voting is not harm reduction.
It quite literally is a reduction of harm. If two options are presented one is extremely harmful and one is slightly harmful, then voting for the slightly harmful one is a reduction of harm. Harm. reduction.
I don’t know what you are talking about with “harm reduction has a specific meaning…voting is not harm reduction.” because the words literally mean a reduction in the amount of harm, whether active or potential.
Even if you can provide an alternate definition, that is more of an example of the versatility of the language allowing multiple definitions, than any commentary on the current subject.
Some people literally think the term only belongs at the methadone clinic.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Thanks for telling me what they won’t. And I shouldn’t be surprised people are that stupid, but somehow new lows always abound.
no harm was reduced by voting for kamala
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I’ve got some interesting information for you about how voting works
I could donate a million dollars to the homeless tomorrow if I do well at roulette tonight. if I play roulette, is that harm reduction?
Same.
But there’s not enough willing to hold their noses for us to reliably win elections.
So it doesn’t make sense to blame anyone besides the people at the DNC actively stopping the type of candidates those people would love to vote for and instead cramming someone the majority of the party dislikes down our throats and hoping enough hold their noses.
Like, not even from a perspective of which policy is better, just on the basis of what wins elections…
Why isn’t the DNC backing the candidates who are most popular with Dem voters?
Why do they keep picking the ones that will get the most donations, then trying to use that money to build up to less than the support the popular candidate already had?
And why the fuck is anyone blaming anyone besides them?
And why the fuck is anyone blaming anyone besides them?
Because if the democrats can deflect blame (again) they don’t have to deliver the change obama promised all those years ago.
Those are all neoliberals, nothing good would come of them being president, and the voting results speak for themselves. Neoliberalism wont work in this country anymore, if you want to beat republicans, elect progressives.
Leopard, meet face.
But don’t call these people stupid. That would be racist.
People I’ve interacted with on Lemmy 👆
Edit:
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No shit.
The leopards are looking mighty hungry.
“Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East”
How the FUCK would you hope for that? Have you been living under a rock and didn’t know who Trump actually is and what he does? The Muslim ban Trump? That Trump? Bringing peace to the Middle East? Seriously?
He just tried to start a war with Iran, NBD.
Yes: the guy who banned Muslims from entering the US on his previous term will end the war and bring peace to the Middle East.
monkey’s paw curls
palestinians are thoroughly genocided and Gaza + West Bank + other lebensraum in the area have all structures reduced to grade #7 gravel
That is also technically peace, in that there is no more fighting. It’s just a really bad one.
Truly, the gullibility of some people simply beggars belief.
Yeah, his vision of peace was Israel getting rid of anyone who they don’t have good relationship with.
Wait wait, I remember a guy who was constantly arguing and berating everyone about how Biden was just the worst Satan reincarnation or some shit and how we all needed to band together against both him and Harris. Oooh @HomerianSymphony , you still around, bud?
We’d like an interview.
Looks like that user no longer exists, at least on Lemmy.world
From what I see the user went to Bluesky, but we don’t know if he really did it or if his account was suspended.
What did sticking with genocide Joe and Kamala get you? They knew they were gonna lose and didn’t change course 1 bit
You sure aren’t living up to that name with comments like that.
Look, it wasn’t about Biden or Harris or Obama or whomever else you want to project your shitty little excuses on. This cycle was about stopping a then would-be dictator. We were trying to do right by the world. Not by you. Not by the MAGA cultists. Not by Gaza or Ukraine alone. For everyone through stopping someone who had made it clear he, and through the agreement and support of the GOP, would do worse.
Then you single issue idiotic disappointments wouldn’t wake the fuck up. Yes, the Dems fucked up. Harris started strong and some snob Left probably ancient “strategist” convinced her to shift gears and she toned it down, along with other bad choices. It was shit. You know what I can die knowing I did?
Not voting someone who might actually be fucking evil BACK into the Office of the Biggest God Damn Chair we have. So kiss my ass, Schwdinehund, at least we tried to stop what’s coming.
Biden had no chance of winning. Kamala had no chance of winning. Their campaigns knew that.
If stopping a would be dictator is so important they would run someone with a chance. The Democratic party is dead, sticking with it means you want to lose
Sticking with it wasn’t a choice. You seem to believe taking our current situation and just rolling that shit back is a time machine we have the capacity of producing. There was no other candidate and we knew that. Unless you have a realistic suggestion that would have worked at the time.
We’re listening.
Biden put his ego over country and stayed in the race because he didn’t care if Trump won. Kamala accepted the nomination even though her team knew she couldn’t win because she didn’t care if Trump won. The Democrats don’t care if they lose, supporting them means you don’t care if you lose which means you don’t really care about stopping the would-be dictator.
Okay, at the risk of being censored: You’re actually being stupid.
We do NOT support the current Democrats, nor the party, nor their way of doing things. We supported trying to make sure Trump did not get a second term by standing beside the only candidate(s) that had a chance because there wasn’t anyone else. So stop for a second and think because it’s clear you’re a single issue voter: You can’t stop repeating the same faulty freaking logic.
Then is not now.
Then does not mean we supported them.
We wanted a better world. Days where we don’t have to worry so much. We support Gaza and Ukraine.
If this and much, much more means supporting the opponent of a would-be dictator, then we fucking do so. That’s the difference. WE SAW THE BIGGER PICTURE and did what we had to do.
It was what had to be done. The Dems fucked up their messaging. However, people like you chose to fuck our home and possibly the world to greater and lesser degrees because you stand so damned fucking stalwart it’s like trying to convince a brick wall to fall over with kind words of encouragement. If I live through these next four years I hope to be a part of the team that writes the history books. If I am I’ll make sure to cite people like you, @MisterScruffy , for your contribution towards tyranny and dictatorship.
And for the record: Yes, I’m pissed. Not at you, you’re dumb. At what brought us to this point.
They were probably just astroturfing, and now that they’ve successfully completed their objective, they’ve got no reason to stick around.
I still see a handful of the useful idiots that were on here paroting those talking points, and I have to wonder if they’ve been able to accept that they were sold a bill of goods.
I have to wonder if they’ve been able to accept that they were sold a bill of goods.
They were the bill of goods. They were a line item on the Trump campaign budget. Their temp job is over so they’re not posting.
Genocide Joe is a demon who put his own ego over the good of the country. He knew he couldn’t win, he knew Kamala couldn’t win, and yet he (and his/her campaign) stuck with the losing playbook because they don’t believe anything they say
These are people who believe in invisible sky wizards. Clearly, they’re capable of believing any amount of BS.
The American electorate is stunningly stupid and disconnected from reality. Look up some of the trending Google searches on election day, they’re stupider than you think
Devotion to religion is also a red flag for inability to think critically. Being conditioned not to think for yourself is a tenant of all religions. The more fundamental the less thought is happening. Trump and the republicans have realized this and used it to his advantage almost exclusively.
decades of dismantling the education system will do that to you…
This is a bullshit excuse. The average America receives a very well rounded education. They choose not to use it.
By what metric? We’re behind most other developed nations.
Like the ones confused that Biden wasn’t an option.
Trump has only ever wanted to glass the place.
The utterly bizarre thing to me is I don’t really think he’s tried to hide any of this. Like he’s pretty much doing what he said he was going to do, he’s done it before, why did anyone think he was going to do anything different?
Before the election he did try and deny any connection to or intent around project 2025 - of course the mainstream media never called him on that bullshit.
But but but you see b b b Biden bad because [mental gymnastics intensifies].
Way to go assholes. You fucked around and now we all get to find out.
Do youean the leader of abandon & punish palestine™, right?
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looks awkwardly at Napoleon in our timeline.
Also… like… the Reign of Terror. Maybe some of the French Revolutionaries should have given more thought to their own leadership. How historically ignorant is this moderately well upvoted analogy?
Actually, I’m wondering if it was an intentional joke - but I went through the US school system through college and most of what I learned about Napoleon came from Total War and the history channel. (And later on through Oversimplified which is actually extremely careful and detailed about their information and then by going to the dude’s fucking tomb and reading shit)
My vague recollection is that the French Revolution was briefly touched on as part of US history Ala “Look, these French people helped us out and built a Republic modeled after ours (false) and then they sent us a shiny statue because Yum, Democracy So Good.” But I also struggled with ADHD in school so my memory isn’t super reliable.
Americans with hardons for the founding fathers rarely talk about France’s involvement because pretty much all the founding fathers took their time in France to get lit af and pound some strange on the nascent Republics bill which doesn’t really fit (along with Deism) in the WASPy version of American history.
How could anyone have seen this coming.
It’s weird people are blaming the ones who didn’t vote…
Obviously, if they voted trump, blame them away.
But it’s like people don’t realize how big of an ask it was to have people to vote for a genocide, especially when it’s against the country someone came from and their family is still there.
If Kamala would have won, trying to criticize her would have worked as well as criticizing Biden on Israel the last four years. Any criticism would be met with “Trump would be worse”.
With trump in charge, people will (rightfully) call out American support of a genocide as wrong. So while trump will undoubtedly make shit worse. Him being president means the Dem party will criticize him, and be more left in 2028.
If Kamala had won, she and the party would have moved more to the right in 2028. Just look at what happened after 4 years as VP. The few parts of her 2020 platform people liked, she moved to the right on.
The genocide of Palestinians didn’t start two years ago, it’s been going on for 70 years. It makes sense they’re thinking long term rather than only focuses on the “now” and voting for a lesser evil that maintains the status quo that is a genocide.
If you want someone to blame, it seems like the blame should be on the “left” candidate that ignored everyone actually on the left and became bff’s with Liz Cheney. Not the people that understand when a Republican wins, we get a primary which even when the party pick wins, the primary pulls them left. Even if it’s just lies to win the primary, as long as they keep the lies up, it helps in the general because voters want Dems to move left.
Without a primary, the chosen candidate takes the left for granted and moved right. In this case if Kamala won, we wouldn’t have another option in 2028 either, it would be 2032 before the next real primary.
Like…
I just don’t see how someone could blame anyone except the candidate, her campaign team, and the DNC.
They’re the ones that prevented a real primary, and that made the campaign platform that alienated lifelong Dem voters in hopes of gaining republican voters who wouldn’t be caught dead voting for a Dem.
It obviously failed, and the media is desperate to blame anything other than the stuff their billionaire owners bribed the Dems to support.
They’ll never ever say the problem was a Dem is too “fiscally conservative” because they’re the ones paying neoli eral candidates to pretend that’s a good move for the average American
Biden started this election -400 electoral votes in his own polling. Kamala Harris was the least popular, most divisive candidate in the primary (even as gamed as the 2020 primary was) and left at the bottom of the race.
You are right. You even see the echo chamber narrative that Biden could have still beaten Trump on bluesky being the preferred narrative.
DNC has almost fully pulled a “It’s the children who are wrong” and I’m not convinced they will ever have a fair, open primary again. This was a historic self-own that saw Trump picking up support in nearly all categories.
DNC has been playing Russian roulette with their primaries and voting base for years, honestly the gun has fired a couple times…
Gonna be honest, i think Biden could have beaten Trump. I don’t blame him for stepping down (though if he had done so sooner i think it would have been better) but i think he had at least as much chance as Harris, maybe more. That’s purely strategic, though. I think the calls for him to step down were coming from a position of weakness and fear and were interpreted as such by the electorate.
He could have easily won if he did something about Gaza other than “support genocide” but here we are, at the (current) end of a long string of such decisions.
We see with the UHC shooting how much anger there is for the inequities in this country, it would be easy to tap into that.
Anyone Democrat could have won if they did the populist thing and didn’t split the difference on Gaza. I think Biden and Harris might have been the only two people who could have lost to him!
Biden wasn’t going to run a different campaign to the one that was losing to Trump when he finally stepped out. Nor did Harris. They both ran losing campaigns against a dude who’s a fucking felon.
The message last time from leftists in the party were that they held their nose to vote for Biden in 2020, it a referendum AGAINST Trump. Well, the DNC loaded another 2 bullets into the revolver, maybe 3 if you included Liz Cheney at the end there, rolled the wheel, and fired a bullet right into the country again.
Mark my words, instead of moving left to capture the voters again, they’ll ratchet right. Fuck the DNC.
Given how Harris ran her campaign, in retrospect, I actually agree that Biden probably would have performed better and I absolutely did not believe that was possible after the first debate.
Harris ran an historically shit campaign that cost bonkers money.
Harris’s major flaw was saying she’d just be more Biden, which Biden would definitely do. And for as poor as she did, it was still an improvement on Biden’s numbers. They needed someone willing to break from the status quo.
She said she’d be more Biden but she didn’t have the track record to back it up. Biden has been underwhelming in a lot of ways but Harris rejected maintaining stronger union ties and failed repeatedly to commit to keeping on Lina Khan - she basically ran on “Who wants four years more of Biden but more neoliberal!”
“Nothing will fundamentally change”
2/2/25 they vote for chair…
There’s a very good chance we get a competent chair who cares about winning. Ben Winkler is my favorite but expect for that crazy lady (Marianne Wilkinson?) who has no chance, any of the candidates so far would be a drastic improvement.
What really hurt us was Biden picked the last chair, and like most of his picks it was absolutely horrible.
So until we hear the results of the chair election, I’m trying to be an optimist.
I almost don’t have a choice but to be optimistic. There are more prominent people who are to left of the DNC who are going to demand more power. I see that happening now and being rebuffed by the old guard. It’s a matter of time and I hope it doesn’t break the machine entirely, we need the stability of institutions.
Did we all just collectively forget that the DNC was panicking about rushing the vote for Kamala as fast as possible to avoid lawsuits from Republican states that could have kept her off the ballot?? If that happened then Trump would just have won by default.
We’re in this fantasy world that we could have had a primary. It’s stubborn old fucking Bidens fault that we were in this position. There was no time to have a primary even if I really really really wish there was. Biden decided that even though he doesn’t know where he is 90% of the time he was The Best Person™ to run against Trump because pretty much every human being that obtains some sort of power for any meaningful amount of time becomes a narcissistic asshole.
This is 100% on the old fuck Biden for not accepting that death comes for us all and decline is a real thing. He just plugged his ears and went “lalalalalalala I can’t hear you!” until someone told him he just finished a debate and it went horribly.
Did we all just collectively forget that the DNC was panicking about rushing the vote for Kamala as fast as possible to avoid lawsuits from Republican states that could have kept her off the ballot?? If that happened then Trump would just have won by default.
What?
As far as I know all those states would have just listed “Democratic Party”…
Like, that’s how the electoral college works. The party with the most votes gets to appoint electors and then they cast the vote for a person.
The name being on the ballot or just the party doesn’t matter. The DNC lied that it would matter to stop people from fighting Kamala’s anointment.
Same as they lied about “keys to the war cheat” that was the victory fund that the candidate and the DNC have control over, both have unrestricted access to the funds and there’s basically no accountability with it.
We’re in this fantasy world that we could have had a primary.
I stopped reading here.
We can’t really continue until you recognize the above. Then we can build off that if you still have questions.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/johnson-replacing-biden-ticket-wrong-unlawful/story?id=112129063
That’s just a few articles after a very brief search. What do you think Republicans were freaking out about when Colorado tried to do the same thing to Trump because he really legally shouldn’t have been allowed to be on the ballot because of his involvement with jan 6th?
I get how the electoral college works, but the states decide how their elections are run and if the state chose to remove her then it’s not clear if there would have been a Democrat on their ballot at all. It’s not a federal thing. it’s 100x harder to get people to know to write in Kamala and to actually do it, than to just have an easy circle there for them to fill with her name in it so whether the legal challenges would have been successful or not, it’s not the best gamble to try to push it when we know how stacked against “us” the courts are.
None of this is to really defend the DNC, I fucking hate them and hope the party burns so we can rebuild something where the people actually give a shit about us. I just don’t think in the timeframe we had there was any reality where we could have taken the time for a primary nor did there seem to be any contenders that wanted to cause a disruption that close to the election.
That’s just a few articles after a very brief search
Ok…
But that’s Republicans claiming shit, I don’t know why you’d listen to them…
Do you listen to them often, or only when it supports your position?
Here’s a better source than Mike Johnson:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jul/22/is-replacing-biden-on-the-ticket-unlawful-as-speak/
It explains why every excuse about keeping the Dem candidate off the general ballot was bullshit.
Biden was incapable of leading from the moment he was elected and the party could have forced him out much sooner if they were committed to having competent leadership through the next election cycle.
Edit: also, if they had forced him out, perhaps by invoking the 25th amendment during his term, I have zero doubt they would have proceeded with Kamala as if she was the incumbent and foregone a primary anyways.
They will pull myriad post-hoc excuses out of their ass, as they did to get Biden elected in the first place and is their specialty as a party, but those are the facts. The rest is just noise.
Fun fact: if you’re not actively against neofascists, you are with them, and everything you say to justify sitting at their table should and will be considered insincere vaporing. It really blows that other people are going to suffer when you get what’s coming to you. I feel bad for them. I better not hear so much as a sigh out of you, since you’re getting what you wanted, what you knew would happen, and what you chose.
Hear Hear! Thank you for taking the time to voice the opinion of many. We should never relent and keep shining a light on these idiots and their moronic reasoning. They chose to not vote, vote jill stein or vote trump (all the same thing) and then want to reason about it? Justify it? They chose, they chose clearly and they knew what they did. Never let these fascist wannabees off the hook.
If you are so concerned with 3rd party voters, you should be working tirelessly to replace First past the post voting in your state.
That way, people could vote how they want and still have their vote count against those they don’t want in office.
Or maybe you just enjoy telling others how to vote. So which is it, are you working to replace FPTP voting or are you against democracy?
I do not seek or want to tell others how to vote. I just look at the results and the people abstaining or voting trump or voting 3rd party should accept what they did: elect donald trump.
Just admit it, these people (possibly you as well?) fucked america over and the consequences will be dire. But accepting responsibility and acknowledging these people know what they did seems out of the question for some reason. It seems they rather would argue someone else did this, just as you seem to do. It’s always someone else who ‘blocks’ you in doing the right thing. Now there are scores of people left in uncertainty and quite possibly face a horrendous time while the fascist is in office.
My message to people who made this choice: don’t mope and moan, accept what you did and live with the outcome of your choices and what they will do to part of society who will not be able to defend themselves.
Imagine that, helping elect that fascist and then complain you had no other choice so hey, fuck all the vulnerable people who will suffer because of it, not my problem.
And now wanting to hide under the umbrella of righteousness because ‘you had to make a stand’, also hating that people point out that what you did was morally questionable. It has to mess with your head I imagine and what better defense is there then attack and blame others?
We should never relent and keep shining a light on these idiots and their moronic reasoning.
They are a significant portion of the dem vote. So if you follow your plan you never win an election again.
Only uniting behind a candidate who is NOT a right wing fellating, corporatist sellout, genocidal peice of shit do the dems have any chance at all of any future. It might even be too late already though.
This is true now and was true before this last election too. Now you have proof staring you in the face.
All of this turns to dust when you understand that the democrats and republicans are two arms of the same neofascist party.
Oh please. That will be enough with the histrionics, go play outside.
It must be tough to look in the mirror for ya. We won’t feel sorry holding it up in front of you no matter what insults you throw my blue conservative “ally”.
Making shit up with conviction doesn’t make it true, which I know is probably a hard sell considering it’s the basis of your performative imitation of sincere belief. You can stop following me around and replying to everything I say now. I’ll dismiss you if that helps.
So the neofascists only exist on the other team, then, and anyone who disagrees is being hysterical?
And everyone who doesn’t actively oppose the neofascists is part of it. Except if they’re on your team and actively adopt the neofascists’s narratives, among other things that turn away voters, demonstrating that allowing the neofascists’s own narrative to exist uncontested at the national level is more important to them than winning on the actual alternatives that exist to the neofascists’s narrative.
Then you should ignore them turning you away as a voter and abandoning the supposed principles that make them not neofascist and vote for them anyways, because the other guy did it worse and “you can’t vote for anyone not evil so it isn’t on the ballot and don’t you dare mention that third parties exist on the ballot because then the evil party will win”
Hm. Understood.
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This is a volcanic take on Lemmy.
It is barely warm enough to soften butter, wtf do you mean
Already at -10. US Lemmy is very against abstainers.
Edited to add: lmao all I did was point out why it was a hot take and I’m being downvoted also.
You mean people who indirectly support fascism by not voting for the non-fascist party?
It’s true tho…
Without a primary the Dems consistently move as far right as they can. Sometimes they overshoot and it lets a Republican in.
But no one wanted Kamala as president in 2020, and she moved further right for 2024 and got even less popular.
The next four years will suck. But at least we might have a say in the 2028 candidate.
Kamala would have been almost a decade of “same as Biden” but she was likely to keep moving to the right.
Like, I voted for Kamala. But I knew it wasn’t going to matter because she had zero chance in my state. For it to go blue we need an 08 Obama type.
But I still held my nose.
I just don’t understand why people want to blame those who couldn’t hold their nose, instead of criticizing the unelected political machine who said Kamala was our only option despite being wildly unpopular.
People in the party and Biden’s admin knew how bad he was, and how his age was effecting him. It’s not an opinion anymore, even Chris Clizza admitted it after CNN fired him.
But the DNC still tried to shove him down America’s throats till the last second, then replaced him with Kamala.
If anyone deserves blame for trump, it’s those people. The ones who wasted 1.5 billon dollars on a campaign and couldn’t beat the hands down worst president America has ever had.
criticizing the unelected political machine who said Kamala was our only option despite being wildly unpopular.
We have FPTP for Presidential elections. We have two major parties who are in control. We have systems at state level that create and maintain gerrymandering and disfranchising certain demographics of voters. The only result was ever going to be Trump or Harris. It’s the system. Everyone knows it’s bad, and any changes will take effort and time, probably from the ground up. Some states have made progress but we have a long way to go.
So in the last election, there was only one way to prevent Trump, a known problem for everyone and every issue, from winning. And too many chose other routes for various reasons, and are now surprised that he won. The math and logistics of FPTP are all over the place, this shouldn’t be a shock. Don’t vote for one, the other will win. Period. The irony is that even though Harris might have just been Biden for another term, we can’t be sure of that. Imagine a timeline where Harris barely wins, and changes many of the things being protested for. Those people would look back and think, wow, we almost missed this possibility because everyone was saying she’ll be the same.
I mean, maybe and probably not. We won’t ever know. We did know what we’d get with Trump though, and thanks to not enough countering his votes, we’re getting even more. Yay.
You don’t need to convince me…
Like I said:
voted for Kamala. But I knew it wasn’t going to matter because she had zero chance in my state. For it to go blue we need an 08 Obama type.
I don’t have the power to decide the general candidate, the DNC calls it before my state has a chance to vote.
You don’t need to convince me Kamala would have been better than trump, I agree and trump will directly effect my life more than most Americans.
The important part is Kamala, her campaign, and the DNC couldn’t convince enough people of that.
The reason, is because Kamala had unpopular policies and little to no charisma. Yelling at people that they have to vote for the lesser evil isn’t a reliable way to win elections, and even when they do, it doesn’t help voters as much as they need.
So the answer to both questions is the same:
How do we stop Republicans?
And
How do we help Americans?
We run progressives.
You can stomp your feet and say you don’t want to. But if you want to do what’s most likely to prevent a Republican president, do everything you can to help a progressive win the primary.
Even if it’s not what you personally think is best, that’s what wins elections.
So if stopping Republicans is all that matter, start voting progressive
The reason, is because Kamala had unpopular policies and little to no charisma.
I think that’s giving non-voters too much credit. Time and again they were saying they didn’t know what her policies were, not that they were bad policies, despite the fact that she was pretty clear in communicating them.
The charisma thing was different, she HAD charisma, but it was this fake, robotic, insincere charisma (see the cocoanut tree nonsense), and when she was called out on it, she reacted poorly.
Walz had 1,000,000x the genuine, sincere, charisma, but people don’t vote for VP.
I don’t think people are really thinking long term, i don’t think there’s any strategy like that at play. (This is kind of accelerationist anyway, even if it were.) However, i think people who blame the voters for refusing to vote for an obviously poisonous candidate are completely delusional.
People do not have a duty to vote for the Democratic Party’s chosen candidate, no matter who it is. Not moral and not otherwise. The candidate has a duty to appeal to the voters. The party has a duty to put forward candidates that can get elected. If they refuse to do that and the voters refuse to vote for them, that’s not on the voters.
(This is kind of accelerationist anyway, even if it were.)
It 100% is, and to be clear I don’t think it was the best path, which is why I held my nose like I have for a very long time and voted D.
But it’s the path we’re on now.
When a Dem wins, they appoint the DNC chair and a symbolic vote confirms it.
When the Dem loses, the chair usually resigns and the DNC has a chance to change direction.
If Kamala had won 2024, the party would stay the same. If she then won 2028 as an incumbent with no primary, shed get to pick chair again. Then in 2032 they would influence the primary to get a similar candidate. It’s a feedback loop that only has a chance to break when a Republican takes office.
Literally, the only way the DNC has a chance to change direction is when the Republicans win. You gotta look at the silver lining, DNC leadership change was accelerated. Which hopefully will be a good thing long term because DNC leadership for decades has been absolute dog shit.
Or they double down and we’re probably fucked. But don’t give up. There’s still the potential of a fair primary in 2028 regardless.
Like Heinlein said long ago:
Certainly the game is rigged, but if you never play you’ll never win
What did you think would happen when you abstained from voting?
Edit:(i see in another comment that you voted. So my question I guess is to anyone that abstained.)
What did the neolibs think would happen when they ran a campaign designed to appeal to the far right at the expense of the base?
Go ask them.
Some people tried, and were told, “shush, I’m talking”. And anyone with my views was locked out of the convention. So they have taken pretty severe actions to not be asked these questions at all.
Ok, but my point by saying go ask them is that I’m not responsible for that narrative. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
fair.
You’re unlikely to get an answer.
Most people who abstained are checked out of politics. They’re not spending free time on social media talking about politics.
To get them to re-engage is going to take some work.
Which makes it harder to discuss what we need to change to get them back, especially when people reflexively down vote that discussion
I’m not disagreeing that leopards face an obesity epidemic but it’s also very interesting that to r image you posted has a “紅星新聞” (Chinese) or “Red Star News” watermark.
It’s all the faces they’ve been eating, they’re having a banger year of it apparently
It gets harder to continually extend sympathy and solidarity with all of the fucknuts who are ostensibly allies on the left, when they focus on a single media-focused disaster, and they try to “send a message” to their own side, by backstabbing them and helping the fascist who will be 1000x worse.
Progressives who proclaim their hate for both parties are simply binary thinkers whose privilege insulates them from the consequences of their “principled stands”. They wonder why the country doesn’t just hand all power over to Progressives… go blow.
shocking - It’s almost as if there was a coordinated media campaign to paint both sides the same, and convince a bunch of people to vote against their own self interests. Absolutely did not see this coming… Nope, absolutely not.
