Honestly, now that we’re literally sending people to concentration camps, I have zero fucks to give about this superficial bullshit. No one gives a shit about what Hitler wore at the '36 Olympics, and no one’s gonna care what this asshole wore to a funeral.
LOL, yes, you got an ad hominem attack in response to blatant bigotry. Comparing all Muslims to white supremacists doesn’t warrent debate, but it does deserve ridicule and contempt. You also ignored a bunch of facts that contradicted your wildly inaccurate statements on who was promoting identity politics, which factions of the party were actually standing up to billionaires, and how successful the Sanders/AOC tour is in middle America, but those challenged your worldview, so you couldn’t acknowledge them. Anyway, keep punching at the left-wing of the party while the Democrats try to run the same strategy put Donald Trump in the Whitehouse twice. I’m sure you’ll change the world by losing every election!
Yeah, I’m an old fuddy duddy who thinks that identity politics is a losing battle, maybe if everyone can get under the umbrella of the idea that billionaires are working to ruin this country?
If that’s how you feel, you’re supporting the wrong people. It was centrists who turned to identity politics to hide their lack of an economic platform. Remember when Hillary said breaking up the big banks won’t end racism? Remember when the new DNC chair said they would still take money from good billionaires? If you want Democrats to focus on the billionaires ruining our country, AOC’s your best bet.
I love Bernie Sanders, god bless him, but AOC and Bernie spreading whatever message they are is falling on deaf ears, the ears of middle America.
10K showed up for them in Michigan. 12.5K people showed up for them in Idaho. 30k showed up for them in a Trump district in Montana. Doesn’t seem like it’s falling in deaf ears, but maybe your right, and the Democrats should just not try to win any states in the middle of the country. I’m sure that’s a great strategy.
What does AOC stand for exactly? Just the typical Gen Z talking points? “We gotta support drag queens in libraries!”
You could take your average everyday Muslim and a white supremacist and ask them both how they feel about women/jewish people/gay people and you’d get the same answer.
Get fucked, bigot.
They could have handled the Michigan problem in a lower key. Letting them speak at the convention and promising real investigations with paused shipments.
Exactly. As much as I wish Americans were ready to cut off aid to Israel, that’s just not the case. The majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, but they’re still broadly supportive of Israel. Labeling the conflict a genocide and ending all military support would have won me over, but it probably would have been a net loss. Still, there were a lot of small steps they could have taken to show support to the Palestinian population and capitalize on the growing disapproval on Gaza, and instead they chose full-throated support.
Well, he promised he would stop drinking during work hours, so it’s probably fine.
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.
Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.
You’re right, but the nuance you’re discussing is not what’s being discussed here. Listen to this bit:
“The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” said Joseph Paolino Jr., DNC committeeman for Rhode Island. “I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day.”
Or as one DNC member from Florida put it: “I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”
These speakers aren’t distinguishing between socially left and economically left, and reading between the lines, it is very clear that the member from Florida is talking about dropping support for trans people (in a thinly veiled and very offensive way, I might add). They lost the working class because they don’t have a working class message, but they’re blaming the social policies for their loss.
There is an argument to be made that the way they are approaching socially progressive issues is hurting them. Kamala Harris telling the ACLU that she supports transition surgery for migrant detainees painted a very large target on her back for a policy that would have effected a very, very small number of people. That probably should have been a, “pick your battles,” moment for her.
If the argument was, “We’re not going to focus on trans people in sports for now, because a lot of people still don’t support that, but we’re going to talk about how Medicare for All helps everyone, and we’ll make sure that gender affirming care is covered,” OK, there’s a case to be made for that. But what they’re actually saying is, “Well, the economic policy is set by the donors, so there’s nothing we can do about that, but the trans stuff seems to be costing us more votes than it’s winning us, let’s drop that.” They’re trying to jettison the progressive groups they think aren’t helping them instead of building an agenda for progressives to rally behind.
As they begin to dissect their collapse in the presidential election, some Democratic National Committee members are concluding that the party is too “woke,” too focused on identity politics and too out of touch with broad stretches of America.
From the bottom of my heart, fuck these people. They’ve moved so far towards neoliberal policy positions that they no longer have an economic message to give their working-class base. In the absence of a coherent economic vision for the party, they keep doubling down on, “identity politics,” to keep the the Obama Coalition happy; they have nothing to unify their base, so their only option is to take up any position that is important to the demographic groups that make up the party. Now that this strategy has been thoroughly and decisively defeated, their reaction isn’t to return to the progressive economic policies that won them these groups in the first place, but instead to figure which minorities are, “unpopular,” so they can abandon them. What a bunch of stupid, shortsighted cowards.
Oh, haha, that’s much more reassuring. I assumed it was someone affiliated in the channel, and I was like, “Uh-oh, how long before this guy launches into an antisemitic conspiracy theory about lizard people?”
Huh. I’m generally wary of any group that has an Eye of Providence in their logo or uses the term, “New World Order,” but that was cathartic to watch.
I’m really sorry to hear that. Would it help if I showed you a graph that shows the stock market is actually doing great?
I am so God damn sick of reading articles from pundits who think they can just numbers-and-statistics away people’s financial experience. Listen to this shit:
America has recovered more quickly and more completely than almost any comparable country. As The Economist put it, “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.” Real wages have risen fastest for those at the bottom of the income scale. Today, inflation is at 2.4%, compared with the 9.1% peak in June 2022. The fight against rising prices has essentially been won.
But few in the electorate seem aware…
Wow, the electorate sounds like a bunch of dipshits. But just for the hell of it, let’s check their source for the wages of the bottom income scale. According to the Economic Policy Institute, real wages grew 13.2% between 2019 and 2023. Now, inflation was 19.2% during that period, but “real wage,” means, “wage adjusted for inflation,” so I guess the author is right. The lowest income earners got a raise during the Biden years. Guess the poor are a bunch of dipshits.
But which of Biden’s policies led to these increases in wages? Well, the Economic Policy Institute says:
Between 2019 and 2023, state-level minimum wage increases along with a tight labor market have translated into faster real wage growth for low-wage workers, particularly faster growth in states (and D.C.) that increased their minimum wage during this period.
So, it sounds like the wages went up because of a competitive labor market (which the Fed intentionally killed to combat inflation) and minimum wage increases at the state level, and that states that increased their minimum wages saw more of that growth than others. So, you could make an argument that Biden deserves little credit for this increase, but let’s not even worry about that. Let’s see look at the minimum wage by state.
The EPI has a handy Minimum Wage Tracker that color-codes states by their state minimum wage against the federal minimum wage. A quick glance shows you the states with the highest minimum wage are mostly states that went to Harris. But what’s really interesting is that, of the 7 key battleground states that Harris lost, 4 of them (Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) have the same minimum wage as the federal minimum of $7.25, a starvation wage that hasn’t been raised since 2009. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that in more than half the key states Harris needed win saw the smallest share of that 13.2%, but did see prices increase by 19.2%.
Now, I’m not an economist, and I don’t have hours to research this shit, so it’s entirely possible that I’m missing a lot of nuance regarding cost of living and non-minimum wage increases in these states. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’ve already spent more time and energy examining why people might not feel good about the economy than the sneering chud that wrote this article. And I’ll end this tirade with one last quote from the EPI report he cited:
Wage rates remain insufficient for individuals and families working to make ends meet. Nowhere can a worker at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution earn enough to meet a basic family budget.
Every headline about this man is either, “Trump unveils proposal for concentration camps,” or, “Trump claims he invented waffles, poops pants at PA rally.” There’s no in between.
Hey, if you’re ever wondering what people mean when they say, “Blue MAGA,” it’s this; 8 rambling paragraphs of conspiracy theories about media companies’ CEOs, with no evidence or sources, to justify a debunked infographic. It’s long-winded, “Fake News.”
By saying the infographic is “debunked”, the implication is that media owners are not supporting trump. And I say again - they could very well be giving millions, as Elmo Musk does, without being directly identified in an FEC filing. So, the “debunking” is itself “debunked” by simply pointing out political donations can be unknown.
OK, but by the logic you’re using, you could accuse anyone of anything. I could make an infographic that says, “Kamala Harris was caught killing small animals as a child,” and when someone says that never happened, I could just say, “Well, juvenile records are almost always sealed and expunged, and people who seek power are often have sociopathic tendencies, so this debunking is debunked, since it’s an unknown.” It’s just using the adage, “yhe absence of proof isn’t the proof of absence,” as a justification to continue spreading a lie.
There aren’t any PAC donation records because SCROTUS legalized dark money. Of course we could argue about it, OR just look at the editorial slants and take this obvious fact at face value.
Maybe you should clarify what the, “obvious fact,” was that we should take at face value. Because based on the context, it really sounds like you wanted us to accept your debunked infographic as fact.
Well, A) I didn’t say the Democrats had lost the working class. I said that their policies were not targeting the working class. Even this election, Kamala Harris’ stump speeches repeatedly focus on the middle class but make no mention of the working class.
And B) those overall numbers don’t factor in race or geography. The Democrats still do very strongly amongst black Americans because of the legacy of Civil Rights Act and the Republicans’ Southern Strategy, and they are much more likely to live below the poverty line, but the black population is also unevenly distributed throughout the south and in northern urban population centers. Because of the Senate’s structure and the Electoral College, winning white working class voters can be a successful path to power in the Midwest and most of the South, where blue-collar whites can deliver GOP victories. In fact, the Republicans have won white working class voters in 8 of the last 11 elections, and that support handed them the presidency in 6 of them.
That’s why the Republicans have the reputation of being for the working class, and the Democrats don’t. The Republicans are actively working to win working-class whites (and there’s some evidence that Trump is gaining ground with working class black and Latino men), while the Democrats are actively trying to win moderate white-collar voters and assuming their base of working class minority voters will turn out
OK, so what you’re saying is that you know there’s no evidence to back up your claims, but you’re assuming they’re true based on your opinion of these outlets editorial decisions, and you’d like your opinion to be treated as a fact. Did I get that right?
Most elected Democrats had abandoned a working class message by the 90s. Jimmy Carter seems like a socialist by today’s standards, but its important to remember that at the time, he was running on a pivot towards the center and an attempt to distance the party from the New Deal. Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge was a campaign to return to their New Deal principles. Mondale and Dukakis were both moving to center as well, as the party had convinced themselves that Regan’s success meant New Deal politics seemed fiscally irresponsible.
By the time Clinton was in power, the party was essentially a center-right party by their own historical standards. Clinton and the 1993 Congress passed legislation that actively hurt the middle class while helping the managerial and financial class. His deregulation of Wall Street was a gift to investors, while his work requirements for Welfare basically killed the program. Worst of all was NAFTA, which created the largest outsourcing of manufacturing jobs in American history.
Obama at least ran on a progressive platform (which should have proved to Democrats that centrism was not a winning strategy), but he governed like another moderate. He even attempted to pass another NAFTA like trade agreement, the TPP, and Trump successfully won over blue-collar workers by promising to kill that deal. Granted, he also won them over by blaming their economic woes on immigrants, and his opposition to the deal probably had more to do with his racist desire to undermine as many achievements of the first black President as he possibly could, but the TPP would have been another nail in the coffin of American manufacturing jobs.
Anyway, point is, aside from a few progressive hold-outs, the Democrats by-and-large pivoted away from their New Deal roots towards being technocratic centrists whose policies benefit investors and white-collar workers and often hurt the working class. Meanwhile, the Republicans, whose policies are even worse for the working class, are able to create the illusion of being on their side through scapegoating and dog whistles that appeal to blue-collar workers (particularly white blue-collar workers, although not exclusively).
I don’t wish cancer on anyone, but these kinds of health risks are exactly why it was sheer hubris to seek reelection in 2024 (or even election in 2020). Cancer, heart disease, and stroke risks are at their highest for people his age, not to mention the dangers of dementia and even just falling. Jerry Connolly and Mitch McConnell have had to step out of leadership due to age related health issues, Sylvester Turner and Raúl Grijalva died in office, and that’s just since the Congressional term started in January. I don’t want to be spiteful or cruel, but I feel extremely angry that he even attempted reelection and once again vindicated in saying his age made him unfit for office.