American Politics: A Brand New Day

pariston_hill

@JulieYBM
This is kind the crux of the neoliberal dilema.
As neoliberalism has been the most successful wealth redistribution program (from workers to multi millionaire and billionaire), parties upholding the neoliberal dogma both can't and wont address the decline in quality of live and staggering wages because to do so would mean turn the flow of money upwards a little bit and in doing show the political class would lose support for their campaign donors (and bribes they receive).

This old David Graeber video talks about the symbiosis of center and far right that neoliberalism birthed

JulieYBM

@pariston_hill said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@JulieYBM
This is kind the crux of the neoliberal dilema.
As neoliberalism has been the most successful wealth redistribution program (from workers to multi millionaire and billionaire), parties upholding the neoliberal dogma both can't and wont address the decline in quality of live and staggering wages because to do so would mean turn the flow of money upwards a little bit and in doing show the political class would lose support for their campaign donors (and bribes they receive).

This old David Graeber video talks about the symbiosis of center and far right that neoliberalism birthed

Yeah, it's why I say that action speak louder than words in politics. If won't fix shit you are not my friend, you are not my ally. If you won't burn down the house to do the right thing then just fuck off lol

Nobodyman

@Time-Control-Magician said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

Don’t know people forgot about the Tea Party and how they habitually tried to repeal the ACA even those that owe their political careers to the movement largely don’t identify with the movement anymore.

MAGA has been in the public conscious for 8 years (and probably will for the next 4 years), so it's had a really good run regardless of what happens from here on out.

At any rate it’ll likely be cannibalized by some new variant of Republican extremism. Especially if they can’t find a candidate able to win the general like Trump did.

Probably. People forget (or never knew) that Reagan originally used it.

andre

@Nobodyman

The tea party started during the Obama era. It's been around for 15 years, but hasn't been relevant in 8.

Nobodyman

@andre Sorry, I was referring to the MAGA slogan.

Yes, true enough that the Tea Party itself is basically defunct, though I might argue that its influence still lingers.

andre

@Nobodyman Gotcha. Don't know how I missed that part.

Time Control Magician

Don’t know if I agree with people like Jay Leno that Trump winning means the election was fair and democracy works.

When you still have people being purged from voting rolls close to an election, people who can’t vote because of blatantly dubious laws, fake bomb threats temporarily stopping people from casting ballots along with egregiously long lines, rich corporations flooding elections with money anonymously, people whose job it is to certify election results openly stating they won’t if their preferred candidate doesn’t win, and of course one of the two candidates being allowed to run despite the fact he should’ve been convicted on impeachment (twice) and therefore disqualified from running.

Can we much about this was fair?

pariston_hill

@Time-Control-Magician
Literally nothing in the US electoral system is fair. Absolutely nothing. The Founding Fathers rigged the game for big land owners (themselves) and it has been this way ever since.

Time Control Magician

@pariston_hill said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@Time-Control-Magician
Literally nothing in the US electoral system is fair. Absolutely nothing. The Founding Fathers rigged the game for big land owners (themselves) and it has been this way ever since.

I mean you’re not telling me something I don’t already know. The problem is many people educated and not don’t know this.

andre

The more I think about this the more I realize politics is a silly game. We have more ways than ever to reach people and instead of making it easier, it's made it more difficult. People have never been more disconnected from major news and prone to disinformation. Kamala is a neocon and the democratic party is conservative, but the policy was very easily on her side this time for just about everyone, but simple is what sells to a vast part of the electorate. Inflation was everywhere and was handled here better than everywhere else, but that's such a hard message. I'm frankly not convinced that the leftist policies I like would have been enough, but I do know the messaging didn't do its job.

Satsuki

@Nobodyman said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@andre Sorry, I was referring to the MAGA slogan.

Yes, true enough that the Tea Party itself is basically defunct, though I might argue that its influence still lingers.

Didn't the Tea Party just basically turn into MAGA?

pariston_hill

@Time-Control-Magician said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

I mean you’re not telling me something I don’t already know. The problem is many people educated and not don’t know this.

If you want and need to deprogram people from the propagandized view of politics and history (which you guys need) one must never be enough pedagogical.

cooldud

@andre said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@cooldud I don't agree. The working class has been duped. Democrat messaging was bad and the Biden situation was unfortunate, but my experience is that people that would be otherwise decent have given in to hatred and done so pretty easily. Other slurs in my plant were too dirty to say here and the guys in general were anti POC and LGBTQ.

They’ve always been that way, and they’ve voted Democrat in the past. Consistently. Reliably. Until the party went neoliberal, broke the unions by exporting all the jobs and left middle America in the dust.

And if you’re going to stop speaking to people because they don’t pass your purity tests, you’re not winning elections.

The unspoken truth about many working class people is that they are individualistic to the point of being selfish and want things to be simple. They don't want to believe that they have moral failures because they go to church and hate the right people. I say this knowing that many of these guys are "decent" with a lowercase d. I think it's really complex, but I don't know how the left talks to them if they see a banana and call it an ostrich.

I don’t know what to tell you. Them being individualistic flies in the face of the fact that they’re the most pro-union swath of people in the entire country. More than people on the coasts.

That's not to say that democrats did even a halfway decent job of doing that, but I'm not convinced that any leftist can get that demographic.

This is aside from thoughts about the missing 15 million plus and what separated them from Kamala.

That is an explicit lack of enthusiasm. Biden has residual goodwill in the midwest and (ironic, given their own races) a better coalition with grassroots black leaders.

You don’t lose all the blue wall states unless you lose the working class.

Time Control Magician

@pariston_hill said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

If you want and need to deprogram people from the propagandized view of politics and history (which you guys need) one must never be enough pedagogical.

Don’t know between the fact here in the U.S. educators are underpaid and under-appreciated. Along with the fact they constantly have to put up with bullshit from kids & their parents.

That’s a hell of an ask.

Robby

Things to keep in mind when it comes to the vote totals.

Not all votes are in yet, particularly in California. Final tally will probably be millions higher for Harris, just not anywhere that matters.
For all intents and purposes, this was a second term Biden run, and incumbents often lose a few million second time around. And for all the good that Biden did, he was an unpopular president because he got to deal with the aftermath of Covid and got blamed for all of Trump's economic policies (in the same way Trump got all the credit for Obama). Losing a few million was to be expected.

(Like Biden stood with and saved a bunch of unions and they still all went in for Trump?)

What wasn't expected was that Trump would do this well again after January 6 and the convictions and selling state secrets and.... the everything... but apparently people just really do not care about that and it really isn't a crime if the president does it. If only Nixon had known.

If you look at Kamala's polling, it nosedived about a month ago... when her campaigning changed and the novelty wore off. I think it the election had been in October she would have done better, as stupid and fickle as that is. Still starting a campaign from scratch 100 days out and coming this close is still impressive, even if the result sucks.

@andre said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@Robby There are a lot of minorities in the middle class.

Sure. But the minorities in this case that were talked about constantly on both sides were very specifically whittled down to "trans folk that are doing surgery in your classrooms" and "insane asylum people that eat dogs and cats." Not the much broader, for example, "women" and "Latinos".

My best friend in the world for 25 years is trans. That's absolutely an important thing to protect and fight for, it's a very important issue for me. But it's not an issue that gets Joe Shmoe that doesn't know any of "those people" excited to vote.

It SUCKS, but that seems to be one of the microcosms of the shift.

They lost the blue wall, they lost the middle class. People feel failed. For whatever reason, they feel let down.

Satsuki

Charles would be ashamed at all this.

Time Control Magician

@Robby said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

(Like Biden stood with and saved a bunch of unions and they still all went in for Trump?)

As aggravating as more blacks going for Trump the guy that’s not missed a chance to show his dislike for blacks. And represents a party that’s spent the last decade and a half disenfranchising blacks and most notably during Biden’s term blocked voting rights legislation they may have counteracted the above.

But yeah what they do lose voting for Trump?

pariston_hill

I beg y'll to look at the numbers and stop threading any other demographic that's not white as a monolith.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

JulieYBM

@pariston_hill said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

I beg y'll to look at the numbers and stop threading any other demographic that's not white as a monolith.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

The fact that 53% of white women voted from Trump—if I'm reading these right—sure is a great sign that they will always support White Supremacy before they support other women and queer people.

Fucking disgusting all around.

pariston_hill

@JulieYBM
Yup. Before any other intersectionality a white person in a racialized society is always white first anything else second.

MetaMario

jesus, looks like Kamala didn't win any swing state.

andre

@Time-Control-Magician

Misogyny has had a turnup in corners of the black community recently. Podcasts like fresh and fit have a similar reach among the youth as joe Rogan does in other communities. I have family who voted for Trump and it all either came down to not believing a woman could lead, or vague monetary hopes.

As alluded to, though, like always. More black people voted for Trump than last time, but we are the block, especially BLACK WOMEN, that held it down, because we are the block, especially BLACK WOMEN, that understand the repercussions of all this and have been here before. I called my momma after the election and she was distraught. This is pretty important to me.

andre

@Robby I don't really agree with that. Trans folks were brought up more by the right as a Boogeyman than the left as a fulcrum of the campaign. An 8 year hate campaign is just now bearing political fruit.

I do think Kamala missed whiffed on messaging, but not that she over emphasized the "wrong minorities".

Robby

@andre said in American Politics: A Brand New Day:

@Robby I don't really agree with that. Trans folks were brought up more by the right as a Boogeyman than the left as a fulcrum of the campaign. An 8 year hate campaign is just now bearing political fruit.

I'm paraphrasing. I'm not going to bring up every example of horrific racism and failure to counter-campaigning, we'd be here all month, I just went with those two examples because they had very specific examples that immediately came to mind.