Elections have consequences, many people say both sides are the same, but there's one side that constantly does things like this, on top of giving tax cuts to rich people that need it the least. Please go vote on 2028 if you don't want more of this.
Where we set our eyes don’t matter. The US electorate has shown we care more about “owning the libs”, “anti-woke” and what bathroom people use than our own health and welfare.
Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.
Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”
I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.
One of my “friends” on Facebook who is a devout evangelical Christian that I went to school with between elementary school at a private Christian elementary school, a magnet middle school and she was one of the few white people at my majority black high school and even one of the fewer that didn’t segregate herself and made friends with everyone claimed that Charles Kirk was a good Christian and said I was insensitive for quoting his words after his death.
I honestly had never heard of him before he was shot and looked up things about him thinking from all of the things said about him by her and other conservatives was that he was a traditional pre 2016 Republican who I might disagree with around the edges. But I could have a beer with him.
I then looked up some of the things he said, showed her with links to videos, verified sources etc and she refused to even read the links because they would have forced her to confront her cognitive dissonance.
For the record, she isn’t one of the fire breathing conservatives and 99% of her posts are quoting scriptures and family oriented.
You didn’t need “sources of information”. Trump was in office for four years before he was re-elected. It’s copium to think that people aré ignorant when in actuality, they are actively hostile to minorities, non straight, the college educated and non Christians.
They would rather feel the fallout of Republican policies as long as it doesn’t help or actively hurts people not like them. In my former home state GA, the Republican governor spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get the Hyundai plant to GA that would have created 8500 jobs directly and no telling how many indirect jobs.
ICE invaded the plant and the opportunity is now lost potentially. The governor still can’t bring himself to criticize the President and the Republicans in GA are cheering the raid. The engineers from Korea were training Americans.
I think it's rather the choice we are given at this moment in history. But I may be wrong.
If you abstract away any other problems and boil it down to environment, health and work protections on the one hand, and restriction of unlimited immigration from countries with very different sets of values no matter the sociological developments that will likely follow you can only choose one.
I just tried to summarize what we hear and see from voters in analyses as fairly as I could, not present my own opinion. If that did not work out, let me know.
But in this case you choose the one problem that appears bigger or makes you more angry probably.
You're giving something away by suggesting that a balanced framing is: (1) destruction of our world, health, and lower/middle classes vs. (2) brown people bypassing an insane bureaucracy that prevents us from effectively receiving the tired, poor, huddled masses that we explicitly invite on the country's figurative doormat. You can be against the latter, sure, but suggesting these sides are anything close to equal is a choice.
Only ~60% of people eligible to vote in 2024 did vote with ~30% of eligible voters voting for the idiotscape we currently have.
So, I think OP message was for the folks who didn't vote. Especially given the people against going backwards on environmental protection is a large majority of the population.
If everyone voted, we wouldn't be dealing with this. Excluding future success of social media propaganda campaigns.
We all need to fucking vote. Otherwise you get folks like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer puppetting an orange shell.
Because of the electoral college. It didn’t matter who didn’t vote. If 0% more people voted in Mississippi or Alabama and every single eligible voter voted in New York and California, it wouldn’t have mattered.
That's some bullshit. If everyone voted the electoral college would be dwarfed across the board. If 50% more people vote the difference won't be in just AL, MS, CA, NY -- it will be across the board. Stop trying to fuck with our elections by discouraging people from voting.
> Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.
I think it depends. I suspect that political messaging has become so tailored that the Mercola/Natural News crowd that voted primarily because of RFK’s anti-vaxxing platform could have been getting so heavily hammered with the “this is the ’chemicals are bad’ administration” messaging that the anti-regulatory stuff seemed pretty quiet in comparison. And I’m pretty sure they also had things they disagreed with Harris about constantly rammed down their throats. I also think that democrat voters had negative things about Trump shoved down their throat, and that messaging difference is probably the main reason many on the right wing are absolutely mystified that people can hate Trump so much, even in spite of the ‘own the libs’ culture war garbage.
I have a list of news sources I hit weekly from Dissent and Jacobin to mainstream TV news and newspapers, to Hot Air and Town Hall. Most are pretty politically homogenous, but discuss all sorts of topics. Then I see how laser-focused a relative’s Facebook feed is on topics that are important to her… not just the political platform on a whole, but those specific things. It’s forgivable that she’d think her primary concerns were representative of most people’s primary concerns, and why she’s thinks people that are heavily focused on other topics are kind of weird.
The presidential debates were the most watched tv last year beating out football. Trump was in office for four years. No matter how filtered the news is, people knew exactly who Trump was.
And one hundred million more people voted than watched that debate. And of the people that watched it, I’ll bet most people couldn’t name half the topics discussed that weren’t in their list of top voting issues. I’m not saying they were deceived or didn’t have access to the information, I’m saying that the things they didn’t care about were easily drowned out by what they did. That’s how the human brain works. Nobody’s seeking out reasons to dislike someone they’re excited about and being emotionally validated by. Saying someone supports something just because it didn’t stick out enough to kill their support for someone doesn’t make sense. That’s no different than saying anyone that voted for Harris because trans rights were extremely important to them also supports Israel’s massacre. The world just isn’t that black-and-white.
Well then maybe it's time to cut some dead weight from the left platform... Many centrists want clean water and sane society and bathrooms and woke ideology maybe needs to take a back seat in discourse for a while
Isn't this what they have been doing? What nationally prominent democrats are vocal proponents of progressive social policies now? I certainly don't remember harris running on any of the things being implied here.
> cut some dead weight
This "dead weight" is the rights of minorities to participate in public life plain and simple. This is exactly why leftists are so skeptical or even hostile to "centrists." Once you're calculating whose rights you can drop for political convenience you share a lot more ideologically with the far right than with historic liberalism.
The motto of the forest service is 'do the most good for the most people for the longest time'
Reality is you sometimes have to drop some dead weight for 2% of people to protect and further the lives of the other 98%.
Turns out it would have been better to find alternative solutions for those 2% back when they were only 0.2%, but instead Dems made them the center of attention and is now staking the future of our country on continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight.
Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war. If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently.
"If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently."
You should know from history that real human beings won’t cower before this sort of unhinged saber-rattling.
So if that’s the take of your political cohort, you might as well just skip the niceties prepare for the worst. Things will get really, really bad for everyone. Perhaps your kids will get to live in a pleasant country again. Maybe the blood-rendered lesson from our grandparents that didn’t seem to stick to our generation will be able to stick to theirs.
"continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight"
There is one demographic that is implicated in the vast majority of shootings, comprising far more than the 2% you’re hatefully denigrating.
> Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war.
Protect children from what? Our what cities? What do you believe is centrist about these stances? These are straight up verbatim right wing talking points. Stand up for your beliefs and join your actual allies instead of pretending to be mine.
Harris lost the popular vote by less than 2%. I know that popular vote is not what gets a president elected, but you make it sound like nobody voted for Harris and the entire American electorate liked Trump's views and voted for him.
That's the thing. Trump would be eminently beatable if the democrats bothered running good candidates and had the courage to stand for something. But they are perfectly content collecting tons of money which probably goes to connected "consultants" who then spend 20 million on figuring out how to talk to people.
It all started because Biden didn’t announce he wasn’t running again after the midterms and the Democrats tried to hide that he wasn’t losing his mental faculties.
I think Harris was a good candidate who did stand for something, but she didn't get enough time to run her own campaign :)
But I'm not interested in having a "she wasn't pure enough for my brand of politics" debate, I was only pointing out that almost half of those who voted did in fact vote for her – not Trump.
It’s actually the opposite. Immediately after Kamala got the nod there was an enormous amount of energy surrounding her nomination that she managed to entirely squander. If Kamala had less time as the main candidate she would have done better. She ran a shit campaign and bled support the entire time. I can’t imagine why anyone wasn’t impressed with her promises to maintain the status quo and her ability to campaign with war criminals from the Bush era.
If Harris had been a good candidate she would have gone on different podcasts without hesitation. That’s where the audience is these days. Her TV interviews were so scripted and inauthentic it wasn’t even funny. Despite all these she almost got half of the votes so imagine how a more likeable and authentic candidate would have done.
> but there's one side that constantly does things like this, on top of giving tax cuts to rich people that need it the least.
That side is consistently good at pushing uneducated voters to care about nothingburger issues like transgender bathrooms and mass immigration.
the reality is that the average american is an uninformed moron made complacent through excess and enteratinment but thats not something that can be easily fixed.
Kindly stop supporting a nation built on genocide and enslavement. The ethical path to engineering a system that's not intended to kill people is to stop it when it does and dismantle it, evolving the foundational principles used to design it in the first place. And to do all that without sacrificing more lives. Electoral reform is impossible because there's no way to say no to the entire system.
I live in the USA. You can put all your skills to work on designing systems of collective liberation to replace the existing systems of oppression this country was founded on & requires to persist. A collapse is coming, so now is the time to prepare so we have something liberatory to fill the predictable power vacuum with. The wealthy are already doing this.
The right managed to succeed with their electoral reforms. Gerrymandering is legal, and the president is now above the law.
The left should use the same tactics: Focus on state and local elections then use those positions to fix elections so that the national majority of voters decide who runs the federal government (instead of the current 25-30% of voters).
Doing this is completely legal now that the Supreme Court has gutted the rule of law.
For starters, all states should aggressively gerrymand. That’ll basically guarantee the house goes democrat in 2026:
If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
As a democratic voter I don't like this either. I vote because I want rule of law. It's not as clear cut to me that discarding rule of law to beat the GOP is the best option. There is a chance they can be defeated without undermining having a functional electoral system
This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.
You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.
Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.
They can be "defeated" that way in the sense of a classic Pyrrhic victory, exactly like in 2020, sure. That's the absolute worst out of all options available. "Losing" in 2020 would have been much better. You need to start thinking about the game, realpolitik, and the patterns that have been happening. And the long-term. You think you're thinking long-term by prioritizing the things you do, but it's the exact opposite.
The first thing you need to come to terms with is that losing in 2020 would've been better for the long-term. Once you've gained that freedom, realizing that simply winning an election can be the worse option, you can start thinking about what would instead be better.
One possible solution is to get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans and run liberal/progressive candidates as Republicans. Built on the Eisenhower platform of 1956 and his record as a military commander. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...
Granted, it's not ideal, but coming in the back door may be necessary.
> get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans
Sorry, didn’t quite follow that! You can vote for anyone regardless of who you Registered for? Or, was that suppose to give a misleading signal to Republicans that they have way too many voters? :-)
It depends on the state (in some you can register as a democrat and ask for a republican primary ballot), but I did this so I could vote against George W three times. (If only we could have him again instead of Trump…). You can register for whatever party you want, but some states have early deadlines.
One problem with creating real change with this approach is that the party elites get to decide who are on their ballots.
A while back, Colbert (?) tried to run as a republican and documented all the roadblocks he hit.
To get an idea of how it went, imagine a popular candidate going to a southern plantation to kiss the rings of the great-grandchildren of slave owners.
After deciding there is no personal upside to them, they decide to keep the candidate off the ballot and ask a servant to freshen their mint julep.
> If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
This has been clear for very long. Hence why they're still not doing it, and have for the last 9 years been and still[1] continue to push for Clinton-like candidates rather than whatever candidate has the biggest chance of winning elections. It isn't incompetence, and it hasn't been for ages. They're nearly just as captured. It's true that they're slightly less captured than R overall, but not to an extent that is actually meaningful.
Stating it as an "if" is copium. They have failed to, are failing to, and will continue to fail to do this, and it's intentional. What you're saying is so blindingly obvious that there is no other explanation - no Hanlon's razor for this one, the incompetence angle is not realistic.
To liberals a “socialist” like Mamdani is way worse than conservatives like Trump. They are more than happy to support a sexual predator over a socialist. Trump and the DNC largely have the same donors to keep happy. Capitalism and how to make a select few fabulously wealthy isn’t a power either the democrats or republicans want to give up. Unfortunately due to the first past the post voting system we have to align to one of the two fucked up corporatist political parties. One which pretends to care about things like equality and fairness and one who has removed their mask and fully embraces all the worst aspects of humanity. I’d still much rather have a Target that pretended to care about things than a Target who fully embraces late stage capitalism.
The most frustrating thing about leftists is their focus on tearing down and self-flagellation over actually doing anything meaningful to make the world a better place.
There is a whole archetype of person that would rather verbally jerk off to thoughts of defeatism and disgust and criticizing everyone else than do anything useful themselves.
Maybe it's not as dualistic as you portray things. I'm literally designing and building a system for collective liberation and meeting needs to replace systems of oppression.