The low-hanging fruit was declining to shit the bed in the election and not letting the fascists win. They failed to do that. Twice.
I have absolutely zero faith in the Democratic Party to accomplish anything meaningful and long term at this point. The party - and specifically its leadership - are demonstrably feckless and, frankly, worse than useless at this point. I’d joke that they should be barred from politics, but Trump is probably actually gonna do that, and probably try to get the DoJ to gin up some charges for all his political opponents, so it’s actually not something I even want to joke about.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/12/great-moments-murcs-law
Murc’s law, for the uninitiated, is the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
The fuck good is low hanging fruit if their rhetoric doesn’t have any teeth?
They don’t have the votes in either house of Congress to actually stop anything. Rhetoric is all they’ve got; what they can do is to make it super-clear how awful Trump’s decision-making is, so that there’s a chance voters will turn out and give them the power to act in the future.
They don’t have the votes in either house of Congress to actually stop anything.
Can’t do anything when they have a majority. Can’t stop anything when they have a minority. They’re useless under all conditions.
They did stuff under Obama and Biden. I couldn’t find a perfect source but here is a source https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administration-record
Then why did I spend the past four years hearing “They don’t have the voooooooooootes”?
The Democratic Party has become the Washington Generals of politics. If you want to accomplish anything, don’t involve the Democrats.
Guess I’ll go to Congress myself can’t be that hard
Great reference.
They are paid not to do anything controversial.
Waste of time, Democrats are the kings of fucking up easy wins.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory…
They’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
That’s by design…
Designed by who
Hahaha this writer actually believes that Democrats really care about our country, instead of just being the party of controlled opposition.
The neoliberals are the same as Republicans.
People want leftist policies, they want leftist leaders.
The Dems haven’t had a primary since they almost lost the whole party to Bernie Sanders in 2016, and they have shown they would rather hand the country to the Republicans than sit down with their rich donors and let them know they have to make some concessions for the American people.
Do they though? Even leftist countries are drawing towards right wing extremists.
There are few places were leftist policies and leaders are doing well… and sure, they don’t exist in the US. But they do at many other places.
Funny thing: if you do polling and don’t mention which party sponsors a policy, leftish (more like social-democratic) policies are extremely popular. Associate those same policies with the Democrats and support drastically drops.
Not to be mean but this is literally propaganda.
People elect right wing leaders when they are afraid and uneducated. And Covid plus all the reverberating economic issues weve had since then made people scared.
When we see a lot of these right wing leaders fail to do anything then we will flip flop back to leftists
That might be true. But the solution to that, is not ”move further to the left” or ”wait for the right to fuck up”. It’s then to help people not to be afraid, to educate them.
I very much hope you’re right, but I’ve seen this trend for over 20 years in Sweden now. With basically zero indication it’s turning.
Just getting worse.
When we see a lot of these right wing leaders fail to do anything then we will flip flop back to leftists
Not if Democrats have anything to say about it. We’ll get milquetoast corpodems or republican fascists and there is no other choice. Yay.
And people will vote for them anyway because if their personal economy is bad they will vote out the incumbent.
After 2016 and Republicans fucking everything up for 2 years they got recked in the midterms.
The same will happen again.
Even leftist countries are drawing towards right wing extremists.
And in those countries, we see the same Russian interference, oligarch money and fascist-controlled media. Another con artist re-running a playbook is not a grassroots movement.
Have I said anything else? My point was that there seem to be few indications of the people actually wanting leftist politics, and leftist leaders.
This response makes no sense. You’re responding to someone saying the people still want leftist policies by saying “I agree, they don’t want leftist policies”
Not sure why the downvotes. The party who put a prosecutor in front of the ACAB crowd is clearly shit.
I used to think they were just dumb but now I think it’s all by design
Under normal circumstances with everyday people, I try to make generous assumptions and “never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
But in the case of the Democratic party, I have a hard time believing that everybody in the Democratic leadership is that stupid, which leaves only the possibility that their continued failure is intentional
It looks to me like much of the DNC leadership, and worse, the long-time admin people who really run things, are deeply cynical and primarily interested in the preservation of their own meal tickets. The nominal party leadership (people like Biden and Harris) could clean house at the DNC if they were so inclined. But instead, loyalty to the institution and not the objectives is rewarded. In any other organization, non-performance like that would have led to wholesale replacement or shutdown.
Yeah, the corporate entity called the Democratic Party only cares about soliciting donations. Both parties are legally entrenched and moated from competition by difficult ballot-access standards they introduced themselves, propped up by subservient media institutions, who portray the two parties as inevitable and natural.
There are well-intentioned people (in both parties? Sure, let’s be kind) but they don’t hold power and must play by the rules of the corporate party leadership.
As long as donations come in, everyone has income. As long as democrats lose close elections, donations flow. As long as there’s some DINO or Blue Dog to ruin a Democrat majority, they can keep whipping up votes and donations (“We need a bigger majority next time! And please send cash”) As long as Republicans legislate unpopular policies when they’re in control, donations flow in on the promise to fight back.
Designed by who?
Just a note to observers, I have this user tagged as, “nonvoter complains”
No one cares about your tags.
Wow this is the dorkiest comment I’ve ever encountered
“Attention everybody: This guy doesn’t vote! Don’t worry, your parents have been called and are coming to pick you up”
Attention everybody: This guy doesn’t vote!
Well, in prole’s estimation, this guy doesn’t vote.
LMAO thank you. What frontend are you using that has tags?
I use Boost on my phone as that was my preferred reddit app
Or they’re doing the same thing to the Democrats they’re counseling that they do to Republicans. They’re not going to change because people say “Democrats and Republicans are just play fighting so don’t bother”, they do it when they’re being attacked for inaction.
Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling into: in an effort to court Republican defectors they temper their criticism of the various Trump nominees. But since there are and will be no defectors they lose on both sides of the equation, gaining no defectors and making their critiques tepid and forgettable. This is unquestionably true. But we can go a step further still. Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them.
If trying to court Republican defectors is a futile effort, who should the Democrats be trying to court? This article seems deliberately vague on that point. The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason? Seemingly, it’s to court people other than Republican defectors, but who would that be? Relatively moderate, neoliberal technocrats? Do any still exist?
who should the Democrats be trying to court?
Discouraged voters who didn’t vote in the last election. Getting 10% of them to vote Dem would swing a lot of races, and that’s far more likely to be achievable than swinging part of the Republican vote like the Dems tried to do last time. Voters want decisiveness, not feel-good policy-free vote-grubbing.
The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason?
Because they are objectively awful choices, several of which are severe national security threats in and of themselves?
who should the Democrats be trying to court?
Solid Democrat voters who are disappointed with the DNC and therefore don’t vote. The Democrats’ noncommittality makes them unappealing to everyone.
People who want change, but see no chance of that coming from the Democrats. The biggest pool of votes that can be harvested are discouraged voters. But they’ll need to see something besides empty talk.
Billionaire fascists and allied fanatics have seized power by illegitimate means. Tinkering around the margins isn’t going to stop them. We need to break the power of the billionaires, which will probably mean capping maximum wealth and forcing them to sell off assets until nobody has more than 5% market share in anything. We need to get influence-peddiling out of politics, and to purge the courts of corrupt stooge judges. And we need to re-establish the rule of law for all people in this country, regardless of their wealth, connections or what office they hold. The people need to see that nobody is above the law.
The biggest pool of votes that can be harvested are discouraged voters. But they’ll need to see something besides empty talk.
Democrats spent the last administration breaking campaign promises and moving right, to the point where they were enabling genocide, running anti-trans hate in their own ads, adopting republican border policy, and touting the endorsement of Dick Cheney.
I’d say that Democrats were actively trying to ruin their credibility, but these are Democrats and they never actively try to do anything.
I think you’re targeting people that have become apathetic and disengaged from the political process because they don’t see anyone actually fighting for them. Someone willing to attack the existing power structure on your behalf is a very appealing proposition to most people in our political climate.
Well we know Democrats aren’t up to the task
Silence, nonvoter
Hey what’s it feel like seeing Trump come down on Israel and end the genocide you spent the last year telling folks like me to shut up and accept?
Get back to me in a few months
Like so.
They should be courting the public by making it really clear how awful Trump’s nominees and policies are.
The defectors the article is talking about are Republican senators. The author links to the piece about the trap:
When I followed up, asking whether Republican senators had voiced any qualms about Patel, he said they had “at first” but that he hadn’t followed up because he’s being “very careful” in a “delicate period of time.”
This is the trap Democrats keep falling into. They don’t want to come out against a Trump nominee too aggressively, out of fear of alienating Republican fence-sitters. But in the same breath, they’ll tell you that Republicans aren’t actually open to listening to what they say, as they’re determined to pass Trump’s fealty tests. So Democrats land in a place where they can neither mount an aggressive campaign, perhaps at least incurring some cost to the Republicans senators and the Trump administration, nor have any hope of swaying their GOP colleagues to their side.
Instead of worrying about the sensitivities of their colleagues, go all out against the nominee so they think confirming the nominee is an electoral risk. It’s a play to their voters.
I mean, it’s inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but Americans have been asking to get rid of changing the clocks every year and nobody’s just… DONE IT. It’s an act of goodwill if nothing else.
So were voters.
That’s part of why Harris polled so low. They had so many angles of attack that they tried to go with all of them instead of focusing on one or two serious differences and biting into it. The campaign looked unfocused and superficial.
Affordability is what Dems need to focus on in 28’ and they need to start that messaging now. Drop the IdPol talk, it’s not working. Things are going to get worse for people’s pocketbook, MAGA is going to say it’s from the Dems in Congress/Govorners/etc. and the Democratic Party needs a counter to that.
Harris didn’t poll low though. And polls are meaningless anyway.
I mean the election polling. Where she underperformed worse than most people thought, which exit polls showed her biggest criticisms came from being confused by her policies.
Got a source that “confusion” from having too many positions was the source of criticisms? Because I’ve seen other polls and they all had pretty specific reasons that weren’t about messaging.
