Summary
Following Kamala Harris’s unexpected defeat, Democratic leaders are scrutinizing their party’s failures, particularly with working-class voters.
Figures like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Ro Khanna argue the party lacks a strong economic message, especially for those frustrated with stagnant mobility and neoliberal policies.
Sanders emphasized Democrats’ disconnect from working-class concerns, while Murphy criticized the party’s unwillingness to challenge wealthy interests.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison announced he won’t seek re-election, leaving the party’s leadership in flux as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prepare to assume top roles amid a Republican resurgence.
“Figures like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Ro Khanna argue the party lacks a strong economic message, especially for those frustrated with stagnant mobility and neoliberal policies.”
"Meanwhile the
Corpo shillsremainder of the Democratic party insist they didn’t go conservative enough. “We had Dick Cheney on our side! We shouted at them that their lives are better now! They no longer can afford homes and found everything to be more expensive, but the stock market! The people just don’t understand how when my investments go up that means everything is working as intended.” Audible groans were heard from within the room and within seconds security was escorting people away from reporters. “We will definitely win next time, we just need to lie harder about their lives being better. I hear workers hate unions so we’ll work on killing those too.”I hope Schumer steps back. He’s part of the old guard that got us here, and I don’t think he should be involved in party leadership anymore. Less sure about Jeffries - but frankly, despite his obvious skills, I’m deeply sketched by his refusal to play hardball with Johnson specifically, when he threw him a lifeline to get some stuff done instead of stepping back and letting his party and the situation they and Johnson created eat themselves alive. I think that alone indicates an excellent argument for Jeffries NOT being in leadership. This is not an era for compromise and half measures that perpetuate the status quo, which he inarguably has done.
TL;DR: at this point, it’s my firm opinion that NOBODY who was involved in party leadership up to this point should be let within a country mile of leadership going forward - up to and including “fuck you, the DNC is dead, we’re making a new party”.
Jefferies was one of the many democrats extremely unfavorable to using the 14th amendment. They all said they were going to beat Trump at the ballot box. They should be washed away from any relevant position in the party.
Well fuck me, I didn’t realize that. That changes my opinion to “keep him the fuck away from leadership”. Another one of those “let’s bring a deck of cards to a gunfight” imbeciles.
It’s rumored Jeffries was instrumental in the congestion pricing delay (that may now be a permanent delay).
There’s a cognitive dissonance on Lemmy. I keep seeing people post the electorate is stupid for electing trump or staying home while also seeing posts like this acknowledging that the democratic party isn’t listening to the constituency. I realize it’s likely very different audiences but this is very much a bubble among liberals which unfortunately make up a large part of the party voting base. They were fine with everything continuing to suck a tiny bit more because the alternative was Trump. I think people are just squeezed and exhausted. They’re tired of being given the narrative that this is the election that will end all elections while things continue to get worse around the margins. And I think the people that would vote for systemic change don’t see Democrats capable of delivering on anything substantive.
Note: This is not an endorsement of Trump or not voting at all as a result. But people really need to reckon with how broken shit is before blaming voters. Democrats have no incentives to fix anything.
Both can be true. A large swath of the electorate is stupid for electing Trump, but the Democratic party failed to reach them. This is a lesson that Republicans have known for decades but Democrats still don’t get. Voter’s are not rational; being better than your opponent does not win elections. People can be annoyed at the voters for making this reality, and at the Democrats for still not getting it.
In fairness to the Dems though, the incumbent party lost ground in almost every Democracy, and Harris underperformed less in swing states where both parties campaigned.
I don’t know about “large” swath… it’s hard to tell since the media is going to focus on them and make them look larger than they are. It would be really interedting to see a poll of voters that also asked if the things trump did were fake news. Then compare how many trump voters answered yes. That might give us an approximation of the % that did so because they were just dumb enough to buy that hogwash.
Even if you wanted to make that argument, 70ish million people actively voted for Trump. He wants to remove fluoride from water. I don’t know what to tell you about those 70 million people lol.
With RFK in charge of healthcare we’ll be lucky if vaccines are legal in four years.
Right?
Like I’m not out here claiming Kamala was a particularly exciting candidate, but it’s not like this was remotely a difficult choice to make. This is absolutely reflective of a fundamentally incompetent electorate.
Democrats are basically a conservative party, a depressing wet blanket to the people’s spirits, and Republicans are illegitimate, unhinged extremists.
Democrats are objectively superior in every way and they still suck ass.
Sure would be nice if there was a party that actually represented Americans instead of company profits.
Mmmmmmmmhmmmmmm. I know that’s right. Preach on!!!
They have got to stop talking down to voters, gaslighting voters, and they need to give people something to vote FOR instead of against. I find Kamala to be a good speaker and easy to understand but people saying she’s using word salad…at first I didn’t get what that was all about, especially when Trump makes absolutely no sense whatsoever but I think I might get it now. She’s talking to well educated people but a huge swath of this country is not well educated, uses social media extensively, and maybe it actually does sound like word salad to them when democrats start using words that normal people never use and probably don’t understand. If you never went to college and only graduated high school because standards have been reduced, maybe she kind of sounds like an alien sometimes. They need an economic message that speaks to people who have been getting crushed more and more since the 80s and they need to say it in terms we can all understand. And when voters tell them “this is how I feel” for the love of God they need to stop saying “no you don’t”.
So national health care, workers rights, shifting the tax burden to the richest and most fortunate of us, eliminating monopolies and enforcing anti-trust, eliminating corruption among politicians and judges aren’t something to vote FOR? That’s a lot of what Harris’s platform was.
I genuinely feel that most people don’t vote for a policy they vote for a feeling.
I also think that either the DNC doesn’t understand the anger that many have about the wealth inequality or they just ignore it due to the donors they were courting. If they did understand this and understand that people vote with their feelings, I believe it would have been a closer race.
She stoped supporting single payer, she backed off worker rights, she backed off on taxing corporations, and a huge part of the platform was against Trump’s abortion ban and against Trump’s authoritarism.
Show us where she did this. Come on.
He tax an was tweaked with a more pro corporation lean on the advice of her brother I law Tony West and probably others but all the articles on that are behind paywalls and I don’t really care enough about convincing you to look for a way to bypass them.
As for Trump’s abortion ban and things like that, I remember her saying it because she said it. https://www.instagram.com/kamalaharris/reel/DBz9j1zquQx/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)#Register_as_formality_scale
I’m not sure about the specifics, but the core I can agree with, that is: ‘people speaking the same language, but with vastly different backgrounds, will have difficulty communicating effectively.’
Yes perfect, thank you for this. I literally majored in Linguistics but didn’t even think of this because school was so long ago. The ability to code switch where someone could use the professional language while governing but colloquialisms and everyday language while giving public statements would be nice, to be better understood. We all understand basic informal American English but not everyone has a great education.
Nice, glad to help! And cool that you did Linguistics in school!
How can you NOT appear to talk down to someone who is Trump vocabulary / concept or less about issues that are actually complex and nuanced? Trump can talk out of both sides of his mouth to different groups with radically conflicting messages tuned to the audience. If anyone did that while trying to cater to the left, you would be immediately strung up for being duplicitous while at the same time being excoriated for being vague and nonspecific with your plans. No “concepts of a plan” are going to fly for someone running outside the Republican party.
Trump is basically bowling with the gutter guards up and it’s because the Republican electorate is angry and not exactly… uh… discerning when it comes to complex or academic issues.
TIL speaking plain English is word salad.
If you’re uneducated and someone is speaking more formally it can be, depending on the topic and the word choice.
It’s the working class economy, stupid
If that was the case then the dems would have won. Biden ramped down inflation brought wages up and supported unions.
The dems lost because people love to cut their nose off to spite their face.
Maybe some of those politicians should just start their own party? That’s what would happen in a healthier democracy
We need an actual left party.
Tired of this fascism vs conservatives masquerading as “left vs right” bullshit.
Pelosi sucks, Bernie should be in charge of the party with AOC under his wing until he dies, it’s their only chance.
AOC doesn’t need to be under anybody’s wing.
As a Swede, calling the Democrats a party on the left is insane, it is center/right and the Republicans are far right.
Well that’s why it’s all relative. Sweden is far left to the US, and your far right people are center.
Opposite in Germany again. It’s all subjective to the locale.
LOL, SD and AFS being center!
It’s not subjective. The U.S. left is why 40 hour work weeks and SSI exists.
We’ve just never been represented by the duopoly elite/land owners (by design) and instead have had to strike and agitate through those means rather than the ballot box.
In other words, the working class isn’t represented nationally and never has been outside a few radicals like Bernie and AOC.
The U.S. left from EIGHTY YEARS AGO is why those things exist. There’s been a drift to the right over time. It has RAPIDLY accelerated in the last 50 years. The present day left has been dragged right by trying to be polite in the face of so many evils. I’m not promoting both side-isms, the democrats are still far preferable to the republicans, but the greed and corruption are not exclusive to the right. The system is broken and my only hope of the incoming disaster is that it may get so bad that we are forced to enact real and substantive change. I only think that will happen if the horrors that come are extreme enough to defeat the current apathy of the country. GOP voter numbers went up less than a percent, DNC voter numbers went down over 12%.
Yeah, even a real fucking primary would probably have helped.
I really hope it won’t have to come to physical conflict, because we won’t win that with a 12% deficit either.
I think they’re saying that some nations’ options are subjectively dubbed “left and right” based on relative comparison, not the ideologies themselves.
And I’m saying that’s propaganda.
For those who don’t know the difference between practice and ideology it is. Your comments lead me to believe you have a pretty solid grasp of political philosophy.
I don’t think the comment above was an attempt at justification, but an explanation of why we use the terms left and right subjectively.
I get that. But the subjectivity is lack of political education and media bias.
In other words, it’s not subjective, really. It’s a misnomer that’s been spread through propaganda by both parties. And repeated ad nauseam by the media.
People need to understand that the democrats are centrists drifting right, in order to understand that there are other real options, like organizing, striking, and community action/mutual aid. Otherwise, everyone is going to sit on their hands for the next four years, praying that the democrats save them.
The question is: how are they gonna get back on track?
One thing to remember is that Democrats, just like Republicans, are sponsored by the rich, and have their hands tied against taking drastic measures that would actually improve lives of common people against the interest of businesses. This is primarily why key economic points they rallied with never came to fruition.
They even go as far as to have poisoned pill dems that are there to tank any change and take the blame. Joe Libreman, Olympia Snowe were likely not the first. Just the first time I saw that trick. I was dumbfounded when everyone let Manchin and Sinema rob that football like Lucy, again!
I remember when Biden was caught hot mic’ed saying “Nothing would fundamentally change” to a room full of rich donors during his first run. He already knew that he wasn’t gonna do a fucking thing to help anyone but his donors.
Surprise pekachu all those who forgotten the first three card montie “find the single payer” trick during the Obama years.
The system is working exactly as designed. Repetitively even.
They weren’t funny, or socialist enough.
Resulting in them coming off as:
Serious, and Corporatist…
…which is what they are (although the Trumps are obviously way more Corporatist).
You still haven’t figured it out yet? The middle hates echo chambers. The right and left both have echo chambers but they vote against the one that seems more disconnected from reality. By controlling speech and removing content as a knee-jerk reaction to any inconvenient information or opinion as a habit, the left have separated themselves from reality more than the right, by at least a little.
This comes off as threatening to people. Because a mob of people disconnected from reality that will simply silence anyone’s defense of themselves feels like a situation that could get out of hand. And everyone has experienced having their speech controlled. They don’t like it.
All politics is a proxy for culture war. And you lost a culture war by being controlling assholes. Watch you try to silence me right now. Just know that that habit going forward will make you lose more.
Your downvotes speak volumes
Okay, I’ll not downvotes but try to engage.
The right I activly holding back information from their echo chamber that can objectively view as factual (climate change is the most prominent example that comes to mind). So they are indeed ignoring reality in a messuarable way. Why do you think the right is not perseved as a thread then? For example the thread of ignoring climate change or science in general? Do you think “the middle” doesn’t see that as a problem?
How, in your option has the left removed itself from reality? Can you provide some concrete examples please?
I can think of examples for the silencing both on the right or the left. In regards to the left I’m thinking of speakers at university’s beeing canceled or yelled over. And I do see how speach controll might be seen as silencing. Is it a thing? Where I am from it seems to be more of a right wing point pretending that they are speach-controlled while nobody is forcing speech on anybody, just suggesting more inclusive ways of speaking (let’s use pronouns as an example).
So I guess what I am saying is: Is the perception of the left grounded in reality or has it been crafted by right wing propaganda? And since the answer has to be “yes to both”, do you think it’s more grounded in reality than it is constructed by the right?
Are you stupid?
The booking banning party is that lies about covid and the weather is closer to reality than the left?
Yup. Stupid.
At what point do we learn that voting for progress is an illusion, a fable, taught and told to us to prevent us from organizing socially to effect real change?
Yeah. Voting is retarded. Yet if anyone on the right tells you that republican democracy is a failed concept that creates a false sense of control and corruption you call them un-democratic and a nazi. But if you come to that conclusion yourself its ok.
I’m still trying to understand why you only get to choose between two candidates. I get how it works. But so many countries elect their president in 1-2 turns.
Also also, Switzerland’s way of electing it’s executive power is much better.
I’ve been spamming the shit out of this video because it is exactly the answer to that question. Ranked choice voting (or maybe a few others) are the answer.
There are organizations working to get ranked preference voting systems adopted, I donate to them. Fairvote.org is one of them. If the participation of Conservadems and GOPers with fair vote.org bothers you, there are other organizations.
Because other countries made better or updated their Democracies since the US was formed. US never got an update.
I had a friend in the Navy back around 2015 that wholeheartedly believed that this is why America would fail.
The US government is the longest, unchanged Democracy in the world. We’ve had the same documents, modified slightly but not enough, as the rule of land for almost 250 years now.
He equated it to a white board that, over 250 years, kept having stuff added to it, but nothing was “removed,” just crossed out and something written next to it, or over it.
And now 250 years later, we’ve essentially resorted to trying to fill the spaces between lines and letters and around the margins, but they’ve already been filled, so we’re just writing over what’s already written.
It’s about to get a firmware downgrade unfortunately
Yep.
Liz
Cheney
“The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us,” wrote Murphy, who represents the northeastern blue bastion of Connecticut.
The problems, he continued, were obvious: stagnant economic mobility for many Americans and an erosion of social life.
But he went on to argue that the only way to shake up that dynamic was with real solutions that challenged the rich donors who support Democrats — wealthy interests who he said Democrats lacked the stomach to really challenge.
“[W]hen progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists,” wrote Murphy. “We cannot be afraid of fights - especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism…Those are hard things for the left. A firm break with neoliberalism. Listen to poor and rural people, men in crisis. Don’t decide for them. Pick fights. Embrace populism. Build a big tent. Be less judgmental. But we are beyond small fixes.”
