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So why did they win?
(lemmy.sdf.org)
The majority of Americans who voted, at least in the swing states, have voted for the republicans. Why? Do the republican policies reflect popular opinion? Or is it that their vibes are more aligned with the public? Or maybe people are worse off now than they were 4 years ago and are hoping to turn back time? As a non-american I don't quite get it. People must think their lives will materially improve under the republicans, but why?
The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision--a total implosion of the do-nothing "centrist" political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future--healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change--the far right will keep winning. They're the only ones with ideas.
On the other side of that coin is that the voting base literally just collapsed from under the Democrats. They really went full on, "no more half measures" when it came to the left and abandoned any attempt to even lie about progressive leftist political values.
Liberals will blame this loss on the left and they are correct to do so. It is the left's fault because that is how electoral politics work. You didn't court their vote and they didn't vote for you. Cause and effect.
I don't really see this as being the other side of the coin at all. Their voter base collapsed precisely because they failed to articulate any kind of positive vision or embrace any policies that might help the vast majority of Americans. People will not turn out to vote for you when you explicitly tell them you're not going to help them and that they should stop whining.
It is the other side of the coin of Trump winning the popular vote. That is precisely part of that dynamic. He also lost votes overall from last election. The Democrats lost so much more for the reasons you mention which are the reasons I mentioned. We must be clear when mentioning Trump won the popular vote, that Harris LOST so much more than that. She lost votes they would have previously gotten without picking up any from the Republicans (she actually lost about half a percent there as well!).
Second time the Democrats lost the popular vote since 1992. Most likely, the Democrats will shift even more right. They shifted right after getting stomped in 1988.
Democrats (well both major political parties in the US) are capitalist and, as such, are standing on the conveyor belt of capital interest, which constantly moves to the right. They would have to seriously fight against the forces of capital in order to just appear to stay roughly in one place, which they do not. The last time there was any meaningful resistance to capital interest were the Keynesian reforms to get out of the Great Depression, but that was really only to keep capitalism on life support long enough to roll them back.
Yeah it would not surprise me at all if they took exactly the wrong lesson from this, but I think doing so would make it crystal clear that they're not operating in anything like good faith. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Harris was totally unchanged from the percentage who voted for Biden, and the traditional Democratic base just didn't vote for them. The rightward shift overwhelmingly hurt their electoral performance. If they move even further to the right, that's just an indication that they actually believe in those policies; they won't be able to hide behind the fig leaf of "strategic triangulation" anymore. Most of us here on Hexbear are aware of the fact that they actually want to feed immigrants and poor people into a meat grinder, but I'm at least hopeful that this might be the beginning of more ordinary people waking up to that fact.