780
I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
I don't even care whether your attitude is, "Oh no, we fucked up," or you go with option B which is what you're saying. If you have to wonder whether you're gloating or not, then fuck you.
I'm not sure what your problem is. Is nobody allowed to point out the failures in the Democrat campaign?
No post mortem. Blind support for neoliberalism is the only way.
"Now's not the time"
"Nobody could have predicted this"
etc...
As one of the dozens of people who are not American, I was chatting to my cousin the other day, and he said that after seeing the amount of dead kids that have come out of Gaza this year, and taking a mental health week off work due to the anxiety of watching the world not give a shit, he hopes Trump gets elected and America collapses into civil war... That Americans suffer for what their government has done, and is doing. He's not a bad guy. Bad guys don't have breakdowns from watching foreign children murdered.
I can't logically support his view, but I completely emotionally understand it. He knew Trump would be objectively worse for humanity, but is a fascist genocide that kills 2 million people better than a fascist genocide that kills 5 million people? At that point you're really just splitting hairs between failed states, and systems that deserve to be burned to the ground. After enough chances, opportunities, and desensitisation, you want the schadenfreude of watching the American electorate who voted for Trump shooting themselves in the face, destroying their livelihoods and lineage, along with all of their false patriotism and exceptionalism. I still suspect the conserva-russian PsyOps to be the main source of Trumps win, but I wouldn't be surprised if Israel's genocide is the straw that broke the Dems back.
With sympathy, panicked thoughts about what to do next, and quite a bit of horror? Absolutely.
With a casual blaming attitude, waiting for someone else to make it better? Sure, they're allowed to, just like I'm allowed to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Panic doesn't help anything. Neither does horror. We survived one Trump presidency, we'll survive this one, despite it being monumentally worse.
Do what you can to help those you can around you. Work in and grow the support structures in your local community, family, and social circles.
Panic leads to stupid, rash, not well thought out decisions. It should be avoided as much as possible while you take a long, honest, realistic look at the situation and evaluate what is and isn't in your power to effect.
You're right that passive defeatism isn't helpful, but you don't have to go straight to the other extreme of emotional turmoil.
Maybe you'll survive, bunch of people will survive, but not a lot of the minorities the Republicans currently have in their crosshairs. Maybe you'll find all the skeletons in the camps after however many years or decades it will take to defeat fascism.
We had four years under Biden to find the skeletons from Trump's last presidency. Please point me to them, as obviously I've missed something huge like roving squads of minority slayers or something.
It's going to fucking suck. Yes, people will die as a result of horrible policies and the general sociopolitical climate, but people claiming that minorities are literally going to be hunted en mass are out of their gourd.
Too many armed civilians spread through all the population demographics for that to work to the level a lot of people are screaming about.
I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.
Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.
I don't have any great insight to offer, but - yeah, me too
They could, or they might not. The biggest thing is that we already have been through 4 years of Trump. We have some idea of what that will look like, we aren't going in completely blind.
As far as this "being the last election", there's too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.
There's a hell of a lot of posturing and hot air going on and that has gone on from Trumps camp that has absolutely no true way to get force behind it.
Things will be bad, but panicking will just make it thay much harder to distinguish true threats and problems from what isn't.
Think of it like this: Your car is stalled on a train track, and there's a train coming a few minutes away. There's also someone with a gun in your backseat about to shoot you. The train makes more noise, but the more immediate threat is the guy with the gun. Being more calm helps to discern those sorts of distinctions, and that the best solution would be to run from your car rather than try to pump the gas.
For every could, might, and may there's a didn't, might not, etc. You could start pissing blood tomorrow, but I assume you're in good health that you probably won't. But you still technically could.
The news media across the board is optimizing for ad views to support their existence with money. Keeping people stressed out increases viewership, so it's in their best interests to put everything through a funhouse mirror and rely on technicalities and speculation to stoke emotional response. There's been studies done and books published on this.
Bad times are not end times.
I'm not so sure considering there's a good argument to be made that this wasn't a "real" election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a "real" election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don't think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).
This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn't end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn't much, but it was something.
What should my attitude be after decades of saying "triangulation doesn't work, going to the right to chase 'moderate republicans' just depresses turnout." and watching the dems do this over and over and over while getting accused of being a secret republican because I point this out?
You know what else doesn’t work?
Not voting and letting Trump get elected.
That shit’s going to do more damage to the left than a million Hillary Clintons depressing the turnout.
(I have more I could say on it, especially pertaining to the difference between accurately describing sins of the Democrats which are depressing turnout versus making up imaginary sins of the Democrats which people will then believe which will depress turnout, but I’m not planning on a long exchange so I’ll leave it there.)
Democrats can maybe not run a totally dogshit campaign?
What's the alternative? Democrats do not fail, they can only be failed?
There will be a lot of this. Same thing happened with Hillary. I'm not American, I don't need to discriminate here, I'm writing off all of the US.
But if you're there... yeah, that anger seems justified. When the shit that's about to happen happens don't let them hide behind the blame game.
I wasn't talking about Hasan Piker, really. I don't agree with him, of course. Let me put it this way: If he'd flipped it around and talked about what a good strategy it was for Trump to get all his followers heated up on lies and ready for violence, get billionaires and media to go in the tank for him, and coordinate with enemies of the US to destabilize our democracy in order to get elected so he could keep kicking out the safeguards and guard rails once he's back in and firmly above the law, seize on any imperfection or compromise in the Democratic side and play it up to the point that a whole bunch of suckers on the left buy into it and depress the vote so he can win, and unfold whatever's coming now... well, if he'd said that, then he wouldn't be wrong. But looking at it purely from a standpoint of strategy, in this context, is missing a massive other aspect. Talking about the Democratic strategy, which I think Piker is probably doing sincerely here, is missing the point in the same way. Even talking about how elected officials can get the support of the voters seems like it'll probably be almost a moot point by 4 years from now.
What I was talking about was OP and the little gang of people who've been spreading the narrative that the Democrats are the worst thing, basically indistinguishable from fascism, and are now having trouble hiding their eagerness to double down on assuring everyone that it's all the Democrats' fault and this whole thing was inevitable. If any of you guys are inside the United States and honestly believe this, have been withholding support until something more to the your liking comes along, thinking that is a good way to make progress... oh my brother, just you wait, and I hope it's not too bad for you, when it comes.
That's why I posted the meme. If OP's really in the US and on the left, they're going to be learning a whole bunch of new songs to sing over the next couple of years, I think.
But why would you talk about the republican strategy? After-all Trump got almost as many votes as he did back in 2020, only ~2,5 million less. And it's not like their strategy wildly differed from what they did 2020. Trump got his followers heated up, he tried to coordinate with foreign entities to find kompromat, he tried to undermine the electoral process, he tested the safeguard and guard rails Jan 6. The only really new thing he did was having billionaires be more prominent in supporting him. But none of it changed his votes.
The question you should be asking is "If trump got roughly as many votes as he did back in 2020, how did he win both the electoral college and popular vote?" I don't see how that question could be answered by looking at the republican party, they didn't do anything new and their result was also the same. IMO the answer to that question lies with the democratic party. There is something the democrats did or didn't do that cost them 14 million votes (81 mil in 2020 vs 67 mil in 2024). And realistically a large part of those 14 million voters were "Fuck Trump" voters who were sick and tired of his shit. But this time Trump went full fascist and somehow people were more apathetic towards his?
I kinda agree with Hasan on the part that trying to appear more moderate when your opponent is a full blown fascist doesn't really do anything. You just come across as a lite version of fascism. Maybe democrats should've stayed more in opposition to the republicans because when the voters don't want fascism, they also don't a lighter version of fascism. I don't know what went wrong, I'm not a political pundit. I just see republicans getting roughly the same amount of votes and the democrats losing ~20% of the votes and I just don't see how that is not the democrats fault when they're the ones who lost the votes.
Yeah, no, we're on the same page. Whether you pin it on the OP or Piker. There are a bunch of presumably leftist pundits that have been asking to see the left's management all through this process (and I mean since 2016) and will continue to act offended that anybody would suggest there is a responsibility in not being persuaded when the alternative is a fascist anarchocapitalist cabal.
As last time, the response to any mention of this will be "it's their fault for not convincing me", which has never been a legitimate argument but will be outright insulting if (when) things start to go poorly.
A better case is that the entire country shifted right, especially fed by a mass of new protofascist youth, but you don't get extra credit for only being part of the problem and not the whole problem.
In any case, like I said earlier, I have no obligation to split hairs. The US has failed as a country and as a people. They can apportion blame however they see fit. For the rest of us it is now a matter of how to build an international community of democracies in the upcoming climate. We all have to write off the US and find a new way forward without them.
I'm not gloating, I just said I didn't want to seem like I was because I'm not trying to antagonize my political allies. I'm sorry if it seems like I am because that really is the last thing I want to do. I want Republicans to lose elections and I'm just putting forth a theory of why they didn't last night that seems persuasive to me because I'm still operating under the assumption we'll have more elections (which, like, very TBD, but either way I think building a coalition of like-minded people will be important).
I am absolutely gloating.
Four fucking years of telling liberals exactly what will happen.
Four years of liberals plugging their ears and closing their eyes, continuing to spew their neoliberal fascist rhetoric.
To any liberal reading this: yes, I fucking told you so. Guess reality was on my side again. You deserve Trump.
As if the party that wholeheartedly accepted genocide as a means to an end was going to do shit for any queer folks or leftists if they won.
Obama won his election after being a good bit to the right of either Biden or Harris. I think most of what's changed since then is the awesome power of the influence operations which succeed at creating alternate realities for people where Trump is important to vote for, and Harris is important not to vote for, depending on the person being targeted.
I'm not trying to be closed-minded about it, and maybe my meme as applied to you was unfair. I'm a little bit on edge when talking with the "what the Democrats did wrong" crowd on Lemmy, since a lot of them also like to make up imagined sins for the Democrats, helping to create that alternate reality, to go alongside any well-intentioned criticism they are giving.
The bottom line is, the Democrats lost for a variety of reasons some of which were their fault and some weren't, and we are thoroughly fucked as a result. I don't think people realize how bad it's going to be.
Obama was about as moderate as Harris and Biden. I'd even say his campaign was more progressive than theirs. He's been the only Democratic candidate to run on a platform of change in the last two decades. All the others have run on a platform of the status quo, even Biden.
This is correct. Propaganda works, its just that simple.