Dem Post Mortem

[Loren Pechtel]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

 

[southernhybrid]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

I think there are only two who are doing that here although there are many others in the US. And, I find it amusing how different people define what is left and what is right. Imo, one of the biggest problems the Dems have always had is that it is a big tent party with people on the left, the center and the right, while at least in my lifetime, the Republicans are the party of conservative sheep, regardless at the time they are center right or far right. It's much easier to herd the sheep than it is to herd the cats. But, it's time for the cats to unite and devour the sheep while understanding that compromise is how things get accomplished in life and nobody ever gets everything they want.

 

[steve_bank]

Remember the southern democrats were the racist Jim Crow enactors.

The democrat saint JFK denied Sammy Davis an invite to the WH because he had a white wife.

Democrats changed. Supporting blacks and identifying with blue collar workers created a new base.
nHis mantra was ' Hey man, I'm from Scranton and I am one of you union guys'. He was a bullshitter.

IMO Biden was as phony as it gets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden

The left has to learn to listen what people are saying. People got fed up with illegal immigration.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

In these days of broad capitulation, it seems like the options are "Democrats and/or death".

If the Democrats aren't willing to wage war on their principles... What do you call a war when one side isn't even standing up to fight? An extermination? A massacre?

You say they aren't standing up to fight, but what's going on is that you want them to fight a losing battle. The Democrats were already too far left, you want them to go even farther.

If the Democrats are far left, then the Republicans are far to the right of actual far right parties such as the German Nazi Party.

 

[Jarhyn]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

And we saw the fascist tide rising and said "the solution to this is to do this specific stuff". We said it for decades, and watched people just ignore the advice "because trust us"

Instead of taking the advice and leaning towards social policies and emphasizing the value of social policies, we watched the Democrats do nothing as the GOP maneuvered a coup.

We decided to quit propping up an alternative that was never going to work, not for anyone and most certainly not for the folks championing it.

Or, other people did. I still voted for the ineffective alternative.

You cost the country dearly. You and anyone else who leaned right, from the left. The only question was whether they would get more time to dig the hole deeper.

2024 had so many voting irregularities that it's clear that one didn't even matter; 2016 was the last election that mattered, and YOU lot fucked it up by not playing ball with Bernie and taking whatever licks the scoreboard indicated.

 

[Politesse]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

What are you even talking about? The whole thing you're pissed off about is that I say stuff you don't like. That's not "sitting back". My day job is educating young adults in the social sciences. My volunteer work is about rehabilitating imprisoned folks, cleaning up the local river, helping unhomed folks adapt to homed life, and my anti-slavery phone tree advocacy around elections.

Just what is it you do that makes you so up yourself? Yelling at people on the internet to be less radical?

 

[Politesse]

Remember the southern democrats were the racist Jim Crow enactors.

The democrat saint JFK denied Sammy Davis an invite to the WH because he had a white wife.

Democrats changed. Supporting blacks and identifying with blue collar workers created a new base.
nHis mantra was ' Hey man, I'm from Scranton and I am one of you union guys'. He was a bullshitter.

IMO Biden was as phony as it gets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden

The left has to learn to listen what people are saying. People got fed up with illegal immigration.

So you feel the Democrats should... go back to their Jim Crow roots? I'm not seeing an obvious "path forward" in this jumbled rant.

 

[ZiprHead]

In these days of broad capitulation, it seems like the options are "Democrats and/or death".

If the Democrats aren't willing to wage war on their principles... What do you call a war when one side isn't even standing up to fight? An extermination? A massacre?

You say they aren't standing up to fight, but what's going on is that you want them to fight a losing battle. The Democrats were already too far left, you want them to go even farther.

Depends on what you mean by left.

I've already shown many leftist ideals such as UHC and others have majority support. You pooh poohed my use of the term overwhelming but you have yet to admit you were wrong when you said those things weren't supported.

 

[Jarhyn]

In

Remember the southern democrats were the racist Jim Crow enactors.

The democrat saint JFK denied Sammy Davis an invite to the WH because he had a white wife.

Democrats changed. Supporting blacks and identifying with blue collar workers created a new base.
nHis mantra was ' Hey man, I'm from Scranton and I am one of you union guys'. He was a bullshitter.

IMO Biden was as phony as it gets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden

The left has to learn to listen what people are saying. People got fed up with illegal immigration.

So you feel the Democrats should... go back to their Jim Crow roots? I'm not seeing an obvious "path forward" in this jumbled rant.

I find it disingenuous to say that people are "fed up with illegal immigration" as if they didn't manufacture the problem by erecting massive financial barriers to entry.

Really, the issue is that the Democrats aren't willing to treat any of their issues with any sort of gravitas or sense of purpose, other than to protect everything as it benefits those who currently hold power.

The Republicans have for generations been loudly discussing what it is they want to do, even if their purposes for those policy demands are not as advertised.

They talked about it, said what they wanted to do even before they secured power and were ready to inch that agenda forward whenever they could, like a ratchet mechanism, always pushing and painting those who would take back any ground as "extremists".

People who love freedom being disinterested in any of the things that actually preserve their freedom is at issue here.

 

[Politesse]

It's not as though Democrats and Republicans alike didn't have plenty of opportunities to "solve immigration". They just don't, because although it is a popular issue, none of the solutions to it (either lowering the bar for legal entry, or turning us into a police state in a hopeless effort to close our border) are nearly as popular. Whereas the status quo, though unpopular woth the masses, is profitable for the companies and families that fund the whole shebang. I've had "farmers" (ie farm owners, the elites of county politics) straight up admit to me that they don't really want all their workers deported, but support anti-immigration causes anyway because having all their workers suddenly turn into legal citizens backed by a union would be an even greater disaster. I also heard Dolores Huerta speak recently, and she was much more public about the critical need to support the Democrats, essentially because if they win at least there's a door open, roughly translated "even though she's been stabbed in the back aa she walks through at times"!

Nearly the entirety of the US middle class earnestly believes that they are oppressed, which js funny if you spend any time chatting with the constituencies that really have grown accustomed to generational betrayal and loss, from a political system that treats them as props to be villainized or fetishized as the needs of the moment dictate.

 

[Derec]

I've had "farmers" (ie farm owners, the elites of county politics) straight up admit to me that they don't really want all their workers deported, but support anti-immigration causes anyway because having all their workers suddenly turn into legal citizens backed by a union would be an even greater disaster.

Yes, all those people who say that we must not deport illegals because of farm and other low-paid labor never continue to say that for this to be true, they must be kept illegal. Once you give them "path to citizenship" you need to import other illegals who don't have that path.

Deporting illegals and closing the borders to more of them would cause short-term pain, but would increase wages in the agricultural sector while providing an incentive for greater automation, obviating the need for most illegals in the long run.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In these days of broad capitulation, it seems like the options are "Democrats and/or death".

If the Democrats aren't willing to wage war on their principles... What do you call a war when one side isn't even standing up to fight? An extermination? A massacre?

You say they aren't standing up to fight, but what's going on is that you want them to fight a losing battle. The Democrats were already too far left, you want them to go even farther.

If the Democrats are far left, then the Republicans are far to the right of actual far right parties such as the German Nazi Party.

"Too far" is relative to the electorate, not to anything set in stone.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

And we saw the fascist tide rising and said "the solution to this is to do this specific stuff". We said it for decades, and watched people just ignore the advice "because trust us"

Instead of taking the advice and leaning towards social policies and emphasizing the value of social policies, we watched the Democrats do nothing as the GOP maneuvered a coup.

We decided to quit propping up an alternative that was never going to work, not for anyone and most certainly not for the folks championing it.

Or, other people did. I still voted for the ineffective alternative.

You cost the country dearly. You and anyone else who leaned right, from the left. The only question was whether they would get more time to dig the hole deeper.

2024 had so many voting irregularities that it's clear that one didn't even matter; 2016 was the last election that mattered, and YOU lot fucked it up by not playing ball with Bernie and taking whatever licks the scoreboard indicated.

You're just repeating yourself. I'm pointing out that you're in a hole (wanting policies left of the electorate) and your response is dig deeper (move farther from the electorate.)

 

[Derec]

Well, there are still a few useful Democrats in office. You can tell which ones, because most of them have spent time in handcuffs since January.

You measure usefulness by them getting themselves arrested?

But yeah, these days it seems like Republican infighting is doing more to delay Trump's plans than most Democrats... most disheartening.

Other than trespassing and getting themselves detained or arrested, Democrats cannot do much, being in the minority. Blame the voters for not only not voting for Kamala, but also not voting for enough Democratic Senators and Congressmen. Pennsylvania Senate seat or NY-17 should have been winnable, to name one example of each.

But that is also why I don't think the DNC has a prayer of convincing centrist voters that they are the best choice for closeted race chauvinists.

Race-chauvinists? Kamala had proposed a forgivable loan program open to blacks only. Talk about race-chauvinism, but not the kind you likely had in mind!

No one believed for even half a second that Kamala Harris' campaign turn toward the disenchanted middle was genuine.

That is true. The "turn toward the disenchanted middle" was the right strategy, but Kamala Harris was the wrong candidate for it. She was one of the most left-wing Senators during her short tenure there, and was contending the left lane during the 2020 primaries with proposals such as banning fracking and offshore drilling. Moreover, she lacked credibility because she was part of the Biden administration that had disenchanted the middle for the previous three and a half years to bgein with. Joe "Théoden King" Biden was too old, and sadly let himself be manipulated and pulled to the left by Alexandria Occasio Wormtongue and Bernie Sandersman the White.

If anything, anti-Harris propaganda intensified as she tried to pivot.

And much of it coming from the left. She wasn't pure enough for them.

 

[Politesse]

After McCain lost, were Republicans all like, "Oh no, we lost the Midwest suburbs, we need to be MORE WOKE to win them back!"

 

[Derec]

How many times does it have to be said that coming here and claiming asylum is and does not make you an illegal?

Doing so fraudulently does. Vast majority of the people from places like Honduras, El Salvador etc. come here for "better life", not because they are being prosecuted by their governments.
Example of an asylum seeker, whose family admitted the real reason for his "asylum seeking" only after he died:
Photo of Drowned Migrants Captures Pathos of Those Who Risk It All

Mr. Martínez quit his job at Papa John’s, where he had earned about $350 a month. By then, his wife had already left her job as a cashier at a Chinese restaurant to take care of their daughter.
The couple lived with Mr. Martínez’s mother in the community of Altavista, a massive housing complex of tiny concrete houses east of San Salvador, according to Mr. Beltran.
Though Altavista is under the control of gangs, the couple was not fleeing from violence, Rosa Ramírez, Mr. Martínez’s mother, told him. Rather, the grind of surviving as a family on $10 a day had become unmanageable.

 

[Derec]

After McCain lost, were Republicans all like, "Oh no, we lost the Midwest suburbs, we need to be MORE WOKE to win them back!"

When McCain lost in 2008, the word "woke" had not entered the mainstream lexicon. That only happened in 2014 during Ferguson riots wih articles such as this gem.
But there certainly were strategists that argued that Republicans had to shift on issues such as immigration in light of demographic change.

Now, do you know who actually used "woke" unironically in 2017?

 

[Jarhyn]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

And we saw the fascist tide rising and said "the solution to this is to do this specific stuff". We said it for decades, and watched people just ignore the advice "because trust us"

Instead of taking the advice and leaning towards social policies and emphasizing the value of social policies, we watched the Democrats do nothing as the GOP maneuvered a coup.

We decided to quit propping up an alternative that was never going to work, not for anyone and most certainly not for the folks championing it.

Or, other people did. I still voted for the ineffective alternative.

You cost the country dearly. You and anyone else who leaned right, from the left. The only question was whether they would get more time to dig the hole deeper.

2024 had so many voting irregularities that it's clear that one didn't even matter; 2016 was the last election that mattered, and YOU lot fucked it up by not playing ball with Bernie and taking whatever licks the scoreboard indicated.

You're just repeating yourself. I'm pointing out that you're in a hole (wanting policies left of the electorate) and your response is dig deeper (move farther from the electorate.)

The electorate is made up of people. I'm one of them. I'm standing where I am not because I find it a "workable compromise" but because according to decades of asking what the nature of what is right actually is, this is the answer I have found.

I will never not judge the people who will compromise on that, knowing it's wrong, because it is "expedient".

I judge myself for having done that and the sentence of that judgement is to allow it of others to the extent I violate for myself.

I'm not even a very good person! I'm an asshole and I will tolerate all kinds of assholes, but I will not tolerate fascists.

I am not moving. I haven't moved in the decade I have been posting here, on doing what I have understood as right.

The fact is, a lot of people don't actually follow Republicans because they like their direction but rather that they have one at all.

If you want to discuss human realities, that's the big fucking mistake here; Democrats, hell progressives can want something specific and have specific goals to get there, and win elections and smear Republicans who poo-poo on those specific goals with their own poo.

Say what you want but Obamacare at least was specific.

Democrats have no politics beyond conservation, and so the GOP can force the Democrats to dance around whatever politics they want to start shit over.

For my whole life, the GOP has been stirring up culture wars, because the Democrats don't set goals and the GOP does and they don't fucking budge on it even if those goals are devious and horrific and Gilead-shaped, and the culture war weakens the Dems in defending. Dems should not even accept a defense position and going on the attack over why the GOP's loud war against peaceful American citizens is immature and stupid when we have goals to accomplish as a society, and those goals don't include their Gilead fandom, or Gilead fanboys.

The reality is that people right at the swing there, many of them are searching for things like direction and leadership, for validation and being heard and seen, and some of them for the desire to be entertained.

None of those things will be accomplished by Milquetoast do-nothings.

Spoilers spoil the Democrats because they promise to do something, to have goals, to take the country in a direction that isn't "to Gilead".

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The problem is that they have never really looked.

But that does not change the problem he's pointing out: you represent an attitude that cost the country dearly.

You see the fascist tide rising, and the only villains you see are those who were brave enough to call it what it is.

I see the fascist tide rising and I see a bunch of you sitting back and ignoring it because the alternative wasn't good enough for you.

What are you even talking about? The whole thing you're pissed off about is that I say stuff you don't like. That's not "sitting back". My day job is educating young adults in the social sciences. My volunteer work is about rehabilitating imprisoned folks, cleaning up the local river, helping unhomed folks adapt to homed life, and my anti-slavery phone tree advocacy around elections.

Just what is it you do that makes you so up yourself? Yelling at people on the internet to be less radical?

No. I'm saying to quit demand that the government take radical positions. You turn voters away from the democrats. Things like letting universities destroy lives without recourse over allegations of sexual misconduct. You're no doubt going to say it wasn't happening but it was. She would be "protected" while they were deciding--expelling him from any class she was in etc, thus in many cases effectively expelling him from school--but he still owes the loans that he now doesn't have a degree to repay with. And he would not be allowed to present a defense because that might be threatening her.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'm saying to quit demand that the government take radical positions

No, you are demanding the Democrats, a party within government, take no solid positions at all, set no direction, and thus do nothing ineffectively as a a group of actual psychopaths slurp up every bit of power because they manage to appeal to those feelings otherwise listless.

We are demanding instead that they at least take a position other than the ironically conservative one; the Republicans are a progressive party, just progress towards a despicable end. That's why they have any power at all, and it's the doing of do-nothings that empowers this.

I keep saying that the key to stopping it is to form a vision within the democratic party.

Progressives provide such vision, and they steal the votes the Democrats want.

If the Democrats want the votes the Democrats must have a vision.