Yves here. It’s easy to get whiplash trying to keep one’s eye on the many fallout fronts after Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday. One evolving spectacle is the much-needed Democratic party recriminations and hopefully the purging of the too many who hitched their fates to elites and failed even to credibly pretend that they cared about ordinary people. Indeed, as I have had some members of the PMC tell me before the election, they were repelled by the mainstream Democrat hostility towards whole swathes of Americans and the offensive insistence that they were superior and therefore solely entitled to rule.
If the party is to sufficiently reform itself, it needs to expel its architects of failure, starting with the DNC. Naturally, the guilty are instead loudly trying to shift blame. The latest, revealing spectacle comes in Common Dreams. It features the head of the DNC getting ugly over Sanders’ correct and long-standing critique that the party has abandoned its roots (he of all people should know, given how badly he was treated).
In an interesting bit of synchronicity, the Hill has just published a story that indicates that many party operatives understand what a disaster the election was and that a big course correction is necessary. But will enough of the old guard close ranks to keep them largely on their current bad course? The Hill’s Trump win leaves Democrats talking about how to start over suggests that at least some insiders have reached the 12-step bottom-hitting phase:
Democrats say they need a fresh start after President-elect Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Harris, which saw him sweep the swing states, narrow Democratic margins in various blue states and win over key parts of the electorate….
“We have to burn the house down and begin anew,” said one prominent Democratic strategist who has worked on recent presidential campaigns.
“We had a warning in 2016 that this wasn’t working, we had another chance in 2020 to realize Trump wasn’t going away and was only growing his base, and we ignored it and pretended this was a midterm election.”
As Democrats perform the autopsy of Harris’s campaign and piecing together what went wrong, they are quickly concluding that their party apparatus and strategies are dated or nonfunctional….
Democrats in recent years have lost their way, the strategist added, appealing to “New York Times elites” while snubbing working-class voters who traditionally supported Democrats.
Contrast this perspective with the DNC blather below, which repeats blatantly bogus defenses, like Biden was the best labor president evah when most unions members thought otherwise.
Nevertheless, despite the breath of fresh air from the Hill account, at least in my media ganders, I see way too much desperate clutching at the story lines that led to the Democrat loss (and divert attention from voter concerns about their standard of living and immigration) such as Trump is a fascist and his voters are misogynists.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
After U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders offered his perspective on why Vice President Kamala Harris lost both the popular vote and Electoral College to President-elect Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election—repeating his consistent warning that the Democratic Party must center economic justice—top official Jaime Harrison signaled once again that the party is unlikely to hear Sanders’ call.
Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a former lobbyist for clients including Bank of Americaand BP, called Sanders’ statement “straight up BS” and touted pro-worker policies embraced by the Biden-Harris administration, suggesting that the party has sufficiently worked for economic justice—and appearing to ignore all evidence that working-class voters gravitated toward Trump and the Republican Party.
“[President Joe] Biden was the most-pro worker president of my lifetime—saved union pensions, created millions of good-paying jobs, and even marched in a picket line,” said Harrison.
This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial… https://t.co/6s4iR5Xtdq
— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) November 7, 2024
Biden has been praised by progressives and labor unions for establishing pro-worker rules on overtime pay and noncompete agreements, urging Amazon workers in Alabama to unionize, presiding over a National Labor Relations Board that investigated numerous unfair labor practices by large corporations and sided with workers, and becoming the first U.S. president to walk on a picket line with striking workers.
He also worked closely with Sanders on one of his signature pieces of legislation, the Build Back Better Act, which would have invested in expanded child tax credits, public education, and free community college, among other provisions—but the bill was torpedoed by right-wing U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), then a Democrat, and the Republican Party.
In his statement on Thursday, Sanders said “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
He asked whether the “well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” would “learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?”
“Probably not,” he added.
While Harris included in her platform plans to end price-gouging in the food industry, expand the child tax credit, and extend Medicare coverage to home healthcare, dental, and vision care, she alarmed progressive advocates by proposinga smaller capital gains tax for wealthy Americans.
As Common Dreamsreported on Thursday, Biden advisers have also posited this week that Harris muddied her early message that Trump was a “stooge of corporate interests” by elevating billionaire businessman Mark Cuban as one of her top surrogates.
Whether Democratic leaders including Harrison will listen to those concerns from Biden’s inner circle remains to be seen, but he expressed hostility when the message came from Sanders.
“There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one,” said Harrison.
Journalist Mitchell Northam noted that the Democratic Party has studiously ignored and expressed hostility toward Sanders’ call for centering economic justice and cutting ties with Wall Street since the 2016 election, when the senator ran for president as a Democrat.
Bernie had a pulse on where all of this was heading back in 2015/16. He had a coalition. He was speaking to voters. And the Democratic party shoved him out of the way.
Also, as chair of the DNC, this result has to land on Jaime Harrison's shoulders too. Just take your L, man. https://t.co/ZMv4hdnuZt
— Mitchell Northam (@primetimeMitch) November 7, 2024
Sanders’ message this week got an unlikely boost from conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2020 dismissed the veteran, consistently popular senator as “useless” and “marginal.”
“I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center,” wrote Brooks. “But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch applauded Brooks’ “striking moment of self-awareness.”
Progressive Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid expressed hope that Democratic leaders such as Harrison will do the same.
“Typically, after a major electoral defeat,” he said, “party leaders step aside to create opportunities for fresh perspectives and voices that haven’t yet had a chance to lead.”
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The real fireworks will start on Jan. 21 when people wake up and realize not much has changed since Jan. 19.
one can only use over-the-top language a discrete number of times before words like “1935 German” lose all meaning as a rhetorical device. which is a shame and disservice to the actual victims of 1930’s social movements.
The real fireworks start when people realize a narrative about who appeals to the working class isn’t the same as any actual policy that stops the rising inequality, homelessness, etc.
I would only add that the actual working class includes groups of people demonized by both the elite and the rank and file of the party that has a narrative appealing to a segment of the working and petit bourgeois classes, while promoting the elimination, suppression, or dis-employment of other segments.
Whether it will be 1935 or something else, it remains to be seen what form the fireworks will take among the now seemingly more diverse rank and file on the right when “first they come for…”
Let’s talk about Newsom’s California Air Resources Board $1.50 extra gas tax over the next three years heaped onto the highest gas taxes in the nation. In Southern California many poor and middle class people drive several hundred miles a day to work. Commuters living in the asteroid belts outside of L.A. are not going to.
https://www.kcra.com/article/california-air-resources-board-transparency-vote-gas-prices/62655320
“Just buy an electric car”, says Newsom. The grid is collapsing already and there are dozens of power failures, scheduled and accidental already plus a commensurate increase in electricity prices thanks to his PUC appointees.
Agree with your comment about gas costs. But I live in CA and this was the first year in memory without rolling blackouts during peak heat. Distributed power (i.e. rooftop solar) was the major reason. CA net metering rules, (watered down for new installations), combined with Federal incentives helped drive adoption. Solar, particularly when combined with battery storage, allow time shifting consumption of grid power from peak to non peak times.
How do you say Gilet Jaunes in Californian?
Yeah, we can ask the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians etc. how they feel about it
Thank you.
As for the feckless and useless “Democrats” (heh!)… After the worst candidate and worst campaign in history who gives a damn. Let the infighting begin!
Never looked at Harris’ platform because nothing attached to her name had any history behind it. When every word out of your mouth is a generality or trash talk about your opponent, you don’t get to fall back on empty words in defense of serious allegations like Bernie’s.
Biden has not been a friend to labor, he’s been a friend to donors. He screwed the railroad workers and leaned on the dockworkers. Thanks to Biden the scourge of wokeism (extremely misinformed and weaponized identity theory) has soaked into union culture. That will not help at organizing time.
Struggling with “voices that haven’t yet had a chance to lead.” This was the cover used to source and elevate spokespersons for nearly nonexistent movements within the party, a cynical ploy to diminish African Americans descended from slaves as a new generation of ADOS were having trouble figuring out why they were Democrats. To replace them, the borders were opened. I do “get” that strategy. Modern ADOS make lousy fieldhands and someone has to pick those vegetables.
But my real anger has always been over the elevation of transgender voices at the expense of the gay community. None of these new voices were brought in to widen the dialogue, all were used to silence other (older) voices who were tired of not being heard and who were who were making noises about replacing their “selected” leaders.
Just an uninformed theory from a nonscientist but I very strongly believe the party’s pro-transgenderism is about something else entirely. Our food is changing us biologically and rather than own up to which additives are doing what, I believe Big Food stealthily funded wokeism as a cover for the sudden upswing in gender confusion. If I’m right, future generations will have a gendered generation gap that will make culture, if not life in general, very interesting.
Oh, and for the record Bernie is well to my right and always has been. I still wish he was finishing up his second term if only for the one million Ukrainians and Palestinians who would still be alive and in possession of all their limbs, all lost in service to empire.
This is baseless, ahistorical transphobia, Mark—especially if Bernie is well to your right. Food does not make you trans. “Gender confusion” is . . . tasteless. Folks like me are not at fault for this.
Sorry if I gave offense but if you know who you are, I wasn’t referencing you. “Gender confused” is a specific reference to young people, puberty blockers and other medical interventions. It’s fine with me if the USA is becoming gayer. Gay is gay, straight is straight, anything in between is also fine, I’m in the wrong body is something else that we need to find out more about.
And my apologies to the moderators for all the work today.
You are correct to say that food doesn’t make you trans. The explosion in trans identifying individuals is far better explained by the enormous amounts of money and propaganda being disseminated by the trans industry which targets the young and the naïve, exemplified by the Democratic power-broker Pritzker family in Illinois amongst others:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/Transgender-Astroturfing.pdf
Trans is a multi-level marketing scheme with big money behind it. It has been force-injected into academia, education, politics, and business. It is an offshoot of the transhumanism movement which seeks to alter the biology of humans with technology, promising a bright new future of happiness free from discontent and disease for the right price. Hubris on an industrial scale, literally if things go according to plan.
Gender confusion is simply another way of saying gender dysphoria, a real condition that mostly affects teen aged boys and girls undergoing the travails of puberty. 95% of these cases resolve themselves when the individual turn 25 or so, many of them coming to realize they are in fact gay or lesbian. Trans can therefore be seen as a kind of conversion therapy, it’s not that you’re gay it’s that you have actually been born into the wrong body.
You are also correct to point out that folks like you aren’t at fault. You have been on the receiving of a well funded campaign of misinformation that presents false choices and focuses on trans at the expense of others. You’ve been sold a bill of goods about what is possible; you are livestock to the individuals and organizations I linked above.
It has been enlightening to see the Democrats target their own minorities as the new deplorables. I repeat myself in stating that if they cared about class based initiatives that would materially impact voters lives, like a federal job guarantee and Medicare for All, they’d be helping a huge swath of people. Including trans individuals.
As for why we have so many people interested in Trans stuff now… who can say? No one really. Because we’re not even allowed to ask the questions. Which is another problem the Democrats are responsible for creating.
That was a very insightful post, Mark, thank you.
One thing for certain, food additives are cause girls to reach puberty younger and younger; as young as 8. The brain is on another track and hence the hormonal changes might feel very strange to basically a child.
There is much to unpack behind the trans phenomon. It is very strange to me that discussion is not allowed and that anybody who isn’t 1000% behind it is branded a monster. This issue, which involves, about 1% of the population, has completely replaced discussions about any other issue.
There’s also been a world wide decline in men’s sperm counts over the last 20-30 years. Are hormone disrupters in the environment or in food additives the cause?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/health/sperm-counts-decline-debate/index.html
Thanks, flora. I first encountered the theory of endocrine disrupting chemicals causing the shocking drop in sperm counts in Shanna Swan’s book “Count Down.” I’m surprised (or maybe not) that this book wasn’t more discussed in the media.
Scents and perfumes are hormonal.
I’m unaware of the effect of food additives but, there is a real potential for hormone disrupters to be found in the groundwater some folks drink. In particular, those on private water supplies (i.e. wells) in unsewered areas. A 2019 article in Psychology Today highlights the issue of chemicals in gender fluidity.
From the article:
“Of course the GLABT community rejects the chemical reduction of what is seen as a voluntary choice and is hostile to the notion that a non-binary orientation is somehow the result of a disorder.
Whatever one’s opinions about such matters, it is short-sighted to ignore actual environmental threats to brain development.
Gender dysphoria is certainly not reducible to any single cause, chemical or otherwise. Indeed, there are several psychological correlates. These include any kind of trauma experienced during childhood. Another possible factor is abusive parenting.”
(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201911/gender-fluidity-and-hormone-disruptors)
Big Food obfuscating evidence….surely you jest!
The more I think about the trans issue, the more I think of it as essentially a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois phenomenon. In other words, it’s a manifestation of class anxieties more than it is an instance of some new enlightenment about human biology.
This might be unpopular here but I do think “masculine” and “feminine” are very crude categories and largely exist to bolster and reinforce existing- and in this case, truly ancient (i.e. Greek)- hierarchical structures which have persisted in Western civilization in one form or another for centuries.
One of the big problems US society faces is that we became very affluent very quickly but have not been unable to sustain that affluence on a broad basis. While that wealth was still predominately concentrated at the top, there was a period of time- roughly, the 1950s and 60s- where it was relatively broadly shared. This manifested in both high-paying, relatively low-skilled work as well as increasingly technical or managerial work which required greater education. For a few decades now, both of these large categories of workers have been facing increasing levels of precarity. Any edge that person can use to their advantage in the employment realm is more important than ever.
What I’m NOT saying is that the trans phenomenon is a sham. I do have trans friends and I take them at their word about their own experience. I can easily see how it would be difficult and stultifying to fit into the social expectations of what a woman or a man ought to be- I think masculinity especially has become increasingly narrow and rigid over the last few decades. I do think a loosening of these categories would be better for our society. If someone was born with a penis and testicles but would like to wear dresses, for a crude example, this is not a big deal and nobody should freak out about it.
Public debate about how humans get categorized and how they’re treated on that basis is valid. People that some of us might regard as strange do deserve dignity, safety, life, liberty, etc. just as much someone who fits well into the existing hierarchical structure. To me that’s fundamentally valid and at this point in history this issue is called trans rights or something very much like that. These issues belong in our political debate.
The working out of these issues largely takes place in the academy. Again, I think this is fundamentally valid. New ideas, no matter how strange they might seem to some of us at first, need to be explored, developed, tested, reevaluated, etc. The academy is the place for this and this is largely where trans social theory has come from.
But the academy is significantly a bourgeois institution and it’s members are often filled with bourgeois expectations. Students entering the academy are hoping to gain special access to interesting/lucrative employment by way of this institution. I believe that enough of these people, a critical mass, grew up comfortably enough that they didn’t have to think much about class, so class doesn’t enter their thinking about social problems. It’s mostly invisible but lip service is often paid to it- largely, I think, because Marx is actually still quite formidable and a lot of these people haven’t really tried to understand him but are hedging that there might be something to it.
Class is actually hard to think about and understand. In this age of identity, it is treated as the opposite, as being very easy to understand. As such, it gets treated as just another identity. To make matters worse, virtually every other ‘identity’ is represented in virtually every class. Thus, class gets tossed aside as too messy and it also doesn’t get taken seriously because ‘the bad people’ (e.g. ‘cis white hetero,’ ‘karens’) are also represented in every class, which and makes class an inconvenient category.
Bourgeois liberals want to help the people they see as most beleaguered as an entire group. Black Americans seemingly being chief among them but certainly also trans people, women, gay people, etc. The muddleheaded thinking around this leads to an inability to make political priorities and set an agenda. This you see in the common phenomenon the American liberal’s desire to help everyone all at once. It’s seemingly impossible to do so and seems to me to be woefully naive, if well-intentioned.
So, the bourgeois liberal looks for avenues outside of the realm of democratic politics and has found avenues within academia, local government, and, increasingly, in the corporate realm. The DEI mindset can take root I’m these pathways but it can never successfully cross over into actual political efficacy. Thus, you have a situation that the competition for elite jobs which require education- an increasingly SCARCE commodity- are being doled out on the misguided, though kindly intended, basis of identity.
This causes class antagonisms because many of people who get these jobs- their other identity markers notwithstanding- are often people who grew up fairly comfortable while a good number of the vilified ‘cishets’ and ‘karens’ grew up truly impoverished and probably never dreamed of a career outside of ordinary drudgery, which many are willing to do. But when they can’t keep a roof over their head, even when doing this drudgery, they understandably start to become embittered.
Liberal politicians don’t really speak to these people’s needs anymore and right-wing ones are more likely to these days. The Dems thought they had unions in the bag. That’s arrogance, pure and simple. Much like the academics, their lives are so much cleaner and easier when they don’t have to actually think about things in class terms but it is class which bit them in the ass in this election and they deserve it. Most of the rest of us don’t, however.
Excellent post Ypg. Thanks
You knocked it out of the park. Excellent post.
Ever since Clinton embraced the banksters in 1993, the Democratic Party’s messaging strategy has been distraction – throw something at the wall and see if it sticks to take the rank and files minds off the fact that the Party is no longer looking out for them. DEI just stuck more solidly than most.
More like breaking down all of society into ever-so-smaller identity groups and setting them all against each other to compete in a zero-sum contest to see who can get crumbs dropped from the rich man’s table.
Or as J. P. Morgan put it:
“By dividing the people, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”
Social media stuck even better!
Mark, thank you for this:
“Oh, and for the record Bernie is well to my right and always has been. I still wish he was finishing up his second term if only for the one million Ukrainians and Palestinians who would still be alive and in possession of all their limbs, all lost in service to empire.”
If in the Heinleinian fascist universe of Starship Troopers service at least guaranteed citizenship, does that mean the empire is actually worse than hypothetical fascist regime?
I guess Democrat’s party advances one funeral at a time. And apparently there has to be lots of funerals before they even to stop digging in.
The acceleration of the “funerals” are as necessary on the RINO side as well, whether physical or by any other means.
The RINO’s all need to be purged, especially the war mongers – starting with Graham and McConnell.
The RINO”s will be an easy out compared to the Marxist Democrats.
Marxist? Do we even know what that means? Have you ever read Capital vol. 1? or vols 2 or 3 ?
Folks make themselves look ignorant when they throw around these grand, sweeping political labels incorrectly. Although he became politically active, Marx was primarily an economist.
Calm yourself. You put me in mind of an old commenter who’s been booted twice.
We’re friendly here.
Friends point out to their friends when they say something but have failed to grasp the content of the terms they use. It helps people think better.
If I offended you with facts, that is on you. As Yves’ says: we don’t like it when people “make shit up”.
What exactly is offensive to you?
Label-slinging annoys me too, JonnyJames. Marxist! Communist! Nazi! Socialist! Fascist! Anarchist! Liberal! Neo-liberal! Neo-conservative! Progressive! Gah!
Perhaps we should begin by, politely, asking any label-slinger to ‘unpack’ (I have been watching too many John Mearsheimer interviews) that term for us. Just what does it mean to YOU. Positive or negative connotation. Because that’s the problem with labels: they’re shorthand for often unreasoning hate. Or the opposite.
I dearly wish there was more – or, indeed, any – truth to the claim that Democrats are, sympathise with, or have even the most passing acquaintance, with Marxists and Marxism. Instead, it is a mind-numbingly inane, comprehensively content-free accusation. Anti-communism is bone-deep in American politics going back to the emergence of the AFL and turn of the century populists like William Jennings Bryan.
Does that means I am also indulging a kind of reverse label-slinging? I don’t think so. Let’s unpack some of the characteristics that could meaningfully justify calling someone a Marxist.
1) using dialectical materialism as a means to critically analyse the world around us and its conditions.
2) understanding history according to the emergence of, and conflict between, different classes that are, in turn, produced by socio-economic conditions. That class struggle is the overdetermining force providing the fuel for historical conflict and development, above and beyond other social or demographic dividing lines.
3) it’s not unique to Marxism but perhaps it bears inclusion since it is elsewhere becoming rare as hen’s teeth: analysing the present in the context of the histories that got us there rather than stumbling from one moment to the next in a state of real or feigned confusion, as if suddenly waking up from a stupor in a new place, like Number 6 at the start of each episode of The Prisoner.
4) understanding, and not losing sight of, capitalism’s essential elements: private control of the means of production, exploitation of labour to produce profit, alienation of workers from both those means and the things their labour produces (but which they do not own), fetishism of commodities. Everything – social relations, ideology, culture, develops from the reproducibility of these core, non-negotiable fundamentals.
Elon Musk and his red-pilled baby-fash confreres would probably assay some pithy takedown at this point, talking about how because Kamala Harris believes in DEI and therefore a redistribution of ‘privilege’ rather than the oh-so-dynamic and free-wheeling joys of pure meritocracy (whatever that means), and how that is akshually the true essence of Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and all points in between. I however am blessed (or cursed) with a memory, and therefore recall that right-wingers screeching how anything from expanding Medicare to paid parental leave is only two steps removed from the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao is itself as American as pecan pie.
Oh, and the eagle-eyed reader may have noticed that I did a bit of label-chucking myself in calling Elon Musk a fascist (I refuse to refer to him by first-name only, as if her were some beloved cetacean or long-serving steam engine. He gets no such parasocial love from me).
Why did I call him a baby fascist – unreasoning hate? I don’t think so. The most backward, decadent, or brutishly self-interested sections of the capitalist ruling class have flirted lustily with fascism since the Model T was trundling along the streets of America’s cities. And why not? Fascism is, per Marxism, not some pathological eruption of moral disease. It is, rather, a kind of capitalism after dark – the crudest defence of private property by dispensing with bourgeois democracy or rule of law in favour of the repressive apparatus of the state. The appeals to militarism and denunciations of internal enemies are the product of its primary purpose: solving the contradictions of capitalist production and class struggle in points of crisis by resorting to their violent suppression.
That is not to say Elon Musk, Trump and their coterie of fascists in Pampers are ready to unleash the Führerprinzip on an unsuspecting America, But, rather, in the depths of their philistinism and brutishness, they have less compunction than others in the ruling class in displaying fascination with the violent and repressive methods they would all deploy, or accept deployment of, if they felt their positions or power were threatened from below.
Funny thing is, I actually agree that there is thought-terminating tendency to the over-application of labels. Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism would be one example. Spending the last two years screaming that Russia is committing what must be the world’s least effective genocide (or, perhaps not one at all) in Ukraine would be another.
I even think the Democrats have done an enormous disservice to popular understanding of the threat posed by Trump and company by their feckless, essentially opportunistic use of the label of Fascism but not in the way you might think. As noted, Trump, Elon Musk and friends are flirting with, and fascinated by, fascism. Trump has spent the last 4 years out of office building a base of support that could certainly be mobilised in service of a fascist takeover of power. That doesn’t mean the entire ruling class is behind him, or even that the next 4 years won’t be like his first 4 in office, characterised by incessant behind-the-scenes fighting as different sections of the state, and the sections of the ruling class to which they are allied, fight for supremacy. But is it really in dispute that, since 2016, Trump and his backers have cohered a base of support in the ruling class, media, military/police and wider electorate that bears many of the hallmarks of a fascist movement?
Unfortunately and as we see now, post-election, with successions of Democrats kissing the ring and congratulating themselves on nobly enabling a peaceful transfer of power, the months spent sounding the Fascist-Alarm was done with as much seriousness as we’ve come to expect from the B Team of American capitalism. They’ve exhausted the word’s meaning by deploying it without consequences and then abandoning it when no long electorally advantageous. As a result, they’ve actually vaccinated swathes of the population to the real dangers Donald Trump poses. And then fled the stage safe in the knowledge that, should fascism truly descend on American society, they will be safe in the knowledge they will always, as ever, be on the right – that is ruling class – side of the equation.
But that doesn’t mean the word itself has no meaning or utility as a means to describe what we see happening around us. Just as Marxism doesn’t lose its meaning because Republicans delight in calling a dreary capitalist panjandrum like Kamala Harris the reincarnation of Rosa Luxemburg!
Well, the 2028 election is beginning and I’m guessing that a couple dozen Marxist billionaires just changed their voter registration to Democrat. So, in four years we can watch the Central Committee of the Communist Party slug it out for President of the Union of Socialist States.
Marxist billionaires?
Central Committee of the Communist party?
You make no sense.
“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”
— Voltaire
Based upon what I have seen of Chuck’s posting history, he probably just forgot a sarc tag …
Marxist Democrats!
HAH
Good one, Big Dawg!
Well, they’re as honest as Chico, they communicate as well as Harpo, and they walk a bit like Groucho.
Got that note from Bernie on Thursday.
Really affirmed that aligning with his Politics and Values was a good, right and solid political choice for me years ago. The wife’s timeline reminder Monday was a photo of us with him in 2015.
Smiling all—younger, happier and optimistic about a possible future.
Still got some of that.
Too bad things turned out differently.
This is the nut now:
Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power?
Class politics!!! Good luck with that. Until you or your neighbor start selling apples for a nickel the wokeists and their corporate, academic and media patrons will rule the day. This Harrison guy…I wonder where he gets his manicure? We would have called him a brother back in the day, but in the new day we will call him ‘a person of color’. That’s sufficiently adjacent for he and his ‘associates’ to don their (D) monogramed knee pads and patronize all the guys with the smudged overalls and name ‘Bill’ on their plumber uniforms.
Until the labor unions get ‘woke’, cut the Dems off and begin proposing their own political and economic solutions we can expect the glacial change to continue. Labor leaders need to be forced by the rank-and-file to reach out beyond their own narrow constituency. Sure there is a risk of getting thrown out of the increasingly small tent. But what are the Dems gonna do…make sure the wanna-be unions don’t get card-check? I wanna hear some working class dialogue.
Unfortunately, and as we have persistently seen since Biden’s sorry term in office began*, American labour unions are almost as great of an obstacle to the emergence of organised working class political activity as the Democratic Party to which they mostly bound neck and crop.
It is an article of faith on the soft, DSA-aligned left that unions are the salvation of American workers, but there is just as much evidence that they are instruments of bourgeois rule and ruling class interests. And why not? Unions have existed and collaborated with every kind of capitalist regime, from dictatorships to actual fascists.
Just a few recent examples of unions betraying their own members or otherwise operating as handmaids of the Democratic Party include: rolling over when the Biden admin intervened in the 2022 railroad dispute; teachers unions colluding to force their members and students back into classrooms during the Covid pandemic; AFT head Randi Weingarten’s photo-ops to Ukraine, where she dutifully parroted every gobbet of propaganda dreamed up in the feverish imaginations of the State Dept; the farcical vote suppression that say incoming (and DSA-approved) UAW head Shawn Fain elected on a 9% turnout, and his role in ramming through company-friendly contracts at the Big 3 despite widespread desire to fight and claw back some of the historic losses imposed by Obama as part of the auto bailout.
The list goes on and on, the methods – of ignored mandates to strike, endlessly bringing the same contract to member to vote while wearing them down, refusing to use strike funds while sitting on billions in assets – are wearily familiar. I could mention corruption, but what would be the point? That is hardly surprising given that the bureaucratic heights of unions are crawling with the same type of people as the Democratic Party machine.
Question is – what is to be done? The assets, funds and infrastructure of unions belong, of course, to the rank-and-file. But how to get hands on them, and is it even possible to turn these Democrat-aligned institutions – and pillars of American capitalism – into instruments of the working class?
*I realise this has been the case since before Biden’s election, but the last 4 years have provided particularly rich pickings when it comes to examples of union bureaucrats shafting their members and either forcing through disadvantageous contracts or ignoring/suppressing mandates to strike.
Organize, educate, persist.
Thanks for this post. The neoliberal Dem estab’s big tent is getting smaller and smaller. Useful Idiots Katie and Matt list a quick rundown of everyone the Dem estab is blaming. / ;)
Dems Shoot Themselves in the Face (with the help of Dick Cheney)
Corporate media manages to blame every possible demographic…except Democrats
https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/dems-shoot-themselves-in-the-face
Sorry Bernie. Grassroots anything isn’t going be allowed in the Democrat party as it exists today. Just keep an eye on the reaction to your mild suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the Dems ought to take a teensy tiny look at the way they are doing things and have a “very serious political discussion” about it. (Is that like a sternly worded letter?) Expect more reactions like Harrison’s. Harris ran the most perfect campaign evah! Even Queen Latifa endorsed her! (So did Bernie Sanders, come to think of it…)
The time for discussions has long since passed. The Democrat party can not fail, it can only be failed. I agree with the anonymous strategist. Burn it down and start over.
Yes. The DNC is not going to fire itself, nor strip its corporate overlords of power. And they have successfully brainwashed 99% of the population into thinking third parties are Bad and Not The Answer.
But how to burn them down, what could upset their applecart? Not too many things. A cabal of altruistic billionaires could buy them out. Or a group of labor unions could get a junkyard tort lawyer to sue them for being a private club run by corrupt elites instead of an actual party; maybe that could get them thrown off ballots themselves, or start operating under court orders to abide by primary results etc.
Good point, Dr. John,
I was a Bernie-Broad but hate the way he plays both sides. Back in 2016, I supported his ideas: Medicare for All, “The business model of Wall St. is fraud”, etc. But then he trashed his own campaign telling us what a “good guy” his opponent, Biden, was. Now he, once again, speaks out for the working class, while endorsing Harris in the same breath. Spineless hypocrit who likes his cushy Senator seat.
Dems know they can satisfy their donors or the electorate, but not both. So they do what’s important to them. No rocket science here.
Yves ty for this post and your lead-in to it. Rod above commented on ideas for taking on the oligarchy. Until there is some organization all most of us can do is work local, We have an inclusive radical Black legacy here which has reached out to bring Jill Stein as a speaker. There was a surprisingly large and accepted amount of support for her, despite all the pulls of identity politics spurred by democrats/liberals trying to force Harris upon us. The genocide has been (tragically) a recruiting tool in a sense. Some of us created a “first Tuesday” event in the West, giving away clothes, produce and meals while bringing in guest speakers. We had some Green Party here as well as locals running for city council. If nothing else we can keep some of the community warm and fed. Inshallah maybe more.
genocide has been a major factor, peeling away a segment of identity politics, also in 2020 Lipstick on a Pig referenced Black and Brown folks experience with Harris.
Here’s a question for Jaime Harrison: Is it possible for Joe Biden to have been the most pro-labor of your lifetime and for labor to be worse off than they were four years ago?
Harrison was born in 1976, just as the neo-liberal anti-labor agenda was taking hold and gathering steam. So while Harrison may be arguably correct on Biden’s record, that’s a bar an earthworm would have difficulty limbo-ing under. Meanwhile, real wage growth is negative over the the last four years.
Harrison, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership class, will never, ever, consider that their’s is a failed strategy. Afterall, how can it possibly be a failure when they and everyone immediately surrounding them prosper regardless of the electoral results? I wonder if this is the narcissism among the elite IM Doc was referring to in the clinical sense several days ago.
I checked his age too and saw that his lifetime began with Reagan! Definitely a sign of massive narcissism…
I recognize that Loser from his brief time as the eventual usurper to Sen Lyndsey Graham here in SC. The Harrison campaign raised a great pile of money in the process, only to lose.
Jaime Harrison is the most ideal person to spout that nonsense as the appointed chair for the DNC. Just figured out the spelling on first name was somehow different(!)
Both of my parents were new deal democrats, my mother was twice president of her union CALMT and my uncle Pete was president of ILWU local 54 in Stockton for many years.
They would be disgusted at what the Democratic party has become.
Burn it to the ground, salt the earth and bury it under 20′ of concrete.
This was Harris campaign to lose and with a great deal of effort and more than a $1,000,000,000 spent she managed to lose to Trump by running what is arguably the most tone deaf Presidential campaign ever.
She did have a little help from her friends the Bidens and whoever designed her commercials produced the most offensive political ads I have witnessed in 70 plus years.
“…more than a $1,000,000,000…”
Evidently that’s not enough. I just got a post election text from Pelosi begging for bucks. Some blah, blah, blah about sending money to make sure every last vote is counted to increase Democrats’ chances to win the House. Since counting votes is a publicly funded function, I assume it’s money for electoral lawfare. Pathetic. I replied STOP.
Yeah
It was less than a hour after Kamala conceded that I got a text from Nancy asking for $
You both are light weights, I got one obomber himself asking cash on the 5th;-)
Got that one too. I decided “stop” did not quite capture my feelings and responded [family blog] all the way off.
The party needs to go the way of the Whigs.
I agree, have to add the cost of living increase felt by most voters. File that under tone deaf.
your uncle would have known a friend Clarence Thomas of ILWU in Oakland, good guy, always calls himself “the Real Clarence Thomas”.
Assume we have a “democracy” where one person has one vote and money is not legally equated with “political speech”. Where political bribery is severely punished. Where there is meaningful choice in policies. Where the world’s richest oligarchs are in danger of not being allowed to hoard all the resources and power and cannot bribe Congress or benefit from blatant conflicts of interest and institutional corruption. A fantasy
Alas…
Sen. Bernard Sanders, like AOC and many other so-called progressives, talk a good game then do the old bait-and-switch and herd the D faithful back into voting for the status quo. The cynicism and hypocrisy are just as bad or worse than the R faction of the Country Club.
Recall Sanders ran for pres before, and said that he would endorse the D candidate if he did not win the primary. That spells it out plainly. The late great Bruce Dixon explains how the game works in detail. Others have written about it
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary
IMHO, BOTH so-called parties are corrupt to the core. And even worse, the entire legal/institutional framework is corrupt to the core. When we have massive financial crimes, war crimes, abuses of power, legal bribery, conflicts of interest, genocide etc. where no one is held to account…How can one speak of the “rule of law” and “democracy” with a straight face? A radical overhaul and crackdown on both institutional and illicit forms of corruption.
It is more convenient and easy to project the rot and corruption onto the Other: China/Russia/Iran are “autocratic” or commie dictatorships where there are no civil liberties, no rule of law, and people live a miserable, shackled existence and have no way to express their opinions or vote for leaders.
As comments above point out: how do we break up the oligarchy, and monopolies? Who has the political will and political power to do that at this stage of the historical cycle? Is it too late for the slowly decaying empire?
I rarely comment these days. But I appreciate Yves post and, JJ, think you hit every single point, thank you, and very eloquently at that. Thank you for the link, too. (I also liked another piece on the BAR I posted below.)
Longtime denizens of California wouldn’t trust Harris running anything, much less the country, so the coronation was that cliched bridge too far. I am done. The duopoly and oligarchy didn’t happen overnight. Several months ago, I went back to my dog eared The People’s History of the United States just to remind myself of reality and fact. Same ole, we’re just on steroids now.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/how-trump-won-and-what-black-people-should-do
Margaret Kimberley has some chops for sure.
Wondering what was the nexus… 2020, when the DNC ‘reimagined’ Harris for JB’s VP…other than the obvious…
after “she/Harris dropped out of the 2020 POTUS race w/out having won a single delegate’
of course there’s the usual suspects ….SF coterie perhaps
“The destruction of the Democratic Party and the creation of a truly progressive political movement is the only hope for black America.” It is also the only hope for the world.”
Kimberly
Thank you Sue, and thanks for the link. I’m also a fan of Margaret Kimberley. After Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford passed, she stepped up and has done a great job.
I was watching an MSNBC clip talking about why Harris loss. The person tied it to ending the Afghanistan war in a “disorganized fashion”. He stated that Biden’s approval rating started dropping at that time. I think its funny how the war propagandists get in front of the parade and claim that its for their cause. I recall at the time that a lot of people, young people, were disappointed about the failure passing the Federal 15 dollar minimum wage and the president’s lack of effort in trying to pass it. The young people were definitely not disappointed about the Afghanistan war ending.
My favorite statement about this has been Krystal Ball’s cri de coeur here, with intro from Ryan Grim. She notes that Dems are already starting to move toward Trumpism as the new political reality.
I just wish that her husband, Kyle Kulinski, would get over his bout of TDS that he has been suffering from for the past few months as well as his Kamala-stanning.
Kyle Kulinski is normally an insightful and fair guy, but the 2024 election appears to have been hard on him and has caused him to be delusional. He should realize by now that things would not have been all that different under Harris, as neoliberalism continues no matter what figurehead sits in the oval office at the moment. Harris would have either been another Clinton/Obama who are basically W. Bush-era neocons, or simply a clueless and empty-headed tool for the MIC and corporate donors to use at their leisure AKA Biden.
Trump is bad, but I think that Harris would probably worse as you would be rewarding the Democrats for trying to ram her down everybody’s throats with no debate. Still, I doubt the DNC is going to learn anything or care from this election as their consultants and big donors win whether or not the candidates themselves lose.
Speaking of the ironically named Democratic Party, the DP base demands nothing from its DP elite, and that’s what they get in return. Instead, in each cycle the base continues to reward the unconscionable behavior of their elite with votes and money. And lo and behold, with each cycle the entire DP institution gets worse. Isn’t that all rather stupid..? Did 2016 not happen? The elite are what they are. They will not stop or change so long as they continue to get away with it. Is this rocket-science? The DP base is simply ridiculous and becoming more so each time.
All the money came from the elite, and quite a bonfire it made, too. I guess unremitting spam texts to Bernie Sanders’ mailing list didn’t work? As for Sanders’ former supporters they are the base of the party, and they rebelled on their own this time — punished the elites by withholding their votes or giving them to another candidate.
re: “by withholding their vote”
That’s true in my blue uni town, a ‘vote blue no matter who’ town. The total turnout for this election was far below the last 2 pres elections according to the newspaper. A lot of Dems stayed home.
It seems that the average American is now more liberal than the average Democrat.
So true!
Hakeem Jeffries in max cope mode, still claims that there is a “path to a House Majority”
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4980110-jeffries-says-theres-still-a-pathway-for-democrats-taking-the-house/
Hmm, latest count right there on the Hills webpage says its 216-204 Red vs. Blue. That means the Donkeys pretty much have to run the table on all the outstanding races, save one.
Not sure I like those odds. Cope harder, Hakeem.
Saint Bernard’s email missive resonated with me when I got it in my mailbox.
My stomach turns every time that I mistakenly read yet another “liberal” screed about “how wonderful” Biden was. I run a search in these classist rants for the words “Palestine,” “Israel,” and “Ukraine” and come up blank every time. The CARES Act and the CHIPS Act were Trump initiatives; the infrastructure initiatives were shaped (and gutted) by Schumer. In my view, Joe Biden is every bit as loathsome as Donald Trump. In too many ways, more so (Tara Reade, Hunter, Commander — I mean c’mon, man).
The billion that the Dems spent was triple what the GOP spent, and the apparatchiks and consultants pocketed every dime of it. They “win” no matter the results. Our problem is that beginning after 1972 they got themselves locked-in to a permanent two-party “managed democracy” in which they have total control of ballot access.
Obama’s insurgency was the last straw. His OFA was a cult of personality that simply bankrupted the DNC. The broke-ass party apparatus became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Clinton-adjacent sycophants who successfully killed the open primary process. Bernie can change nothing and neither can we.
This model is Inverted Totalitarianism, not popular democracy. The voters weren’t fooled. Trump may be a loathsome mobster, but he listened and like the huckster that he is, for the moment sustained the illusion that he had heard.
David Brooks finally realizes that the subculture that he’s hated all along is something called the “PMC”, and now his tepid 3/4″ gardenhose of op-ed genius will be aimed in their direction for late-career kudos, until his good-bye column.
This is all to my satisfaction. Let god harden their hearts. The DNC should purge and ignore what little grassroots working class elements are left in the party. They won’t have a leg to stand on come next election.
It still depends on how crazy the Republicans run the country and lucky timing with the start of the next recession. At least a mediocre economy and another neoliberal ghoul candidate will finish the Democrats off once and for all.
There will be absolute chaos but anti-elite populist movements and socialist parties will slowly begin to rebuild. It’s America’s only chance. The Democrats were a barrier the whole time.
My feed has come to the conclusion that Harris lost due to racism and/or misogynism.
As long as that’s the level of introspection, Dems should expect more beatdowns
Dems have become increasingly autocratic over the past 15 years infecting virtually all policies: foreign, domestic, and social. After killing Dean’s 50-state strategy in 2009, the DNC has become a haven for those who believe they know best and demonstrate unbridled contempt for democratic governance within the organization and at all levels of government. The resulting unchecked intelligence powers, censorship, lawfare, and humorless call-out culture promote the fear needed to become a banana republic. Dems project these authoritarian fears on their opponents without introspection. Burn it down and rebuild.
They, like the reichpubs are a capitalist party.
The issue is economics
A friend, a Democrat, voiced the same as Harrison to Sander’s assessment when I had suggested that the Democrats needed to reinvent themselves. He blamed the billionaires for Trump (Harris had more in her corner according to Forbes) and misinformation and an alternate universe that was unknown to the Democratic Party. I pointed out that how could Harris lose to a person like Trump unles the majority of voters thought she would be worse. That takes talent. Pure and simple, Trump’s teams studied the facts on the ground and the Democratic Team was oblivious to them. Putting all of Trump’s voters into the same basket of deplorables, nazis, and garbage wasn’t a winning strategy. People sent a message. Did the Democrats get it?
In my opinion, it might have been difficult for Harris no matter what. IMO, Biden takes a lot of blame. He could have resigned a few years back when there was a Democratic Congress and let Harris become POTUS and Congress could have chosen a suitable VEEP. Instead everyone, including the media, covered up his limitations. Then he could have resigned after Harris was installed and let Harris run as POTUS , giving her the opportunity to define herself apart from his policies and to show her leadership capabilities. Instead, Harris as a subordinate, was tied herself to Biden’s baggage and never articulated her policies, if she had any that were coherent. . Biden could still resign and why not, he is the lamest and most useless duck imaginable. This would at least stir things up.
This election was a choice between two bottles of poison and Trump won the majority. Sucess has a thousand fathers. Failure …no one wants to claim parenthood. The Democrats should listen to Sanders.
“IMO, Biden takes a lot of blame. He could have resigned a few years back when there was a Democratic Congress”
The List of people who have stayed past their “sell-by-date” is long and Bipartisan.
I think they’re gonna embalm Mitch McConnell right there on the Senate floor …
Hilarious and maybe too true! Very funny. I needed a laugh.
Not to mention Nancy Pelosi. She’s way past her sell by date.
I don’t think Harris wanted to be the First Woman President for three months on a resignation. She wanted a Victory brunch. Kudos to her for that, at least.
Somewhat ironically I think many voters did what the Democrats had trained them to do – vote for the lessor evil. They just decided Trump was the lessor evil.
And I think that many, many voters that voted for Biden just went [family blog] it, and didn’t vote.
It turns out that purple is closer to red on the color wheel than blue. Working class people are no longer into imitation red and decided on the real thing, for better or worse.
Didn´t Lambert suggest “pink” for the next revolution…
(I´d love Pink Panther signs on the next campaign – including unheard of burglaries committed against donors…)
Jamie Harrison should disappear into the dustbin of Democrat campaign history just like RobbieMook1.0™. All of these people are horrible ambassadors for the billionaire class and care nothing for the struggles of the working class. They refuse to surrender anything of value to people and families on and below the median income level. Even when they do, it’s crumbs … and it’s always balanced out by a far more beneficent tithing (usually in the for of tax cuts) to the capital holding class. It was supposed to be Sanders v Trump in 2016, and maybe again in 2020. As it turned out, COVID stopped both Trump and Sanders in 2020. When Bernie won Nevada, and liberal mainstream media threw a collective conniption, Anand Giridharadas got on MSNBC with Joy Reid (via MSNBC), and warned that Bernie was tapping into something important, and that the establishment needed to pay heed. They didn’t listen then but got lucky due to COVID; and they won’t listen now after they’ve had their asses handed by someone who did listen – Donald Trump.
Thank you very much for this MSNBC snippet of, indeed, utter hysteria.
And wow, were these people incompetent.
These 4 min. are enough to understand why the alleged US-Left is in such a state since the end of the Cold War.
They virtually know and understand n.o.t.h.i.n.g.
And this disaster has become worse with every decade.
They speak of socialism and mean Angela Merkel like German CDU-style corporatism.
In Germany we used to laugh about US commentators calling Sanders a “Socialist” since what he demanded used to be standard among CDU/CSU until may be recently. Which are die-hard anti-Socialist.
p.s. And then they seriously exchange over an idiot-moron anchor who was drawing an analogy between the German 1940 invasion of France and Sanders winning 3 states???
see TC: 2:30
Were these people smoking too much Crack?
But I fear they simply lack the insight and the necessary education. How much money do these clowns make anyway?
(Well I just read German so-called TV-debate shows like “Lanz”, “Hart aber fair” or a “Maischberger” make between 150k and 250k per show. And remembering the political immaturity of APPLE+´s show “THE MORNING SHOW” – I guess it´s all the same.)
Sorry for ranting. But since I spared myself the consumption of US/German TV for 2 decades these moronic media appearances just hit me.
Is Joy Reid the same who now called Florida voters fascist which Taibbi was so pissed off about?
p.p.s. I just finished watching Disney´s let down feature “Inside Out 2” – the main character being – “JOY” – which explains a lot…💣🙀💕
Bernie should finally start a business. There is a market for 15,000,000 alarm clocks which adjust for daylight savings time and leap years.
As a recovering Democrat, I voted for Jill Stein in 2024. In analyzing what happened in this election, I think we should start with the popular vote. Donald Trump did not go anywhere between 2020 and 2024, getting about 74 million votes both times. On the other hand, Biden got 81 million votes in 2020, while Harris is on track for about 70 million in 2024. Third party votes were about the same in both elections. So, where did the 11 million missing votes go? I think Bernie Sanders had part of the answer. Genocide must have stopped a lot of voters. Republican suppression probably cost some votes, but surely not 11 million. Trump did not win by persuading anyone. He lost as many voters as he gained. Harris gained the Cheneys and lost 11 million voters. Now I hope someone does a deep dive into those statistics!
I think people would be better served getting their heads out of the statistics, pull a Michael Moore, and visit diners all throughout the rust belt states, and gasp, actually talk to real people. In 2016, we talked about tearing down the blue wall. Looking at how the margins tightened up in New Jersey and New York, this is penetrating well beyond it now.
The uncounted number in CA will bring the total to about 150M. Other states are still counting a small percentage of a smaller number of ballots.
2020:
Biden 81M Trump 74M = 155M
Per AP election results website:
2024 currently:
Trump 69.2M Harris 73.5M = 142M
2024 CA currently:
Harris 6.1M Trump 4.2M with 58% reporting
AZ currently showing 78% reporting, NV 96% etc.
Whether or not the projected numbers in this link will be accurate, it has some comparisons to previous years.
https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024
Typo: the other way around, of course — Trump won the popular vote this time, the 73.5M is his total.
> Per AP election results website:
> 2024 currently:
> Trump 69.2M Harris 73.5M = 142M
Oops. Thanks. Just checked again and now it’s Harris 70.2 Trump 74.1 = 144M
Yes, people are talking as though Mr Trump got 60% of the votes, there was no huge change, just another turn at the margins, nothing fundamental. I hope it was the genocide that made enough Democrat voters stay home. At a recent State election here in Australia I, a life long Labour voter, voted Green and will never again vote for either of the Uniparty candidates at any level.
For some of us supporting genocide is beyond the pale.
Calculating along the wikipedia numbers, 103,000,000 or so eligible voters did not vote in this election. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they found all candidates repulsive. Maybe they had no time between the three jobs they have. Maybe they suffer from long covid and couldn’t get to the polling stations.
tldr; 29.9% of eligible voters voted for Trump. That’s less than 1 out of 3, but it’s enough when people don’t show up.
“Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they found all candidates repulsive. Maybe they had no time between the three jobs they have. Maybe they suffer from long covid and couldn’t get to the polling stations.”
Yep. Would be my 2 cents too. (Instead of a conspiracy – again?)
People are simply fed up – granted its Germany and my Mom is long retired (but 100% fresh in her mind) – but she wasn´t even aware there IS an election. And many more younger ones are like that too.
You have social media and pseudo-politics and then you have those millions who just ignore that stuff.
And rightly so, though I am certainly not among them.
In almost every election we have had for the last twenty years, longer even, the majority of the people did not vote for the winner. Third parties, blank ballot lines and voters that don’t vote couple with the loser is a massive majority. It isn’t just Trump.
The percentage of the population eligible to vote who chooses not to keeps dropping. And as long as that is still enough for someone to get elected, things aren’t going to change. The people on the inside have no desire for it to change, candidates would need voters too much then.
“And as long as that is still enough for someone to get elected, things aren’t going to change.”
wisdom of the month – but don´t tell the Dems. They might get fuzzy ideas…like “winning”
Voter participation was rising during the Sanders democracy-scare years.
The people who got involved and contributed and voted on behalf of Bernie and some kind of sane reform of our rotted system got kicked in the teeth and shoved to the ground by the DNC for their trouble. Now they are very very sure that it doesn’t matter whether the corrupt candidates wear red or blue, the people will not be heard from and the moneyed interests will get their way. No point in filling out the form any more. Particularly when the DNC arbitrarily decides to run a useless candidate who won no primaries in the first place.
Yes I know voting can be effective at the very local level. Although even then, it’s usually developers and ego cases versus other flavors of the same.
Comparisons between Bernie and Trump used to bother me, when I was spending 20 hrs/week and thousands of dollars on Bernie.
But now I understand that they are indeed similar in some ways. For example, they both will occasionally have a good take. But they quickly follow it up with many idiocies. Bernie was all in on Russiagate, Ukraine war, Putin is evil, Israel has a right to defend itself, no mention of genocide, Clinton is wonderful, Biden is wonderful, Kamala is wonderful, etc etc etc
So when he speaks, I definitely do not listen
>So when he speaks, I definitely do not listen
Good for you.
Too bad the Vermonters around here just keep lapping it up and sending him back, term after term.
I wonder what would have happened to Vermont results if Bernie came out and endorsed Jill Stein and the Green Party. What would he have had to lose? He’s out in the cold now anyway.
Start raising the awareness to the populace and start to gain a little momentum for the future.
I’m a Vermonter, I voted for Bernie. He was a vastly superior choice to the alternatives. @mo, Sanders says there’s not ‘any doubt’ Netanyahu is perpetrating ‘ethnic cleansing’, from this past April 24.
https://archive.ph/z8dIT
Pelosi Laments Biden’s Late Exit and the Lack of an ‘Open Primary’
Oh, now she wants a primary, after their hand picked candidate crashed and burned. I don’t recall her singing from that songbook back in the earlier part of the year when the actual primary was taking place. Biden’s problems were clear enough at that point, and they could very easily have insisted on a real primary. If nothing else, sticking him the shiv at that time would have been a whole lot easier than after the debate with only a few months to go. How about taking some responsibility for a change?
“Which side are you on, which side are you on”
Where have you gone Bob LaFollette, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you…”
Incumbents have been struggling in many countries, so there is likely no lesson here for the Democrats. The big picture is that Trump’s vote was more-or-less unchanged from 2020 while Harris lost some 16% of Biden’s majority. Casting my mind back to spring 2024, there was much talk of ‘none of the above’, especially among the young; the challenge for Harris then was not trying to land blows on Trump so much as getting those starting out as disengaged to come out and vote for her; but her problem is that she was both too ‘woke’ for Republicans and not woke enough for progressives (I can imagine that the ‘warmonger’ label was the main stumbling block). Also considering the disproportion of black males who get incarcerated in the USA, maybe the ‘prosecutor’ label was not so attractive to them and their families either…
The issue for centrist-leaning parties is that they are vulnerable from both the left and the right, especially in electoral systems without proportional representation, and that is equally true for more traditional democrats and republicans. The winning skill is then to be able to create coalitions by finding ways to communicate promises directed at different constituencies without too much disonnance between them.
Good interview by Nima of Dialogue Works of Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff covered much of this territory.
You can be a member of the strongest American union on the planet and have your job offshored. Bernie is right, but any incumbent or proxy-for-incumbent presidential candidate is going to have a hard time running with an inflationary backdrop, especially when the street-level experience doesn’t jive with the statistics.
Needless to say, Harris didn’t even bother manufacturing “She Whips Inflation!” buttons, never mind disavowing the razing of Gaza; hard to believe she could make Hubert Humphrey look vigorous by comparison.
What I can’t fathom is how the DOJ took as long as it did to file against RealPage. Bidenworld understood the price of nothing and the value of nothing!
Synopsis of “Shattered” via Goodreads (in case you missed the most recent installment of the “Benny Hill Show”):
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign
Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes
(compare the more critical first half with the rest)
“#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the riveting story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign–the candidate herself. Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors’ deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered offers an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders. Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign’s difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.”
The first problem I see in this analysis was accepting the campaign’s delusion that her election was a sure thing. The numbers alone said that wasn’t true. Even before she declared for office nearly half of all voting age Americans deeply disliked her and would never vote for her.
Democrats ignoring pesky facts on the ground, like real inflation, is not new. Writers/journalists/historians should not do the same.
“Writers/journalists/historians should not do the same.”
I can only assume re: that book above are neither. If they were the book couldn´t be published.
But one always hopes among the 90% lies/banalities you find something useful.
The Democratic Party establishment — operatives and politicians — are manipulators not leaders. Corporate business and billionaire donors finance a politics of top-down manipulation. The electorate are some herd animals, to be classed, penned, and shorn, with time out for an occasional stampede, triggered by a moral panic among the manipulators, fearing that they may lose their grip.
It is a perfect setup for elite psychopathology. There is no intention to manipulate the mass electorate into generating political power to enact some policy through concerted action. Manipulation itself is job 1, with the aim of neutralizing the electorate as a font of political power, encouraging people to fear and loathe fellow citizens so much that cooperation on pursuit of common goals is impossible.
That is a very good insight. It explains their obsession with messaging instead of delivering. If we just had the messaging tuned for current political realities. . .
Trump’s reelection should serve as a capstone end to the antipopulism described in Thomas Frank’s “The People, No”. Voters decisively rejected Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s neoliberal elite. This should be a final blow to decades of anti-populism entrenched in the party’s leadership.
The People: No
Describing the policies of Bernie Sanders as “a disruption” shows how wedded the current managers of Democratic politics are to a status quo power-sharing arrangement with corporate interests.
I have a fantasy that sometime in some not too distant future I will read an article wondering how could all those “progressive” Democrats have been manipulated to vote “against their interests” in the campaigns that gave us Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden? Hahahahaha.
Our neighborhood, here in New York’s southern Chautauqua County, had an election night social around a nice little bonfire: bring your drink of choice and a snack to pass around. The temperature had reached almost 70 degrees, so we were comfortable.
My neighbors run the gamut politically from non-engaged to quietly pro-Trump (but no signs on the lawn) to staunch Democrats (with Harris-Walz signs.). So, it was agreed that there would be no ‘political conversations.’
One couple are both long-haul contract truck drivers. Or both were until she developed Muscular Sclerosis and decided it was not a good idea to be driving a big rig with fuzzy vision. She is struggling with the local medical establishment. And, BTW, is completely toothless. No money for dental care.
Her partner (who, BTW, has a couple of missing teeth) continues to truck, although spending more and more time off the road helping her. He is a born story-teller, and among the tales he told that night was one involving his experiences on the road with foreign -born truckers. In this case, East Asians, (he used a very racist term for Pakistanis). According to him, they are increasing in number, drive badly-maintained and often uninsured (he says he has been in accidents with them) rigs, and, somehow, are the beneficiaries of Government programs to help them stay in business.
How much of his story is unvarnished fact and how much is speculation is uncertain. I do know that, based on a road trip along the West Coast’s Interstate 5 late last winter, I can confirm the increasing number of truck-stops and motels run by East Asians, south of the Bay Area, serving 24 hour Indian food buffets, as announced by billboards along the side of the highway.
Sixty years ago, my trucker neighbor would have belonged to the Teamsters, had health care (including dental) and a future pension and work rules. Now, he has to complete with immigrants who can outbid him on contracts because they will work for less money and, so he believes, are subsidized by the Government.
So, he is anti-immigrant. And, racist. Because that’s who he sees as a threat to his livelihood. He is not a stupid person: his parents, whose house he inherited, were solid, civil servant type, middle class. One sister is a lawyer, the other a teacher. His path through life has been a bit different. So he is a Trump voter.
This is a huge undercurrent that we do not see much in the media. Ambulance drivers who transport Medicaid patients at no charge, but whose working relatives cannot afford to pay for the same ride. Drywall contractors who are forced to use illegals or lose bids and go out of business. People of all stripes who lost employment to globalization. People who normally would have been employed making things run well in local government or businesses, ‘downsized’ out of work, or forced to do the work of 3 for some private contractor.
And yes, instead of seeing the big picture, the corruption, the excessive financialization, privatization and greed, they blame ‘communist godless liberals’ and the immigrants. And somehow think the disorganized Mr. Trump is going to make things all right.