Why do people keep purposely misrepresenting the criticism people had for Harris? Like, I know, it was hard at the time to listen to people warning about her potential to lose. But, we have the advantage of hindsight now. Do we have to pretend the main criticism of Harris was that Trump would be better? No one that wasn’t a grifter was saying that.
The vast vast majority of people criticizing Harris were doing so because they correctly warned people that if she did not separate herself from Biden and run FOR something turnout would be low and she would lose.
The people critizing her for trying to run “strong border” ads were correct.
The people that criticized her for saying “nothing comes to mind” when asked if she would have done anything differently than Biden were correct.
The people that criticized the campaign for stopping the very well received “weird” messaging Walz brought. They were correct. Walz brought momentum and they shut it up. It’s like they were allergic to things that were working and getting people interested in her campaign.
The people that critized her when she suddenly stopped talking about her ONE concrete policy idea on grocery store price controls. They were correct. She stopped talking about a vastly popular position because Trump called her “communist”. And then they kept calling her a “communist” anyway.
The people that criticized her for supporting Bidens Israel policy; THEY WERE CORRECT. We are living in a world were 75% of lifelong Democrats are against any support for Israel. This didn’t happen overnight. This has been happening since Bidens genocide began. And her absolute failure to LEAD and understand were the country was heading was a complete failure. We told you in 2024. The country was begging for a real leader and this issue would shown that she had that ability to lead. That she could call a spade a spade and not be another bull shit politician afraid to upset AIPAC. She failed.
Do you know what a leader does? They LEAD and guide others in the correct direction. We are there NOW. The people that vote for the Democratic party are ALWAYS significantly ahead of there leaders on the actual issues. They were begging for a leader that would actually step forward and be unafraid and unapologetic in leading on issues and policy.
We don’t have to wonder. We are literally seeing it growing RIGHT NOW. From Mamdani to Abdul (soon) we are seeing anti Israel and leftwing populism wipe the floor with Harris style Democrats.
A 15 term incumbent losing DEMOCRATIC primaries to a 29 year old that was saying “fuck Kamala Harris” for not taking a stand against Israel. The people you are crying about that “lost Kamala the election”. They are the people literally going out and organizing right now because they are sick and tired of having to explain why the Democratic party keeps losing to Trump and being told “you’re the reason Harris lost.”
We’re done with just explaining it. We’re done being used as a scapegoat for the failures of the Democratic party when we offer constructive criticism. We’re forcing these politicians out of office that refuse to actually lead.
I don’t know a single person I organize with in DSA that didn’t go vote for Harris. We aren’t the ones that didn’t show up. The ones that didn’t show up were the people that didn’t even know who the presidential candidates were a week before the election. And a lot of them didn’t have reason enough to take off work, not be able to pick their kid up from daycare on time, or didn’t want to get stuck in traffic, so they decided to not vote that day.
So, please, stop pretending the people actually organizing for good candidates like Mamdani were the people that didn’t show up. And, please, come join us at DSA and help us elect people that actually have the motivation and knowledge to be leaders.
Edit: And for the love of God, please stop confusing the majority of the socialist movement with Anarkiddies and the socialist that like to LARP as Maoist third worldist online. We don’t like them much either. They are kinda stinky and need to shower. But, they aren’t worth even caring about. They don’t have any negative effects outside your twitter feed.
I know. It’s exhausting. Especially when you yourself want that team to win rather than the other team win.
People seem to treat the voters like “the players”. The voters are the fans in this analogy. If the stadium is empty it’s not helpful to keep screaming about the team losing because they aren’t being cheered for enough. “The players” are the people that actually have power to make political change. We aren’t a direct democracy. If the players aren’t “scoring” and don’t even try to “swing” the fans stop showing up.
Hell, the Democrats are essentially playing like the 1919 white sox. That’s an old analogy. But it’s fitting.
I don’t know a single person I organize with in DSA that didn’t go vote for Harris. We aren’t the ones that didn’t show up.
Why are you writing novels to defend yourself against something that wasn’t even directed at you?
OP clearly referenced people who protest-voted against Harris and subsequently made everything measurably worse for the Palestinians and Earth at large (which was obviously going to happen if Trump won).
My very first sentence categorized their comment as a misrepresentation of what caused the Harris loss. I had a paragraph in my “novel” originally that said that even if all protest votes went to Harris she still would have lost. But I guess my editor removed it in the final draft /s.
So, since I categorized the comment as a misrepresentation of what happened (protest votes having impact), provided evidence for why people stayed home, and provided an explanation of the campaigns failures; the quote you took was a defense of this conclusion in my “novel” and the actual actions of the people that spoke out against Harris for not standing against a genocide.
You can joke about the length of my comment. I am myself. But, don’t quote a single sentence out of the context of “the novel” and pretend it was irrelevant to what I was explaining. Do you disagree with the protest vote being irrelevant? It doesn’t sound like you do.
I’ve had this conversation for years now. The next step after I point to the protest vote as mathematically irrelevant is for Harris defenders to blame the “stay at home”. It’s why I addressed the reasons people stayed home and the failure of the campaign to win against “the couch”. The problem was people staying home. But people stay home because they are apathetic, uninformed, misinformed, or aren’t excited for either candidate.
We can be frustrated about why that is. But, if a presidential campaign doesn’t run their campaign on how things actually are; and instead try to motivate this large voter base through morality or fear. They’re going to fail like they did to have people “pokemen go to the polls”.
Why didn’t all those non-voters bother to vote for Harris? You say it was because she didn’t run a good campaign, that she had a bad platform. You criticized her ‘bad’ mistakes and spread the word on how bad she was. Don’t you think that might have been a contributing factor as to why too many people thought she wasn’t worth getting off their asses to vote?
Let’s assume for a moment that what you’re saying is true. I’ll “steelman” you’re argument. Let’s assume that the criticism of Harris “from the left” played a large enough role for enough people to stay home.
What you are advocating for is that if a political campaign is bad, but “less bad” than the alternative, we should not criticize it. We should not demand the candidate for our party run on policy positions that we want.
You realize you are advocating for an increasingly worse and worse political choice over time. If no concessions are ever offered by politicians to their voters, and those voters still show up religiously, that is not democracy. That is a cult.
Not only that. But what you’re advocating for is impossible. You will never live in a world in which people don’t criticize a candidate that is “less bad” than the other candidate. You can, however, live in a world where the politicians that lose elections to historically unpopular candidates like Trump, are replaced by candidates that actually offer policies the voters of their party WANT. We are seeing this grow with DSA right now.
So, even if what you are saying was true, the solution would not be to shame voters. That literally will cause MORE of them to sit on the couch on election day. That’s just people. You can’t sustain a political party by being “less bad” than the alternative. People will stop showing up. People sitting on the couch when their politicians ignore their material needs is literally how democracy should work.
You’re saying the same thing I am saying. But you’re for some reason placing blame on potential voters doing exactly what they SHOULD do in a healthy democracy. You seem to want a party that has cult like loyalty as long as “the other guy is worse”. Well, that’s exactly how you get worse and worse political policy, constantly shifting rightward, for decades.
Ok. So things are working perfectly then with the upshot being Trump gots elected, and so we’ll probably never get reasonably fair election again? And we’ve already destroyed our global alliances, started unnecessary wars, sent the economy to hell, put corruption off the charts … and that’s just perfect.
You wanted to have a discussion about the influence of criticism in the elections. I yielded concessions to your point of view to make an important point about what you are advocating for. This is your reply?
Why do I even bother? You didn’t respond to a single thing I said.
Sorry. I’m just very frustrated. You are right in concept, but nonetheless we’ve ended up with Trump. So is it really right? Should we have ‘played the game’ and pushed all out for the better candidate and ignored the deficiencies to do anything to convince enough people to vote against Trump? I don’t know. But we’re fucked now.
I think our biggest difference in opinion is that you seem to think Trump brought fascism to America. Would that be fair to say?
I can understand that belief. But, I don’t blame Trump solely for the rise in fascism. He didn’t bring it. We are talking about a country that had an apartheid state of white supremacy when many of the representatives in office today were already grown adults.
White supremacy is a fundamental part of the American political system. If you always analyze your politicals based on an single election between two presidential candidates then what you are saying makes sense in a vacuum.
But, that is not how we got Trump. We didn’t get Trump just because he won the election in 2016. If Trump died from a heart attack in 2013 we very much would have gotten the same dominant Republican party. The Republican party and it’s tea party was ripe for the conditions of a politician like Trump. Roe V. Wade would have still been overturned. ICE would have still been expanded.
The Democratic party has been running on “lesser evil” campaigns since they lost to Reagan and abandoned the working class party of FDR.
Trump is leading fascism in America. He didn’t create it though.
Probably because people still don’t seem to understand the electoral college. Which is very bad for demonstrating being a knowledgeable member of the American electorate.
Votes for president have negligible to no meaning due to the electoral college system. We now know that the protest votes counted in the hundreds whereas millions failed to vote at all. No outcomes in any race were decided by protest votes. More right wing libertarians protested the GOP.
The protest voters demonstrably did not make everything measureably worse. They are quite frankly the reason we have seen the dial shift towards elections of people like Mamdani. They’re still throwing McMurrows out at every turn.
If you’re active in organizing with DSA, you’re literally not the problem. The people we’re criticizing would call the DSA “fascist-lite” for not being far enough left. You hinted at acknowledging those people exist in your edit, but I don’t think you realize how prevalent they are.
Don’t take it personally when people criticize them, because they’re not talking about the DSA. Literally no one would call the DSA tankies. Tankies hate the DSA because it proves to people that you can have socialism without authoritarianism. Tankies gatekeep and purity test leftist specifically to keep democratic socialists out of leftist spaces, because they don’t want people realizing that the two can go together.
Your critiques of Kamala Harris’s campaign aren’t without merit, but they’re a bit misplaced in this discussion. No one here is saying she was an ideal candidate. But we had two choices: trump or harris. No matter how the election turned out, we were going to get one or the other. Many of us took the harm reduction approach, knowing that opposing trump was worth voting for someone who wasn’t great but was not as bad.
We can relitigate this till we’re all blue in the face, but I don’t think it would be productive. What’s done is done, and the current political climate is different from the one in 2024. We have an incumbent Republican trifecta with which many people are displeased, and the pendulum is swinging back into the Democrats’ favor right when the internal tides of the Democratic party are shifting towards the DSA and progressive caucus.
There’s a lot of momentum right now building for progressive candidates and democratic socialists, so let’s not waste that by fighting with each other. Centrist Dems want that. Republicans want that. Let’s not give it to them
I think it’s reasonable to warn people to look out for bad actors stoking division by using trite catchphrases like “both sides,” “blue fash,” “fascist lite,” etc. Let’s focus on the positive momentum. Let’s not squander it on purity tests and infighting
I wish. Every single word was typed by my adhd/autistic brain. If you read it it’s painfully obvious from my writing style. I am not nearly digestible in my writing as an AI is. It usually leads me to misunderstandings with people that reply to me.
If you find a gpt that can shorten my comments, make it more digestible to liberals, but also still provide the same information I’d love to hear about it.
Unfortunately, almost embarrassingly so, my comment history is all my own original thought.
Oh, also be sure to have several dyslexia related typos. It’s my signature writing style. I need the gpt to mimic that. /s
Edit: it’s weird how long comment with a minor amount of structure and hyperlinks means it’s AI now. It’s pretty unfair to those of us that have been doing it for decades on the internet. How do you think these AIs were trained in the first place?
Edit2: damn, they just downvoted me and didn’t respond. My brain will not wonder if I sound like an AI bot for the rest of the day.
Yes. My comment is entirely about the failures of the democratic party and how they lost to a racist narcissistic old white man twice.
People critical of voters are for some reason trying to place blame on them instead of the political campaigns with near limitless funds that lost to him TWICE. And still keep arguing for the same tactics.
They don’t realize how embarrassing it is to admit their defeat and not reflect on the political party itself as the thing that needs to change. Arguing for voters to change without the party changing is arguing for no change at all. Voters change VIA the messaging and actions OF THE PARTY.
Blaming voters is an admission that the party is unchangeable and that democratic process is dead. Because, like it or not, the party and it’s representatives hold the power through elections. If the party refuses to change policy based on voters then we are just bouncing between two parties that do not represent the majority of the population. Which we are.
Why do people keep purposely misrepresenting the criticism people had for Harris? Like, I know, it was hard at the time to listen to people warning about her potential to lose. But, we have the advantage of hindsight now. Do we have to pretend the main criticism of Harris was that Trump would be better? No one that wasn’t a grifter was saying that.
The vast vast majority of people criticizing Harris were doing so because they correctly warned people that if she did not separate herself from Biden and run FOR something turnout would be low and she would lose.
Do you know what a leader does? They LEAD and guide others in the correct direction. We are there NOW. The people that vote for the Democratic party are ALWAYS significantly ahead of there leaders on the actual issues. They were begging for a leader that would actually step forward and be unafraid and unapologetic in leading on issues and policy.
We don’t have to wonder. We are literally seeing it growing RIGHT NOW. From Mamdani to Abdul (soon) we are seeing anti Israel and leftwing populism wipe the floor with Harris style Democrats.
A 15 term incumbent losing DEMOCRATIC primaries to a 29 year old that was saying “fuck Kamala Harris” for not taking a stand against Israel. The people you are crying about that “lost Kamala the election”. They are the people literally going out and organizing right now because they are sick and tired of having to explain why the Democratic party keeps losing to Trump and being told “you’re the reason Harris lost.”
We’re done with just explaining it. We’re done being used as a scapegoat for the failures of the Democratic party when we offer constructive criticism. We’re forcing these politicians out of office that refuse to actually lead.
I don’t know a single person I organize with in DSA that didn’t go vote for Harris. We aren’t the ones that didn’t show up. The ones that didn’t show up were the people that didn’t even know who the presidential candidates were a week before the election. And a lot of them didn’t have reason enough to take off work, not be able to pick their kid up from daycare on time, or didn’t want to get stuck in traffic, so they decided to not vote that day.
So, please, stop pretending the people actually organizing for good candidates like Mamdani were the people that didn’t show up. And, please, come join us at DSA and help us elect people that actually have the motivation and knowledge to be leaders.
Edit: And for the love of God, please stop confusing the majority of the socialist movement with Anarkiddies and the socialist that like to LARP as Maoist third worldist online. We don’t like them much either. They are kinda stinky and need to shower. But, they aren’t worth even caring about. They don’t have any negative effects outside your twitter feed.
It’s weird how much effort you have to put into convincing people that the team who lost had a bad strategy…
I know. It’s exhausting. Especially when you yourself want that team to win rather than the other team win.
People seem to treat the voters like “the players”. The voters are the fans in this analogy. If the stadium is empty it’s not helpful to keep screaming about the team losing because they aren’t being cheered for enough. “The players” are the people that actually have power to make political change. We aren’t a direct democracy. If the players aren’t “scoring” and don’t even try to “swing” the fans stop showing up.
Hell, the Democrats are essentially playing like the 1919 white sox. That’s an old analogy. But it’s fitting.
Why are you writing novels to defend yourself against something that wasn’t even directed at you?
OP clearly referenced people who protest-voted against Harris and subsequently made everything measurably worse for the Palestinians and Earth at large (which was obviously going to happen if Trump won).
My very first sentence categorized their comment as a misrepresentation of what caused the Harris loss. I had a paragraph in my “novel” originally that said that even if all protest votes went to Harris she still would have lost. But I guess my editor removed it in the final draft /s.
So, since I categorized the comment as a misrepresentation of what happened (protest votes having impact), provided evidence for why people stayed home, and provided an explanation of the campaigns failures; the quote you took was a defense of this conclusion in my “novel” and the actual actions of the people that spoke out against Harris for not standing against a genocide.
You can joke about the length of my comment. I am myself. But, don’t quote a single sentence out of the context of “the novel” and pretend it was irrelevant to what I was explaining. Do you disagree with the protest vote being irrelevant? It doesn’t sound like you do.
I’ve had this conversation for years now. The next step after I point to the protest vote as mathematically irrelevant is for Harris defenders to blame the “stay at home”. It’s why I addressed the reasons people stayed home and the failure of the campaign to win against “the couch”. The problem was people staying home. But people stay home because they are apathetic, uninformed, misinformed, or aren’t excited for either candidate.
We can be frustrated about why that is. But, if a presidential campaign doesn’t run their campaign on how things actually are; and instead try to motivate this large voter base through morality or fear. They’re going to fail like they did to have people “pokemen go to the polls”.
Why didn’t all those non-voters bother to vote for Harris? You say it was because she didn’t run a good campaign, that she had a bad platform. You criticized her ‘bad’ mistakes and spread the word on how bad she was. Don’t you think that might have been a contributing factor as to why too many people thought she wasn’t worth getting off their asses to vote?
Let’s assume for a moment that what you’re saying is true. I’ll “steelman” you’re argument. Let’s assume that the criticism of Harris “from the left” played a large enough role for enough people to stay home.
What you are advocating for is that if a political campaign is bad, but “less bad” than the alternative, we should not criticize it. We should not demand the candidate for our party run on policy positions that we want.
You realize you are advocating for an increasingly worse and worse political choice over time. If no concessions are ever offered by politicians to their voters, and those voters still show up religiously, that is not democracy. That is a cult.
Not only that. But what you’re advocating for is impossible. You will never live in a world in which people don’t criticize a candidate that is “less bad” than the other candidate. You can, however, live in a world where the politicians that lose elections to historically unpopular candidates like Trump, are replaced by candidates that actually offer policies the voters of their party WANT. We are seeing this grow with DSA right now.
So, even if what you are saying was true, the solution would not be to shame voters. That literally will cause MORE of them to sit on the couch on election day. That’s just people. You can’t sustain a political party by being “less bad” than the alternative. People will stop showing up. People sitting on the couch when their politicians ignore their material needs is literally how democracy should work.
You’re saying the same thing I am saying. But you’re for some reason placing blame on potential voters doing exactly what they SHOULD do in a healthy democracy. You seem to want a party that has cult like loyalty as long as “the other guy is worse”. Well, that’s exactly how you get worse and worse political policy, constantly shifting rightward, for decades.
Ok. So things are working perfectly then with the upshot being Trump gots elected, and so we’ll probably never get reasonably fair election again? And we’ve already destroyed our global alliances, started unnecessary wars, sent the economy to hell, put corruption off the charts … and that’s just perfect.
You wanted to have a discussion about the influence of criticism in the elections. I yielded concessions to your point of view to make an important point about what you are advocating for. This is your reply?
Why do I even bother? You didn’t respond to a single thing I said.
Sorry. I’m just very frustrated. You are right in concept, but nonetheless we’ve ended up with Trump. So is it really right? Should we have ‘played the game’ and pushed all out for the better candidate and ignored the deficiencies to do anything to convince enough people to vote against Trump? I don’t know. But we’re fucked now.
I think our biggest difference in opinion is that you seem to think Trump brought fascism to America. Would that be fair to say?
I can understand that belief. But, I don’t blame Trump solely for the rise in fascism. He didn’t bring it. We are talking about a country that had an apartheid state of white supremacy when many of the representatives in office today were already grown adults.
White supremacy is a fundamental part of the American political system. If you always analyze your politicals based on an single election between two presidential candidates then what you are saying makes sense in a vacuum.
But, that is not how we got Trump. We didn’t get Trump just because he won the election in 2016. If Trump died from a heart attack in 2013 we very much would have gotten the same dominant Republican party. The Republican party and it’s tea party was ripe for the conditions of a politician like Trump. Roe V. Wade would have still been overturned. ICE would have still been expanded.
The Democratic party has been running on “lesser evil” campaigns since they lost to Reagan and abandoned the working class party of FDR.
Trump is leading fascism in America. He didn’t create it though.
Probably because people still don’t seem to understand the electoral college. Which is very bad for demonstrating being a knowledgeable member of the American electorate.
Votes for president have negligible to no meaning due to the electoral college system. We now know that the protest votes counted in the hundreds whereas millions failed to vote at all. No outcomes in any race were decided by protest votes. More right wing libertarians protested the GOP.
The protest voters demonstrably did not make everything measureably worse. They are quite frankly the reason we have seen the dial shift towards elections of people like Mamdani. They’re still throwing McMurrows out at every turn.
If you’re active in organizing with DSA, you’re literally not the problem. The people we’re criticizing would call the DSA “fascist-lite” for not being far enough left. You hinted at acknowledging those people exist in your edit, but I don’t think you realize how prevalent they are.
Don’t take it personally when people criticize them, because they’re not talking about the DSA. Literally no one would call the DSA tankies. Tankies hate the DSA because it proves to people that you can have socialism without authoritarianism. Tankies gatekeep and purity test leftist specifically to keep democratic socialists out of leftist spaces, because they don’t want people realizing that the two can go together.
Your critiques of Kamala Harris’s campaign aren’t without merit, but they’re a bit misplaced in this discussion. No one here is saying she was an ideal candidate. But we had two choices: trump or harris. No matter how the election turned out, we were going to get one or the other. Many of us took the harm reduction approach, knowing that opposing trump was worth voting for someone who wasn’t great but was not as bad.
We can relitigate this till we’re all blue in the face, but I don’t think it would be productive. What’s done is done, and the current political climate is different from the one in 2024. We have an incumbent Republican trifecta with which many people are displeased, and the pendulum is swinging back into the Democrats’ favor right when the internal tides of the Democratic party are shifting towards the DSA and progressive caucus.
There’s a lot of momentum right now building for progressive candidates and democratic socialists, so let’s not waste that by fighting with each other. Centrist Dems want that. Republicans want that. Let’s not give it to them
I think it’s reasonable to warn people to look out for bad actors stoking division by using trite catchphrases like “both sides,” “blue fash,” “fascist lite,” etc. Let’s focus on the positive momentum. Let’s not squander it on purity tests and infighting
Fuck off with your gpt slop.
I wish. Every single word was typed by my adhd/autistic brain. If you read it it’s painfully obvious from my writing style. I am not nearly digestible in my writing as an AI is. It usually leads me to misunderstandings with people that reply to me.
If you find a gpt that can shorten my comments, make it more digestible to liberals, but also still provide the same information I’d love to hear about it.
Unfortunately, almost embarrassingly so, my comment history is all my own original thought.
Oh, also be sure to have several dyslexia related typos. It’s my signature writing style. I need the gpt to mimic that. /s
Edit: it’s weird how long comment with a minor amount of structure and hyperlinks means it’s AI now. It’s pretty unfair to those of us that have been doing it for decades on the internet. How do you think these AIs were trained in the first place?
Edit2: damn, they just downvoted me and didn’t respond. My brain will not wonder if I sound like an AI bot for the rest of the day.
LOL trump is potus
Yes. My comment is entirely about the failures of the democratic party and how they lost to a racist narcissistic old white man twice.
People critical of voters are for some reason trying to place blame on them instead of the political campaigns with near limitless funds that lost to him TWICE. And still keep arguing for the same tactics.
They don’t realize how embarrassing it is to admit their defeat and not reflect on the political party itself as the thing that needs to change. Arguing for voters to change without the party changing is arguing for no change at all. Voters change VIA the messaging and actions OF THE PARTY.
Blaming voters is an admission that the party is unchangeable and that democratic process is dead. Because, like it or not, the party and it’s representatives hold the power through elections. If the party refuses to change policy based on voters then we are just bouncing between two parties that do not represent the majority of the population. Which we are.