Sad truth

If only they had compromised more and reached across the aisle harder. That will surely fix it next time.

"meet me in the middle", says the unjust man.
you take a step towards him. he takes a step back.
"meet me in the middle", says the unjust man.
- This is such a good way to put it.
  
  And they're both dumb enough to scowl at you for pointing it out.
It's obvious that Liz Cheney wasn't enough. Next time we must revive Henry Kissenger to get his endorsement. Surely that'll win the moderates
- And an AI clone of Ronald Reagan, just to be sure.
"Next time"
What Kamala said: I don't believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I'll give them a seat at my table

What Kamala did: "A few minutes after I was seated, a lady asked me to follow her to the door. When I got to the door, she closed the door," Ghanim said. He alleged that two Secret Service officers said the campaign wanted him removed and that he was threatened with arrest if he did not leave.
- Democrats have the energy of that kid in high school who wanted to sit at the popular kids table and were willing to lose the friends they had in order to get there.
  
  But all they did was look like fools and jettison allies.

It is also time for the Democratic Party to genuinely embrace progressive policies. It is evident that not many people were enthusiastic about Harris’s moderate campaign policies.

It was time in 2016. Biden barely won in 2020 and somehow Dems took that as a mandate to be even more conservative. At this point I have no idea how progressive ideas ever get implemented.
- They do!
  
  In... Other countries?
- I mean, in the US, the archetype of progressive policy success, the New Deal, was only possible because of labor militancy and the threat of systemic collapse. That should give an idea
One would think
It would have been. Now it's going to be...something else. Not something fundamentally similar to before. Not fun to think about.

I've heard so many contradictory explanations today. And thought more still. I guess the idea that Kamala and/or Biden and/or Democrats in general didn't engage enough with media (didn't sit to be interviewed by Joe Rogan or whatever) is as good a theory as any. But I don't think anyone knows WTF just happened.

I am 35.

My entire lifetime, the way Dems run presidential campaigns, the way they push the message is heavily, heavily reliant on mainstream legacy media outfits talking about and repeating their announcements and rallies.

Meanwhile, the Republicans do the same... but they also control the vast majority of talk radio stations, and since the internet came into wide use, the number of popular internet figures with overt right wing tendencies just vastly, vaaaastly outstrips similar figures on the left, in terms of viewership and funding.

Basically, the Dems still think that dying legacy media, with fewer and fewer readers/viewers, that increasingly has to sell out by running more bombastic, shocking news, and/or cowtowing to the whims of their corpo owners...

... they still think that this nearly dead legacy media will give them the same treatment as in the 70s, when there were only 3 fucking TV news channels and newspapers op eds were far more influential.

They should have learned that they needed a real way of pushing their message after 2015/16.

Trump dominated the media without paying anything for it simply by being bombastic and saying insane shit.

That should have set off a whole bunch of alarm bells that ... Dems can't rely on news stations giving roughly equal air time to them.

But it did not.

The Republicans, through their various think tanks and foundations, funded the hell out of every one willing to repeat their message on any medium for 35 years.

Dems have never had anything like this, even though the average Republican thinks George Soros is doing something like that.

Now, combine all of the above with another trend the Republicans have manifested into reality over 35 years:

Public Education has been decimated. The average American now has critical reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th grader.

So even if huge numbers of people were still reading Op-Eds in papers... they would not understand any moderately complex discussions of policies, or history, or economics or anything anyway.

... And this is all just a critique of how the Democrats have been at distributing their messages.

The actual content of those messages is an entirely different failure.
- So what's the solution? What should the Democrats have done? Pay Mark Zuckerberg to run left wing propaganda? Prop up a bunch of am radio talk shows?
  
  I don't have answers, but it's hard to imagine what specifically they did wrong. This might have been inevitable, maybe they screwed this country up to the point where there is no winning move.
The error would be expecting it to be any one thing. It’s a large large large combination of various factors.
But Kamala went on The View and played the opening act for a Beyonce concert! She did everything right
- SNL, too!
I genuinely beleive that Joe Rogan alone will be responsible for at least a million votes getting mobilized
- But, Trump got less votes than in 2020 didjnt he? This theory doesn't hold up, there wasnt some surprising mass turn put by the republicans democrats didn't turn up to vote and there are two big reasosns for that, woman and poc.
- I really don't understand the joe Rogan thing. Probably because I just don't pay attention to him at all. I thought he had a reputation as a very soft interviewer, so her not appearing seems odd.
The dems are so shit they lost to a convicted rapist . That’s what happened.
Even if she did she would have gave the same pre planned long form answers she gave on her fox interview.

The social media clips of her telling off the interviewer for interrupting never included the question she was asked for a reason.

She gave dodgy politician answers and expected republicans and third party voters to go for that.

I was also very confused why they thought they could scold people into voting for her too. Barrack and his wife did it, and so did kamala. Insulting people who might have issues voting for you seems like the opposite way to gain their vote.

Maybe someone smarter than me can explain the strategy there.

lol

Isn't this how every other authoritarian regime on the planet operates? Control all the main media sources, promote only the main messages and propaganda that you want people to see and listen to, repeat it all endlessly, repeat it everywhere, fund it so that this media machine has all the resources it needs to maintain everyone's attention all the time.

Then when someone on the outside looks in .... everyone inside will think they are weird because they exist in their own reality.

We have always been at war with Eastasia
How did I escape? Or did I? I'm probably just a tool of the machine that causes good Christian people to huddle back into their safe space otherwise I'll give them trans.

Why did we even want liberalism to be mainstream (other than to ease the suffering)? These people don't deserve to be free of the fairty tales that bind them and make them attack their own person hood. I feel for you, the future disaffected youth of America. This might be grim and will probably get me a ban but instead of making punk rock music, do us all a favor and smother your parents in their sleep.

Unless anyone here has spent time on other social media platforms that are unfiltered you really don't have a clue what a cesspool of troll farm propaganda that has been pouring out for the last several months.

And it all stopped last night.

Non-stop made-up bullshit blaming Harris for the last four years for some completely undefined fault, high fuel prices even though they're down, grocery prices, inflation, cost of housing, etc. etc. Just a steady sewer pipe drain of dreck for months. I bet Putin got his money's worth.

dnc had spent 1.6 billion on ads vs a billion by trump, so we don’t get to make that excuse.
there was plenty of pro-harris spam on insta, reddit and even my linkedin feed.

we are again not accepting that dnc is a corporate entity fooling us. they support lgbt, abortion etc because it cost their donors nothing. ask them to compromise on inflation, housing or even genocide and we are told “stfu, do you want to get trump elected ?”

they don’t care about america, bernie said it best here

"Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not,"

edit: source on media spend https://digiday.com/media-buying/presidential-ads-mark-a-divide-as-both-candidates-spend-big-in-battleground-states/
- Pretty sure the legitimate campaign spending wasn't what he was referring too.
  
  The propaganda machine was also being funded by international entities (e.g. Tim Pool being paid by Russian state media employees).

They didn't ignore this reality. They tried to move to the right, and woo right wing voters, trotting out Liz Cheney, acting and talking like Republicans. And it accomplished nothing: R's voted with their party. It was a total failure.

wow I can't believe Republican voters preferred to vote Republican rather than Republican Lite. you can't expect even career politicians to see this coming.
Liz Cheney was a great get on their part. It's the rest of it that was the issue. They should have gone hard left and still had Liz up there, for the full-spectrum effect. "Even this crazy conservative woman thinks Kamala's great" but then everything else: left left left.
- DNC Leadership: Is "left" your people's way of saying "status quo?"
- They're both working for capitalists. Democrats bank on getting the support of capitalists that have morals. Unfortunately most capitalists, and the wealthiest capitalists, don't. When both parties appeal to the same group but one gives them more of what they want unsurprisingly that's the one that wins.
  
  The working class is invisible because the working class is not organized.

I don’t think that tweet is saying it’s the democrat’s fault, but that we have to give more attention to this fact.

I mean Matt McDermott is a democratic strategist himself.
- IMO, partial blame on the Democratic Party for not successfully countering rightwing propaganda techniques and for executing some flawed policies; partial blame on citizens who chose not to vote or chose to protest vote against them; and mega huge absolute blame on the Republican Party for promulgating bigotry and lies and on their voters for not critically examining this disinfo, not having the heart to care about their fellow persons, believing that they must adhere to their in-group, and for also repeating the aforementioned disinfo and bigotry.
  
  Each of these is a point of failure and must be remedied if we want to actually have a decent society to live in.

The Democratic party is stuck on this idealistic platform of unity and appealing broadly to the American people. The Left, however, recognizes the fact that the Right has forsaken unity and is more than willing to irradiate the Left in pursuit of its own goals.

The Democratic party is stuck on this idealistic platform of unity and appealing broadly to the American people.

That's the marketing for "moving right every chance they get."

it's too late for all this dialog

I dont think it is. If I understand the American election process right, the next step is in January, when democrats are allowed to violently assault their elected government, but I'm really not sure if the plan at that stage is supposed to be for Harris to move in or for Biden to stick around. How exactly does that part work again? I don't think other countries do this part.
- As long as it’s referred to as an official act by Biden the rest doesn’t really matter, right SCOTUS?
- Day of peace 2.0!
Centrism is saying it's too early for dialog until it's too late.

Practically speaking, what is supposed to be done about it? It's all protected by the first amendment. Even if they were to somehow pass a new kind of "fairness" legislation in a future blue wave, the stacked SCOTUS will strike it down.

Fight fire with fire.

Dive into social media and be shameless. Get dirty. Lie. Pay influencers. Promote conspiracies. Push meme policies.

What are Republicans gonna do? Demonize Democrats more? That will just get them more eyeballs, which is exactly how Trump won.

The actual answer is that the world should have banned targeted advertising/engagement optimization so assholes don't trend so much, but we are way past that.
- If there's one thing I'd hope that Democrats would learn from Trump's successes, it's that playing the part of the staid, respectable, traditional politician is not a winning strategy. I don't think it's reasonable to suppose that adopting better policies will, in and of itself win elections; Trump has either terrible policies or none whatsoever, and voters still eat him up. He's a carnival clown, and that's what the majority wants.
  
  Get out there and start screaming. Throw tantrums. Take credit for things (preferably good things that you did, but again, Trump proves that all you really need to do is take credit, period, and let reality try and catch up with you). Democracy is a shared hallucination, and Trump has proven that if you employ sufficient pressure, you can change the nature of the dream, policies and reality be damned. If Democrats don't accept that public perception is reality and adjust their strategies accordingly, they and we are going to continue to get fucked for the foreseeable future.
They could at least try to end corporate personhood.. make it so that corporations are not protected by the 1st amendment and don't get free speech... Anything they blast out needs to be scrutinized and any misinformation needs to have heavy penalties... Sure the actual person saying the thing is protected, but the corporations pushing it out or allowing it to go out through them get crushed under fines... This would require a party that is not working for the oligarchy/donors though
- They could at least try to end corporate personhood… make it so that corporations are not protected by the 1st amendment and don’t get free speech…
  
  You'd need a supermajority to amend the constitution, and that is completely unrealistic.

Maybe it's time to start focusing on reasons to vote for a candidate instead of against one. Trump got less votes than 2020 and won.

Just because the election is called does not mean we are done counting votes.

The largest state (California) only has 50% counted.

Trump will likely surpass his 2020 total.
- /c/yesyesyesno comment
I have to second this one.

Most of the people I hang with tend towards 3rd party. All of them proudly touted their votes for the democratic candidate in this/the last election, but each was also very clear they were only voting that way as a way to vote against Trump.

They all hate Biden and Harris.

Bold of them to assume there's going to be a Democratic party.

Okay. Am I to assume this means they have to do interviews on fox News? What the fuck are they supposed to do about this? They clearly know it

They need to come to terms!!

I've been coming to terms and I never see them there!
- Thats because you eat all the donuts and coffee before anyone else gets there!

but it's not.

its about 20 million voters throwing a tantrum and fucking us.

For a second time!

Anyone with an AM radio has known this for decades.

This is partially right but really the issue is non voters. There are a lot of sexist and racist people that won't vote for a black woman but will vote for a white man.

I really don't have any hope for humanity. Whether we kill ourselves from global warming or nuclear war it ends with the same result. It's too depressing to actively worry about. Better to live in the moment and ignore things I can't control.

Hopefully we will have another election but somehow I think the military and policing agencies will be turned against the general population. The first step will be removing Congress, both senate and house, and using violence to enforce it while restricting free speech and freedom of the press. Then the imprisonment of political dissenters in modern day concentration camps. After the consolidation of power is complete and free speech is truly restricted America as it was will be gone. I expect a civil war during this transition, and while that happens China, Russia, and India will all make moves to expand, with wars erupting throughout the world.

Our only hope is if the military truly believes the oaths they swore, to serve the us constitution. But really I'm not holding out to hope for that.

waiting for a chance to elect the least shitty candidate every 4 years is how you got into this mess.

If we don't organize and start taking direct action then nothing will change.

People need to join organizations in their community or labor unions and begin to directly sabotage the conservative agenda. General strikes should be something that the American left are actively planning right now.

Don't sit down, stand up
- Right. If we’re organized we can cripple this shit in week. Don’t need guns. All we would need to do is withhold our labor. Put our hands in our pockets, call in sick. If nothing is functioning all of a sudden we have our power back.

So Dems don't turnout to vote and this is the Republican propaganda machines fault? The day the Dems actually take accountability for their continual fuckups is the day I might vote for them again.

People act where they think their actions will do something. The fact that you intuitively channel your rage at the democrats is a kind of proof that you understand the republicans are beyond hope and infinitely, infinitely more at fault.

This is something the left has to start getting right. Pointing the rage at the right place. It starts here.
- What the fuck are you on? I'm mad at the Dems for refusing to play the game properly and actually gain wins.
  
  Shut the fuck up with your psychobabble.

It was never a tenable solution.

It's depressing that after all of this, the only thing that is certain to defeat Trump and his ilk once and for all is the fact that presidential terms are capped at 2, they won't have this kind of turnout for some rando in 2028.

You honestly don't see any left wing bias in the media? Be honest now. Honest.

Left wing bias? Like anything remotely anti-capitalist?

No, never seen it from anything remotely mainstream.
I see what Americans have been conditioned into believing is “left wing” - aka neoliberalism - but absolutely none of it save for a few streamers and podcasters are actually left.

It’s all right of center and the difference is that the American “lefties” hide their imperialistic racism, or convince themselves they don’t have any.
they aren't saying all media. they're saying that the media conservatives consume is like that. this is about the media and information bubble that you clearly exist in.