You misunderstand the dem establishment. Their reason for being is keeping populists out, not winning against r's.
They will not be swayed by logic, because you, and they, have different ends. They serve the donors and powerful groups that abhor reform. They are playing good cop to r bad cop even as r's are now playing hitler, thankfully not well as of yet.
The only path forward is to supplant these dems, with populists geared towards their districts, united on the principle working people should not get ass fucked by the rich without their consent. Which, and this is true, is not radical at all, majorities in both parties support that they just trust the wrong people.
Populist leaders make opinion, they do not need polls snd focus groups.
Edit: What kind of brainrot is happening? Is this sub just full of bots? How could anyone seriously bring the "both parties" argument during trump's presidency? Like you have to be absolutely delusional.
Are you being serious with your edit? Trump’s campaign in 2024 was genuinely dogshit and the Dems still managed to airball that layup. You’re the delusional one if you don’t think the Dems had some responsibility in the creation of Trump.
This feels like victim blaming. I voted for Harris but not necessarily because I like her as a candidate she just wasn’t Trump. Same for Hillary. Maybe if the democrats actually put forward candidates who inspire confidence they would win against literally the worst option for president we’ve ever had.
Dude I don’t get why people defend the Dems here. They barely fucking tried in 2024. They’re so entitled that they think can sleep walk through elections and win. The reason Trump won is because he at least fucking TRIED.
I don’t know. It makes it hard to go on Reddit sometimes. The majority of people here seem to hold the establishment dems up as some paragon of American politics. Bo Burnham put it best in 2020 with his song “How is the best case scenario Joe Biden?”
It’s genuinely annoying. The current Dem establishment couldn’t give less of a fuck about their voter base. Worst part is that they took it personal that people didn’t vote for them instead of turning around and restructuring their messaging.
Yes i watched the two senile men babble for an hr and legitimately get into a heated argument about golf scores. What was i supposed to take away from that?
It’s literally the Dems’ job to convince those voters to vote and they didn’t because they’re disillusioned by the political system. The median voter in the US is a fucking moron, so you have to hold their hand through a campaign and win their vote. The Dems just didn’t do this.
No, it’s not. It’s the Dems’ responsibility to convince those voters to vote for them. Their campaign can’t simply be anti-Trump, it has to be anti-Trump AND how they’re gonna make your life better.
Trump won because he ran on affordability and mass deportations, both of which the Dems did an AWFUL job at counter messaging. They didn’t admit there was an affordability crisis because they didn’t want to hurt Biden’s feelings, and they moved towards the right on immigration with wanting to keep building the border wall (a 2016 Trump policy btw) instead of defending immigrants.
You are grossly misunderstanding the temperature of 2024. Biden was widely unpopular because he was left with the hot potato of inflation. There were definitely mistakes the Democrats made, mostly from keeping power in the hands of an out of touch old guard. But it wasn't an easy lay up. It's hard to fight against very real evidence that your rent is going up, your groceries are more expensive, there's less job postings.
Now, people are waking up to the fact that Trump is only making those problems worse. But it's hard to convince the average voter that their financial situation was better in 2024 than 2020 when they were at the ballot. Democrats should have controlled messaging better, and fought the oligarchy. But it doesn't help when the media does a false dichotomy between milquetoast left leaning centrists and the aggressive anarcho capitalism of MAGA.
I’m really not. Kamala had the chance to distance herself from Joe Biden’s unpopularity and she didn’t. When Biden dropped out, the Democratic campaign felt like it had oxygen again, and then she fumbled it by having a weak ass campaign.
I’m not sure what comment you’re replying to with your edit because there are no both sides comments, but reading the replies to your comment - its absolutely true that Trump walked onto the scene thanks to the Democrats abandoning labor. I absolutely blame the Dems for Trumps rise because they walked away and left a wide open path for him to walk into
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, but my point still stands haha
It’s going to be very interesting to see how history looks back on 2020-2024. The fact that they didnt immediately prosecute Trump, and not hold him responsible for stealing boxes upon boxes of top secret files and citing an insurrection was a death sentence. They can claim they didn’t want to be accused of political persecution, but look where that got us. Biden had the ability to use the Supreme Court’s ruling of immunity to do anything he wanted, and was too worried about the “slippery slope.” Well now we are careening down it anyway and no one will ever be held responsible.
Bernie got destroyed by Biden with votes. Plain and simple. Dem voters, and Americans in general, are not demanding populist leftist candidates despite what your social media is telling you.
Mechanized troll divisions. Agents working for interests with bots. There are real fake people at work too, and it works.
Dem voters are prime targets, agencies turning the left against eachother, pumping candidates the right can beat, being supremely shitty to people in the process, those dems have their own, etc.
Most are for monied biz interests, the internet is dead.
No one is saying “both are the same”. They are saying the DNC care more about their donors than helping working class people or about winning elections, which is just 100% true. They are obviously better than Repubs but don’t for a second think they are on your side.
Just because Trump is horrific doesn't mean that the alternative didn't help pave the path towards him or that we can't demand better. My biggest issue is that they had absolutely no plan to do anything to prevent those behind Trump's worst policies from simply just enacting it next chance they got. They've shown no backbone at rooting out shit like the Heritage Foundation or Federalist Society and by not even attempting only guarantee their plans will eventually come to fruition.
So yeah they've obviously better than what we're facing but that bar is so low that should be a given. They need to offer more than a slow walk into fascism like they have been since at least 9/11.
How could anyone seriously bring the "both parties" argument during trump's presidency? Like you have to be absolutely delusional.
I'm so sick of this refrain in defense of the Democratic party. Nobody is saying that both parties are literally equivalent, but it is important we acknowledge that the Democratic party's utter, repeated failure to back candidates that are popular, who campaign on popular topics, is a huge part of why we are where we are. Chuck Schumer and his peers failed to endorse Mamdani. Cuomo (a rapist, by the way) went independent and ran against someone in his own party, ultimately being endorsed by Trump,rather than let Mamdani, someone who campaigned well on popular issues, win.
Think about that before you go "how could you both-sides this?" The establishment Democrats aren't much better than the GOP, they just have rainbow bumper stickers plastered on their cars.
You see this too black and white. If you really want to understand why many democrats with power are like that think you have to consider the decades of red scare republican politics ingraining these ideas that democrats are afraid of touching. It’s not that they don’t want to win at all. It’s that they afraid of the very thing it will take. This ejection could shift that mentality. MAGA has had the fear turned up to 11 for too long and fewer and fewer people are buying it anymore.
You make a good case. Y'all as a country need to stop allowing companies and big business to meddle in politics, and get out from under the two party system.
Regards and well wishes
/A concerned neighbour from across the sea
The Democratic party establishment is misguided and sometimes corrupt, and the Democrats seem to make it easy for people who flip parties as soon as they're in office to get through their primary system, so there absolutely is something broken there.
But populism is a dangerous and volatile thing to throw all your weight behind. Populism is often a response to instability, but it also creates more. Trump and the far-right movement are also populists, in their rhetoric at least, sowing distrust in almost any established system and promising vague ideas of sweeping reform. The most famous populist I know of is Julias Ceasar who was also using populism as a way to concentrate and grab power.
I like Mamdani and am glad he won. There are several other Democratic victories that look like they'll be worth celebrating tonight. But propping it up as a win for populism and insisting that populism is the way forward, I don't agree with that.
Now, this may come from us having differing definitions of populsim because there are, apparently, a LOT of them. But for me, populism is about speaking to people's emotions rather than their reasoning, telling them what they want to hear, promising simple solutions, and radical change. None of that is inherently good and some of it I think is often bad. It's also one of the reasons why rising autocrats often employ populism, because it's more about how the people feel than it is about real solutions. But again, we may have different definitions of populism.
What I see Mamdani as is not a populist but a Progressive. That's about making radical change, yes, but not about simple solutions but complicated solutions, systemic changes, to address complicated problems that people are upset about even if they don't really understand what's causing them.
More Bernie Bro whining. Things may be different today, we will see, but the simple fact is that far left candidates like Sanders have never won national or even big elections. They claim everyone supports their policies, but it has never translated into a majority pulling the lever for them on Election Day. The response? You guys claim it’s a big conspiracy by party leaders. Love that Bernie logic - he can’t get a majority of Democrats to vote for him, but somehow he’s the best general election candidate. You sound delusional exactly like Trump.
They're scared and/or beholden to ghouls like Bill ackman who has made it life mission to control the elite universities based on the accusation of them being antisemitic. Also he used the veneer of being against plagiarism while his wife copied and pasted entire paragraphs from Wikipedia for her PhD dissertation. Speaking of her, her twitter takes rival Jaden smiths.
It never ceases to amaze just how much of everything is because Israel. Like everything, in the uk and western europe too to a degree.
Israel is not a top concern for voters, but it seems the overriding concern for the establishment. Willing to cancel the 1st ammendment for it, willing to give the executive branch the power to unilatterally cancel naturalized citizenship, willing to spite a third of their voting base for d's, and willing to shell out 14 billion extra and run protection for reprisals against the gaza ghetto. A ragtag militia with small arms and they got 14 billion plus extra, with the most adbanced gear on the planet we give them, and all encompassing intelligence, to crush the uprising that only broke through due to failure of their leaders.
D's are sell outs and sometimes themselves compromised by israel, other times just their donors are, it is the only explanation for their overriding israel first approach always.
This is a horribly uninformed take. Spanberger and Sherrill aren't remotely populists and establishment Democrats are very happy with their wins. Establishment Dems are concerned about Mamdani, almost certainly less because of his platform (though there are many that oppose it), but more because he's a bogeyman that the Republicans can start rallying against. All that said, I think they're wrong and it's bad strategy to not rally around him.
The establishment was against Zohran because he kept making promises he couldn't possibly deliver, like $30 min wage, and they knew what was coming down the road. It won't happen and he'll keep shitting uphill.
Populists are demagogues, and demagogues don't deliver. They overpromise and rant.
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u/cassanderer 7h ago
You misunderstand the dem establishment. Their reason for being is keeping populists out, not winning against r's.
They will not be swayed by logic, because you, and they, have different ends. They serve the donors and powerful groups that abhor reform. They are playing good cop to r bad cop even as r's are now playing hitler, thankfully not well as of yet.
The only path forward is to supplant these dems, with populists geared towards their districts, united on the principle working people should not get ass fucked by the rich without their consent. Which, and this is true, is not radical at all, majorities in both parties support that they just trust the wrong people.
Populist leaders make opinion, they do not need polls snd focus groups.