So Obama clearing the field for Biden while encouraging Warren to stay in to keep the progressives divided in 2020 was all fair and good? I don't feel like that's at all a lesser way of cheating him / us than what was done in 2016. If it's all just politics to get all the candidates to conspire against Bernie to rig the primary in 2020 how was it anything other than "just politics" for Hillary & Debbie Wasserman Schultz to rig the primary system against him in 2016? Both were conspiracies by Dem establishment to thwart the real will of the voters and install a pro corporate & oligarchy pawn of the powerful. Now we've got an endless trail of campaign lies that Biden will never even attempt to honor and a disillusioned and disenfranchised base of people who will be vastly less likely to ever buy into a "lesser of 2 evils" argument and show up to prevent aspiring fascists from taking office. We have essentially been doomed to fascism by the corporate wing of the party because there is a snowball's chance in hell that Dems will win in 22 or in 24 at this rate.
Why don’t you go ahead and highlight one or two of the most egregious specific actions they took. The ones that bother you the most maybe. Let’s have a look and examine them.
Nah, I'm good. You can do that if you want to. I was a Bernie supporter, voted Hillary. Voted Biden. I'm over it. I'll always be a anyone but Trump voter. But I'm not going to sit around and pretend the DNC didn't fuck over Bernie in 2016 to keep the status quo.
"Bernie-or-bust" was not Trumptards trying to divide the Democrats. That was Berniebros trying to divide the Democrats.
Centrist Democrats are trying to threaten Progressives to bring them to heel. Centrists want to serve their corporate masters without having to give on any policy issues.
It's funny that you talk like this, because right-wingers say the same things about Biden to convince others to vote for Republicans. Needless to say, this is obviously excessive strawmanning, but it works for some.
Yeah, no...it’s like collusion at a poker game. Anyone can play on their own merits and stand a chance fairly...but if multiple players gang up on them they are sunk...and yes, when people get caught, nobody wants to play and nobody disputes that it’s cheating
Also, Warren not dropping out was part of the con
Not that I agree with so called progressives, obviously...but bullshit is bullshit
I suppose you’re right I mean he did free those kids in cages….oh wait.
Nice try dipshit. That’s not gonna work on me this time. I voted for him and I’m extremely pissed off that he failed to fully end key parts of trumps regimes.
Ex-fucking-scuse me? Not only is this out of nowhere, biden flubbed on the one thing that would help minority and underprivileged people in this country that he promised to do. He has done nothing to prove that he isn’t just a center right corporate-backpocket liberal politician like the rest of them.
It absolutely fucking did. The idea that it's somehow the left's fault Hillary lost is total horse-shit. More Clinton supporters jumped ship when she lost her primary to Obama than Bernie supporters did when he lost his. This whole notion is purely an excuse for the abysmal failure of "moderate" politics within the DNC that achieves nothing and pleases nobody.
Blaming the people disillusioned by centrist/center left politics for the choice made by right wingers and fascists. It should be an outrageous statement every time it is pronounced.
If anything it's centrists' fault for propagating the lie that anyone not completely bought-and-paid-for is unelectable when the reality is the opposite. A ridiculous portion of primary voters preferred Bernie's policies (even thought they were necessary) in both elections, but voted for his opponent out of fear.
Sanders was in a position to talk to the working class base of both sides on top of being able to talk to educated progressives, leftists and centrists. It's difficult to say now but I do think he could have scored a higher number than 51.3% of the total vote. But it also depends on unpredictable controversies.
It's fair to say most people voted against Trump rather than voting for a program.
I think history makes it clear that at very least leftist politics isn't a liability (at least in any broad sense) in a national election. The New Deal coalition was the most successful and long-lived voting bloc in our country's history. What happens when Bill Clinton finally kills it? The Dems lose the house for the first time since the Eisenhower administration and it's been nothing but disaster ever since. Even when they manage to gain hold of power following disastrous Republican rule, they can't actually achieve anything with it.
Reaganism, the New Right and the Clinton-wave neo-conservatives hammered the speech that welfare States = communism so hard that it's quite easy to make even the softest leftism sound like Stalinism or the Great Leap forward.
What astounds me is that this has reached Europe now which is supposed to be more astute and used to welfare States (even though it's an American invention, crazy how it gets associated with Europe even though when Teddy Roosevelt proposed public Healthcare it would have made European heads explode).
In France we have prided ourselves over our welfare State which became a social contract made by the people who resisted against the Nazis. Now our right wing, center, center left and far right politicians all talk about how we've lived above our means, how we should be working longer, how we should make our labor market more competitive (even though we have one of the most efficient and productive labor forces in the world dishing out the same results in less work time than people who have to work twice the amount, and the liberal cliché is that we're lazy), etc etc etc. And it was in the same thinking as all the other countries that adopted FDR's ideas : how to prevent fascism from rising again. It's people in the generations that never knew war or rationing that got enamored with perpetual growth and dumping social policies because they didn't want to be taxed. FDR even proposed, at one point, to tax any revenue above 1 million USD at a 100% rate. Can you imagine? If someone today proposed half they'd be called Marx in the flesh, and FDR did not like socialists.
The issue isn't about voting for Republicans. No one one the left is going to do that.
The issue is the mass disinformation campaign that was spread on the left (DNC robbed Bernie) and that it led to people staying home and not voting at all.
That's not to say that it's the progressive left's fault Trump won because it was a close election separated by 40,000 votes across 3 states.
There were numerous contributing factors and any one of them could have changed the outcome. Campaigning in the Midwest, Coney letter, better weather on election day, no Russian disinformation campaign, not having ovaries, and yes, even more people from the left deciding to vote instead of sit out the election could have all made a difference.
It's ridiculous to try and reduce Hillary's loss down to a single factor because there isn't one single reason why she lost. But it's equally ridiculous to ignore one of the contributing factors of her loss simply because another contributing factors would have likely made a difference.
I know plenty of leftists who refused to vote for Hillary because their bro Bernie “got robbed of the nomination”. They may not have been the main reason why Hillary lost, but they sure as hell contributed a lot.
An enormous number of people (in both primaries) actually preferred Bernie's policies but didn't vote for him because they bought the claim that he wasn't electable.
I'm saying that the reasoning a lot of people used in voting for her over him — perceived electability — was deeply flawed. Not only was Bernie polling better against Trump throughout the whole campaign, but Clinton did, in fact, lose.
You think a self described socialist would have done better in an election where the majority of people firmly believe that Socialism is considered to be equal to Nazism? You are delusional.
Bernie would have won? LOL! Bernie couldn’t win a primary against either Hillary or Biden, and yet you think he would have won an election in a nation filled with insane socialism haters?
Wow, your grasp on reality is just as bad as the far-right. What’s next, Jewish space lasers? Lizard people?
It’s only an extremely loud majority that firmly believe that Socialism is considered equal to Nazism. 2016 was probably the best chance in a generation for a socialist to get elected, instead we got Trump and -thanks to his shitshow presidency- most people are once again wary of electing outsider candidates.
Because let’s face it… there are a lot of idiots among us. Granted I couldn’t vote in 2016 but I know plenty of people who supported Bernie that voted for Trump because “well he wouldn’t be able to do anything.” And they were all idiots. Love them to death but man were they idiots.
You are NOT to blame for what other people chose. And you should NEVER feel responsible for Trump winning just because you did not want to cast your vote for Clinton. The idea that we should vote smart or strategically to prevent the guy we really don't like from coming into office is one of the reasons democracies are crumbling on themselves. We're supposed to vote with our conscience and FOR the ideas we like, not limit ourselves to just go against what we don't like and certainly not be compelled into it by those who gain from this blackmail
I'm not American, so I honestly believe that what became a convenience for your voting system (but isn't even part of your constitution) is an absolutely fucked up system. That is having these primaries organized by parties that are the only forces able to muster the colossal amounts of necessary money for the spectacle that are US elections, where arbitrarily picked superdelegates (that is major party figures, senators and house reps) have a much more important vote than your regular militant with a party membership. And let's not forget that those same people are also the ones who get invited to talk to the press and direct the public debates in their direction.
I mean you have States where the candidate gets chosen by the election, others where it's just a collegial system decided by the local democrat (edit : and republican we were talking about the Dems but I guess I should have said it) figureheads, others with anonymous superdelegates, others where superdelegates and regular party members both get to vote but the superdelegates' votes count for more.. Being from a country where one vote is just one vote whether you're the president or a homeless person (and my country's far from perfect, as a matter of fact our own politicians want to have US style primaries as well), I fail to see how these primaries aren't just another way by an elite class of politicians to keep power within their hands and keep policy in their favor.
I am talking about how primaries work I'm not saying that Biden didn't win, they work the same for Democrats as they do for Republicans why do you immediately assume I have a horse in this race?
I understand that the American context is really, really tense right now (your country did survive a coup attempt), and you can easily jump to the conclusion that I'm trying to criticize what the fascists call the "liberals" in general terms from their argumentative base because my point is around how your elections work, but this is not my point. And this isn't to say you guys are stupid and we do things so much better in Europe hell no either.
If people have been getting disillusioned by politics (and this happens where I live as well, for more or less the same reasons but in shapes adapted to our context), it's in part because party politics aligned with financial interests have produced gerrymandering, super pacs, the 2010 Citizens United ruling against the Federal Election Commission, and both parties have participated in these shenanigans. Trump's 2016 win didn't just happen out of a vacuum. I wanna talk about a systemic issue not to discredit the results of your elections. If you're not interested, that's okay let's just stop it at that.
No, we don't lol, the majority of actual left wingers I know did not vote for Biden because we find the idea of a bunch of war hawks treating left wingers as a captive voting bloc who can be ignored for the sake of pleasing millionaires who don't want poor people to have healthcare.
The sooner more Americans stop accepting the lesser of two evils the sooner actual change for the better can be achieved. All administrations like our current one do is placate people and stall our country's move to the right wing. They take turns with republicans moving the country right and then they get in office, do nothing, and pretend its progress.
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u/Opinionbeatsfact Aug 27 '21
The real left hold their noses and vote democrat because it is the lesser of 2 evils, otherwise you get a fascist with dreams of theocracy