When people are struggling economically, they’re looking for a change candidate. Running on everyone being better off than their actual bank statements and credit card bills say was always a shit strategy. Cozying up to Liz Cheney and her lot was secondary to that.
This is exactly it. It’s white Trump wins. Why people are willing to overlook all of his craziness- because his platform is one of radical change. He may be crazy and he may be full of shit but at least he is talking about change. And when you’re hurting and you see the entire country hurting and you see nobody in charge giving a fuck, or worse telling you this is how it’s supposed to be, you want radical change.
Problem is, the status quo of the last 20 to 30 years is significantly different than the status quo shortly before that. Income inequality is through the roof. The middle class is stagnant. There’s much less upward mobility than there previously was. And for the majority of the people, that are on the lower half of the income spectrum, costs have gone up and up and up and wages have not.
For 15 to 20 years people kind of dealt with it because standard of living was pretty decent before that. But you can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnip. People see boomers who were able to have a house and a family on one average 40hr/week income and they say what the hell we now have both partners working full-time and we can barely afford ourselves let alone a kid. That’s why make America great again is such a great slogan, because it invokes those days when the American dream was still alive.
I would say Republicans are much more responsible for the extraction of the nation’s wealth, but Democrats happily sat by and fiddled while Rome burned and were eager participants in the extreme offshoring of all American manufacturing type work in the '90s and 2000s. There was a ridiculous idea that this would somehow make life better for Americans, that everybody would get retrained to do computers or something like that, and we would become a nation ‘better than’ having to build our own stuff. Obviously that didn’t work out.
Come to today, and while Democrats I think have better policies for the average worker, none of their messaging addresses the major systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Obama’s did. Hope, change, yes we can. That was what the country needed. He won on a platform of radical change. Unfortunately he turned out to be a moderate change president but I think he generally did a decent job.
What was Hillary’s platform? The only thing a lot of people learned about her is that she’s too stupid to hire decent IT people who use encryption, and that she has a private and public position on things, in other words don’t tell the plebs what you really think cuz they won’t vote for you.
Then you have Kamala, magically frocked by some DNC elites to sit in the big chair, who ran a pretty boring campaign that seemed to, like Hillary’s, be based on ‘I’m not Trump so of course I’m going to win’. Obviously that wasn’t good enough.
If the DNC wants to start winning the White House, they need to clean their own house. Get rid of all the status quo dinosaurs like Pelosi and reform the party into one of the people. Find someone like Bernie and put him in charge.
Ditch wedge issues like gun control that only cost votes. And make a party platform that focuses on the common man. Not just the blue man, every man. Then you win elections.
Quite true. Especially since we don’t seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.
Okay but then what was the alternate winning strategy? The whole world was undergoing massive inflation, the US actually did better than basically every other country. There’s no way to turn around a global pandemic followed by unprecedentrd global inflation in short order. Egg prices went up because of avian flu and culling but no one wants to hear that. What could democrats have run on instead?
I’m biased because I wish what she advocated for was closer to what I want, but I think she needed to be bold. She had some good policies, but we need more than some good policies right now. We need to rethink how we live because our institutions are failing us. I don’t know for sure if she would have won, but I think Medicare for all, free school lunch, even more antitrust action (Lina Khan was one of Biden’s best picks), etc, probably would have helped.
When people are struggling economically, they’re looking for a change candidate. Running on everyone being better off than their actual bank statements and credit card bills say was always a shit strategy. Cozying up to Liz Cheney and her lot was secondary to that.
This is exactly it. It’s white Trump wins. Why people are willing to overlook all of his craziness- because his platform is one of radical change. He may be crazy and he may be full of shit but at least he is talking about change. And when you’re hurting and you see the entire country hurting and you see nobody in charge giving a fuck, or worse telling you this is how it’s supposed to be, you want radical change.
Essentially: the status quo of the past 30 years is dead (and its never coming back), some people just haven’t realized it yet.
Problem is, the status quo of the last 20 to 30 years is significantly different than the status quo shortly before that. Income inequality is through the roof. The middle class is stagnant. There’s much less upward mobility than there previously was. And for the majority of the people, that are on the lower half of the income spectrum, costs have gone up and up and up and wages have not. For 15 to 20 years people kind of dealt with it because standard of living was pretty decent before that. But you can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnip. People see boomers who were able to have a house and a family on one average 40hr/week income and they say what the hell we now have both partners working full-time and we can barely afford ourselves let alone a kid. That’s why make America great again is such a great slogan, because it invokes those days when the American dream was still alive.
I would say Republicans are much more responsible for the extraction of the nation’s wealth, but Democrats happily sat by and fiddled while Rome burned and were eager participants in the extreme offshoring of all American manufacturing type work in the '90s and 2000s. There was a ridiculous idea that this would somehow make life better for Americans, that everybody would get retrained to do computers or something like that, and we would become a nation ‘better than’ having to build our own stuff. Obviously that didn’t work out.
Come to today, and while Democrats I think have better policies for the average worker, none of their messaging addresses the major systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Obama’s did. Hope, change, yes we can. That was what the country needed. He won on a platform of radical change. Unfortunately he turned out to be a moderate change president but I think he generally did a decent job. What was Hillary’s platform? The only thing a lot of people learned about her is that she’s too stupid to hire decent IT people who use encryption, and that she has a private and public position on things, in other words don’t tell the plebs what you really think cuz they won’t vote for you. Then you have Kamala, magically frocked by some DNC elites to sit in the big chair, who ran a pretty boring campaign that seemed to, like Hillary’s, be based on ‘I’m not Trump so of course I’m going to win’. Obviously that wasn’t good enough.
If the DNC wants to start winning the White House, they need to clean their own house. Get rid of all the status quo dinosaurs like Pelosi and reform the party into one of the people. Find someone like Bernie and put him in charge. Ditch wedge issues like gun control that only cost votes. And make a party platform that focuses on the common man. Not just the blue man, every man. Then you win elections.
Very hard to identify the end of an empire while your living in it.
Quite true. Especially since we don’t seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.
Okay but then what was the alternate winning strategy? The whole world was undergoing massive inflation, the US actually did better than basically every other country. There’s no way to turn around a global pandemic followed by unprecedentrd global inflation in short order. Egg prices went up because of avian flu and culling but no one wants to hear that. What could democrats have run on instead?
I’m biased because I wish what she advocated for was closer to what I want, but I think she needed to be bold. She had some good policies, but we need more than some good policies right now. We need to rethink how we live because our institutions are failing us. I don’t know for sure if she would have won, but I think Medicare for all, free school lunch, even more antitrust action (Lina Khan was one of Biden’s best picks), etc, probably would have helped.