this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Big tents absolutely win elections, that's really the only thing that does. Seats at the table are incentives to get people in the tent. But if they don't get the votes , they don't get the table, and any seats they offer are worthless.
You put me in a room with Democratic party leadership, and I'll tear into them with all the rightful criticism they deserve. You put me in a room with voters, before the election, I will sing their praises. I'll advocate their victories and downplay their flaws.
Not because the victories are substantial, and certainly not because their flaws aren't terrible. But there are two tents big enough to win the office, and the other one is worse and backed by lockstep support.
Did the Dems gain significant votes by offering Liz Cheney a seat at the table?
A little, but they lost many many votes by shutting out any pro-Palestinian voices from the DNC. They wouldn’t even let Palestinian-Americans endorse Harris at the convention, let alone talk about Palestinians suffering (but they stacked the convention with Israeli-Americans and families of hostages).
Maybe the convention lost them more voters than gained ? Widely circulated videos of democrat delegates making fun of the protest that was naming the dead kids might have lost Michigan all by itself .
Absolutely. This should not have been difficult; “we grieve the loss of these children and something needs to be done to force both sides into a ceasefire” was too controversial for the mega donors of Biden/Harris. Any talk at all of nudging the rightwing Israeli government was too unpalatable even though Chuck Schumer himself was publicly criticizing Netanyahu.
Liz Cheney represents conservatives who don't want to vote for Trump. That demographic represents more votes than leftists. That's what happens when you play hard to get too hard, the person you're after gives up and goes after someone else.
Exactly, which is why Kamala won!
Just because it wasn't successful doesn't mean it wasn't the rational choice. It's very possible that she would have done worse if she hadn't courted conservatives, and possible she would have done even worse than that if she'd gone full tilt toward progressives. Hindsight is easy.
Worst performance since the Republicans took California but hey who knows, could've been even worse somehow if they did anything differently. Clearly the right play is to learn absolutely nothing from this. Even the really obvious stuff like the fact that virtually everyone in the country hates Dick Cheney's guts with extremely good reason.
Also is it still hindsight if a bunch of people were screaming that it was a terrible move before it blew up in her face? Because that kinda seems more like foresight.
Again, you put me in a room with democratic leadership and I'll scream their flaws in their face. But this isn't a room of democratic leadership. How exactly does screaming about the flaws of the DNC to the voters accomplish anything?
It's in the best interest of the DNC to adopt policies and campaign approaches that have the best chance of winning. It's in the best interest of leftist voters to keep fascists out of office.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that yelling about it here is not only ineffective, it's counterproductive. I'm not DNC leadership, and I'd wager good money that no one else on this site is DNC leadership. So yelling about their flaws here doesn't communicate with them, all it does is discourage the voters that are here from big tenting against the fascists.
But clearly the right play is to learn nothing from this, and continue to fracture the left and foement apathy in leftist voters. That's been working great so far, right?
I happen to believe in a little something called "The Truth." I don't believe that everything I say should have to serve an immediate strategic purpose. In fact, I don't think it's at all sensible to even set a strategic purpose until you have first clearly identified and laid out the truth. Even if the truth is inconvenient or counterproductive, I'm not really interested in a political project that's based on ignorance or deception.
If the truth isn't enough to get people to back your political project, then perhaps your political project isn't worth backing. Regardless, it's likely the truth will come out eventually, at which point you will lose credibility to the opposition. And if the left doesn't speak out for fear of hurting the democrats' chances, then the only opposition will be from the right.
Furthermore, people having correct political ideas and a clear understanding of the world is more important than any election, which is of secondary concern. A person's political actions (or lack thereof) do not end at the ballot box, and when a person has correct ideas they are more likely to participate in productive actions and avoid harmful ones. Collective action, boycotts, protests, etc have more capacity to effect change than a political system designed by slaveowners explicitly to subvert the popular will.
The reminds me of what Zizek said of the liberals: they are very cynical. "We need to do things we don't believe are good, maybe even bad, but it works"
I also believe in the truth, but I won't let a fixation on it increase suffering. We're fighting a well-oiled propaganda machine directly opposing us. If the truth doesn't actually reach people, it doesn't do them much good.
To be clear, nowhere did I suggest lying. I'm just advocating a little rhetorical tact. The other side isn't fact-checking their dog in the race. They're blatantly lying, and their supporters whistle and look the other way. When one side says their candidate is the Messiah, and the other side says their own candidate is deeply flawed, where does that push someone on the fence?
Support the easier enemy in the election, highlight their success and shut up about their flaws. After the election, switch that up and shout the truth from the rooftops.
It's not about who deserves to win, it's about choosing which of the two that are going to win is a more favorable enemy. When we have 80 million voters on our side, then we can start pushing the good candidate.
Probably the one that admits to their candidate's flaws. The side claiming that their side is the Messiah can only reach people who are willing to believe that narrative. It tends to be very alienating to the average voter.
What's baffling to me is that there seem to be a lot of people on the democratic side who simultaneously believe all kinds of contradictory things. Trump voters are all blindly devoted to their cult leader, but if we just shift a few more degrees to the right, that will win them over, somehow. Or, the key to winning elections is by winning over moderate swing voters who don't feel attached to either party, and the way to do that is to demand blind devotion to our candidate while screaming that the other side is Hitler and anyone who even considers them is a fascist. It's absurdity. And yet, no matter how many times these strategies fail, people refuse to learn from them.
I happen to come from a conservative family, and that made it immediately obvious that even the best attempts by someone like Biden or Harris to win over the right were doomed to fail, and the Dick Cheney strategy was absolutely not even close to "the best attempt." The reason is that Biden and Harris look and sound like typical, mainstream democrats, who their entire political identity is built on opposing. Of course, my parents are always going to vote Republican, but the one person on the Democratic side I've ever heard them say they respect is Bernie Sanders. DNC strategists and their loyalists cannot comprehend this.
So many people adhere to this overly simplistic ideological model as if it's just a truism - that the things people support are more or less innate characteristics randomly developing from birth and the combination of those things makes everyone fall someone on a one dimensional spectrum from left to right, and everyone votes according to who's closest to them ideologically. And so the only way to win is to assume the far left votes will fall in line behind you while you move right to appeal to the centrist swing voters. But that whole model is bullshit, and it has been proven to be bullshit time and time again.
A large part of Trump's appeal is that he's able to present himself as an outsider. Moving right and shaking hands with Cheney, trying to be like, "See, the whole political establishment hates Trump," merely reinforces Trump's credibility as an outsider while also tying Harris to the disastrous policies including the War on Terror. The failure of the Bush administration is a part of why conservatives turned to Trump in the first place! It's insanity.
If you wanna win by peeling off Trump voters, the best way to do that is by targeting people with libertarian values and running on isolationism and staying out of foreign entanglements. But that would require actually doing that, or at the very least, it would require not painting everyone who disagrees with your interventionist policies with the same brush of being a "Russian bot." Alternatively, you can say, "screw Trump voters, we'll win by mobilizing the base," but that would require adopting popular leftist policies that would hurt their donors' profits.
So, being unwilling to actually play the game, all that's left is to put forward the same platform of interventionism and neoliberalism that has simply outlived it's moment and does not have enough adherents to win.
This is woefully ignorant of reality. People are not immune to propaganda. It's noble that you think most people are rational and politically informed, but that's very clearly not the case. Rhetoric has been extensively studied and developed for literally millennia, there's a reason.
80 million people voted for that.
No one has suggested that. Shifting a few degrees to the right isn't supposed to win over Trump voters, it's supposed to win over moderate conservatives that don't care for Trump.
What happened to caring about The Truth over all?
Of course. Which is why effective propaganda and rhetoric is generally more sophisticated than just "our side good."
More like 158 million.
So... Trump voters.
What happened to pragmatism over truth?
I don't consider it true that everyone who votes for Trump is a fascist. There are plenty of reluctant Trump voters who are primarily motivated by negative partisanship, which is to say, voting against the Democrats.
The donors and the consultants making the bulk of the decisions disagree. The donors are motivated to shape policy, not win elections. The consultants are motivated to raise money, not win elections. They literally tell us they would rather loose than be disloyal to Biden by criticizing his legacy.
Yeah, you're probably right. They should try it a few more times just to be sure.
Its not rational to hold to a position that was empirically shown to be false. remember the askes were mostly: stop being a cunt to palestintians, stop shipping weapons to genocidal regimes, and have policies that actually help american workers. like committing to ms khan, maybe a fucking min wage increase, maybe a single payer option, restoration of various corporate tax policies we've gutted regan.
but sure keep blindly carrying water for a dead party. thats definitely rational.
imagine thinking 'don't genocide' is playing hard to get. also:
talk about delusions. remind me what disaffected republican voters. reminder: you're party lost and hard because they're trash at least the republicans give their voters what they want someone to blame.