The leaders of the Democratic National Committee announced they plan to learn absolutely nothing from their embarrassing loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
“To all those growing skeptical of this party’s strategies and overall agenda, let me just say we hear you loud and clear. Rest assured we will be doing everything short of interpreting that sound into words and responding to those words in any way shape or form.”
sounds a lot like the same thing they said in 2016 and now that we know that they're doubling down on their stubbornness here and in other examples; we should expect a repeat of 2016 & 2024 in 2028.
I think after 4 years of Trump, if there are still elections in 2028, we'll see a Democrat elected president simply because of the fact that how bad it is under Trump will be right in people's faces. In 2032, however, we'll definitely see the Dems lose to somebody even worse than Trump for exactly why they lost in 2016 and 2024.
The Dems don't learn anything and lose, then 4 years later they win because the Republicans made things worse, and then they learn nothing, double down, and lose again, starting the cycle all over again.
Establishment parties across the EU and OECD countries (mostly liberal democracies) all had their incumbent parties lose ground in 2024, for the first time in history.
The Democratic party isn't a viable alternative to the Republican party. They're too friendly to corporations, not doing enough to show teeth or enthusiasm, and definitely not explaining why Republicans are the worst option. Let's assume that D is politically bankrupt after taking right wing medias beating for the last 40 years. SO HOW DO WE FIND A NEW ALTERNATIVE TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? And how do we get everyone to migrate?
Or, and hear me out - stop desperately trying to reform an unreformable system and ignoring that it is working exactly as it was designed to, abolish it, and build something better instead.
I think they just got stuck in a rut. They have been dealing with an all-obstructionist Republican party for nearly 16 years now, ever since Obama was elected, if not before.
They stopped promising the moon because they became policy wonks and focused on what was realistically achievable, only making promises they thought they could turn into reality with an obstructionist party blocking them.
They stopped being dreamers, started being policy wonks, and were unwilling to make promises they didn't think they could keep. Think about the amount of messaging in the last few elections about how progressives were asking too much because we have to be realistic about what we can pass with only a sliver of a majority. People rightly view that as starting from a point of compromise and thus as weak.
Trump promised to smash norms and ignore laws to get his promises done, which people wrongly view as strong. When Republicans like Trump make promises, they are completely unburdened by whether they can accomplish them or not: make the promise, follow through be damned.
Nobody wants a policy wonk telling them they need to wait until their kids are middle aged for things to get better for their family, and the Democrats somehow failed to realize this in 16 years.
Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system. Everyone else has been Bush-era-style "Stay the course" status-quo enabling.
you’re right, they make an outlandish promise (build a wall, mexico to pay) and then blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. The agenda-setting aspect you’re mentioning is also something that caused everyone in the democratic party to snipe Bernie since his whole thing was talking about what must happen and not getting bogged down in the endless details (though I think he could have also done that at that level too).
Yeah, the presidential election is a circus and only a performer can be an effective candidate. Ever since 2016, the DNC just runs these duds who focus more on extending an olive branch to the GOP than championing solutions to anything voters actually care about, no matter how realistic. Whether the solutions can actually be achieved is irrelevant; what matters is that you’re willing to shoot for the moon on important issues and not weaken your position before you’ve even started negotiating. Without that, how can you possibly expect voters (particularly, typical low-information voters) to show up for you?
Honestly, Tim Walz would have been a better presidential candidate. At least he has a personality.
Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system
And, even then, he enacted a shockingly small amount of actual change.
He had the majority long enough that he could have codified Roe V. Wade, and increased the minimum wage, and done UHC and all sorts of shit, but he wanted to policy wonk both-sides across the aisle cooperation shit, and well, ended up passing the Republican version of UHC and bailing out billionaires, which really doesn't exactly reflect hope and/or change.
I'm not saying he didn't have problems, or that he had an endless mandate, or that he did nothing, but mostly that the "best" democratic president in damn near 30 years who had the biggest mandate you're probably going to find in modern politics still did a shockingly little amount of anything to improve or harden the government against clear nutters - the Tea Party was showing up, so it was or should have been blindingly obvious where that was going to end up eventually going.
I don't buy the (R) "do nothing democrats" line, but boy, they certainly make it hard to refute that claim in any form that's not a 1000 word essay which is why it plays so very well on TV/news/Twitter.
Democrats are afraid of there not being elections in 2028. What they should be afraid of is the DNC moving even further right as they are planning to do right now.
Unlike prior revolutions in which the new regime was established after the old, we should write a new constitution in advance.
Start with a framework. Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes (getting rid of the EC, say. Or election by ranked choice)
And then, we develop it. Run clauses by legal scholars, hold town halls. Get it on the web. Debate about the benefits of competing clause versions.
So that when there is a movement, a resistance (and there will be) an organized rebellion, the people will not just have an enemy to fight against but something to fight for.
So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all† the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all† languages.
Then there'd be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they'd be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they're ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)
The point of all this when the world isn't on the precipice of despair is twofold:
1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d'etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And...
2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don't receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.
Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.
I don't have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.
For now it's a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn't have any idea how to begin it.
† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.
The DNC often deals with this, because the nature of federal politics in the US requires them to appeal to the general public, which has left-leaning interests, and then businesses and oligarchs for sponsorship which have right-leaning interests.
Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they've only been able to nominate neoliberals since.
So no, those of us on the left have no candidates. And since its a two-party FPTP system, we only can vote against the worse popular guy by voting for the slightly better other popular guy.
In this case, assuming the election went down as it appeared, the majority of the US voted for the racist autocratic dictator rather than another neolib. (Granted, Biden went further left than we expected and I had hope Harris would as well. Walz certainly seems to understand the US public, but none of them are without ties to industrial interests. We'd still only be able to expect a couple of scraps.)
What this tells me is that most Americans don't get it. They think they have a choice. And now they're going to endure the consequences of their folly.
Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.
It's amazing that a naval officer/peanut entrepreneur/devout Christian was "too left wing", especially since he got beat by a Hollywood union boss from California.
Mind you, we just had an anti-elite rebellion led by a thrice-divorced billionaire failson of a New York City real estate magnate.
What would it look like if they "got it"? They'd still have chosen one or the other, I don't know how I'd distinguish between this outcome that indicates they don't get it and one where they apparently do.
As best as we understand the motivation of the constituency, they felt the economy was bad under Biden, that immigrants were increasing crime, weighing down our social programs and taking our jobs, and that Trump will fix everything with his concept of a plan.
In reality, Biden was dealing with the after-effects of Trump's economy, plus the COVID-19 epidemic, and while prices did increase, the US has recovered better than any other nation, so he can't really be faulted on the economy, especially after Trump's initial response to the epidemic of pretending like it's not already in the community, and politicizing mitigation efforts like masks and social distancing.
Then, immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don't want, are paying taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the general population. So all of our concerns about immigrants are demonstrably false.
And if Trump's previous methods of fixing the United States is consistent, then he's only going to break things. An example would be his efforts to repeal the ACA, which turned into the skinny repeal that is, killing the program without a replacement, because making a better healthcare program was too hard for the GOP.
I remember all this, and it's troubling the short memories of the American electorate. It's not the first time, though. They should have remember not just how bad it was under George W. Bush, but how awful Republicans became during that time. Street Republicans were outwardly endorsing torture and suggesting that waterboarding wasn't really torture. It's like they lost all moral direction or even basic sense in favor of party loyalty.
Now as more votes are processed, and as we're able to see how demographics voted, our review of the 2024 election might change, but right now it looks like huge chunks of the electorate are just forgetful and completely daft. More likely they're just racist and bigoted more than they care about their own self interests.
If they got it they'd know that putting a Democrat in office and then pressuring them can get results, which is how we ended DADT and DoMA. The GOP doesn't care what the public thinks.
It's worth tapping the quote (accredited) from Linden Baines Johnson:
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
Lest we all forget, Trump took the well considered Romney post mortem, threw it in the trash, pissed on it, then gradually built a coalition of, checks notes... White women and men of color. For fucks sake.
Are you shitting me? I know it was a small margin but women voted for Harris. Black people voted overwhelmingly for Harris. Yeah Trump got some black people to vote for him and Latinos shifted. You're going to pin this disaster on white women and black men?
That's not the point of my argument. My point is that Republicans warned themselves they would lose MORE women and minorities if they didn't move away from harsh immigration discussions and conservative social policies.
And then Trump did the opposite and made gains with those voters.
Bernie Sanders reflected on it stating that it was the Democrats failing the working class that won Trump the election, and people in the Democratic Party denounced him for it.
They already learned nothing from 2016. If they didn't learn before why would you believe they've learned this time. It's a situation where satire runs too close to reality so of course people take it seriously. In fact the "she didn't get elected because she's black/woman" reasoning already shows they don't plan to learn from this time either. The answer to dems losing isn't "we weren't racist/sexist enough".
I'm kind of amazed that more politicians don't just promise to try to implement all the highest polling ideas. (Spoiler: Most are progressive and socialist policies.) Especially presidential candidates running against potentially catastrophic fascists.
Part of the problem is that polling has been fundamentally flawed for a while now. Polling in 2016, 2020, and 2024 all showed Trump as losing and the polling agencies had to artificially weigh pro Trump supporters higher in the polls because they weren't being adequately represented. It seems that a major portion of the problem is that some number of liberal/socialist poll respondents don't end up actually voting and some number of conservative voters don't end up responding to polls.
What is the lesson they are supposed to learn? Stop running women candidates?
Harris' loss wasn't some Electoral College bullshit, or 3rd party spoiler. Maybe the Palestinian vote cost her Dearborn, but it can't explain the numbers throughout Michigan, much less Georgia and North Carolina.
I'm skeptical that leftest policy would save the Democrats when the country just roundly rejected liberalism.
The lesson is they shouldn't have abandoned the working class. Instead of listening to working class concerns, they told the working class they were wrong. For example, they waited way too long to care about immigration even after Bill Clinton tried to do something about it in the 90s.
I didn't hear much of anything about social spending, creating a ton of jobs or any plan at all for the federal govt to help the bottom 80% outside of "we'll help families buy their first house" from the Kamala campaign. When we rolled into the last month and I still hadn't heard about the big economic plan I knew we were cooked.
First houses are great and all but what about people who can't afford their own place to live, or healthcare, or enough food? Folks have been living with parents since the pandemic, food banks are seeing record use right now and they campaigned on neoliberal business as usual with more growth for Wall St? "We're very proud of Bidenomics"? Bidenomics did great pulling us out of the pandemic slump but then inflation happened and we never pivoted to giving folks any help getting back to where they were before the pandemic happened. Nor did we make a show of going after corporate profiteering, we just let that happen without a peep. What about mass layoffs over the last couple of years followed by record setting stock buybacks, dividend payouts and corporate profits?!
Your usual base of well off educated voters who see the long term stability and overall growth benefit Dems bring showed up of course but everyone else stayed home because more neoliberalism after 30y of that plan leaving 80% of us behind simply doesn't inspire hope or excitement. Meanwhile you had the other guy shouting "I'll break laws to change things!" Guess which of those is more popular right now?
The left rejected the Democrats' corporate neoliberalism. Some held their nose and voted for the lesser evil despite loathing them, but too many couldn't bring themselves to do it.
The lessons to be learned:
Nominate Bernie Sanders when you have one. Be popular with the working class.
Get rid of the shitty FPTP voting (= two party system) despite Democrats benefiting from it, because Republicans benefit even more now that they don't have any spoilers or single-issue nonvoters.
I'm surprised at how many Gen z kids are trump fanatics, I didn't expect the level of support from that base. So I don't know how much age is in play here now.
Future prospects for those kids aren't great and there are right-wing grifters targeting the disenfranchised youth. Fascism is a tempting ideology for those who are scared about the future and feel they deserve better opportunities in life. Also being an edgy teen is a right of passage. I've also seen that many many gen z kids care about Palestine, and Kamala told them to fuck off so they did. The ones that see a genocide and don't care tend to lean right.
If the democrats could show a plan to fight climate change, reduce wealth inequality, and stop arming genocide, youth support would slam left like a screen door in the wind. With a broad brush, the older members of the caucus don't see that or don't care.
Young men in particular are annoyed with all the "wokeness" and to be honest, so am I. Not because I disagree with what's being said but because Democrats let Republicans control the narrative every time they engage in it. Republicans bitch about trans people in boxing matches and instead of redirecting to an actually important topic like healthcare or income inequality they just start debating about testosterone levels and in so doing legitimize the complaint.
I've got nothing against trans boxers but let's have some perspective. I doubt anyone reading this even knows a trans boxer. Stop getting lost in the weeds and focus on the stuff that matters to everyone. That trans boxer is having trouble affording their healthcare too. Let's deal with that first. I bet you'll find people willing to listen if you'll talk about stuff that actually makes a difference in their lives.
My nephew who is 21 explained horseshoe theory to me a few months ago. He wouldn't listen to why it was bullshit. He has grown up in a right wing government and he likes the "center". I doubt he voted but if he did it would be for Trump.