Oh no, I’m not brave enough for politics
Right.
You said it! Shifting right, right?!
My bad I thought he was a Democrat. I thought obama had a slim majority in the senate in the first half of his first term? I’ll have to double check
The thing though is that you NEED a centrist government. Just as a pure right wing government ignores the wishes of many, a pure leftwing government will so too.
I’m not even saying it should be 50/50, you just need actual honest representation.
That ain’t ever going to happen though with the current first past the post and winner takes all system. You need a representative democracy
Depends how you define the left. Really, representative democracy is a leftist idea compared to most historical governments.
Ignoring people’s wishes is OK when those wishes are to hurt other people.
One key point in politics is you never have only two possible views. The simplistic notion of left versus right doesn’t make sense at all because people have a wide variety of priorities and problems and needs. It’s convenient to use those terms, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they could ever define what’s actually happening.
Anyway, specifically in the US in the last few decades, what people call the centrists are actually pro-corporate politicians. They will vote for whatever makes money for big companies. And we don’t need people representing big companies.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree there. Right-wing politics are fundamentally hierarchical and anti-democratic. Going for Centrism there is saying that wolves should have a say in decisions related to fencing and whether barns should have doors.
Depends on what you mean by “centrist”. If you mean what the US calls centrist, then hell the fuck no. Actual centrism is considered “radical left” around here. If you mean “centrist” by the rest of the world standards, then we can talk.
No. You honestly don’t.
The Democrats in the US fall to the right of conservative parties in other countries, and we seem to be the only modern country that can’t get it’s shit together.
assuming therell be a next time
They need to keep garnering that valuable Cheyney endorsement
Dems are controlled opposition
Any excuse to give yourselves a pass for banging the drum for American and Palestinian genocide, huh?
Well why not have some for oneself if it’s so good to be exported everywhere.
I love the part where I predicted that the talking point of the day would change to “It’s Good, Actually, that LGBT folk and POC are going to get genocided in America”
What’s the world like when you can paint every topic with a single brush and walk away feeling smug?
I don’t know, you should probably ask the “Dems are controlled opposition” guy.
The difference is that their statement seems appropriate to the context, your statement seems to be roping in something that does belong which makes me think that you make every argument about Israel/Palestine. Hence the comment about a single brush, since I cant imagine how else you could make this about that.
On here, Gaza was a prominent issue for advocating for abstaining from voting for Harris, especially of “BOTHSIDES” types and .ml users.
Ok, so someone says something negative about the Dems, and because you have seen other people use Isreal/Palastine as a reason for abstaining from voting, you brought it up unprovoked here. Have we come full circle to what I originally said? Can we answer my question this time around?
What’s the world like when you can paint every topic with a single brush and walk away feeling smug?
this doesn’t even make sense
Honestly, I could have labeled the knifes and grenades better. Basically I am saying that it is silly to blame anyone other than the organization that runs the campaign as it is their job to motivate voters and they spent billions of dollars, record numbers and motivated nobody. The only people who voted were regular democrat voters and people, like me, voting on a harm reduction ideal. However now that the election is over we can clearly say that the harm reduction voter strategy for the left and dumping billions in courting the right is not a sound strategy.
Thus blame and pressure should be placed on the Dems for failing to do anything to motivate the left to vote for them, as they are the ones who run the campaign and make the strategy, are named individuals who can be pressured and moved and less effort should be expended yelling at the left for not voting as that is the strategy that has now lost two elections.
I hope that is a better explanation than the meme provided of my viewpoint on the matter.
I don’t care about the parties. Anyone who fairly to offer the slightest resistance to fascism is responsible. And the rest of us get to live with this for the rest of our lives, trying to fix the unfixable.
You don’t care about the parties? So you are just letting the entire political leadership off Scott free for their failure in this election to blame random people on the internet? Big brain maneuver. Maybe you should pay attention more, care more, understand more.
Every. Human. Being. Is. Responsible. For. Opposing. Fascism.
Nothing and nobody can absolve anyone from this responsibility while they draw breath. Party leadership failed this responsibility resoundingly. As did every single eligible voter who did not oppose the fascist candidate.
Maybe you should pay attention more, care more, understand more.
Like paying attention to the fact that one candidate has been quoted about looking Hitler, encouraging increased speed and reach of genocide, has been consistently attacking LGBTQ+ people, and stated intent to dismantle democracy in favor of a dictatorship? Or, does caring what happens to the Palestinians who are going to be wiped from the West Bank or Ukrainians who are going to lose the rest of their nation and self-determination count? How about caring about my trans friends and family that are at much greater risk of death now than two weeks ago? Or maybe the women and children that will die because of the federal abortion ban that will pushed next year? Or the workers whose rights are likely to be rolled back to the times of robber barons, despite the blood, death, and hardship that previous generations put in to win these rights?
Oh. You mean caring about the desire to avoid culpability and personal responsibility that people who care about others less than their own egotistical concepts of moral purity continue to express. Sorry. I’m fresh out of that. If telling yourself that you did the right thing in shirking basic human responsibility helps you to sleep at night, great. Good for you. Will I lend aid if you need it and I’m able? Yup. But, it’s likely that I’ll never forgive nor forget.
Lol. Lmao even.
Bold to assume there will be another cycle.
By “centrist” you mean “someone between the moderate right Dems and the extreme right Reps”?
Harris’s Hope: Getting Right-Leaning Voters to Shift to the Left
“Democrats see a narrow opening to peel away center-right voters bothered by abortion bans and by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”
“Ms. Harris and her allies have made persuasion of moderate and even right-leaning voters a central aspect of their closing strategy”
Good question. That’s the problem with labeling shit by a term that gets hard to nail down instead of expressing the intent behind your usage of the word. My definition of a centrist (the unwarpped version) is someone in the middle of left and right, but everyone on the Internet hears in the middle of Dems and GOP, which puts them quite to the right.
The more we use labels that are constantly evolving the less we can communicate effectively
Yup. It’s one of the least representative and most corrupt so-called modern democracies in the world.
“Ha ha sitting out and letting the far-right win will really show them”
I’m… I’m just so tired, man. I’m just going to lie down here and die, I guess.
Ha ha, refusing to appeal to the left and letting the far right win will really show them.
Make sure to call the Trevor Project, families that have already lost people, and those who are about to see genocide in the West Bank about how it’s ok because you held to your conviction without a care about the second and third order effects or increase in human suffering that it would cause.
Classic
Complete genocide of the Palestinian people is a moral victory? Huh. That’s a new one to me.
I don’t think you understood the picture.
I doubt anyone could make heads or tales of that diagram
Ya know what. My last response was pedantic. Here’s the 33 minute explanation of this thought. https://youtu.be/wCl33v5969M?si=MaOaGngmjZxMjxM3
It requires self reflection if you are of the same mind that is discussed in the picture. Seeing yourself from another perspective. Pretty hard stuff.
Political views are a bell curve
The left doesn’t show up to vote
Look I voted because I’m a big picture guy and I see where you are coming from but the Democrats made it very clear they didn’t give a fuck about the left vote this time around.
Maybe this time they will learn that if people want a conservative they will just vote for the psycho-conservative party that actually delivers than the milquetoast-conservative party that crows about “unity” and “woke” shit all the time.
Haha who am I kidding
You sure showed them, didn’t you?
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Deleting a meme for misinformation is the funniest meme of all lol.
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Remains to be seen 4 years from now.
Hopefully we’ll still have elections then.
There aren’t enough leftists in America to win an election without catering to multiple ideologies.
Democrats were catering to leftists and moderates and never-trumpers. Because there is a lot of diversity in our country and it is a politicians job to work for all their constituents not just a certain ideology.
Leftists have a track record of not voting if they have to compromise.
Because moderates will compromise a progressive policy to death. Where is the public option?
Its cool man, im 33 and I’ve voted democrat in every election. I always push left but I showed up for barack, hilary, biden, and kamala.
This neoliberal shit is not going to fly with leftists, maybe y’all do need to push further right, hell why not just amalgate with republicans? Fuck it, its a a diverse nation afterall.
See ya in 2 years, where I’ll tow the party line again and get blamed for its loss again somehow.
What do you mean by “where is the public option?”
The public option in the affordable care act that was killed by Joe Lieberman?
Maybe if they ran a fucking left-wing candidate they might.
There are some left wing candidates in local elections, but they don’t get votes either
No offense, but that’s so vague it’s almost meaningless. What candidates? What elections? When?
I can tell you that progressive legislation had a lot of wins last week, with voters passing minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, abortion protections, and union protections while rejecting school vouchers in 3 states. Progressivism did a lot better than Centrism last week.
Then they would lose votes from moderates and lose again
The sheer number of trump voters I’ve heard say they were originally gonna vote for Bernie is larger than you would imagine.
People are angry the system is rigged, trump channels that anger and says he will solve it. Granted he won’t and they’re dipshits for believing him, but that’s how it goes.
100% of Trump voters I’ve met call Biden and Kamala radical leftist that are responsible for inflation and many other things.
I’m sure there are some fringe trump voters that would vote for Bernie but not enough.
Trump has foreign bots, the billionaire class and republican propaganda machine all helping him.
Bernie would be depending on donations from lower income workers.
I am talking about the voter swing required for trump and GOP to sweep the whole government. That isn’t because of Trump supporters, they would vote trump if he personally knifed their mother in front of them. That is because of disenfranchised fence sitters who put zero effort into educating themselves and then vote for a change of leadership off of a gut instinct that a different person cant do worse. Its ignorant and wrong, but look no farther than worldwide elections this year showing a huge ousting of incumbent officials. Inflation has been unreal, and the uneducated think the president controls literally everything (see the “I did that” stickers on gas stations nationwide) People want change but they don’t know how to get it, and here is a man yelling and screaming about how he is going to change shit.
I know its difficult to imagine being this ignorant, but i truly believe this is how a lot of people operate. Its not malice, its ignorance and apathy.
I would vote for Bernie but in my experience many voters are closer to the middle of the ideological spectrum than far left or right.
This is very true, a lot of people get wrapped up in their bubbles, either the internet bubble or their own personal bubbles, so they believe the bubble when it says “everyone is left or right” but theirs a ton of people sitting in the middle just apathetic towards being invested politically.
The kicker is that those people in the middle are villanized by both sides as being a part of the other side. Instead of them trying to bring them to their ideology, they push them away. But this was what the constant polarization through wedge issues get you, an easily divided populace that is divided fighting about things the political figures on either end don’t actually care about, so you vote for those issues instead of the ones that prevent the ever increasing cancer that is billionaires.
Its all a distraction.
There not getting votes from moderates now! Why is it somehow smart and good to go, “wow, moderates didn’t vote for us, I guess we have to get more moderate,” but it’s somehow dumb to say, “the left didn’t vote for us, maybe we should go more left?”
Especially because, according the Pew Research Center, you’re, “the left doesn’t vote,” premise is a lie, and people on the far-left and far-right are more likely to vote, donate, and attend rallies than people in the center?
What makes you think moderates arent voting for democrats?
Because they keep fucking losing when they try to pick up moderates. In 2016, Chuck Schumer makes a grand prediction that Democrats will pick up two moderates for every one working-class voter they lose. Turns out they just lost working class voters. A NY Times study showed that hidden Trump voters were much more likely to be moderates. 2020, Biden went much farther to the left than Hillary, and he did better than her with not only moderates but conservatives. Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney to try and flip moderates, and she wound up doing 11 points worse than Biden with moderates.
The Democrats won big with a moderate message exactly once in 1992 when Bill Clinton beat Bush, and they’ve been chasing that high ever since, even though they keep losing. Gore? Moderate, loser. Kerry? Moderate, loser. Obama? Progressive (at least in platform, he pivoted hard to the center almost immediately), winner. And we’ve already been over Hillary, Biden, and Harris.
The data is in. Chasing moderate voters is a much worse strategy than having a robust, progressive platform. But they keep doing this, and they keep losing. It’s ridiculous.
Biden catered to moderates in 2020 and wouldn’t have won without them.
So you are wrong. Moderates are voting for democrats.
Yeah, no shit, that’s literally in my comment! Maybe try rereading it and getting back to me.
You Charlie Browns types are just actually incapable of learning, huh?
I learned that “leftists” on lemmy claim they won’t vote unless dems act in a way that would lose votes from other groups. It’s an obvious bad faith argument.
“Leftists” on lemmy aren’t willing to compromise and claim they won’t vote for dems unless dems have the same attitude and also don’t compromise.
America isn’t made up of leftists though so you can’t win in a diverse democracy without compromise.
Lol, okay buddy.
I’m not so sure about that. As an outside observer, it seems pretty obvious to me that the lack of a left vote in the US is because they do not have a notable left wing party. The best way to win someone’s vote is to represent them. If nobody represents someone nobody will get that vote.
Obviously to actually fix that you’ll need election reform, this is pretty much the expected outcome of a single vote FPTP winner-take-all system.
While I agree, it would probably help if the Dems actually tried being left-wing for once, rather than always trying to be Republicans-lite
Why vote for a right-wing campaign?
Have they stopped teaching politics in school or something?
If you sit out enough democratic elections, eventually, it defaults to a socialist party. It’s a known exploit, they’re just trying their best. /s
Because the center right to right wing Dem leadership simultaneously ignore the wishes of the Left and take them for granted, offering them little to nothing in the way of improvements to the atrocious status quo.
Give people something to vote FOR, instead of only a greater evil to vote AGAINST, and you’ll get much higher voter turnout.
For example, another received wisdom is “young people don’t vote” and guess what? When they were given the chance to vote for their bodily autonomy in Kansas, young women voted at a higher rate than men of any age combined.
The last time the Dems campaigned on going further left, 2008, was their biggest win in decades. When Obama then governed further to the right and campaigned for reelection accordingly, he won by a MUCH smaller margin.
and you’ll get much higher voter suppression.
You mean turnout here?
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out 😄
Fixed
How dare you suggest that the best way to get my voice represented is to use my voice in the first place.
Billionaires buying votes, China and Russia trying to get Trump reelected, republican propaganda that causes voters to ignore reality.
You: how could the DNC do this to us?!
SMH
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