this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Saying they're the party of complacency isn't really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there's an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn't get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That's wasn't an act of complacency, it was expansion.
To me, the difference in Democrats' and Republicans' positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn't call either anti-war.
But let's say you're right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they're too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can't tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?
The democrats are not anti war.
Yeah, that's certainly how I feel.
You're predicating your false dichotomy on the idea that: (A) the electorate will vote consistently for pacifism and for pacifists, (B) the electorate tracks the policy positions of politicians. Neither of these things are true.
This single issue did not decide this election, and it will not decide future ones (if we even have them) either.
The electorate is vibes based and has been for some time now.
Well, I would disagree with a lot of that. The average voter may not understand policy nuance, but it's not just vibes based. Trump made a case for being anti-war. He won the first Republican primary in no small part by being the only person on stage to say that the Iraq War was a mistake. He promised to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and then set a withdrawal date (and then changed it several times, and eventually set it to after his term ended so that Biden would get all the bad optics). I think Trump is a manipulative liar, but his supporters have concrete examples of things he's said and done that make them think he's anti-war.
The economy was the number one issue for voters, and I don't think voters' reaction was vibes based either. Democrats almost always improve working class conditions more than the Republicans, but look at what happened during the Biden administration; inflation went way up, the interest rates went way up, and what the best jobs market for workers in the last 40 years got nuked. People might not understand why that happened, but they know what happened.
From where I'm sitting, the solution is to go so big that voters can't misinterprete where you stand. Biden and Harris could have gone after the price gouging that was responsible for so much of the inflation during their administration, but instead, it was a footnote on the campaign. They could have come up with some kind of endgame for Ukraine other than, "send them as many weapons as they need indefinitely." They should have taken a more confrontational stance with Netanyahu, since he was actively sabotaging the peace process while holding out for a Trump administration.
But again, let's just say I'm entirely wrong: voters are idiots, they understand nothing, and their decisions are based entirely on vibes, not reality. The question remains the same; what do we do? Because right now, the strategy seems to be offering them incremental, technocratic solutions, then insulting them when they don't understand how they're better than Republican lies. And it doesn't seem to be working.
I'm not a political consultant, but one of the things -- if it were me (which it isn't) -- would be to start talking to people in this country not as if they're involved people with a lot of knowledge about how anything works, but rather on their (4th grade reading) level, and keep repeating simple messages. At least for your mainline politicians, it's important to appear somewhat stupid, so that the American voters think you're one of them.
Bernie was actually very good at this IMO. I'm not sure his policies would've ever gotten anywhere -- who knows? I would've loved to find out -- but he was very good at repeating the same shit over and over again and speaking at a stupider level (most likely on purpose, because he's not a stupid guy).
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and I think that's why he's been so effective at winning over people who have gone to Trump. We can argue over whether or not the political class would ever let him have been the nominee, much less allowed hid agenda to pass, but I think his policies are very clear to everyone: higher minimum wages, higher taxes on billionaires, Medicare for everybody. People find that much easier to understand how that will improve their life tomorrow instead of a small business tax credit program.
The small business tax credit program Harris spent so much time talking about seemed like exactly the wrong thing to be talking about to exactly the wrong people.
It would maybe work for people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal (AKA nobody). Deeply nerd-brained capitalists that think "gee whiz, this market is not competitive, competition could be grown by creating small businesses for the giant corporations to compete with!"...it's a completely bookish garbage policy competing for ad space in an environment where her opponent was talking about how Harris was for giving transgender, border-crossing, violent criminals "sex changes" for free with "your tax dollars".
When I saw the "She's for they/them, not for you" commercials airing on NFL broadcasts this year, I shuddered to myself and I got that bad 2016 feeling all over again.
YUP. She ran a campaign that was focused on middle-class ideas, but very low on working-class ideas. If you're struggling to buy groceries, starting a small business is as unattainable as purchasing a yacht, no matter what kind of tax credit you're offered. I didn't see the ad you're talking about, but I got that exact feeling when I heard she was campaigning with Liz Cheney.
Looks like it was famous enough that it got its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_is_for_they/them
I read an article saying that basically everyone that watched the ad came away with much less support for Harris. It triggers the exact portion of people's lizard brain that they use to make their political choices. It was the 2024 version of the "Willie Horton" ad.
Oof, I just watched it, and I can immediately see why it was effective. Yeah, "Willie Horton," is a good comparison.