PhilipTheBucket

In many ways, the Democratic leadership responsible for Donald Trump’s return to power. Let's explore why.

Fixed the headline.

I mostly agree with the article itself. I would just urge anyone who wants to read the headline and absorb only the general sense-picture "Democrats = bad" to read the whole thing.

Assigning some blame to corporate-friendly Democrats who turned their backs on most of the people on the ground fighting for real change, and failed to do much of anything successful when the wolves arrived at the door for real in 2016, is completely fair.

Now that the shit-storm has arrived for real, though, I think that deciding you want to make anyone who's a Democrat into your enemy, and so reduce your coalition size from 70 million people to maybe 1-2 million if that, sounds like suicide. We will either hang together or we will surely hang separately. Nobody you're talking to, or going to be in a position to be talking to anytime during the coming storm, had anything to do with failing to prosecute Trump effectively or betraying Bernie Sanders. They worked with what was in front of them, same as you.

Read the article. I'm usually in defense of Democrats, but I fully admit that I think it's a mostly fair assessment of how we got here and what we do from here.

Sure. 100,000 people hauled away by the cops when they haven’t done anything or committed what we would now consider a crime. Mass deportations of currently legal immigrants, or serious charges for people who participated in a protest but nothing else, is the obvious possibility.

That and laws or federally enforced law-facsimiles of some kind that mean you get punished just for a certain viewpoint that would be fine now. It could be a crime for a social media company or a private citizen to debunk election fraud claims from 2020, or something similar to that.

Give it a rest. I can argue back my point of view to you, and we can go back and forth a little, and it's pointless.

I can guarantee you that people in large numbers will get their doors kicked in by the police and hauled away, and laws will get passed that make it a crime to be anti-Republican. How wide a scale and how bad that all will get isn't certain, but I think it will be pretty bad.

Your days of pointing at the Democrats as the problem need to stop, and their days of pointing at the Bernie Sanders crowd and the Palestine protestors as the problem need to stop, because even if we (edit: ~~don't~~) do put all that bullshit aside and start fighting together against the real enemy for real, we might not win. I really don't care who's right anymore. Before the election, I did. That stuff is over.

The more people who are still convinced that their own side needs to be made into the enemy in any respect, the harder that fight will get, and it'll already be hard, and bad.

Bernie Sanders did that, and it did great. It wasn't enough to win, partly because the Democrats fucked him.

At this point, you'll have to contend with massive social-media operations which are working against and shaping the narratives that most of the country use as a substitute for news, to understand what's happening in the world. I think the time to be able to do it has passed, for a little while, without on-the-ground anti-electoral organizing on a massive scale.

See who you can find in your area. It's about to get real, I think.

All the people who were doing that are now pushing RCV or other election reforms that would make it realistic for third parties to be able to get all the way to winning. The third-party people who are running in FPTP elections are, almost universally, either attention-seekers or deliberate spoiler candidates. Bernie Sanders, when he was running, joined up with the Democrats instead of running as a spoiler candidate, because he's making an earnest attempt at making things better.

It doesn't really matter now because we've slipped one rung down the civilizational Maslow pyramid now, and are in for a fight to preserve the right in any capacity to elect who we want in power. But, whenever we make it back out to the other side of that, it'd be nice to remember to reconfigure the system so third parties can actually win, first, and then run third party candidates after that, not the other way around.

Sanders got fucked in 2016 and the Democrats who get nominated aren’t great and yes it’s partially the Democrats’ fault they got so few votes in 2024. I strongly disagree that it’s chiefly their fault, but that horse is out of the barn now, and also the barn is on fire now and connected to the house with the children inside.

There will be some incredible shit going down in the next few years. It’ll be a challenge to have any sort of elections in 2028 that have anything non-Republican in any position to win anything. I don’t think it will happen.

If you want to have a conversation about how we get left-wing values to win in future elections, start with how we fight to preserve basic freedoms like elections that don’t have Trump’s election integrity squad in charge of them, and free speech online, and the military not being used against American protestors.

I hope I’m wrong but I think some real shit is going to go down real soon. I don’t think we should assume elections are going to be normal and then plan from that assumption.

Blame can be shared.

If one person left a bunch of oily rags in my home, and then when they caught fire, someone else refused to fight the fire but in fact let it actively continue, then I can blame both people.

There are people who went through the holocaust who compared Trump in 2016 to Hitler. They, if anyone, understand the gravity of the comparison, and made it a little bit carefully. But they said that the way he speaks, the way everyone who is his enemy is an animal who must be destroyed, is very similar.

Well... if it makes you feel better, they'll get punished, too. I think most of those people are unknowingly living within a very cushy society which has been set up and maintained for them, which is nearing its end, to be replaced by one much more difficult and dangerous.

They're victims too. They had so much propaganda, and so much bad education, and so many legitimate grievances about a government that since the 1990s at least has mostly forgotten about them.

I try to be kind in my thinking. They might attack and someone might have to defend against them. They might get attacked by the same system they supported in the beginning. A lot of them are going to get hurt, some of them very badly. None of that is good, even a little bit. Some of it "has to happen" and some will just happen because it happens. But I don't hold any of it against them nearly as much as I do against the people at the top that engineered this whole thing on purpose, with full awareness.

I'm pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it's not without a human in the loop. I've been doing some experimentation with it, and I don't think it's a fully automated response.

I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don't think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn't really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I'm not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look "right" is part of their system.

Take a look at this:

https://ponder.cat/comment/835655

I'm not sure it will be possible for a while.

Hunker down, make allies, have an escape plan. Keep doing unobtrusive things to keep important seeds alive and healthy, they're about to face some challenges. Stay off social media or anything that will put a target on you, keep your nose clean.

Until there's a critical mass of resistance, all it will do to try to oppose this is give it more cause for repression. Once it reaches a certain point, then sure. But in the meantime I don't know what would even be possible that would make anything any better.

It's not going to be a fun time.