It’s because the Overton window is shifted to the right in the US.

If the Democrats were a better tool, that would be great. They’re neoliberals, they don’t listen to anyone. Socialists have been able to get into their primaries. One day we might even get one of them elected as the nominee. But we need to keep our democracy long enough to do that. And there’s a good chance we just screwed that up.

Harris called for a ceasefire multiple times and promised to do everything in her power to end the war in Gaza. Trump said Israel needed to finish the job. Harris was the correct choice to help the Palestinians.

I saw you were stuck parroting propaganda and still are, so I decide to try to reach you. Me pointing this out to you has clearly been upsetting. Who ever got you hooked on this wanted to debilitate you so you would harm your own interests and the causes that you care about. Hopefully you’ve been able to tell that I don’t think particularly highly of the Democrats. I see how they are useful and point that out to people. You seem unable to stop trying to sink Harris’ campaign. She lost. It’s done. If we’re lucky we will still have a two party system. In the event Democrats still exist in some capacity, consider using them to advance your goals, as opposed to spread propaganda about the Democrats at the expense of your goals.

The Democrats aren’t going to become the party you think you deserve. But they are the party we can use to achieve our goals. If we fail to leverage them effectively that’s on us. Spreading this propaganda is self-defeating. It’s an exercise in shooting yourself in the foot. The Democratic Party is what we have to move the needle to the left. If we insist on casting them in the most unfavorable light possible to everyone, we shouldn’t be surprised when no one wants to vote for them and they lose. Your time would be better spent targeting the Republicans with this stuff considering they are the people who want to kill us.

Obviously the Democrats would do better if they adopted a populist message. We can’t control the Democratic Party. But we can influence the rhetoric around how people view their vote. If we make the Democrats look like fascists who must be protested out of a moral duty, then we’ve done the Republicans a favor. If we point out the Democratic Party are a useful way to advance progressive and socialist causes over time then we’ve done leftists a favor. Let’s do the latter.

Of course we’ll see what happens next year with this. Seems like the party could die if it’s leadership are all arrested. If it doesn’t, let’s use the Democrats to our advantage. edit: typo

The ratchet effect is incorrect because it fails to describe the actual dynamic at play. Neoliberals move one step forward while fascists move three steps back. A fascist power grab followed by a neoliberal’s incremental changes appear to the causal observer as the ratchet effect.

The solution is not to disparage the democratic process, thereby denying ourselves the chances of ever getting progressive or socialist agendas implemented. But to recognize it is nonviable to ever allow fascists to win. Especially when you only have neoliberals to replace them with.

I should have come up with this sooner, but it really takes seeing the sword of Damocles overhead that is impending fascism to not give a shit what others think of you.

A politicians job during a campaign is to convince people they are worth electing.

Which is why American politicians stay in the American Overton window. Which is on the right side of the political spectrum. The way we made progress is by voting for the party that was the furthest to the left.

She became Biden 2.0 as her campaign went on,

DNC consultants, including Hillary Clinton, took over Harris’ campaign after the DNC and ran it into the ground. That’s not permission to give fascists a free pass. We are not Democrats. We don’t live or die based on what Democrat politicians do. We find a way to make their campaign work because everyone’s lives depend on it. There’s too much at stake to just throw up our hands and say both sides. Democracy is not we the Democrats, it’s We the People.

Anyway, let’s see, oh yeah: 94% of registered Republicans voted for Republicans in 2024, the exact same amount as 2020.

Yes, Republicans demonstrating they understand how democracy works as they dismantle it.

No one was duped, you sound weird and strange talking the way you do. It’s off-putting and makes me want to actively work against Democracy, because you’re doing exactly what I’ve been describing: dismissing everything I have to say while condescendingly speaking to me like I’m some misguided child.

This is you. Duped. Sounding weird and strange. Actively working against democracy because you didn’t get what you wanted. It is an incredibly childlike temper tantrum.

The options were Biden or Harris or fascism. Through our collective failure we have chosen fascism. As adults, it’s our job to take responsibility for what We the People had control over, which was our votes. Now if we fail to organize we will likely end up in death camps.

You’ve given up your agency the second you had someone to blame your misfortune on. I recommend you reconsider. There is again to much at stake to continue blame a party that is now going to prison. If we fail, we will again have no one to blame but ourselves.

We lost to fascism. This is the useless rhetoric that lost us the election. If we wait for the perfect candidate we will never see any progress in this country again. We got to this point with the rights we have because people voted for the furthest left option they could.

You have fallen for every fallacy that was thrown at you this election. As long as you care more about keeping your hands clean than people you will be stuck this way. Find someone you can trust irl. Anyone who has something to lose from this christo-fascist takeover will tell you got it wrong. Rejecting the Democrats feels good to you, but it has done nothing but harm the causes you claim to care about.

We knew the Democrats were neoliberals. The assignment was to prevent the christo-fascist takeover. People who didn’t vote for Harris or spread this rhetoric failed the assignment. Trump may get two more Supreme Court picks and Israel will be allowed to continue their genocide of Palestinians indefinitely.

The stakes could not have been higher this election. At no point does the Democrats being neoliberals who are bad on issues compel us to be ineffectual. We got bogged down by rhetoric that got in the way of what we as the left needed to win, record voter turnout.

Everything in your post boils down to the Democrats didn’t promise me everything I wanted so it’s the Democrat’s fault. This is a useless mindset that helps no one. For everyone’s sake, ditch it.

We’re on the same team. We try get to the Democrats to win because as progressives and socialists we are outside the Overton Window in the US. Getting the Democrats to win and move to the left is the strategy minority groups have been doing for decades. Disinformation campaigns to make people lose sight of that fundamental strategy is part of how Harris lost. A lot of younger people didn’t know better and fell for it.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been Gen Z’s moral injury. Bad actors exploited that to give fascists the win. And a lot of people fell for it.

It’s the neoliberalism that tells people that they are at the end of history and their society’s institutions are infallible.

I do not want to go quietly. I’m going be vocal and hope people are convinced.

That’s why efforts to organize grassroots movements need to start now. While we still have the cover of our democracy for about the next two and half months. When happens next depends on our ability to convince people who don’t vote to care.

Kamala was a neoliberal, who would improve things incrementally, running against a fascist. We all knew she wasn’t an ideal candidate and told people that. I know I did. We know the Democrats are neoliberals, a right leaning political position. We needed to delay fascism four more years to get a progressive or socialist candidate in the next Democratic primary. We failed.

It’s over. We lost the election. You were had. I’m sorry that happened. It can happen to anyone.

Take a break, when you feel better, come back. People will be organizing to fight back against fascists. This time, please join them instead of arguing against them. Saying ‘both sides’ isn’t helping.

No, voting is part of how we move the Overton window to the left. If we don’t vote, it moves to the right.

The parties are not the same. Democrats passed the infrastructure bill, cancelled student load debt, and appointed judges to the courts that uphold our rights. They did those things in response to pressure from grassroots movements that showed the viability of progressive causes. Republicans separated immigrant families, took reproductive freedom away from Americans, and led an insurrection against our country. People who aren’t watching Fox News or otherwise trapped in right-wing information silo can tell them apart.

There’s no way to argue you out of a con. You’ve been duped and we need people like you to realize it. Or things will not get better. The people who sold you the both sides narrative are gone. They spread their misinformation, tanked American democracy, and now you are still parroting their talking points.

I am begging you. You have been fooled. Please believe me. Again, it is not possible for me to argue you out of this. You have to trust someone. If you can’t trust me or any of the other people on lemmy saying the same thing, find someone irl you can trust. That’s the only way you can get better.

Things don’t deserve to get even worse because people let them get worse. This is why accelerationism is inherently a false promise, because no matter how bad things get accelerationists want to watch them get even worse. Accelerationism can’t make things better because the only way to do that is to actively make them better.

It was never about stopping genocide because the US burning to the ground would involve the genocide of tens of millions of people and allow dictatorships to continue genocides and start new genocides all over the world.

It was never about leftism because now the far-right is in the position to prosecute their political rivals and send the armed forces after their ideological opposition.

It was never about helping anyone because now the Republicans can replace the government with MAGA loyalists and defund any social program that could have helped people.

It was about destroying a country that shattered their self-image as a good person. Accelerationists felt like they had blood on their hands by association of being a US citizen and they wanted revenge for the damage to their ego. They were duped. The scam was different but they contributed to the same fascist takeover as the Republican voters who had been duped by Fox News.

We have between now and the death camps to fix this. Start by learning this. We don’t live in a moral universe, but a physics-based universe. Acting in a way that feels morally right isn’t guaranteed to achieve the goal it is subjectively morally consistent with. But it is a way to be conned by people who will offer a way to absolve a person of their country’s guilt.

What difference does it make which form of government is fucking you over?

Democrats wanted to incrementally improve things. Republicans wanted to round us up into camps.

Voters had an opportunity to prevent a christo-fascist dictatorship and they didn’t take it. Moving things to the left in this country has always involved voting. Losing our democracy doesn’t improve the Democratic Party. If there is another election, which we can’t count on, Democrats are going to learn that they need to move further to the right to pick up votes. They’ve done it before, and they will do it again. They will look at the conservatives who voted and tailor a party platform for them.

Democrats could not care less about appealing to nonvoters or third party voters. They only care about winning, which is probably part of why they suck at it.

Voting should be a mechanical choice during elections. If people want better candidates, organize, and do the work to get grassroots movements off the ground between elections.

Instead of picking a strategy based on a subjective morality people should consider analyzing strategies based on their utility.

If a strategy advances a goal it’s useful. If it doesn’t, it’s not. Voting for the Democrats demonstrates a wider voting base for them to move to the left. Moving Democrats to the left is the goal so this strategy is useful. Protest voting takes votes away from the Democrats so they look for voters on the right. This accomplishes the opposite of the goal so this strategy is not useful.

I like to think most people will have a wake up moment between being rounded up in death camps and digging their own mass graves. We need to organize to tell them sooner than that so they can do something about it before it’s too late.

The fascists will kill you for voting for their opposition sure. They were going to kill their political and ideological opponents regardless. They know they need to remove socialists and progressives so the country they takeover has no alternative to them. They aren’t going to spare a member of an out group because that person voted for them.

Nationalism is just a mechanism to justify racism to the fascist. Not all racists are fascists, but all fascists are racists.

340 - (74 million children + 70 million Trump voters + 68 million Harris Voters) = 128 million nonvoters, some of who are probably not eligible for one reason or another, so a conservative estimate of 100 million nonvoters

Regardless the worst case estimate from 2018 is 11 million people in the US are fascists. That’s a good ball park number to work with anyway. The nonvoters outnumber the fascists almost ten to one.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans-alt-right-racism-white-nationalists

Dictators do love revising history to entrench their rule.

RIP Peanut 🐿️ and Fred 🦝 with Harambe 🦍

The worst case estimate has it at 11 million people are fascists in the US. This is from 2018, but it gives a good ball park number for today. edit: 2018 not 2016

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans-alt-right-racism-white-nationalists

They are unlikely to be happy with being murdered by fascists in death camps.

I’m sorry that happened. Thank you for sharing. People need to hear stories like these.