8mo ago

AOC denounces anyone engaging in online vitriol after Trump’s victory — Democrats included

www.msnbc.com

Summary

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressed Trump’s election win, urging Democrats to move past infighting and post-election rancor to focus on preparing for potential impacts of his presidency, such as tariffs, mass deportations, and censorship.

She criticized some Democrats for blaming the loss on “identity politics,” despite Trump’s campaign centering on white racial grievance and calls for white men to turn out. Ocasio-Cortez pointed to moderate voices like Reps. Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton, who argued that supporting trans rights hurt Democrats, as misguided.

She encouraged people to engage in direct communication and join physical communities to combat despair and build resilience.

76 comments

She's talking about "moderates" who are trying to blame it on defense of LGBTQ....
Because surely what the Dem party needs to do is move further to the fucking right and abandon the Dem voter base.
Despite the fact that Trump ran a campaign steeped in white racial grievance and the fact that MAGA influencers were literally calling for white men — specifically — to get out to the polls, some commentators have resorted to tired takes about Kamala Harris losing because the party leaned too much into “identity politics.”
The Democratic ticket didn’t actually lean into identity politics, but some in the party have settled on that line of thought as well — such as Reps. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who suggested that Democrats’ support for trans people’s rights helped spell their doom this cycle.
We can't keep electing "moderates" just because the wealthy, corporations, and foreign governments like Israel keep giving them hundreds of millions of dollars
Shit, if anything that should be a reason we don't vote for them.
This a class war going on, and the only side fighting it is the wealthy.
- Unfortunately where I'm from (the self centered shithead part of NY) moving to the right is EXACTLY what they want... I've had no shortage of people tell me they only voted for Kamala because she dropped the progressive stuff and was taking on Republicans in her cabinet. Of course the propagandists have done a wonderful job this cycle associating progressives with antisemitism so that did wonders for us too....
  I think we just need to accept that America is a far right country and we're the miniscule minority that wants change... I was already depressed about the result but then hearing just how many selfish bootlickers are out there made it even worse.
  
  So your idea is to keep ignoring the third of the country who never votes because "both parties are the same"...
  And you think a better strategy would be to continue to drag the Dem.party right, even tho when we try that the result is always depressing Dem turnout, Republican turnout staying the same, and Republicans winning the majority of the time?
  I just don't see how that's a logically sound plan that has any chance of stopping fascism.
- abandon the Dem voter base.
  I'm Ok with that at this point. The Dem voting base is just liberal Republicans at this point. It's time for something else.
  
  The Dem voting base is just liberal Republicans at this point.
  No it's not.
  They're a very small but vocal amount of Dem voters.
  But they're not the problem, they voted R against Obama and Obama still flipped red states in 08.
  Not only are they not the voting base, the party literally doesn't need them.
  The problem is those people run the freaking DNC, and are the ones that keep dragging the party right.
  The problem is party leadership and the solution is changing party leadership.
  Not doubling down on party leadership to further piss off the Dem voter base.
- I'm liberal and voted blue. I think we have gone off the deep end for trans. 100% for non hate, but I would like girls to be able to play sports without allowing former boys.
  
  If that was a large issue you'd have a point. But it's almost never happening. There are just very very few examples of boys transitioning to girls while being on puberty blockers long enough to compete as a girl and then dominating.
  It's a made up problem.
  But the right won't just stop at "girls sports" they're going after adults who have never played a sport in their lives.
  But even tho the trans population in it's entirety is still a small amount of people, that doesn't mean it's ok to abandon them.
  Start abandoning subgroups and the larger group won't be strong enough to protect you when the fascists come for one of the subgroups you belong to.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
  Obviously defending the innocent from fascism should be reason enough, but you're literally saying it's not enough, so I have to appeal to the selfish need for self preservation most humans have.
  Empathy sadly needs to be learned, so not everyone has it.
I do think a lot of liberals are spending far too much time trying to score cheap political points...That criticism actually extends to one of Ocasio-Cortez’s top allies in the Senate — Bernie Sanders — as well.
America is silly. Because of our first-past-the-post electoral system, we are a de facto two party state. As a result, Americans have come to believe that there are only two political or ideological possibilities: liberalism and conservativism. Therefore, everyone is either a liberal or a conservative, and everyone who isn't a conservative must necessarily be a liberal, and vice versa.
I am not a conservative, but I am also not a liberal. I don't agree with either ideology. Yes, generally, I might agree more with the liberals than the conservatives, but that doesn't make me a liberal. It doesn't even necessarily make me a liberal ally. Stop calling us liberals. We are not liberals, stop trying to make us part of your group. Stop with the, "hey, we're all liberals, guys," no, we're not.
Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. If he were a liberal, he would be a part of the liberal, Democrat party. He is not, he's an independent. He often joins with the liberals, because, again, the liberals are nearer to him than the only other party, the conservative Republicans, but he nonetheless remains an independent. Stop calling us liberals.
- Martin Luther King Jr identified this roadblock some 60 years ago: The White Moderate.
  Particularly salient point, 53% of white women just voted for Trump.
  https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
  [ I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
  I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. ]
  
  Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.
  I just wanted to highlight this statement. He's absolutely right.
  
  53% of white women just voted for Trump.
  Well, I'm not distinguishing between myself and the liberals based on skin color, but ideology. Liberalism is not an ideology that is exclusive to people with light skin. There are plenty of liberals who have darker skin. There are also many people who are left of liberals who have lighter skin, myself included.
- American political lexicon is stunted (probably deliberately). I volunteered my time and donated my money for Bernie’s campaign, and prefer to go by “progressive” since it hits the main points and has an actual caucus in Congress.
  The conservatives I know call me a liberal (if they’re feeling nice), but they also know it’s not accurate, they’re just trying to sow chaos on the left.
  
  I don't really like progressive because some of the major figures of the progressive era a hundred years ago are people I'd like to keep a large distance from.
Next cycle she better be in the fucking primary.
- Next cycle
  Bless your heart.
  
  Relax
  There will be another cycle.
  There will be "elections."
  You know like the kind they do in Russia.
- While I do think she has gone against the grain of the broken system and would be a great choice, thinking another woman and especially a woman is color will win over the racist misogynistic US populace, I think you'll be disappointed.
  But who knows what will come of an actual fair primary if we even have elections in the future.
  
  Obama won, with record turnout and vote count. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, despite her severe unlikeability and controversial history.
  While it is important to recognize the role that white supremacy and misogyny have, it has demonstrably not been a hard ceiling.
  
  What if the US populace is not misogynistic. Perhaps Clinton and Harris were just bad candidates.
  
  I don't think gender or color is as big a barrier than who the person is. IMO Harris was a better choice than Clinton, still a piss poor choice, not even close to someone I would choose to vote for. If I had a choice that is. Pick a woman of any color that has the fight in her and the policies and fortitude to follow through on an actual populist agenda; I think she would succeed.
  I think we've had enough of the "we hope we might be able to give you the change that you mandated but we're not really gonna try and if you point that out FUCK YOU!" candidate the dems always push on us.
  
  She doesn't need to win over the racists. If there's anything we can learn from the last few election cycles is that you win elections by convincing your existing base to go out and vote, and to do that you need to give them something to believe in and something to vote for.
  I think AOC would absolutely kill that.
  
  That’s the whole point of the primary. To find out. We had no primary for Harris.
  
  I certainly can't prove this and it may be me being optimistic but I don't buy the "it's just misogyny" claim. Clinton and Harris represent the two furthest right candidates that have ever run for president on the Dem side and I think their spectacular failures owe more to that than anything else.
  
  While I do think she has gone against the grain of the broken system and would be a great choice, thinking another woman and especially a woman is color will win over the racist misogynistic US populace, I think you’ll be disappointed.
  Been calling this for the past week. The "Harris lost because she's a woman of color" narrative was an excuse for blocking an AOC run.
  Harris lost because moving to the right doesn't peel off Republican votes, but it sure as fuck alienates the base.
"You go high, we go low"
There's a reason why the right manages to spread its message, it's because they know the left won't do shit about it.
- Going low doesn't accomplish shit - the problem is that previous the strategy wasn't "they go low, we go high" - previously the strategy was "we fail to deliver any change that impacts everyday Americans".
  
  Going low doesn't accomplish shit
  Ahh. A statement in direct contradiction of the evidence.
  Most recent data demonstrates that going low gets you the Whitehouse, the Senate, and the House. And going low for long enough gets you the judiciary as well.
  I'm not saying there aren't other ways to succeed: but going low is clearly an extremely viable strategy. It would seem to me that when you are losing as completely as Democrats have been for 30 years, you aren't in a position to leave options that are shown to work on the table.
  
  Really? Because when it comes to the right putting minorities lives in danger by going low, minorities might be morally dead right by going high, dead right is still dead.
Guys guys, I know the country is getting taken over by criminal fascist scumbags, but let's please tone it down online.
- Let's keep it friendly and civil while the MAGA police is dragging you out of your apartment because you made fun of the orange emperor
She needs to go Independant and start a new party. It's time.
- We don't need a new party to begin with. Just start by going independent.
  It's the same thing that we needed to be employed this election cycle, but at a larger scale. The Blue MAGA/ Any blue will do/ "Trump bad, you have to vote Blue" is the precise reason we lost this election, because the gave the did not ask anything of the candidate, which gave the candidate cover to not have to shift to more generally popular positions that would get them elected. Blue MAGA threw the opportunity, when Kamala was on a trajectory to be in the mid to high 50's in October, by effectively making the argument that we can't demand anything if this candidate because Trump is too great a threat. But the reality of that is that the demands laid down on a candidate serve the important function that they drag a candidate into more generally popular positions.
  Kamala had no real economic plan, and when she said "I would do nothing differently", she's telling Americans, 60% of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, that this is what her policy is going to be.
  So if we're going to blame voters for a failure this election cycle, we need to be clear that the voters to blame are the ones who accepted less and little, and who abused and defeated those who wanted the candidate to move on specific policy positions. It was rampant and structural on Lemmy, and I've heard that it was similarly bad on Reddit. Extremely biased moderation here turned communities like c/News, c/Political_Memes, and c/politics into echo chambers where any pushback against an obviously failing and now obviously failed political rhetoric was basically site sponsored. And that needs to be called out and addressed. It literally cost the Democrats this election, and some of the most prominent names in Lemmy were responsible for it. Now obviously Lemmy is tiny and the impact was microscopic, but the same pattern was repeated for much larger platforms like reddit.
  It started a couple months before with a tiktok video that got basically repeated regarding "strategic voting". The problem, however, is that the strategy outlined is completely half baked. It doesn't actually work because it keeps candidates unaccountable for having to "go to where their voters are" and get their votes. The result is that the candidate is afforded the opportunity to maintain policy positions that are broadly unpopular because they don't think they need to move to get voters. It's not good strategy, and both 2016, and 2024 offer direct evidence for this, while 2020 offers the counterfactual (Biden did shift in policy, effectively handing over the platform to Bernie, and he gathered the necessary coalition of voters to win as a result).
  Going independent is what Democratic voters needed to do in this election to force Kamala into more popular positions. She didn't feel the pressure to do so and lost in a frankly, almost unmitigated disaster of a campaign. And she was afforded the opportunity to do so by voters who demanded nothing for their votes. Going independent takes those votes of the table and makes it beyond clear that they are simply not yours to begin with.
- A new party would do nothing with our current voting system.
- https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
What does that preparation look like? Ocasio-Cortez said she’s still taking a moment to process her plan. But she said she’ll personally be “doing a lot more direct communication” — i.e., methods other than social media, which can be overrun with unverified claims and outright propaganda.
“I think I’ll be planning on using my email list to give a lot more thorough and specific things about what’s on my mind and how to prepare for things,” she said. And she encouraged her followers to get out of their online bubbles:
I was going to point out that nobody reads those, but then I realized I'm a fucking weirdo who blocks all that shit with extreme prejudice. So maybe it'll work because normal people apparently read every email they get in detail.
- Most people I know either obsessively filter and delete junk like this so their inbox is always empty, or they have 30k emails, all unread, and this'll just go in the pile.
  
  I am definitely the former. Having an unread email in my inbox drives me nuts. So I basically never sign up for email newsletters.
I will never vote for a democrat who opposes trans rights. I’ll encourage my friends not to as well. They want these stupid games they can have the prizes that come with
Wow, what a strong figure!
Democrats once again focused on taking the high road after losing one of the most consequential elections in history. I mean I like AOC but calling for people not to be hostile or divisive towards voters who believe in dragging immigrants from their homes, putting them in camps, and then deporting them to their potential deaths is just not it.
You can call for unity all you want to but you won’t ever hear those same words from the mouths of republicans.
- This wasn't taking the "high road" it was four years of Biden/Kamala and party leaders not taking the threat of fascism seriously.
  If you read the article, she's talking about "moderates" who are saying we need to abandon LGBTQ and become more conservative.
  She's trying to unify the Dem voter base in preparation of 2028, what does anything Republicans have to say matter?
  Question:
  If you read a headline and get upset, why not click the article first to see if you even understand what is happening?
  *Especially" when the headline makes you mad at a progressive, and the owner of the "news website" is a shitty billion dollar corporation like fucking Comcast.
  You think Comcast wouldn't lie to people to ensure the only political options are fascists who are pro-business, or neo liberals that are pro business?
  
  She's trying to unify the Dem voter base in preparation of 2028
  Hopefully she's trying to unify the base in preparation for 2026. However, we'd probably all be better off if we abandoned the Democratic party in favor of a real progressive party that puts the needs of individuals over the desires of corporations and billionaires.
- You can call for unity all you want to but you won’t ever hear those same words from the mouths of republicans
  Yeah we do, when they lose, and only then. And even then, they're fucking lying about wanting it at all, they think it's weakness (literally a conservative belief)
So now it's racist for white men to vote? Unless they vote for who AOC approves of? It's BS like this that lost you the election. Elitist snob.
- This might help!
  https://scholarwithin.com/10-best-practices-to-improve-reading-comprehension
  
  Holy hell, i love this response, but one question: do you really think they'll understand if they actually go read that? The comprehension is sorta lacking.
- That's not even remotely what she's saying
- Lol. AOC is pretty much the opposite of elitist.
  
  I mean, the misogynist elitist right wing were trying to "put her in her place" by constantly mocking the fact that she worked as a bartender.
  Talk about elitist.
- AOC actually did quite well in her election.
- I mean, sure as shit was racist to vote for a racist platform.
- So now it's racist for white men to vote?
  Most white men vote for racists, so...
  
  The old anyone that votes different than i do is evil position. This is why you lost.

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