She had a huge surge in media popularity, but how many of the eventual sit-out voters would still have sat out from day 1, we'll never know.
Either way, the DNC has to go, because their choice to back Biden and delay everything until the last possible moment created this entire situation in the first place.
So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I'd be more okay with getting behind it.
Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they'll miraculously turn into winners?
After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn't like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.
Didn't matter. The DNC doesn't understand what is needed to win. They're still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they're to the Left.
Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of "never Trumper" repubs who clearly aren't willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.
I think the DNC being a "big tent" party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won't vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don't drop when someone says to "send social workers into the homes" of black parents...
Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.
I did, absolutely. I'm much more suspicious of the older, more Centrist people who told me they didn't think America was "ready to elect a woman". I suspect that most of them really meant they weren't ready, and sat out.
My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.
I'm also pissed off that, based on the numbers we're seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn't even be surprised anymore.
Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.
15+ million Democrats sat out compared to voting for Biden. I suspect this was less about Harris not being progressive enough, and more about sexism.
I repeatedly heard Democrats tell me they didn't think America was going to elect a woman president, and it looks like what they meant was they wouldn't elect one.
IG and TikTok videos often have captions to read so they can be watched without sound, so they're not inherently a counter to my point. But yes, it's just another "boob tube". It's not good, but it's certainly not any worse than watching tv nonstop, which is where we were in the 90s and aughts. And kids are on Discord and in text chains constantly, whereas during the pre-internet 20th century, most people called people to communicate long-distance; letters were certainly not a daily thing.
We're about 70 years too late to stop visual media supplanting text as the main form of entertainment media, but at least the internet has brought text back in lots of ways that just didn't exist previously (especially forums and messaging).
I remember when Harry Potter and Twilight both made headlines for both getting adults "reading again" (because they already were mostly not), but then also a bunch of people jumping in and deriding them as trash, insisting that they need to read 'real' books, and there's a bouquet of that in a lot of the discussion of social media.
If we take away IG and TikTok and smartphones, kids aren't going to go read, they're just going to watch TV.
The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren't making anyone racist, they're just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, "yeah, if you're in this town after sundown and you're not white, we're gonna hang you" (which it's important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).
Since they can't do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of "justice" (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren't there, they just make them up.
Given that there are plenty of pro-consumerism schlocky books (if not the majority, being that most are just entertainment-targeted consumer goods), and plenty of highly educational non-book texts, this doesn't really mean anything.
I'm always interested to see exactly what is included and excluded from their definition of reading. On average, most adults actually read more today that we did in the 90s, if you're purely talking words of text consumed. Are graphic novels being included in these stats? Short stories? Social media threads? Most people even watch videos/tv/movies with subtitles they read now, which was not something that was an option before.
The actual article text never says the word "book" once, but I strongly suspect that is all that's being counted.
Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:
We can eventually have that conversation as a nation, but in the '90s, when I lived in Germany, it was still considered gauche to be proud to be German. Is that the 50 years you want going forward here?
feels out of touch. It's already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven't-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed "eventual" conversation will never actually come. We're never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.
Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it's too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than "Centrists". As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.
For every person claiming that we'll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there's another Centrist Democrat who is saying, "No, actually, the party doesn't need to move leftwards... It's always been a lesser of 2 evils choice... Don't let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide...".
Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of "respectable" anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.
If we're just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we're never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn't move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen's United gets overturned, that route isn't going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.
At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when "eventually" is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.
We got Bush instead of Gore because of 700 votes for Nader in Florida.
Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.
Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.
This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.
Side story about how shitty retail management is:
When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I'm talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the "one more write-up and you're fired" over their head.
"AI" is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.
Us Millennials and GenXers are old now. :P
Fortnight used to be a kids game, because GenZ were still kids. Now they're adults, and Fortnite ain't a GenAlpha game.
As much as the US is an imperialist colonial state, they also keep the other ones (Russia, China) in check. Both of them were subsumed by state-capitalism, and became just as expansionist and xenophobic as the US is. I don't want any of them around, but all 3 breaking up ain't in the cards right now, and unchecked imperialism is exactly what made the US so dangerous to the "margins of the world" for so long.
Nah, and I say this as an ansoc who would love for the US to break up, but there's just no appetite for that at any scale large enough to actually cause this.
Even at the time of the Civil War, it was only when state governments decided to secede that things kicked off, and no states now- no matter how "blue" they are- are going to try that. It would be up to individuals, and there's just no organizational capability for that at the scale needed to force a civil war. The closest we might ever get is a bunch of individual attacks or small-scale violent mobs.
She had a huge surge in media popularity, but how many of the eventual sit-out voters would still have sat out from day 1, we'll never know.
Either way, the DNC has to go, because their choice to back Biden and delay everything until the last possible moment created this entire situation in the first place.