this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
835 points (91.4% liked)
Microblog Memes
6178 readers
2809 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They underestimated the degree to which the public had been impacted by propaganda and lies. They thought the public understood the threat Trump poses but they did not.
From a millennial perspective, it honestly reminds me of the terror threat level. After 9/11, the DHS would set a daily terror threat level in one of several threatening colors and the 24/7 news channels always had it just chilling in the bottom of their broadcast for years (of course it was always at nearly maximum leading up to invading Iraq, go figure). After a few years, nobody paid any attention to it anymore.
If the only thing you've got to offer is fear, eventually people get numb to that message, even if they should be scared. Imo, it's hardly surprising that the democrats lost whe coming to the table with conservatism lite, small business tax credits, and "OMG TRUMP IS SCARY WOW" while Merrick Garland slow walked the case against him. I had a feeling we were cooked when Kamala started doing appearances with A-listers; it reminded me a lot of the tone-deaf gilded campaign run by the Hillary team.
What does Trump offer but fear? The illegals are coming to steal your jobs! Muslim terrorists! Dems are DESTROYING the economy!
Yeah, but it's a new fear or a new spin on some old one every other week. Conservative media tries out a new panic pretty regularly to see what gets bites. The democrats have basically been on "Trump is our Hitler" for more or less eight years. At least, that's what they say with their mouths, though not with their actions. It might have had a little more sticking power of they'd showed that they took at serious as they want us to, but as it stands, that car is pretty much out of gas.
So the problem is that Democrats have had a consistent message? Right...
What do you want from me, exactly? You just can't keep people afraid of the same thing forever. People stopped paying attention to the terror threat level just three years after 9/11, which the entire country agreed was bad. That's why their secret sauce is to keep rotating in new panics.
I would like it if you acknowledged that Republicans are the root of the problem and not Democrats. Sure, the Dems have a lot of room to improve, but there is no comparison! Republicans are fucking insane!
The root of what problem, exactly? Yes, republicans are insane, I hate everything about their entire platform and I hate that they're in power. I want a real left party that will kick these stupid Nazis' asses, which is why I'm not afraid of being critical of the democrats. Now's the time. We've just been punched in the head and it's time to decide how to proceed. Do we get our shit together and start swinging for the fences, or do we pout and blame the voters because we really deserved this win and they just didn't understand that?
Okay, we agree that Republicans are insane Nazis. Good.
What could the Democrats have done that is so bad that insane Nazis sound like the better option? What makes that a rational choice?
I don't think there is one. I don't think anything the Democrats did mattered because voters weren't voting based on reality.
There is no democracy without an educated populace. We have something worse than that: a miseducated populace. The apathy towards voting and the hatred of the current administration are intentionally engineered by bad actors.
I think that it's pretty simple. Tl;Dr, Trump campaigns 1, 2, and 3 were each the democrats' race to lose, and they rose to the occasion. The data shows that most Trump voters don't sincerely believe his most insane promises, and they're desperate for big changes (thus, the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter). Where the democrats are falling on their face is thinking that just showing up and putting a body in a seat is good enough to beat Trump. It's obvious to them (and us) that he's bad, and they're betting that a policy plank of "not Trump" and a bunch of pretty meh proposals otherwise will be enough to get voters to turn out. Twice, they've been wrong. A lot of people feel like they/we never really emerged from the great recession, and the order of the day is big dramatic changes. Trump promises that, regardless of whether he can deliver or whether it will actually help. In this last election, I distinctly remember that the Democratic messaging was that everything is fine, actually, and the economy has really never been better. If you're drowning, you'll take what you can get, and someone patting you on the head and telling you everything is fine, actually, doesn't help.
If the democrats want to start winning, and I hope they do, they need to realize that just existing as not Trump isn't enough. They need to come out fighting like they came here to do universal healthcare and cocaine, and they're all out of cocaine.
So basically the Democrats need to lie big like Trump and promise things they can't deliver. Sadly, you might be right.
Here's the secret that my boy Montesquieu knew way back in the day: government rules by the consent of the governed. The constitution is a scrap of paper and only holds the power we believe it does. Trump gets away with his blatantly unconstitutional bullshit because of the consent of the governed; he tries it, whether he knows he can get away with it or not, and often succeeds. The democrats need to get with the times. High roading is over, become difficult.
While they probably would have disagreed about everything else, I think Montesquieu would have agreed with Mao's statement that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. In Montesquieu 's day the numbers of armed civilians would have easily eclipsed any slight edge in technology and tactics that the military would have. Today however, even if we had every citizen pick up an AR-15, it would be insignificant to the bombs and missiles and artillery the military could field. The consent of the governed is no longer needed.
[gestures vaguely at Afghanistan]
Joe Biden, is that you? The public didn't love genocide.
It's propaganda that Trump is the anti-genocide option. It's propaganda that not voting for the Democrats will somehow stop the war. It won't. It will make it worse.