This is no honeymoon, the American “left” will never recover from the Harris/Walz combo; every major base of support (demographic/economic) is covered; Black woman with a jovial heartlandish white man standing behind her is the universal password for the legendary “competent American fascism” software update leftists have been prophesying.
They got this shit locked for at least eight years, Walz is suburbanite catnip and Harris has the identity libs eating out her hands, along with big tech, wallstreet, and the zionist lobby who are now methodically eliminating the last holdouts of the post-2016 nascent left movement
There is no credible avenue of leverage here, the libs can effectively respond to any leftist utterance with accusations of racism, misogyny, and purity testing and it will stick. Already we have most liberals being one rhetorical step away from defending Walz unleashing the National Guard on BLM protesters
There is no point in engaging with domestic national politics at this current time, the ball is firmly overseas
The only series of events that can undermine this new DNC paradigm is Israel blowing up the world and the US mobilizing to save it. Not even the collapse of Ukraine can dent it now, since that was “Biden’s project”
Hate to say it, but the DNC won a firm generational victory
You miss one important thing. Material conditions will continue to get worse. We are past the point where we can have another Obama pretending everything is just fine while the vast majority can’t afford shit. It’s not 2008 anymore, they can’t pretend the economic shit will get better because people already have 16 years of the opposite.
The damage is done, there is no recovery for them. They will win this election, but people will still be poor and angry, the US economy will still be crumbing and China will continue to improve. Something will have to give.
Yeah and also Harris is more Selina Myers than Obama, I’m not convinced she can even beat Trump, but people will quickly get sick of her if she does. She’s having a burst of support only in relation to replacing Genocide Joe’s doomed campaign
I’m pretty sure a ham sandwich with a bit of mold on the corner could beat Trump. Hillary and Mr Genocide are some of the only people who could lose to him.
That’s all true, but my point is that their victory will deradicalize people away from leftism and socialism and instead radicalize them toward the competent fascism the DNC now represents even as it makes them poorer, something will give but the potential of a countervailing force emerging domestically has been foreclosed for at least a decade, unless something major happens overseas
I’m pretty much just copinly admiring the engineering quality of the off-ramp the dems built overnight on the highway leading toward worse conditions
I don’t know about that. The things you list going for Kamala and Waltz work electorally, but elections are short and the intervening years are long. Will people give a shit that a #Blackwoman is presiding over the next energy shock? Will folksy Tim win over anybody as Blackrock continues to become the works largest landlord and jacks up rent across the country? Will food inflation and deteriorating health systems go unnoticed because the political leaders can string 4 cogent words together? I doubt it. I think the Democrats have tripped into an electoral win, but as committed neo-liberals they’ll still fall face first over every hurdle of actual governance. Their ideology contains no solutions: everything will get worse and the proles are supposed to be grateful for it. That’s just not a message with staying power.
As long as they can get away with blaming Republicans or a rotating villain for obstruction the Dems won’t have to do shit. “Progressive” Dems were calling Obama out for not doing things he could get away with like firing people and executive orders and libs were still defending him. Libs happily defended his Grand Bargain where he volunteered to cut Social Security payments. There’s a lot more people radicalized now to be sure, but the Dems still have a pretty good stranglehold on people’s vision of what’s possible.
Agree with the sentiment, but maybe 2008 is a bad example to use for ”the economic shit will get better”
Nono, I meant it’s a good example of it not getting better.
because people already have 16 years of the opposite.
Yeah, I see what you meant now.
I’d also say the optimism of the Obama getting elected era is long gone, but that might be just a me thing, because I see these libs everywhere online acting like it’s still the end of history.
Let go of left-electoralism, comrade.
Hate to say it, but the DNC won a firm generational victory
lmao trump was shot in the fucking head on live tv and everyone forgot about it in a week
every time anything sort of happens we all decide [x faction] has won the country for another generation and then within a matter of days another thing sort of happens
To be fair that speaks more to the unique dysfucntion of the Republican party than to the overall state of decay
The Republicans fumbled a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure political primacy, while the democrats responded (initial civilty overdose aside) with a series of deft political choices that were the correct counterplays everytime
Biden drops out --> Walz inaugurates the “Weird” campaign --> Kamala fakes a snubbing of Bibi while keeping the zionists happy --> Kamala passes over Shapiro for the more popular Walz…four straight Ws in a row, while republicans flatline two weeks after a goddamn assassination attempt, the graph lines are diverging here and the dem line is heading to victory
The Republicans fumbled a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure political primacy
they didn’t fumble, its just no one who wasn’t already MAGA gave a shit about Trump being shot. That’s why it went away.
None of these politicians are popular, because peoples lives are getting worse. Harris/Walz are right now as popular as they will ever be. If they win, their approval ratings are going to be bad, because peoples lives will keep getting worse
Yeah his approval ratings didn’t even go up after being shot. Half the country just went “wish he died lmao”
They got this shit locked for at least eight years
Lets not underestimate the Democrats unparalleled skill at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
There was talk of “permanent Democratic majorities” after 2008, and the Obama coalition was much stronger than whatever this thrown-together emergency plan is.
Yea hope nobody takes this as an excuse but part of the reason there wasn’t more urgency at the end of Obama second term (other than he was a neolib who never actually wanted to accomplish any progressive goals) was because theybwere operating under the assumption they were never gonna lose the white house again
I don’t think that’s right – the “permanent majority” talk died down pretty quickly. There was still overconfidence, just not to such an absurd degree.
I’m not sure anyone who is exiting here was really “radicalized” to begin with. Yes, it’ll tone down the online rhetoric of some Twitter personalities, but they were always just looking for an excuse to bury their heads deeper in the sand. The people who are really out there doing the work aren’t suddenly going to stop organizing and feeding people because a couple of somewhat likeable Democrats got nominated (or elected). When the novelty wears off and everything turns out to be more of the same–austerity politics, forever wars, out of control warming, and no meaningful social reforms–we’ll be right back in the same place. The people who are ecstatic about going back to brunch weren’t fellow travelers in the first place, and anyone who really was flirting with genuine leftism will quickly be disillusioned. The problem isn’t the dismantling of the American left, but rather that there wasn’t anything to meaningfully dismantle in the first place. The struggle continues.
I don’t know, if they try doing Minnesota-style social democracy on the national level, it will be like giving a small glass of water to someone lost in the desert. People are still going to die of thirst, but they’ll die loyal to the party that gave them the sip
That’s a huge if. I agree that if we get some non-trivial SocDem reforms, that might change things. I don’t see that happening, though: Walz did a decent job with that kind of thing as governor in a couple of places at least (and at least does seem to give a shit about the working class), but he’s not the Presidential candidate. Plus, the whole rest of the national political machine is very solidly against making any concessions to the working class. I don’t see Kamala spending all her political capital trying to make that happen, even if she does win. She’s given no signal that that would be a priority–quite the opposite, in fact.
I think they’ll use the selection of Walz as a cudgel against the left for quite a while (i.e. “we picked the guy you and Bernie wanted, so shut up and fall in line! You can’t control everything here!”).
We’ll see. They’ve done it before, pre-neoliberalism. It’s just such an obvious, intelligent move for the ruling class to make (if they are interested in that sort of thing)
It would really rile up the fascists though
