this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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I mean, yeah, this guy is wrong for thinking Trump will keep us out of wars, and the idea that you would vote for someone you think it like Hitler to stop new wars is both contradictory and morally reprehensible. But I've heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that's bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That's a big shift that's occurred in my lifetime, and it's worth examining.
Because they're idiots?
Every major war started in my lifetime (including the "war on drugs") was started by Republicans.
The Democratic party is the party of complacency, I'll grant them that, and we were in wars for several administrations that Republicans started. So it's hard for their donkey brains to remember when and why the wars started and when they ended. A lot of people think that Obama was in office when 9/11 happened. The country is full of idiots.
I think you can't approch it from a party line issue. People want to see it in fact as action for the candidates, and at least right now Biden dropped the ball on Isreal badly. He should have put harsh levers on Isreal to get them out of Gaza quickly, Ukraine is a more complicated problem, but the US should focus more on ending conflicts quickly rather than let them drag on forever. But that takes real policy and leadership.
Neither war is happening on US soil (or between the US and any country involved) and the US and Israel have had an alliance -- which will remained unchanged if not strengthened in the Trump-Vance administration -- spanning decades. In addition, Congress allocates funds to send to other countries and the President executes the orders he is given. Biden could've vetoed the aid bills I suppose, but there is a good chance that they would've overridden his veto. He could've impounded the funds, but I'm not really sure how strictly-speaking legal that even is, and Democratic administrations face pressure from both sides to follow norms (i.e. I wouldn't be surprised if Biden's own party members would've impeached and removed him given just cause for doing so).
But, as per usual, people like yourself expect the impossible (world peace) under Democratic administrations and yet many of them will turn around and think any war that Trump starts is fully justified and support it bigly until the next Democrat (if there is one) gets in there.
Biden literally bypassed congress to send more aid than what they had approved multiple times.
I hate the way liberals just shamelessly lie about this stuff, you don't even have the excuse of the election anymore.
The article you linked, did you even read it? That is approval of weapons sales, not sending them more money.
Congress allocates funds in our government.
I hate the way label obsessed "leftists" don't know basic shit about how the government works, and spend all of their time online talking out of their ass and name-calling.
And that matters why? We shouldn't be giving them aid or selling them weapons?
That's right, just accuse me of lying and post ap news articles that don't disprove anything I said, and then when it turns out you were wrong...words no longer matter!
You're arbitrarily focusing on something Biden doesn't control while intentionally ignoring the stuff he's very clearly and intentionally done to materially support Israel. That's obviously disingenuous. Suggesting that the problem is he just doesn't have the power to do anything differently is a lie.
I wrote about things he conceivably could've done differently. I also stated some possible reasons why he didn't do those things. How is that a lie?
If a president truly wanted to stop supporting Israel, they absolutely could do it, but it would come with repercussions. Either Biden did not want to face those repercussions, or did not want to stop supporting Israel. In his case, it's probably both.
Believe it or not, some people are still outraged over the terrorist attack that occurred in October 2023. The US had a similar scale attack on 9/11/01 and launched two lengthy ass wars over it.
I don't support this shit and think it's an overreaction similar to how the "war on terror" was, but there was no choice to be made in this election cycle about this issue.
Because you completely ignored the stuff he actively did to make the problem worse. It's like saying, like, "Sure, Ted Bundy could've been more supportive of women by donating or volunteering for various causes, but he was busy and short on cash. Sure, he could've done better." It's absolutely ridiculous. The lie is in the way you frame it. But Ted Bundy only killed 36 women while the weapons Joe Biden went out of his way to give to Israel have killed orders of magnitude more. So what you're saying is even more absurd that that.
Absolutely inexcusable genocide apologia.
Not everyone sees it as a genocide. The political class especially doesn't see it as a genocide.
You and yours see even simple explanations of other people's viewpoints as agreeing with them...because you're simpletons.
You can keep screeching about it online all you like...making crappy analogies and apologizing for Ted Bundy? weirdly?, but there was zero choice to be made between Trump and Harris on support of Israel. Both support Israel, and Israel will continue to do whatever it wants regardless of your online bullshit.
How on earth could you possibly read that analogy as apologizing for Ted Bundy? Can you read?
You were saying Joe Biden is somehow worse than Ted Bundy. You're ridiculous and you're now on my block list.
He pretty objectively is, yes. But that's not because Ted Bundy wasn't a monster, it's because Joe Biden is.
Joe biden has killed way more people than ted bundy, objectively he’s worse.
Ted Bundy was politically involved too, but I guess he somehow evades blame for any of the destructive policies he supported and only gets blame for his direct actions.
You guys are space cadets.
He was not a politician and at the end of the day he killed way less people than biden. And that just based on our support for Israel’s bullshit this go around, let alone his entire fifty year career of being a fucking war mongering asshole.
Are you fucking serious? It’s a fucking genocide. Fuck liberals man.
The only reasonable comparison between 9/11 and 10/7 is both the US and Israeli governments had intelligence forewarning them of the attack (Egypt warned Israel three days prior, as reported by the times of Israel) and they both - at best - chose to let it happen.
Saying they're the party of complacency isn't really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there's an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn't get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That's wasn't an act of complacency, it was expansion.
To me, the difference in Democrats' and Republicans' positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn't call either anti-war.
But let's say you're right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they're too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can't tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?
The democrats are not anti war.
Yeah, that's certainly how I feel.
You're predicating your false dichotomy on the idea that: (A) the electorate will vote consistently for pacifism and for pacifists, (B) the electorate tracks the policy positions of politicians. Neither of these things are true.
This single issue did not decide this election, and it will not decide future ones (if we even have them) either.
The electorate is vibes based and has been for some time now.
Well, I would disagree with a lot of that. The average voter may not understand policy nuance, but it's not just vibes based. Trump made a case for being anti-war. He won the first Republican primary in no small part by being the only person on stage to say that the Iraq War was a mistake. He promised to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and then set a withdrawal date (and then changed it several times, and eventually set it to after his term ended so that Biden would get all the bad optics). I think Trump is a manipulative liar, but his supporters have concrete examples of things he's said and done that make them think he's anti-war.
The economy was the number one issue for voters, and I don't think voters' reaction was vibes based either. Democrats almost always improve working class conditions more than the Republicans, but look at what happened during the Biden administration; inflation went way up, the interest rates went way up, and what the best jobs market for workers in the last 40 years got nuked. People might not understand why that happened, but they know what happened.
From where I'm sitting, the solution is to go so big that voters can't misinterprete where you stand. Biden and Harris could have gone after the price gouging that was responsible for so much of the inflation during their administration, but instead, it was a footnote on the campaign. They could have come up with some kind of endgame for Ukraine other than, "send them as many weapons as they need indefinitely." They should have taken a more confrontational stance with Netanyahu, since he was actively sabotaging the peace process while holding out for a Trump administration.
But again, let's just say I'm entirely wrong: voters are idiots, they understand nothing, and their decisions are based entirely on vibes, not reality. The question remains the same; what do we do? Because right now, the strategy seems to be offering them incremental, technocratic solutions, then insulting them when they don't understand how they're better than Republican lies. And it doesn't seem to be working.
I'm not a political consultant, but one of the things -- if it were me (which it isn't) -- would be to start talking to people in this country not as if they're involved people with a lot of knowledge about how anything works, but rather on their (4th grade reading) level, and keep repeating simple messages. At least for your mainline politicians, it's important to appear somewhat stupid, so that the American voters think you're one of them.
Bernie was actually very good at this IMO. I'm not sure his policies would've ever gotten anywhere -- who knows? I would've loved to find out -- but he was very good at repeating the same shit over and over again and speaking at a stupider level (most likely on purpose, because he's not a stupid guy).
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and I think that's why he's been so effective at winning over people who have gone to Trump. We can argue over whether or not the political class would ever let him have been the nominee, much less allowed hid agenda to pass, but I think his policies are very clear to everyone: higher minimum wages, higher taxes on billionaires, Medicare for everybody. People find that much easier to understand how that will improve their life tomorrow instead of a small business tax credit program.
The small business tax credit program Harris spent so much time talking about seemed like exactly the wrong thing to be talking about to exactly the wrong people.
It would maybe work for people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal (AKA nobody). Deeply nerd-brained capitalists that think "gee whiz, this market is not competitive, competition could be grown by creating small businesses for the giant corporations to compete with!"...it's a completely bookish garbage policy competing for ad space in an environment where her opponent was talking about how Harris was for giving transgender, border-crossing, violent criminals "sex changes" for free with "your tax dollars".
When I saw the "She's for they/them, not for you" commercials airing on NFL broadcasts this year, I shuddered to myself and I got that bad 2016 feeling all over again.
YUP. She ran a campaign that was focused on middle-class ideas, but very low on working-class ideas. If you're struggling to buy groceries, starting a small business is as unattainable as purchasing a yacht, no matter what kind of tax credit you're offered. I didn't see the ad you're talking about, but I got that exact feeling when I heard she was campaigning with Liz Cheney.
Looks like it was famous enough that it got its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_is_for_they/them
I read an article saying that basically everyone that watched the ad came away with much less support for Harris. It triggers the exact portion of people's lizard brain that they use to make their political choices. It was the 2024 version of the "Willie Horton" ad.
Oof, I just watched it, and I can immediately see why it was effective. Yeah, "Willie Horton," is a good comparison.
It's because they aren't. Clinton and Gore were 100% interventionist, and had no issues with preemptive war, some accused Clinton of starting a war to boost his popularity. Kerry was anti war historically, but pragmatic on Iraq, Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war-->
Obama's military adittude was ''a Democrat can't say no to the military'' and allowed whatever the joint chiefs wanted, which is never going to be anti war. And Biden was the same. Harris clearly not anti war either. Trump says he is, and that's more anti war than any Dem in my lifetime. Can he effectively govern for war reduction? No. He's an idiot, and liar. But he's selling it.
Being "pragmatic on Iraq" turned off a lot of the left. Ralph Nader's running mate, Peter Camejo, remarked at the time "Kerry isn't Bush Lite. He's Bush Smart! We do not need a smarter Bush!" Apparently the electorate agreed, because W. Bush went on to win a second term.
Directly responsible for escalation in Libya, as Sec State, and the deaths of tens of thousands as a result.
The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say "Worse, tho".
If you aren't voting for the lesser evil, I have to assume you hate America and want it to fail. And that's worse than genocide.
OK, but so far, that hasn't been a very effective electoral strategy. I think we should try something else.
It doesn't need to be effective, because the pendulum of politics always swings back in the end. Trump will become the next scapegoat of American politics just like he was back in 2018 and then 2020. If the economy tops itself (as is increasingly likely), they'll be facing even bigger headwinds. Even if it doesn't, inflation and sky high rents aren't going away. Consumer debt isn't getting any lighter. The Trump Admin isn't going to be nice to people.
That's the electoral strategy at the end of the day. Just to keep being the Other Option and wait for people to come around. Wait as long as it takes. Maybe it'll take twenty years, like in Arizona. Maybe forty years, like in Georgia. Maybe it'll be over 60, like in Utah. Doesn't matter. Just keep squatting on the Other Option until the day comes.
It seems like having policies that make people want to vote for Democrats would deliver more immediate and lasting results than allowing American conditions to continue deteriorating and hoping our opponents receive the blame.
Dems have to deliver on those policies when given the opportunity. If all they can deliver are excuses, they won't have a base that trusts them.
Go down to Mexico and see how this is done. AMLO and Sheinbaum have been on a historic electoral tear, in large part because they've been so effective at delivering their reforms. They're crazy popular right now.
First off, that's a ridiculous assumption. Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism, and the vast majority of people who correctly reject that ideology are not accelerationists.
But secondly, just curious, if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis? The Nazis were just doing genocide, after all, but I committed what is apparently a far worse sin in your eyes, of insufficient patriotism.
If they don't subscribe to my ideology, they must be a greater evil.
It would make you a Communist Fifth Columnist Jew-Loving Traitor and earn you a ticket straight to the camps.
The Nazis would absolutely say you were worse than them.
The Nazis would say it, sure. Would you agree with them? Because it sort of sounds like you'd agree with them.