Too late Bernie, there was a need to speak way before this election started. yet you preferred to side with Biden when everyone could see that he was cooked, and preferred to blindly endorse kamala, her policies and her campaign through out the few pas months, you didn’t even negotiate a damn thing for your endorsement even when knowing you have a sizable following.
America needs more people like Bernie, too bad Republicans and Democrats are hopeless and don’t get it
I think Bernie is giving too much credit to Americans. IMO the election doesn’t show that the Dems abandoned anybody, it shows that half the voters in the country are fucking idiots. To help them you would have to trick them into letting you. Unfortunately most people with that ability are assholes who are only going to use the amorphous mass of stupidity for their own benefit.
He’s spot-on. I’m pissed and do want change.
Both sides do.
It’s just a shame that was the only real option on the ballot.
This is exactly what happened - not that there weren’t any real options on the ballot, but that people are fucking idiots. You don’t even get that this comic is about you.
Seeing Bernie speak truth to power is incredibly refreshing, especially since he points the finger not at the voting public, but at his own team mates, who absolutely did drop the ball multiple times.
I hope people actually take his words on board.
A lot of my in-laws are Trump supporters, but do you know who they support more than Trump? Bernie. They want a lot of the same things that progressives do. Obviously there are Trump supporters that are racists and fascists, but I’d bet the majority just want a better deal for the working class, and they fell for Trump’s promise that he’s the one to do it.
That’s one thing that I like about grandpa style lefties and don’t like about Lemmy: blaming trumpists for wanting a change in the political system. Lemmy and MAGA crowd share common fears about the future and have absolutely different solutions.
Why the fuck one wants to highlight the difference and not the thing that’s in common. People achieve unimaginable results when working together.
Blaming the voting public does nothing other than to help us feel better about ourselves. “It’s not our fault, the people are just stupid and naive. They were always going to vote for Trump, there’s nothing else we could have done”. It’s what we’ve been doing the past three election cycles and it isn’t working.
We can’t make them change. Change only comes from within. We can’t keep telling them they’re better off with us. We need to pass legislation so that the average, uniformed voter can see it for themselves.
The Democratic party has failed us. We need an actual workers party and we have about 3 years to build it.
Join PSL if you have not already
You guys don’t deserve it. This election proved to me that you’re leftists can be every bit as hateful as your right
Leftists can definitely be as stupid as rightists, and we’re seeing it in full technicolor in this thread. “Waaaahhh, there weren’t any good options. I should be able to click on something perfect!”
And if they really cared about what Bernie has to say they would have listened to him and voted Harris
It’s easy to paint a huge group of people with a broad brush, but that’s exactly the mindset that got us here.
That’s rich from a group calling everyone a Nazi in the last few months unless they fully agree with you on Gaza, and I’m a leftist and one that’s been at this a while, and you Americans are toxic as fuck. You don’t perceive that we around the world who are actually leftists are aghast at the stupidity of your country.
The right was always toxic, but the left really went with it this election too. Nobody was good enough for anyone and nobody was leftist enough for everyone. And if you saw someone you thought was less left, you shouted “Nazi” at them. Not just at the right wingers, but your own allies on the left.
You have every right to be frustrated and angry, and if it helps you to direct that anger at me, then go for it. I want you to know that even though it feels like there are so many people against you, there are people around the world you’ve never met that are pulling for you. I sincerely wish you the best, and I hope that you’re able to find happiness.
Nailed it. The Dems didn’t fail the voters, the voters failed themselves. Some fell in love with a con man and some sat on their purity pedestals and refused to help. America is full of all kinds of idiots.
oh so sanctimonious “purity pedestals” like, Stop abetting an exterminationist campaign
It was only broadly popular with most of the country and polled well in swing states; thank goodness party leadership had the stones to stick to their values and loose on this issue. Nobody to blame here but people who didn’t make campaign choices and do not have access to the levers of power!
Why do liberals have to get in the way and make enemies of us? We’ll have to go through you all then.
Leftism isn’t a stranger to being attacked on all sides and being pushed to the margins, but we’re still here generation after generation even as the most rich and powerful nations organize their militaries and media against us.
Sure, kiddo
Keep chasing that center as your country descends into fascism. It’s easier than thinking for yourself
You’re from El Salvador. Should I suggest that El Salvadorians deserve MS-13 because you’re stupid brown people who can’t get away from drugs?
No, you bigoted piece of shit.
That suggestion would only be as bigoted as calling criticism from an El Salvadoran bigoted. I’m a white male American and I say America is full of idiots. That was how Trump got into the White House to begin with, and it’s why he’s going back. It’s not either party’s fault, it’s that the majority of Americans are just stupid.
Yeah the people advocating for the end of a genocide and social healthcare are the hateful ones 💀
They’re not hateful, just too stupid to face the reality that one of the two viable choices they had was clearly much better than the other.
When they want to end it with bloodshed, yes. Yes they are.
Welcome to reality
The DNC isn’t entitled to Americans votes. They lost us and lost folks to the Republicans because they promised to fix the economy and are actually talking to people directly. The DNC is fucking dead to me.
I voted Kamala but I knew she didn’t stand a chance. I knew we were cooked when it was Biden/Kamala
Thank you for choosing Kamala even though you didn’t want to. We’re in this mess because too many people were the cartoon character somebody posted above.
That’s a solid take.
Far left and far right are just “far”.
Far from truth, reality or the burden of existing in a social system with people they don’t agree with.
This makes them mad and they traded their honor and honesty to pwn the libs.
The only difference between tankies and the magats is a red hat made in a Chinese sweatshop.
Running to the mythical center-right just failed spectacularly.
Democrats’ only tactic failed.
What failed was millions of people deciding that walking across broken glass barefoot was better than wearing shoes they didn’t like.
This country is full of fucking idiots.
I’m tired of being told how awesome the economy is. It’s great for the rich, but the cost of necessities like housing, food, and healthcare has outpaced the CPI, so we all feel worse. A cheaper big screen tv doesn’t help much if you can’t afford the basics.
Aggregate economic data only says so much. Lots of INDIVIDUAL people are suffering. While the CPI is one basket of products, everyone has their own, and this everyone has their own rate of inflation. So saying wages have kept up with inflation is a fallacy on 2 fronts. Some saw income outpace the CPI, others it did not and they’ve lost income. But even among the former group, everyone had a personal rate of inflation that may well be higher than the CPI.
Instead, the wealthy and politicians look at averages and medians and assume it’s just negative feelings. But we were alive in the 90s. We were alive in the early 2000s. We know about the 50s and 60s. We know the economy used to be better for working people. We want better.
Trump, of course, will not deliver that. But Harris didn’t inspire confidence she would, either.
My wife is a teacher, so we use her healthcare, but I still peek in at the healthcare at my job when enrollment comes along, just to be diligent.
It went up 20% this year, from $600 to $720. If you make $30K a year and got a 3% cost of living adjustment, you make less this year than last year from healthcare alone.
Food, gas, rent, cars, childcare, utilities, everything is up. I guess it’s cool that US steel or something might be doing well, and the stock market is up, but that minimally affects the day to day of most people.
My raises, baring promotion, are 2% a year. I did the math. I’ve lost $10,000 a year to inflation at this point. In aggregate it’s around $22,000 at this point.
And yet every newscast has a stock ticker. Even NPR gives the stock index ratings several times a day.
We don’t really have to worry about what Trump offered, he got less votes than last time on the same tired platform. The problem was Democrats through and through not being left at all. Losing millions of votes that way. Some people can play the lesser of two evils game, but as we just saw there are not enough people who can vote while holding their noses.
I held my nose, but the numbers clearly show it was a Democrat failure to communicate, empathize, and/or initiate with voters.
I held my nose, but the numbers clearly show it was a Democrat failure to communicate, empathize, and/or initiate with voters.
But they got Dick Cheney on board!
How can this man be so based. The world simply didn’t deserve him.
I hope liberals learn from this and start organizing. The billionaire-funded Democrat party will never pin blame on the capitalists that fund them to get working class votes.
Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And— never forget — he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.
Read Blackshirts and Reds
Please note that the “Bernie bros” that became right wing could have been psyops. I’ve seen a few ones stupidly admitting it, because Trump would have struggled against Bernie, maybe even have lost in a landslide.
Liberals and neoliberals are the problem. The only solution is for progressives to start a new party. The DNC just showed that it is incapable of learning, constantly courting the right that will never actually vote for them, or telling billionaire donors to fuck off.
Liberals are just conservatives that refuse to take their masks off. Neoliberals even more so. These are the “white moderates,” and the “supporters of the MIC,” that Martin Luther King Jr., and Eisenhower warned us about.
Bernie showed us the way forward. Billionaires are merely dragons to be slain and ignored.
We need at least one new party in this country, and one that runs for local elections first to build a bench of people who can run for higher office.
Even if I didn’t believe the national Green Party was just a spoiler (regardless of how they started out,) they spend all their time and energy pushing a presidential candidate every four years rather than working on ground game.
I think states like Texas are actually fertile ground if you focus on what people are dealing with in their day to day life and start small-county commissions, town council positions, even sheriff if you have a county where the local sheriff is unpopular and your party platform is looking at criminal justice reform.
I also think pushing for changes to use ranked choice voting with proportional representation would generate long-term change. Single Tranferable Vote has worked well in Ireland, and historically it worked well in multiple American cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote?wprov=sfti1
I think the problem isn’t the cities, it is the rural bits in between that won’t want to give up their excess power per vote in the current system.
Those are also places where a lot of regressive candidates run unopposed and hold office for decades because they’re the only ones who have an interest in the position. Prime spots for someone with different ideas to throw their hat in the ring.
I was specifically talking about changing the election system, not just getting elected.
I’ve been seeing suggestions for that book a lot. I was even going to see if I can grab it from my local library, but it’s just an e-book for some reason. I guess I can read it on my tablet but i prefer physical books. I do want to support my library though by using them, so it’s a tough choice lol.
You can always check out the e-book version even if you go find a physical copy to read instead. I saw a librarian asking people to do stuff like that since the active use of library services let’s them argue for better funding and services.
Also, see if they have a physical copy at another branch. My local library is part of a network that spans across multiple towns, and they can often get books sent to them from other branches if they don’t have a copy themswlves.
Good idea. I haven’t used my local library in awhile, but I’m worried about library funding with Trump. It’s why this is the first time in a long time I looked into a book from the library. I’m using any excuse to like you said, argue their services are being actively used. It’s good to hear it confirmed that it does actually help librarians and that they’re encouraging that.
I think the Democrats are too far right, but that’s not what lost them the election. What lost them the election is that voters think the President controls the price of groceries, and if cheaper groceries means killing a lot of brown people, that’s a small price to pay.
Trump is going to prove that the President controls the price of groceries by enacting tariffs on imported food and getting rid of all the people who catch, raise, and harvest our food. He’s going to make grocery prices go through the roof.
I’m sure that will be blamed on someone else. Probably trans people.
It’s a toss up between them or the “illegals.” While they do hate trans people, it’s a more convincing argument for people who aren’t complete idiots to say it’s because of an increased demand caused by non-citizens taking resources from patriotic American citizens™
More like Democrats lol.
And the same immigrants they deported which keep help keep grocery prices down without all the subsidies so the people at the top can price gouge us during a pandemic only to line their pockets and have Republicans shoot down every chance Democrats try to legislate against it.
Democrats were also in favour of killing Palestinians. They had the chance to stop all of this and didn’t. The choice in the election was slow genocide that’s currently going on, or probably a faster one, when Trump gets into power.
But at the end of the day, genocide happening in a year or 3 doesn’t change how horrific it is, doesn’t change the fact that they will be gone.
Tankies helping trump this election cycle has put a SHITLOAD of Palestinian blood on their hands.
Feel free to disagree, just watch the casualty count skyrocket in late January
You overestimate how many tankies there actually are. The casualty count is sky high already. Democrats already have blood on their hands. That’s what happens when the aid is a PR stunt and not actual aid.
I really don’t understand this whole Palestine argument. You have the choice between two candidates who both have very similar positions on the issue in a country that has historically never held any other position on it, regardless of who was in power and somehow you make that the one deciding issue for this election even though it literally makes no difference on the issue who you vote for in the election.
There aren’t 2 major sides in the US, there are 3.
The 3rd side never does any formal campaigning (though there is some grassroots self-organised spreading of its message), often wins as it did this time and yet never controls any power because of how the electoral system works.
One might call the 3rd side the Not Voting Party.
The entire Democrats campaign was negative campaigning against the Republican Party, something which did nothing to take “votes” from the Not Voting Party and then specifically on Palestine, their actions, whilst if one judges them relative to the Republican Party were neutral, very strongly helped the Not Voting Party whose appeal on this was that a “vote” for Not Voting is a vote that doesn’t support mass murder of children.
So if you look at it as a 3-sided contest, suddently the Democrat result is easilly explainable: they didn’t as much lost to the Republicans as they lost to the Not Voting Party, and in that loss Palestine probably weighed heavilly, both because the Democrats broke some pretty strong principles for a lot of people (there aren’t much strongers principles than being against the mass murder of children) thus convincing them to go “Not Voting” and because they, while raging about how Trump was a Fascist, were activelly supporting ethno-Fascists in Israel (the worst kind of Fascism there is) in the middle of a Genocide, they looked like evil hypocrites and weakened their only message trying to capture votes from Not Voting - the whole “Not voting at all is like voting for a Fascist” thing: calling the other guy evil and dangerous hardly helps convince the unconvinced when the people saying it are active supporters of an extremelly violent ethno-Fascism that has already killed thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children.
Not voting to absolve yourself from moral responsibility for the outcome is a fallacy though. Many people do believe that inaction somehow makes them less responsible but that just isn’t the case. Inaction isn’t the magical option, you still have to live with the outcome and you still have all the same opportunity costs as with any choice on the ballot.
If you think you aren’t responsible for the events in Israel and Palestine because you didn’t vote for either candidate you are just deluding yourself.
Well, that’s the thing: that’s just your character and your opinion.
Clearly other people feel and think differently and a “Trump is Evil vote Harris to stop him” message didn’t work with them, otherwise the Democrat Party wouldn’t have lost 14 million voters with their strategy of being as bad as Trump in some areas and not much less so in others whilst selling themselves as the “Not Trump” option.
I’ve had these talks well before the election and indeed back them people might have been right (and me wrong) in their expectation that most people would put “Keep Trump out” above pretty much everything else, including their principles, and vote for a no-hope-offered candidate just to stop Trump.
Turns out that 14 million people clearly didn’t got convinced to go vote for a party that offered no actual positive policies, only “We’re Not Trump” a characteristic which, as I pointed out above, would only convince to vote Democrat solely to stop him those who think Trump is trully the most horrible thing in existence.
I suppose that outside the bubble in places like Lemmy a lot of people either did not fear Trump anywhere as much as a certain well-off middle class that hangs around here does or thought the Democrats were about as evil as he is (which is were the Palestine situation comes in: in my opinion it convinced a lot of people that the Democrats too are Evil, since it’s a pretty natural thing to conclude of those who activelly support the mass murder of children).
The impact of the Democrat choices in Gaza wasn’t just about concern with Palestinians, it was also about what it told of the character and morals of the Democrats leadership, which in turn impacts the trust in them and in what they say, which is especially bad for a party with a tradition of lying with half-truths and other such forms of deceit using dialetics trickeries (I suspect with would impact less those using the “just saying anything that comes to his mind independently of it being true or not” technique such as Trump).
A platform of “we’re the most moral choice” doesn’t work all that well when you’re activelly supporting and giving weapons to a genocidal regime mass murdering civilians for their race, including tends of thousands of children and thousands of babies.
Certainly the results don’t seem to indicate that “More people like Trump”, rather they indicate that even in the face of Trump, fewer people could bring themselves to vote Democrat, which is IMHO a horrible indictment of the Democrat Party.
Hey, if you’re cool being complicit in the final steps of a genocide don’t let us evil libs stop you 🤷
Says the one putting a cross next to the name of a confirmed and active Genocide supporter that even refuses to face Palestinian families all the whilst claiming like an hypocrite that she’s anti-racist.
How does complicity in the murder of 17 pages worth of babies less than 1 year old feel?
Did you masturbate yourself when those 2000lb bombs (that the US Military refuses to use themselves because of their massive collateral damage) that Biden sent to Israel whilst you supported him got used to blow up Lebanese neighborhoods killing hundreds of civilian, or was the pleasure of supporting the leader of your tribe no matter what he did enough to give you maximum pleasure?
You know what would have done the most to stop the Holocaust in Palestine? If people like you had turned hard against Biden and the DNC a year ago (with time enough to force him to change his actions well before the election or be replaced by somebody who was different) instead of being subservient little bootlikers to Biden and the DNC guarateing the inevitable Democrat defeat on top of hundreds of thousands of dead with your support.
Keep up preaching your moral superiority from the top of that pile of children’s bones - built with the bombs the party leadership you supported like a “good boy” sent to Israel - you think is a moral high-ground.
You would disgust me if I didn’t pitty you so much.
My point is that Gaza should have no impact on your voting decision at all because not voting, voting Democrats and voting Republicans will get you the same outcome there, which would also be the outcome you got from literally any other US administration or potential administration (as in candidate that lost) in the entire history of Israel’s existence.
Which leaves all the other potential considerations. Trust in the Democratic party can certainly be one of those but don’t pretend not voting makes you morally better on the Gaza issue itself. That whole “inaction makes me better” mindset when action and inaction have literally the same outcome needs to die because it is literally not true.
“I shall never support evil-doers” is a pretty strong drive in my world.
I guess that’s not the case in your own world, leading you to expect that it won’t happen in large numbers that people will refuse to vote for either racist bully (which is how Arab-Americans probably saw the Democrat Leadership and Trump both) or calous sociopathic supporters of mass murder for the sake of political and economic convenince (which is how the University students risking their degrees to demonstrate against the Genocide all the while being called anti-semitic by Biden probably saw both).
I would say that the 14 million votes’ worth of evidence towards it tend indicate that I’m at least partially right.
I like how you put the comfortable middle class as those pushing for Harris vs not voting. Not a single person, I know, pushing that initiative is doing it because they are well-off middle class. They are all people in minority demographics, and people who are deeply struggling, that are seeing Trump threaten things they rely on to live. They just don’t happen to be reactionaries.
So lets turn this around, just because you are privileged enough to be able accept Trump, rather than vote for someone who sucks, but isn’t vowing to actively make everything you need to live, get scrapped, while already being in thread bare living situation, doesn’t mean the people who do, are just well-off middle class people.
You are making crazy assumptions about me.
The last great presidential candidate. The only once I’ve ever actually liked.
Hopefully more senators like AOC will come around that were motivated by Bernie and can take the party over.
It is so incredibly refreshing to hear someone with (however limited) power say what I’ve been seeing with the naked eye.
A four-hour drive through rural America last week showed me this: trump signs in the very poorest and the very richest yards, for miles and miles. There was the occasional Harris sign for obviously middle-class dwellings but not all.
He describes the plight of these people correctly, and while they haven’t been offered enough by the dems, they aren’t choosing the republicans because they are offering them more. They’re choosing them because they fear change and the Republicans promise to protect them from change. The fear comes from ignorance / lack of a decent rural education system.
Not American, but I saw it as the opposite: that US voters are sick of the status quo. They want a radical change candidate who’ll shake things up. They want anything but business-as-usual.
Not to discount stupidity and racism. There’s that too, but I have to hope it’s mostly borne out of fear.
Yeah, that is a very weird position to hold, the status quo is shit for me but I don’t want change. Not disagreeing with you though that it is that way.
People are pretty good at adapting to even pretty lousy conditions if a steady-state can be maintained. We all have very strong loss aversion though. You can capitalize on the most extreme versions on this in populations that don’t have a loss buffer, lack diverse skillsets , and have had limited exposure to diversity of any sort. Tell them someone that looks different than them is going to change the food they eat, build a different place of worship next to their church, and take their jobs away from them by working for much less and you’ve got an effective boogeyman that you can promise to defend them from (while stealing from them even). Hell, it works so damn well you can tell them that these boogie men will eat their pets and they will take you seriously.
I want Bernie for president and I’m not even American.
We tried. And almost got him. But then the DNC Services Corp rigged the game against us to stop him.
I’ve said this before but the DNC is actually just another wing of the Oligarchy. They exist to provide a fabricated conflict so that people think it’s a divide based on ideals, not on class divide it truly is. Look at the wealth of all of the leaders in the DNC. It’s pretty much the same circles and wealth as the RNC.
I don’t think it is quite that simple. It is more like part of each party is controlled by that interest but there are also people who genuinely try to achieve something matching their own world view, some of those good, some bad.
People keep saying they list due to reaching out to moderate republicans. No, they ARE the moderate republicans. They won’t do anything that will upset their wealthy donors.
I think the term you’re looking for is “controlled opposition.”
TWICE!
The right are perpetually angry. They are angry when they win and angry when they lose. It’s a hallmark of their cult. There’s no pleasing these people because they don’t know what they’re angry about, they just prefer to be angry.
Every fascist needs an enemy. The threat is required to rally around their flag and blame someone else for their failures. When there’s no obvious threat in sight, it has to be produced - else there’s no other way to maintain popularity among subordinates while also sanctioning them.
The enemy in fascism is always all powerful and inferior at the same time.
Anybody got the actual press release for this? I can’t find it. Only the X post with screenshot.
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698
Can’t find them here.
