Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip
The majority of Americans who voted, at least in the swing states, have voted for the republicans. Why? Do the republican policies reflect popular opinion? Or is it that their vibes are more aligned with the public? Or maybe people are worse off now than they were 4 years ago and are hoping to turn back time? As a non-american I don't quite get it. People must think their lives will materially improve under the republicans, but why?
Look at the vote totals, (as of right now) Harris 66 mi vs Trump's 71, compare this to 2020, 81 Biden vs 74 Trump.There is also this Pew article which shows the breakdown of non-voters
The simple conclusion is that the singularly most important thing a politician can do is excite and move their base. For how awful/low energy his campaign was this year, trump still excites and moves a base, while kamala was confused about what base to cater to- first calling Republicans weird then copying their platform and getting the dick Cheney approval.
This all could have been avoided if the Dems actually had a primary this year, but I think the DNC is actually afraid of progressives taking the party back over
Wow.... So Harris just... lost 15 million voters? Trump didn't gain much but Harris managed to be so repulsive 15 million people just stayed home?
Yes, but no. More years for context (count in millions)
2016: 66 Hillary v 63 Trump
2012: 66 Obama v 61 Romney
2008: 69 Obama v 60 McCain
2020 was a rarity in terms of turnout, 4 years of trump motivated a lot of angry Dems, but 4 years of Nothing will fundamentally change doesn't really excite the base. Add on top of that the Dems last second changed their nominee to a person who dropped out of the 2020 primary because she did not have a base.. If I remember right, it was so bad even mayo Pete had a higher percentage of the black vote.
That's what I remember. Kamala didn't have supporters, like at all. It was Neera Tanden and a few hundred absolutely bizarre people in the Twitter KHive.
I knew the turnout this time was going to be dogshit. Turnout is strongly correlated with a dem victory, but they only get turnout when they run someone who projects a break from the norm.
Non-voters are converted into voters when there is uncertainty, but I think that also cuts both ways, if the electorate feels that nothing will change based on the options, voters get converted into non-voters.
Democrats had nothing to offer beyond not being Donald Trump. They copied his policies, celebrated endorsements from hardcore republicans, and bragged about wanting to put republicans in positions of power in Harris' cabinet. Every vote for Harris was a vote for Trump. Trump has been the center of the democratic party since he won the 2016 primary. The two cornerstones of democrats strategy have been that they are not the person Donald Trump and that any criticism of the democratic party is Russian propaganda. It works better than it should because most Americans have the memory and political literacy (and sometimes even the literal literacy) of a goldfish, but it doesn't work well enough to win elections unless their opponents do an even worse job campaigning.
this, and plus: the far right worldwide is offering the "radical" solution of tearing it all down. people want this, people are sick and tired of whatever we have now and republicans offered an alternative.
the electoral "left" is pretty much just offering the status quo. nobody fucking wants the fucking status quo.
Let’s be real, the electoral left in the west is gone. Many reasons: the idiocy that de-Stalinisation was, completely derailing leftism for the next 70 years, the complete corruption of socdems into lackeys for capitalism, the decoupling of politics and economy in the west (bravo Jean ~~money~~ monet), and the slow, methodical, destruction of state programs and education. All of this led to a world where people cannot understand cause and effect, that politics and economy cannot be separated (no matter what the Central European Bank would like you to believe), and that the world isn’t a chaotic mess with evil forces pulling strings, but a rational one where material conditions dictate action and reaction.
Naturally when all of these conditions are achieved, people will flock to a simplistic worldview and solution which is what fascism offers, no matter your skin colour or location, look at Japan or Rwanda for salient examples. You might say the same of Marxism, if you were deeply ignorant of how much work is required to study it and understand it, yet even cursory knowledge allows you to make more sense of the world. When I was a run of the mill EU neolib, I was confused at the world, and didn’t understand why so many people were furious at western governements, and thought slop like “Hypernormalisation” was groundbreaking, now I see it’s completely aimless and idealistic, and I understand the status quo is literally the devils work.
Actually one funny outcome of becoming a hardcore communist and unapologetic Stalin fan is that my faith in Christianity which was practically gone has strengthened the more I learned. I remember meeting a communist priest who taught me about liberation theology, the guy thought that achieving communism was basically the second coming, that really inspired me.
Now, coming back to your initial comment, it is true that after 70+ years of status quo bullshit, a lot of people have had enough and coincidentally, leftism is very, very slowly rebuilding itself in the west, sometimes in clumsy ways, but rebuilding nonetheless. We’ve seen attempts successful or not in France, the UK, Spain, even Canada or the US. Sometimes (most times) results are disappointing, or even crushing (looking at the NFP in my country), but results nonetheless. Hell, maybe the masks slipping off this past year regarding the genocide waged on Palestinians may be the proverbial punch in the face many need to finally wake up and organise, because blowback will come back home at some point.
Convincing Westerners who couldn't define "private property" that Stalin was giga-satan and everyone who doesn't ritually denounce him wants to bring him back via Juche Necromancy is probably one of the greatest propaganda coups in history.
Also, note how they lost Georgia. They only won it in 2020 thanks to people in the BLM and Sunrise Movement, who were quickly marginalized by Dems claiming it was thanks to Abrams. They then spent the entirety of Biden's admin shitting on them.
The democrats' main pitch was: We are doing a shitty job, but the other team will be worse.
The republicans' main pitch was: They are doing a shitty job, we wont.
Democrats main offer was doing what the republicans did. Why go for a cheap knockoff that's only in it for the votes, when you can get genuine homemade rabid racism? The democrats have nothing to offer and they're not even willing to admit shit is fucked. Republicans have lots of stuff to offer: Fascism and they are willing to admit shit is fucked (because of immigrants, not the rich)
If you're an average voter and your choice is between someone offering to do genocide while denying it and someone offering to do genocide while enjoying it, then the average voter (who is a fascist) will go for the ones who are open about it.
On top of that the democrats method of campaigning via smug condescention and veiled threats does not do them any favours. Pointing at a graph and saying "you don't get it, inflation is going down!" (which just means it's going up slower) to a person who has to choose between paying utilities or eating every day, isn't a good idea if you want that person to vote for you.
It also doesn't help that democrats do anything they can to kneecap their own strong grassroots movements (See: Bernie Sanders being fucked over in the primaries two elections in a row, the dems turning on #metoo, the dems marginalising the BLM activists that won them georgia in 2020)
Republicans have lots of stuff to offer: Fascism and they are willing to admit shit is fucked (because of immigrants, not the rich)
I think you can go simpler than this, or rather I don't think fascism necessarily has broad appeal. It's the same take I have from when they kept trying to rail against "populism" At the end of the day when everything is fucked up but the system is "working as intended" people have a lot of motivation to want change. It may not be likely they'll get what they want but staying the course is pretty clearly a disaster.
I do wonder what happened with the "Your husband will know if you voted or not, but he won't know who you voted for" letters, like what the effect was. Bc to me they really looked like some kind of threat and I wonder some of hte recipients interpreted it as a confusing threat to narc on their husbands.
Because the democrats have done nothing but piss on people and tell them it's golden rain for 4 years, then campaign on "that guy will piss on you harder" while actively courting that guy's main supporters instead of getting votes from people who don't want to be pissed on
This is just what happens in a declining country with an enforced two party system: people blame the decline on the incumbent party and vote for the other party in a desperate attempt to right the ship. But the decline continues and people blame the decline on the new incumbent party and vote for the old incumbent party back in a desperate attempt to right the ship.
At the end of the day, Harris couldn't distance herself from the Biden administration by virtue of being part of it. Her not invoking the 25th amendment meant that she either cosigns to everything the Biden administration has done, including genocide in Palestine, or lacks the leadership qualities to make decisive decisions. Factor in her being a terrible candidate in general and the (truthful) perception that she didn't earn her spot as the presidential candidate (ie she lost the only primary she participated in and was only handpicked at the last minute) and it shouldn't be that surprising that she got BTFO.
I honestly think any Democratic candidate that isn't working directly for the Biden administration like Gruesome Newsome would beat Trump because Trump is also a known quality and a shadow of his former 2016 self, but it goes back to what I said in the first paragraph. The US is going to be worse off in 2028 than in 2024, people will blame it on the GOP, and whoever is the Democratic candidate would BTFO their Republican rival. The smarter political operatives like Gruesome Newsome understand this and are setting themselves up to run in 2028. He's probably going to push some ghoulish "liquidate the homeless" initiative in California to show how he's "tough on crime." I guess this also shows Harris's poor political instincts. In a way, the DNC pretty much set her up for failure whether they realized it or not.
I disagree that Harris couldn't distance herself from the Biden Admin. She chose not to. She chose to constantly say that she agreed with Biden on everything and wouldn't do anything different. Her campaign started off with voters broadly agreeing that Biden's economy wasn't to blame on Harris, but she made the decision to embrace inflation, zionism and everything else.
But broadly speaking yeah, it seems we've entered the era where the incumbent eats shit every 4 years. Nobody is gonna fundamentally change anything, so the ship will keep careening towards disaster.
Turns out the 'moderate republican White women upset over abortion' that Harris kept casing were at the end of the day.......still White Women gasp
Right? And they were all so fucking smug after those "Your husband won't know that you voted Democrat" letters.
The ‘economy’ is a big thing. That doesn’t mean GDP in this case, but that there is inflation and no rise in wages that follows. When the message from the incumbent side is that things are great actually and you’re wrong if you don’t think so the viability of the policies from the other side stops mattering as much. The big problem is that history didn’t end and neoliberal policy is failing right left and centre all over the world.
Also that Kamala is a historically shit candidate, there is a reason she immediately ate shit in the 2020 primaries.
Right? Dems yelling "The economy is doing great!" when groceries and rent are both impossible was just dumb as shit. Unfathomably bad decisionmaking.
But after prices skyrocketed they stayed high as fuck instead of skyrocketing twice! Aren't you grateful??
Yeah idk how rank and file dems can be saying "These dumb plebs don't understand how good the economy is!" when the economy is milk, bread, eggs, veg, and meat for 95% of the population. You can't tell someone who isn't a deeply 
economics wonk that they economy is good when they went from eating out a few times a month to eating beans a few times a month in the course of two years.
The only reason Brandon ever won was because of covid. If 2020 had been a "normal" year, this would have been how 2020's electoral map looked.
Because yeah, as others have said, the Dems just have nothing to offer. It's the same as 2016 - Trump does represent an alternative, it just happens to be barbarism.
I think it's two things:
Firstly, identity politics is a hell of a drug and Trump has put the blame for the current miserable situation on the "Wokes".
Secondly, America is a country where you have beaten into you from a young age that voting every 2 years is how political action is done. Protest are constantly put down as childish inconvenience at best and actively criminal at worst. With that in mind how as an American do you voice your frustration with the incumbent? You vote for the challenger.
This was a referendum on biden. People don't like him. They voted him out, and at every opportunity Harris showed that besides the gender, age and race, they were the same person
What will you do differently? "Oh I don't know lol, I'll have a republican in my cabinet!" Lmao
"Oh I don't know lol, I'll have a republican in my cabinet!"
"Those other guys are horrible fascists who want to keep abortion illegal and make democracy history! Also I'll have one of those horrible fascists in my cabinet!"
what a great message you're sending, really
there are 50 reasons and all of them boil down to the democratic party's refusal to be popular. at this point the party is run by committed neocons and centrists who despite knowing that progressive policy is popular (let alone morally correct) will never campaign on it. whatever organized left exists in this country must break with the democrats if there is any hope for the future
Yeah. Thats always a hard realization the first thirty or fifty times it happens. : |
"everyone who disagrees with me is a bad person and/or an idiot" is maybe not the hard realization they need
Somewhere between forty and seventy percent of American adults do not demonstrate comprehensive English literacy meaning they can technically read and write but the ability to recall, analyze, reference, or think critically about text is at or below the level we expect twelve year olds to read at. This is not a matter of them being able to read words on a page, it's a matter of them being able to think. America makes a lot more sense when you realize this.
Final tallies aren't in but it seems like significantly over half the population also did not participate in this election.
In reality I think there's probably not just one reason you can point to. Inflation, refusal to do a primary, abysmal campaigning, et al. All of it is probably a factor to one extent or another.
End of the day the one thing I do hope all of us on this site can agree to is that whatever the actual material reasons for it: the Democrats absolutely unquestionably deserved this loss.
Agreed. If you want to win you take every advantage you can get. Harris fucked up in many, many different ways, and the Dems as a whole have been fucking up for decades.
Sounds like historically low turnouts. It's entirely possible that the Democrats' behavior the last four years was so demoralizing and dispiriting that a couple million of their voters didn't bother.
Because it's less a matter of more people voting republican and more a matter of not enough people voting Democrat.
Why did people not vote Democrat? The party refuses to be popular, had no real policy proposals, and actively alienated key voting blocks in key swing States.
If I understand the matter Trump had like 3 million fewer votes than he did in 16
Yeah, I think Kamala even had fewer total votes compared to Biden in 2020. People just didn't vote, because why the fuck would they??? No one was giving them a reason!
The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision--a total implosion of the do-nothing "centrist" political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future--healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change--the far right will keep winning. They're the only ones with ideas.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
I mean, yeah, it looks like Kamala didn’t get the dem base out to vote for her because no one wants “more of the same” when following an incredibly unpopular president. Kamala was very openly telling the base to fuck off, and made her race singularly about attracting white, upper middle class suburban women at the cost of everyone else.
But that’s the micro view. In the macro view, Michael Roberts’ analysis of rates of profit shows it’s been falling for a while now. Capitalism was in crisis during the Great Depression, only to be “saved” by WW2. The reconstruction of the industrial world led to good times for a couple decades until there was a profitability crisis in the 1970s. Capital’s response starting the 80s was offshoring, privatization, and financialization - neoliberalism in other words. But the gains from that was only able to keep things going until 2009 or so. Since then profitability has been shit. Capital has no answers beyond just tightening the screws (austerity at home and imperialism abroad). Just increasing misery in order to slow the decline of the rate of profit.
The US needs that surplus value extracted primarily from the global south to keep running. That surplus value is how capital is able to buy off the domestic working class. But that slice of the pie keeps shrinking, i.e. material conditions keep worsening. Things are getting worse as every year goes by and everyone knows it, even if they don’t understand it. That’s why we keep bouncing between parties every four years instead of the steady 2 term presidents we had in the era of neoliberalism. Most people are not doing in depth political analysis. They are just seeing their situation get worse and blaming whoever is in charge.
Of course the economy won’t recover under Trump. It will almost certainly get worse, and I happen to think the odds of a major economic crisis are pretty high. I would bet everything we get a dem president in 2028. Things just get worse and people are fumbling around for a solution.
And that’s where we come in. WE HAVE THE ANSWERS. It’s our job to bring the light of Marxism to the world. I’m not even gonna pretend we can make much of a dent in 4 years but this is a multi-generational project.
Thank you for that. Makes too much sense and feels like the big picture to put these things in context.
Would you be and to share some resources which helped you to this conclusion? No pressure if not!
Would be cool to see this on a graph somewhere (although I can imagine we can see the correlated variables react in kind). That's the problem of trying to sell the future and having the "promise" of future value. Seems with Trump in power, corporations will eat but since that value has to come from somewhere. Like you alluded, from the global South or from tightening the working conditions of the workers. And it probably still not be enough to "fix the economy". There is serious cost to inaction on our part that the future will pay.
Sure thing. Regarding the rate of profit, it’s something Roberts talks about a lot, so if you go to his website and search for “rate of profit”, you’ll find many articles (and graphs).
Regarding the extraction of surplus value, that one’s a little trickier. It’s a key part of what’s in volume 2 of Capital, specifically in chapter 6 (but the chapters before are important to comprehend as they build up to ch. 6). Long story short, it is only in the sphere of production (i.e. making things) where surplus value is created. So any costs that are not directly a part of production are “unproductive” and thus must be covered by surplus value. At the individual firm level this is often called “overhead” or “indirect costs”.
But at the economy level… what about the US? We don’t make anything anymore, so where is our surplus value coming from? Production in the global south! The value is created there but it is “imported” into the US. This is plainly obvious when you consider how much it costs to make a t-shirt in Bangladesh and what it ultimately sell for in the US. (I am admittedly mixing surplus value and profit a bit here but I think it’s appropriate).
How that surplus value makes it to workers indirectly is a bit abstract. But it can be done politically or through action. Meaning, you can pass a law that grants universal health care to pacify workers. Or the workers themselves can go on strike and earn more. Or even just through market forces this can happen. It’s a hard thing to empirically “prove” but it’s something you can see historically: when capital faces pressure, they have mechanisms to redistribute surplus value. In England, there was an increasingly militant labor movement that was eventually bought off by England ramping up imperialist plunder in the second half of the 19th century. In the US, up until the early 20th century you could always just steal more indigenous land and give it to workers (stealing capital and distributing it to workers isn’t the same and sharing surplus value per se but the effect is the same).
I get you (I think). Seems you're claiming at some point, surplus value can be shared across people who are willing to fight for it. Either via legislation, lobbying or through direct action.
Appreciate the recommendation of the blog.. it's a great rabbit hole and I think I got the graphs I was looking for..
(Edit..The graphs didn't copy properly.. I was referring to the ones here: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/02/the-us-presidential-election-part-one-the-economy/)
That rate of profit seems like a powerful metric. That scarcity mindset is never a great thing for an economy or even the psyche.
Thank you for the detailed response! Look like I need to move Das Capital up my reading list.
dems look like a party of over-educated weirdos who failed to message on the economy -- the Important Thing. losing 2nd and 3rd income quartiles, only 10 point margin for union families, trounced with first time voters and those who think the economy is Not So Good or Poor, and those who are Dissatisfied and Angry. lost latino men and those without any college. Few voted chiefly on foreign policy and those who did swung for Republicans (no one gives a fuck about Gaza, obviously). And abortion wasn't salient-- nearly half of those who though abortion should be legal in nearly all cases still voted GOP.
More upshots: Harris may have reduced the number of "double haters" but the remaining haters swung clearly to Trump. Vance salvaged his favorable/unfavorables and appears at par w/Walz. Those who decided late (within the last week) broke clearly to Trump (RIP squirrel).