I've been stewing on this for over a month, and it is time to unload. Alas, there is a lot of self reflection we need to do as a society, and I am not sure we are ready for this internalization
I think one thing people who don’t worry about money don’t consider when talking about 2020 is just how much money people had. There was nothing to do, you couldn’t go anywhere and the government was dumping money on you. But because of the way Donald managed Covid, we threw him out in 2020. When inflation hit, the expanded child tax credit had just ended and wages were slow to catch up to the rising costs. And even once wages (for new hires) caught up, that didn’t change what a lot of people were getting paid at the jobs they already had. When the lockdowns ended and the world was free to move about again, those of us who live in states within not daily, but maybe once a week commuting distance of major cities like NYC and Boston saw housing prices skyrocket in our areas driving up rents and making buying a home unattainable for anyone not paying cash. ALL of this is what pushed people back to Donald. They don’t remember all the bad because it’s been completely rewritten by 4 years of propaganda and denigration of anything and everything the Democrats tried to do and praise for all things dear leader did when he was in office. And they all remember that sweet, sweet cash and maybe if we bring Donald back, he will kick out all the illegals and all that money the government is giving them will now be given to them instead.
It took all the power of the patriarchy, all the money of it's business interests, all the fury of the whining men and their captive wives, all the excuses of the "I'm secretly racist but it was really the economy," to eke out a win against the Harris campaign. Take heart from that and organize locally.
I enjoy reading your thoughts regardless whether I agree or not. Always food for thought. I think the answer lies somewhere in between all these points you and others have brought up. It wasn’t just one thing, it was a whole smorgasbord of shit, plus amnesia about how great Trump 1.0 was(n’t). This explains to me at least why so many Dems won their down ballot races even though Trump won the presidency.
I’ll never unsubscribe to you because I always learn something when I read your words. I think decades of strategically placed propaganda did the trick and the democrats can’t seem to stop being polite and reasonable. They need to sharpen their messaging and become far more assertive. But then maybe it’s just easier for the populace to stay lazy and entitled. I have no answers. 🤷♀️
I see the problem as the opposite. They’ve been quite consistent in funding The Groups at large, and per Group Standard Operating Procedure, they often view any defeats as evidence they aren’t shouting at normies loud enough.
Here's where I part company with you—or suggest a different interpretation, or something.
I've long felt, and firmly believe, that the one person who can crush Trumpism utterly is Bernie Sanders, who is even more populist than Donald Trump is, and is a pro-labor Leftist to boot. When he talks about income inequality he's not spinning fairy tales about bringing coal or oil jobs back to America—he's talking about working-class Americans taking new jobs with roughly the same skill sets they have now, and with unions to bargain for them, in sustainable energy industries. Bernie's also talking about balancing the tax burden so it's not on the backs of working and middle-income people, but so the rich pay their fair share same as the rest of us do—and you can send your kids to college without beggaring your family for the next two generations.
I'm not suggesting Bernie should've challenged Biden in 2024, because he's even OLDER than Old Joe! But his ideas still work with younger political leaders like AOC (who was too young to run for President anyway in 2024!) or Hakeem Jeffries, and they seem eager to carry the torch and break away from the kind of "Corporate NeoLiberalism" that Chuck Schumer, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are responsible for, that DOES feel all smug and elitist, and like it uses socially liberal causes as a quickly-discarded figleaf for their own support of corporate greed—I haven't forgotten Pelosi crushed a bill that would prevent members of Congress from insider trading based on information they learned while in office!
You don't need a Ph.D. in Physics or Astronomy or Engineering to set up solar cells or a wind farm—anybody who's worked in construction can do that! You sure don't need an advanced degree to make a home more energy efficient when 90% of that is sealing windows and doors against outside weather, using glass blocks to provide light and insulation in basements, and installing a heat pump instead of a boiler. These are all jobs working income people can do well, and they don't require propping up a system that's unsustainable both for the environment and for itself, because that oil and coal isn't going to last forever.
Pro-labor Progressivism CAN work if it's allowed to, but the Democratic Party has turned into the party of Corporate Elites and their Corporate Media Lapdogs who hang out at Davos(!) and attend "Global Environmental Symposiums" in Dubai(!!!) and proudly call themselves "Hillary Liberals"(!!!!!!!!!!!-I'm running out of exclamation points here). Basically, I just used how Columbia School of Journalism and NeoLiberal Toady Jeff Jarvis describes himself—he might be even more odious than Trump himself in his smug, entitled way of talking about "how the world is".
Supporting working-income people and unions is Progressivism, and so is racial equality—and it's not a "one or the other" kind of thing, either, unless like Democrats of the last forty years you insist on MAKING it so!
I will pick a few nits. I know a LOT of people who claim to be "progressive", and by and large they do not share your thinking about labor unions and the working class.
I get a dismissive vibe, that these people are lost because they have gone full MAGA, from the Bernie fans.
And that seems to harden their love for Trump and "sticking it to the others".
To be honest, the Democrats have abandoned them, and the progressive wing is almost as bad in their looking down upon these laborers, and they offer things like you mention (wind farms, solar installations, etc) while exuding disdain. Almost like the working class and lower rungs on the middle class are contemptuous.
No, not all of them, but watching people who were leftist/progressive icons like Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasperian hop over to the far right. Whilst I am hesitant to say they were being dishonest before their flip, now that they have gone MAGA, it is hard to not view the far left with a bit of a filter.
I will end with this. Bernie had a strong following, but in 2016, he lost, decisively, to Hillary (and no, he wasn't cheated), but his fans, people I have called "Bernie Bros" were the worst fucking losers on the planet, and they were super aggressive and shitty, especially on Twitter. I was a minor player on Twitter (mostly I cultivated a product management community there) and I was shit all over, so no, I do not think Bernie would have beaten Trump when he couldn't beat Clinton.
Still, you do make a lot of good points, but I am not sure that the Dem's will get their heads out of their asses before 2026 or 2028.
In fact I think the MAGA and Trumps is going to be ascendant for probably another 8 - 12 years, unless the coming Trump administration truly shits the bed. But the damage that the billionaires are going to impose, and the money they are going to extract will take a long time to fix, if it can be fixed.
As for the rest of what you had to say—I don't think it's with "distain" that Progressives offer working-income people wind farms OR solar panels. It's in recognition that oil is a finite resource, and is killing the planet as well.
"Drill, Baby! Drill!" is a BAD philosophy to embrace, or even to condone—but you don't have to be an arrogant Hillary asswipe to tell people that.
I'm one of your "worst fucking losers"—I believe Hillary Rodham Clinton is a corrupt traitor (yes, her e-mails!) who CHEATED to beat Bernie Sanders, and I believed she gave us President Donald Trump because she wanted her hand-picked *jibroni* to win in the General, and was too arrogant to see how he was appealing to an audience she smugly thought was all hers....
So, no—I don't think Bernie lost fair and square EITHER time. I think the Corporate Clinton NeoLibs have it in for him, and I HATE them all for it.
Nooo—and there you go again, offering false equivalences just like Fucking Hillary Rodham Clinton did! They SHOVED Qween $Hillary down our throats when it was obvious she was widely disliked, and her petty vindictive actions in response turned that into utter detestation. She and Trump are two sides of the same corrupt coin, as far as I'm concerned.
I voted Third Party because...FUCK HILLARY! If she wanted my vote, she should have given me a reason to vote FOR her—instead, she did her level best to shove me and everybody who wanted a way forward, which Bernie Sanders was running on, away. She didn't even acknowledge that us "Bernie Bros" may have had a reason to be sick of Clinton Politics as Usual—and WTF should I vote for somebody who has nothing but contempt for me like Hillary Rodham Clinton does?
You go ahead and keep thinking Hillary was in any way a better choice than Trump—all she campaigned on in the General Election was how "tough" she was going to be to Putin. All I heard from her was "I'm going to turn America into a smoking nuclear crater! See? I'm not some 'softie'!" 2016 was the worst election ever, and It's. All. Hillary's. Fault.
You do you, but I will say this. Bernie isn’t a democrat, he shits in the democrat’s pool, and then his followers (who you so eloquently point out aren’t democrats) go feral and fuck up the election.
Go start a “progressive” party, where you can espouse all these supposedly popular ideas that the general population will love, and see how you fare against the Greens and the Libertarians.
Very quickly, you will see that the popular “progressive” policies will be relegated to the dustbin.
America (as in the US of A) isn’t a far left progressive country.
As for saint Bernard, he can fuck all the way off.
This is a very well-informed post. I think unfortunately this country is more to the right than us progressives might think. But also very racist & misogynist and it truly saddens me. We will never get rid of the Electoral College or have Single Payer healthcare or paid Childcare or so many other benefits that other less richer countries offer their citizens. The richer getting richer, insurance getting worse even education is failing us. And I feel neither Dems or Reps really care. They just go on the talk shows and say what we want to hear and that’s it. It really saddens me for my grandchildren & their children who will be inherit all this. Thank you for your post, a real eye-opener….
You're not losing this subscriber. The past month has been a whirlwind of emotions for me. As a committed abortion rights activist of nearly four decades, I am in despair for where I think my country is going to end up. As a lesbian I am more apprehensive about political direction of my country than I have been in decades, and I don't like the idea of all the ground that has been gained being lost.
But I try to remember that all of us are experiencing this together, and we have to hang together and talk things through and find uniting points.
You may be right that the United States is center right in political orientation, but on certain issues, I do not believe that where as far right as that. And I think some Trump voters are in for a very rude awakening come spring. The bad thing is that that awakening will be hurtful for everyone, not just them.
I live in the Chicago area. Those of us who watched the local news during the DNC were seeing huge daily crowds of pro-Palestine supporters protesting daily. Palestinian Americans were not granted a speaking slot at the DNC, despite pleas from pro-Palestinian delegates. I had a feeling then that Harris’ campaign should have let them speak.
I’m afraid we’re just going to have to go through some of his shit for people to finally figure out just how consequential their vote or not voting is. Maybe then, they will finally be able to see what damage has been done.
I think one thing people who don’t worry about money don’t consider when talking about 2020 is just how much money people had. There was nothing to do, you couldn’t go anywhere and the government was dumping money on you. But because of the way Donald managed Covid, we threw him out in 2020. When inflation hit, the expanded child tax credit had just ended and wages were slow to catch up to the rising costs. And even once wages (for new hires) caught up, that didn’t change what a lot of people were getting paid at the jobs they already had. When the lockdowns ended and the world was free to move about again, those of us who live in states within not daily, but maybe once a week commuting distance of major cities like NYC and Boston saw housing prices skyrocket in our areas driving up rents and making buying a home unattainable for anyone not paying cash. ALL of this is what pushed people back to Donald. They don’t remember all the bad because it’s been completely rewritten by 4 years of propaganda and denigration of anything and everything the Democrats tried to do and praise for all things dear leader did when he was in office. And they all remember that sweet, sweet cash and maybe if we bring Donald back, he will kick out all the illegals and all that money the government is giving them will now be given to them instead.
a brilliant read, thanks Geoff
It took all the power of the patriarchy, all the money of it's business interests, all the fury of the whining men and their captive wives, all the excuses of the "I'm secretly racist but it was really the economy," to eke out a win against the Harris campaign. Take heart from that and organize locally.
Yeah, I’m not going anywhere, brother. Thanks for the thought and time you put into this post.
I enjoy reading your thoughts regardless whether I agree or not. Always food for thought. I think the answer lies somewhere in between all these points you and others have brought up. It wasn’t just one thing, it was a whole smorgasbord of shit, plus amnesia about how great Trump 1.0 was(n’t). This explains to me at least why so many Dems won their down ballot races even though Trump won the presidency.
I’ll never unsubscribe to you because I always learn something when I read your words. I think decades of strategically placed propaganda did the trick and the democrats can’t seem to stop being polite and reasonable. They need to sharpen their messaging and become far more assertive. But then maybe it’s just easier for the populace to stay lazy and entitled. I have no answers. 🤷♀️
I’m too lazy to expat and I love my house. If you like you can join in my secession fantasy.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190221-what-if-california-seceded-from-the-us
Geoff - I think what you’re missing on the Dem donor side is that Dem donors primarily donate to CAUSES, not institutions or centrist candidates.
They need to behave more like the right wing donors, and to stick with it. They seem to bolt as soon as they fail to get immediate traction.
I see the problem as the opposite. They’ve been quite consistent in funding The Groups at large, and per Group Standard Operating Procedure, they often view any defeats as evidence they aren’t shouting at normies loud enough.
I came here to rebut this, but alas, I can't.
::the US is a center Right electorate::
Here's where I part company with you—or suggest a different interpretation, or something.
I've long felt, and firmly believe, that the one person who can crush Trumpism utterly is Bernie Sanders, who is even more populist than Donald Trump is, and is a pro-labor Leftist to boot. When he talks about income inequality he's not spinning fairy tales about bringing coal or oil jobs back to America—he's talking about working-class Americans taking new jobs with roughly the same skill sets they have now, and with unions to bargain for them, in sustainable energy industries. Bernie's also talking about balancing the tax burden so it's not on the backs of working and middle-income people, but so the rich pay their fair share same as the rest of us do—and you can send your kids to college without beggaring your family for the next two generations.
I'm not suggesting Bernie should've challenged Biden in 2024, because he's even OLDER than Old Joe! But his ideas still work with younger political leaders like AOC (who was too young to run for President anyway in 2024!) or Hakeem Jeffries, and they seem eager to carry the torch and break away from the kind of "Corporate NeoLiberalism" that Chuck Schumer, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are responsible for, that DOES feel all smug and elitist, and like it uses socially liberal causes as a quickly-discarded figleaf for their own support of corporate greed—I haven't forgotten Pelosi crushed a bill that would prevent members of Congress from insider trading based on information they learned while in office!
You don't need a Ph.D. in Physics or Astronomy or Engineering to set up solar cells or a wind farm—anybody who's worked in construction can do that! You sure don't need an advanced degree to make a home more energy efficient when 90% of that is sealing windows and doors against outside weather, using glass blocks to provide light and insulation in basements, and installing a heat pump instead of a boiler. These are all jobs working income people can do well, and they don't require propping up a system that's unsustainable both for the environment and for itself, because that oil and coal isn't going to last forever.
Pro-labor Progressivism CAN work if it's allowed to, but the Democratic Party has turned into the party of Corporate Elites and their Corporate Media Lapdogs who hang out at Davos(!) and attend "Global Environmental Symposiums" in Dubai(!!!) and proudly call themselves "Hillary Liberals"(!!!!!!!!!!!-I'm running out of exclamation points here). Basically, I just used how Columbia School of Journalism and NeoLiberal Toady Jeff Jarvis describes himself—he might be even more odious than Trump himself in his smug, entitled way of talking about "how the world is".
Supporting working-income people and unions is Progressivism, and so is racial equality—and it's not a "one or the other" kind of thing, either, unless like Democrats of the last forty years you insist on MAKING it so!
Thank you for this.
I will pick a few nits. I know a LOT of people who claim to be "progressive", and by and large they do not share your thinking about labor unions and the working class.
I get a dismissive vibe, that these people are lost because they have gone full MAGA, from the Bernie fans.
And that seems to harden their love for Trump and "sticking it to the others".
To be honest, the Democrats have abandoned them, and the progressive wing is almost as bad in their looking down upon these laborers, and they offer things like you mention (wind farms, solar installations, etc) while exuding disdain. Almost like the working class and lower rungs on the middle class are contemptuous.
No, not all of them, but watching people who were leftist/progressive icons like Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasperian hop over to the far right. Whilst I am hesitant to say they were being dishonest before their flip, now that they have gone MAGA, it is hard to not view the far left with a bit of a filter.
I will end with this. Bernie had a strong following, but in 2016, he lost, decisively, to Hillary (and no, he wasn't cheated), but his fans, people I have called "Bernie Bros" were the worst fucking losers on the planet, and they were super aggressive and shitty, especially on Twitter. I was a minor player on Twitter (mostly I cultivated a product management community there) and I was shit all over, so no, I do not think Bernie would have beaten Trump when he couldn't beat Clinton.
Still, you do make a lot of good points, but I am not sure that the Dem's will get their heads out of their asses before 2026 or 2028.
In fact I think the MAGA and Trumps is going to be ascendant for probably another 8 - 12 years, unless the coming Trump administration truly shits the bed. But the damage that the billionaires are going to impose, and the money they are going to extract will take a long time to fix, if it can be fixed.
As for the rest of what you had to say—I don't think it's with "distain" that Progressives offer working-income people wind farms OR solar panels. It's in recognition that oil is a finite resource, and is killing the planet as well.
"Drill, Baby! Drill!" is a BAD philosophy to embrace, or even to condone—but you don't have to be an arrogant Hillary asswipe to tell people that.
The problem is that to the working class, it reeks of elitism, and others telling them to change. And that is the disdain which I refer to.
I'm one of your "worst fucking losers"—I believe Hillary Rodham Clinton is a corrupt traitor (yes, her e-mails!) who CHEATED to beat Bernie Sanders, and I believed she gave us President Donald Trump because she wanted her hand-picked *jibroni* to win in the General, and was too arrogant to see how he was appealing to an audience she smugly thought was all hers....
So, no—I don't think Bernie lost fair and square EITHER time. I think the Corporate Clinton NeoLibs have it in for him, and I HATE them all for it.
So, if they can't get Bernie, Trump's the next best thing?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/upshot/voters-trump-bernie-sanders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gE4.mJ19.7iBSH17Kz7Ae&smid=url-share
Nooo—and there you go again, offering false equivalences just like Fucking Hillary Rodham Clinton did! They SHOVED Qween $Hillary down our throats when it was obvious she was widely disliked, and her petty vindictive actions in response turned that into utter detestation. She and Trump are two sides of the same corrupt coin, as far as I'm concerned.
I voted Third Party because...FUCK HILLARY! If she wanted my vote, she should have given me a reason to vote FOR her—instead, she did her level best to shove me and everybody who wanted a way forward, which Bernie Sanders was running on, away. She didn't even acknowledge that us "Bernie Bros" may have had a reason to be sick of Clinton Politics as Usual—and WTF should I vote for somebody who has nothing but contempt for me like Hillary Rodham Clinton does?
You go ahead and keep thinking Hillary was in any way a better choice than Trump—all she campaigned on in the General Election was how "tough" she was going to be to Putin. All I heard from her was "I'm going to turn America into a smoking nuclear crater! See? I'm not some 'softie'!" 2016 was the worst election ever, and It's. All. Hillary's. Fault.
Selah.
You do you, but I will say this. Bernie isn’t a democrat, he shits in the democrat’s pool, and then his followers (who you so eloquently point out aren’t democrats) go feral and fuck up the election.
Go start a “progressive” party, where you can espouse all these supposedly popular ideas that the general population will love, and see how you fare against the Greens and the Libertarians.
Very quickly, you will see that the popular “progressive” policies will be relegated to the dustbin.
America (as in the US of A) isn’t a far left progressive country.
As for saint Bernard, he can fuck all the way off.
Funny, that's just how I feel about Saint $Hitlery".
I'm out of here.
This is a very well-informed post. I think unfortunately this country is more to the right than us progressives might think. But also very racist & misogynist and it truly saddens me. We will never get rid of the Electoral College or have Single Payer healthcare or paid Childcare or so many other benefits that other less richer countries offer their citizens. The richer getting richer, insurance getting worse even education is failing us. And I feel neither Dems or Reps really care. They just go on the talk shows and say what we want to hear and that’s it. It really saddens me for my grandchildren & their children who will be inherit all this. Thank you for your post, a real eye-opener….
You're not losing this subscriber. The past month has been a whirlwind of emotions for me. As a committed abortion rights activist of nearly four decades, I am in despair for where I think my country is going to end up. As a lesbian I am more apprehensive about political direction of my country than I have been in decades, and I don't like the idea of all the ground that has been gained being lost.
But I try to remember that all of us are experiencing this together, and we have to hang together and talk things through and find uniting points.
You may be right that the United States is center right in political orientation, but on certain issues, I do not believe that where as far right as that. And I think some Trump voters are in for a very rude awakening come spring. The bad thing is that that awakening will be hurtful for everyone, not just them.
I live in the Chicago area. Those of us who watched the local news during the DNC were seeing huge daily crowds of pro-Palestine supporters protesting daily. Palestinian Americans were not granted a speaking slot at the DNC, despite pleas from pro-Palestinian delegates. I had a feeling then that Harris’ campaign should have let them speak.
I’m afraid we’re just going to have to go through some of his shit for people to finally figure out just how consequential their vote or not voting is. Maybe then, they will finally be able to see what damage has been done.
Very well-reasoned and insightful. Thanks for this.