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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah the people advocating for the end of a genocide and social healthcare are the hateful ones 💀
When they want to end it with bloodshed, yes. Yes they are.
Welcome to reality
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.
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.
How can this man be so based. The world simply didn’t deserve him.
I lean left, but I have never been able to get behind Bernie.
So fucking what? I’m sure lots of guys have had half naked women sitting on their lap at one point during their life.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13227686
This you? You are a neoliberal at best. You don’t lean left in any way, shape, or from. You lean right.
Bernie is center-left at most. If he’s too left, you don’t lean left at all. If he’s not left enough, that makes sense.
Bernie is against corporate corruption and wants to expand social programs. He doesn’t want to flip the table of capitalism. Just improve the lives that have to live within it.
This would sit a lot better if he didnt sell out for a beach house from Hillary.
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.
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.
Don’t call Bernie a king…
I think it’s more of a synonym for “the GOAT” or any other superlative rather implying he has a divine right to rule. E.g. “if you come at the king, you best not miss”
I am, in fact, aware of the sociopolitical aspects of the phrase, thanks a bunch, lib.
woof ok sorry
So why did you endorse it all Bernie? Washing your hands clean now as if nothing happened? We were all saying this months ago. But you said it was Kamala’s turn.
Because Kamala was better than Trump and months out from the election is too late to challenge the fundamentals of a political party
No it was never too late. There should have been an open primary With three months left there was plenty of time.
Kamala was massively ahead of Trump within 2 weeks of her swap in. Then she started losing in the polls when she opened her mouth and stated her name was Joseph Robinette Biden.
Sure they should have had a primary. Biden should also never have run. But neither of those things happened and neither was Sanders’ fault
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.
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.
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™
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 🤷
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.
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.
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 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.
Alright this is gettin a bit much, Bernie endorsed all of this shit. The change he’s talking about was on the ballot and he was pushing the conservative coddling moderate.
What else was he to do? Sometimes the lesser of 2 evils is the only choice.
Endorse an even lesser evil, perhaps even popular good? Why was Kamala the only person in the world that wasnt Trump?
Because no one else could win.
She didnt win. Thats literally the only thing you see in her, and even that is not there.
He specifically said he doesn’t endorse it other than because on each topic, trump is worse.
You know who else trump is worse than? Everyone! Bernie, AOC, jill stein, cornell west, any progressive.
Yup! But only one person had enough votes to potentially beat trump, which is how the system is designed. I checked last night, and I don’t remember the exact number, but Cornell West received something like 0.67% of the votes in my State. Knowing how the system works, we had one option to prevent a far right government, and it was a less right government. I didn’t design the system, I just live in it.
No one had enough votes to beat trump, and no one had any votes before everyone decided to hold their nose and half-assed support a candidate no one liked. Yeah, West and Stein and any other potential progressive candidate did poorly, everyone here was actively breaking their knees to knock them out of the race. From daily, hourly propaganda against everything but their policy, to actually banning them from participating in states elections. Everyone here fought more against progressive candidates than they did trump.
Because they know how these things go. Everyone here is an even smaller percentage of Americans than the number of people who voted for West. You can’t control the way that the average person is going to think and vote. But you can recognize it and try to support the lesser evil, or refuse to recognize it and maybe end up with the greater evil. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, or it would have turned out very differently. Obviously a bunch of people said “I’m not voting for the lesser evil because of XYZ reason”, so here we are with the greater evil.
They know how these things go? Its past tense now and we both know how things went. Your candidate that you don’t even like lost astoundingly, thats how things went, thats the outcome all of you were pushing for.
If your candidate loses its voters fault, but if my candidate loses its the candidates fault. Your candidate was a piece of shit nobody liked, with an outcome people like me saw coming.
Simma downa. She wasn’t my candidate and I didn’t vote for her. I’m just conveying the rational. Everyone knew what the only possible choice was to try to stop trump. To be clear, I didn’t vote for her because I live in a very blue state, and knew I could safely make my stand without increasing the odds of a trump win.
He was trying to do everything he could to prevent Trump. That meant holding his tongue so as not to encourage people against strategic voting. It’s a very dumb system we have, but it’s not Bernie’s fault we’re in it.
Now that the general is over, he can speak his mind again. And probably a hint of getting ahead of the Democratic Party’s inevitable blaming of the left for this loss rather than an ounce of introspection.
Not everything, one thing, the same thing everyone here was trying to do, the same thing the DNC was doing, trying to appeal to conservatives. This is the result, no one wanted conservative democrats, but everyone was holding their nose and pushing for it.
Now after the fact people are trying to act like they support progressives.
For once I disagree with Bernie.
You can blame the DNC for being useless and out of touch but they always have been, nothing changed there. You can blame them for their shitty messaging and not listening to the concerns of working people … ditto.
What changed in this election is that millions of people, who know Trump is a a liar, a criminal, a rapist, a narcissist … I could go on and on. Well, they decided to vote for him because none of those negative traits were sufficiently off-putting.
This was a test of the collective character and morality of the nation and the United States failed that test miserably. Put it down to a poor standard of public education, Russian/Iranian/Chinese propaganda, accelerationism, racism, misogyny, whatever mix of reasons you’re comfortable with. Could the DNC have done better? Absolutely. Would the DNC doing better have won the election for Harris? Probably not, given the margin of victory.
Nah, you’re wrong to blame the voters.
It’s time to take an honest look at DNC leadership and ask some difficult questions - why aren’t they interested in doing more to actually win votes? Will they ever learn that pandering to corporations for bribe money is a losing strategy?
Besides, Trump actually got fewer votes this time around than 2020. So your premise is flawed there too. It’s just that Harris and the DNC got way less. Dems lost this one and if you ask me it’s because of their Israel First policy and fierce commitment to ongoing genocide and denial of reality. Couple that with insane inflation directly and negatively impacting people’s material conditions, and somehow Trump was able to pose as the change candidate. Politically, that’s all that matters when the people are miserable.
Trump’s vote was largely static. He didn’t add significant support in any way. We already knew a third of the country was filled with regressive assholes. The reason he won was that over 15 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 sat this one out. This was 100% a messaging failure and the DNC deserves all the blame. Sanders is absolutely right here. We wanted to hear about unions and job protection and taxing billionaires, not see Harris try to court right wingers while paling around with that fucking ghoul Liz Cheney and her war criminal father. They fucked up, they lost.
Trump’s vote was largely static. He didn’t add significant support in any way.
That’s my point. Trump is a known quantity now and he didn’t lose support. That’s a failure of the US electorate.
Ask yourself why Harris had to run a near perfect campaign to even stand a chance of winning while Trump ran a campaign that should’ve seen him lose badly, in a more informed and moral country, and still won.
Because she’s party of the administration in power and people aren’t happy right now, so they blame whoever is in power even if it’s not quite their fault. They don’t care that the rate of inflation slowed to basically normal, they care that things are still expensive because their wages haven’t risen to match the raised inflation and their savings are lower. It used to be easier for incumbents, but as the conditions in the US continue to degrade from late stage capitalism and 60 years of neoliberal policies, I have a feeling it will continue to be the opposite.
Holding the line won’t work with people getting poorer every year (and if your wage doesn’t match inflation or the rising costs of housing or transportation, that’s what happening, you’re getting poorer).
Bro if you call that campaign “near perfect,” have I got a bridge to sell you.
That’s not what I said, not even close.
She wasn’t even the candidate for most of it… she was only the candidate because the other guy had to be replaced for having egg salad for brains
Gerrymandering.
That doesn’t apply to Senate and Presidential races though.
