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?
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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.
Oh I just put in fascism to make it clear I don’t think they will actually do anything good. They’re not out and proud fascists.
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.
I’m very confused about it, it feels to me like somebody is planning to leak a database of who voted for who (which is suppose to be impossible but that’s easy to lie about), very ominous shit either way.
Apparently what it was supposed to be was “It’s safe to a vote for a democrat because your GOP husband can’t check your voting record to see who you voted for.”
at the same time though, libs were claiming their canvassers were asking the GOP men in households to speak to their democrat voting wives and getting rebuffed.
That seems like it would make things worse?
It’s a well-known form of political pressure. It’s sometimes labeled “social pressure”. More info here: https://isps.yale.edu/research/data/d001
I got multiple ads that were straight up threats of public shaming by your peers if you don’t vote and they look you up in the record
I’ll admit I’m paranoid because my adoptive family is abusive but all I can see those ads doing is making some poor woman’s/adult child’s life harder and more likely to be forced to vote trump
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).
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.
On the other side of that coin is that the voting base literally just collapsed from under the Democrats. They really went full on, “no more half measures” when it came to the left and abandoned any attempt to even lie about progressive leftist political values.
Liberals will blame this loss on the left and they are correct to do so. It is the left’s fault because that is how electoral politics work. You didn’t court their vote and they didn’t vote for you. Cause and effect.
I don’t really see this as being the other side of the coin at all. Their voter base collapsed precisely because they failed to articulate any kind of positive vision or embrace any policies that might help the vast majority of Americans. People will not turn out to vote for you when you explicitly tell them you’re not going to help them and that they should stop whining.
It is the other side of the coin of Trump winning the popular vote. That is precisely part of that dynamic. He also lost votes overall from last election. The Democrats lost so much more for the reasons you mention which are the reasons I mentioned. We must be clear when mentioning Trump won the popular vote, that Harris LOST so much more than that. She lost votes they would have previously gotten without picking up any from the Republicans (she actually lost about half a percent there as well!).
The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote.
Second time the Democrats lost the popular vote since 1992. Most likely, the Democrats will shift even more right. They shifted right after getting stomped in 1988.
Democrats (well both major political parties in the US) are capitalist and, as such, are standing on the conveyor belt of capital interest, which constantly moves to the right. They would have to seriously fight against the forces of capital in order to just appear to stay roughly in one place, which they do not. The last time there was any meaningful resistance to capital interest were the Keynesian reforms to get out of the Great Depression, but that was really only to keep capitalism on life support long enough to roll them back.
Yeah it would not surprise me at all if they took exactly the wrong lesson from this, but I think doing so would make it crystal clear that they’re not operating in anything like good faith. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Harris was totally unchanged from the percentage who voted for Biden, and the traditional Democratic base just didn’t vote for them. The rightward shift overwhelmingly hurt their electoral performance. If they move even further to the right, that’s just an indication that they actually believe in those policies; they won’t be able to hide behind the fig leaf of “strategic triangulation” anymore. Most of us here on Hexbear are aware of the fact that they actually want to feed immigrants and poor people into a meat grinder, but I’m at least hopeful that this might be the beginning of more ordinary people waking up to that fact.
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.
That and running just like hildogs failed run
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
maybe those 15 million along with the rest of the nonvoters didnt see any benefit from biden kamala being in office for 4 years and so didnt care
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.
The Dems pissing off the most volatile part of their electorate (the youth vote) probably didn’t help either
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
We need to stop calling them centrists.
The majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, and decreasing war & the military industrial complex. They aren’t centrists, they’re corporatists.
Otherwise, this ^ is totally the right answer. We now have republicans and store-brand republicans. So people choose the regular republicans.
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!
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
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
moneymonet), 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.
Any sufficiently advanced
technologycommunism is indistinguishable frommagicEden.blowback of the Palestinian genocide will come back home at some point.
i hope the country learned the lessons from 9/11, or else its gonna be just that all over again.
I Hope you do, because if you don’t it’s going to be another bloodbath.
I think your comment about leftism slowly rebuilding in the west is a good one. I’ve seen a lot of people dismayed about how there was literally 0 leftism or even hints at appealing to leftists during this election, but ultimately that’s because a real left wing movement can’t come from the government, it has to start at ground level.
yeah, a moderate dose of cynicism and skepticism is good, but to fall for fatalism is liberalism. I’m sometimes irritated by idealists who throw their arms at any defeat like everything is over, like building a party can be done with zero failures and learning gleaned from them. You see those types a lot on social media since they rarely engage in any way with politics irl.
Hope-core post. 10/10
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.
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.
- Really hard to run an attack campaign when you’re the incumbent party. If your messaging is just “im a bit better than the other guy” people are just gonna point to the shit job you’re doing right now. Historical levels of unpopularity is real hard to come back from, bush needed 9/11.
- The whole Biden debacle was disastrous, probably ended any chance of scooping up the moderate vote they were desperately pining for.
- Gaza, immigration, and generally running to the right put a bullet in any chance of bringing this campaign back. They tried really desperately with the weed stuff at the last minute, but the damage was done.
- Democratic party reeks of putrescene
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
🥰
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.
Dems just have nothing to offer.
Which is why they gave up on everything other than trump bad or what are you gonna do vote for orange?
Well they would have protected abortion. Which was under threat. During a Democratic administration. To which the Democrat candidate is currently serving as Vice President.
Would they have? They didn’t the last 4 years. Or the 8 under Obama. Or the 8 under Clinton. What evidence is there that the Dems would have done this?
I think that was sarcasm, considering the heavy handedness of their last two sentences
None, that’s what I mean. Their main promise rang hollow when Roe was overturned under the current lib president.
“Protected” in the “mobster ‘insurance’ scam” sense
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.
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.
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
Says the genocide supporter
I didn’t know you were allowed to be this insufferably smug about ‘human rights’ after voting for a loser that is literally second in command for an admin that is funding and supplying diplomatic cover for an ongoing genocide
To say nothing of their immigration policies, which are to the right of fucking George W Bush (and were going to be to the right of Donald Trump)
Not to mention giving billions to out-and-proud nazis forcibly conscripting civilians to fight/be meatshields
