Holding your nose and voting for the non-MAGA option in the general election is not at all the same as throwing a social media temper tantrum on behalf of your “team”, no matter how condescendingly you phrase it.
During the presidential election, people considering third parties were dv’d to oblivion, Blue MAGA shouting that it wasn’t the time. Guess what happens now every time someone suggests finding, running and supporting third party candidates?
Oh it was so much more beyond that. And it’s seems like , by looking at the dv ratios, they’ve forgotten their shame.
If you made any obvious criticisms of the campaign, you were dv’d to oblivion. If you pushed that Biden should be removed as candidate, you were dv’d to oblivion. If you were promoting the idea that the party needed to pivot on Gaza or they’d lose the election, dv’d to oblivion. That Bidens mid summer attempt at the worst border bill we’d ever seen would lose him the election. And on and on and on… I mean they litterally bullied people even mentioning third parties in a way that I think should have gotten them banned permanently from Lemmy. And how many votes did all of the third parties get? not even enough to make a difference to a fart in the wind.
Every single issue that could have turned the tide for the Dems this last election cycle, the same people downvoting in this thread, they downvoted those same things in the run up to the election.
AND THAT is why they are blue MAGA. This is a team sport for them. They can not withstand criticism of what they’ve come to associate their identity with. It’s always that you just need to get in behind the party, no matter how bad the parties ideas are. And the biggest issue these people don’t recognize: if you are downvoting in this thread **you are why the Dems lost **
The Dems were running bad candidates and worse strategies. They needed to be corrected. And defending them from that critique, preventing them from hearing it by keeping out of the mainstream for as long as they were able to, that is what lost the election. There was ample time to course correct in Summer of 24. But blue MAGA insisted you have to run the incubamant, in spite of the fact they were polling at some of the lowest levels in history and had been since almost 23.
And we had a repreive from these idiots for about 12 months while they hid from the shame of the damage they did. Now they’re back and they seem to think they’ve got the right of it again.
On our left hand we have a party who, while generally spineless in the face of opposition, at least understands the general principles of governance and has an interest in continuing the lifespan of the country.
On our right hand we have a party aggressively campaigning that they should be allowed to shoot you in the face. Yes, you, personally.
On our left hand we have a party who, while generally spineless in the face of opposition, at least understands the general principles of governance
Andrew Cuomo couldn’t govern himself out of a paper bag and he ran one of the largest and richest states in the country for eight fucking years. So many of the Dem Senators that got kicked to the curb in '10 and '14 and '22 sucked ass. We’re still stuck carrying around dead weight like Fetterman and Slotkin holding winnable seats, while the occasional “Trump Democrat” like Amy McGrath sucks up hundreds of millions of dollars to face-plant during a blue wave year.
Can we maybe put down the theory that these people know what they’re doing? Dianne Feinstein could barely form coherent sentences by the time she was being wheeled into votes on life support. Chuck Schumer’s got his own party base in full revolt. Newsom can’t decide if he’s running for President or running a podcast.
Oh its just a fight thats been going on within the party, basically forever. One side says “vote blue no matter who” as a cudgel that lets feckless moderates rule the party, then no one shows up on election day when the feckless moderates run campaigns under the assumption that their voters have no other options. And thankfully, we’ve now got the data in to recognize the people who put this toxic rhetoric out there as the very reason Democrats lose elections.
If you defend the perpetual worthlessness of Democrats, you are the problem. If all you can do is “Trump bad”, you are part of the problem. If you are a “blue no matter who”, blue maga democrat, you are why Democrats keep losing elections. Its not strategic voting if the strategy costs you elections. And you literally just cost us 2024 running a campaign based on this rhetoric, so as the part of the Democratic party that actually wants to win elections, we kindly ask you to shut the fuck up and take the back seat. Because you lose us elections with that voter blaming blue maga shit.
Its not worth my time to explain this, yet again, when I spent 2 years telling people that if they tried this approach again, and its an incredibly well trodden issue, but I can assure you this, if the rhetoric you are approaching this conversation with is the same that you approach voting with: I consider you to be the reason Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024.
I gotta be honest, its fucking exhausting constantly having to explain to the people who just threw the election to Trump why they are the problem.
And honestly, if you don’t know what Blue Maga is, or why that may apply to you, why the fuck do you think its my job to educate you? You are in a politics forum. Go google it. Heres the kym, though it could be updated.
And here is Jon Stewart, in a longer form segment, explaining it further:
The reason you get put into this camp, is the apologetics. Its the approach to rhetoric. Its approaching the issue with the argument “other side worse” as if thats an argument for your positioning. Its Joy Ann Reid saying she’d vote for Biden if he was in a coma. Its Whoopi on The View saying she’d vote for Biden if he was shitting his pants on stage. And when you make these kinds of arguments, like the one you are making, you end up with a candidate who is practically in a coma and is basically shitting their pants on stage: and that loses the election.
Its an approach to electoralism that excuses the consistent and perpetual failure of the Democratic party by trying to shift the focus to how bad Trump is, and it handed the election to Trump. Twice. You don’t win elections this way, you literally push votes away from the party in using this argument. 2024 wasn’t lost because Trump was some amazing candidate. It was lost because Blue-MAGA Democrats told the entire voter base to shut the fuck up and let them run the milquetoast Democrats.
I and (at risk of speaking for others) many of the other commentators agree with at least 80% of what you have written and close to 100% of the spirit of your argument. But a few points to reflect on:
You are not winning anyone over with your rhetoric in your first posts
Infighting, purity tests, and micro-clans are common methods used by the right to fragment the left
Voting third party in a general election in the US as a protest vote is close as to as impactful as not voting, be prepared for those consequences and for people to call you out on it. Of course there is no doubt some justification
Relatedly acceleration is not viewed as a viable political strategy by most on the left (who aren’t naive new comers to political discourse)
You are not winning anyone over with your rhetoric in your first posts
Oh I am though, I promise. This is the one thing I do know without a doubt, because I’ve watched the entire narrative completely flip. And I know whose minds have been changed and I’ve seen how severely weakened the ABWD/ Blue MAGA side has become. I’m also not basing this off one thread or one comment, but all of them, and the complete shift in narrative we (its not just me) have been able to drive by being right in the first place and consistent with where we place our criticism. We made these critiques before it was obvious they would lead to failure; we made them while the process was leading to failure; and we make them again, now that the process has been demonstrated to lead to failure.
We may not be winning over those who are so irrationally committed to a team sport their brain is broken, but what matters now isn’t “winning them over”; its inoculating the rest of the community against listening to them. Those people are lost, broken-brained individuals, those are Blue-MAGA, and like traditional MAGA, its a cult we can’t really expect their heads to ever become fully removed from their own asses. But there are two outcomes to consider in this case. Either A) we don’t need to worry about those voters, because, if they are truly blue MAGA/ ABWD, they’ll just have to vote for the candidate who is going to speak to a populist progressive agenda and get along. Or B) they are voters you were never going to be able to rely on in the first place, and assuredly shouldnt base your campaign around. In either case, basing campaigns around them is a surefire recipe for disaster, as we’ve seen, repeatedly.
To your other points, they are entirely straw men and not worth responding to. You are effectively doing exactly what I’m accusing Blue MAGA of doing. Its a effort to use group identity to silence criticism of that identity.
You write two paragraphs responding to my comments on the effectiveness of your rhetoric and have nothing to say to respond to what you derisively refer to as “straw men” for the other three points I raised in (online) discussion with you.
I’m forced to roll my eyes a bit as I feel vindicated in my point on rhetoric.
I would close by saying, I haven’t seen you assert a compelling positive solution to what you problematize correctly, other than don’t vote / vote 3rd party (which no one sees as the answer, maybe not even you?).
If I may be so bold, some reflection on a solution on your side would be helpful - as would articulating it at the start of your attempt to converse with fellow left/left-leaning internetizians you are seeking to influence
I would close by saying, I haven’t seen you assert a compelling positive solution to what you problematize correctly, other than don’t vote / vote 3rd party (which no one sees as the answer, maybe not even you?).
Where did I assert that? Show me. You (and a multitude of others) make that assumption because I point out that when Blue MAGA brigades against those themselves who may want to discuss a third party, or not voting, that drives people away from the party. Do you see your strawman more clearly now?
And I agree with the sentiment of the biline, I am proposing a solution, at least implicitly:
Stop defending shitty Democrats or the shit polices they insist on. When they are doing dumb shit, call them out on it and stop just carrying water. Hear, acknowledge, accept and support the critique. Demand better candidates, better policies, and better governance from Democrats. Stop engaging in a rhetoric that has results in a race to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to candidate quality among Democrats. When you silence criticisms or try and pretend that voting is a binary, you hurt Democrats ability to win elections. When people tell you they can’t or don’t want to vote for Democrats, hear them, and try to understand why they are saying that, and instead of trying to change the voters opinion to support a lower caliber of candidate, demand more from the candidates themselves.
You can’t move an electorate over the course of a campaign. It makes no statistical practical sense. Projects like that take decades. You always need to meet the electorate where they are at, and if a candidate is insufficient to do so, the candidate or their policies are what needs to change. When you tell voters they’re the ones who need to change their priorities to support a candidate who doesn’t support them, you just lost us another voter, and you perpetually make it harder to get Democrats elected.
ABWD/ Blue MAGA loses us elections. The “strategic voting” trope that tells voter they need to accept less loses us elections. Campaigns that work to tell voters they need to compromise instead of working to change candidates lose us elections.
I know what blue maga means. That’s why I asked you to explain why the hell you’re so eager to lump anyone who ultimately makes a pragmatic choice in the general election, after all other choices have been exhausted, in with the crowd that has spent months/years actively pushing to ensure the worst possible option is running against a fascist.
The wildest part is we dont even disagree, so save your fucking smugness.
The fuck kind of false equivalence is that?
Holding your nose and voting for the non-MAGA option in the general election is not at all the same as throwing a social media temper tantrum on behalf of your “team”, no matter how condescendingly you phrase it.
Man we’re really going to have to slog through this fucking election throwing blue-maga shit again aren’t we?
During the presidential election, people considering third parties were dv’d to oblivion, Blue MAGA shouting that it wasn’t the time. Guess what happens now every time someone suggests finding, running and supporting third party candidates?
Oh it was so much more beyond that. And it’s seems like , by looking at the dv ratios, they’ve forgotten their shame.
If you made any obvious criticisms of the campaign, you were dv’d to oblivion. If you pushed that Biden should be removed as candidate, you were dv’d to oblivion. If you were promoting the idea that the party needed to pivot on Gaza or they’d lose the election, dv’d to oblivion. That Bidens mid summer attempt at the worst border bill we’d ever seen would lose him the election. And on and on and on… I mean they litterally bullied people even mentioning third parties in a way that I think should have gotten them banned permanently from Lemmy. And how many votes did all of the third parties get? not even enough to make a difference to a fart in the wind.
Every single issue that could have turned the tide for the Dems this last election cycle, the same people downvoting in this thread, they downvoted those same things in the run up to the election.
AND THAT is why they are blue MAGA. This is a team sport for them. They can not withstand criticism of what they’ve come to associate their identity with. It’s always that you just need to get in behind the party, no matter how bad the parties ideas are. And the biggest issue these people don’t recognize: if you are downvoting in this thread **you are why the Dems lost **
The Dems were running bad candidates and worse strategies. They needed to be corrected. And defending them from that critique, preventing them from hearing it by keeping out of the mainstream for as long as they were able to, that is what lost the election. There was ample time to course correct in Summer of 24. But blue MAGA insisted you have to run the incubamant, in spite of the fact they were polling at some of the lowest levels in history and had been since almost 23.
And we had a repreive from these idiots for about 12 months while they hid from the shame of the damage they did. Now they’re back and they seem to think they’ve got the right of it again.
On our left hand we have a party who, while generally spineless in the face of opposition, at least understands the general principles of governance and has an interest in continuing the lifespan of the country.
On our right hand we have a party aggressively campaigning that they should be allowed to shoot you in the face. Yes, you, personally.
I hope you have the day you vote for.
Andrew Cuomo couldn’t govern himself out of a paper bag and he ran one of the largest and richest states in the country for eight fucking years. So many of the Dem Senators that got kicked to the curb in '10 and '14 and '22 sucked ass. We’re still stuck carrying around dead weight like Fetterman and Slotkin holding winnable seats, while the occasional “Trump Democrat” like Amy McGrath sucks up hundreds of millions of dollars to face-plant during a blue wave year.
Can we maybe put down the theory that these people know what they’re doing? Dianne Feinstein could barely form coherent sentences by the time she was being wheeled into votes on life support. Chuck Schumer’s got his own party base in full revolt. Newsom can’t decide if he’s running for President or running a podcast.
None of these people can govern.
Or the day they don’t vote against.
Unfortunately we all suffer the day that got voted in.
Oh its just a fight thats been going on within the party, basically forever. One side says “vote blue no matter who” as a cudgel that lets feckless moderates rule the party, then no one shows up on election day when the feckless moderates run campaigns under the assumption that their voters have no other options. And thankfully, we’ve now got the data in to recognize the people who put this toxic rhetoric out there as the very reason Democrats lose elections.
If you defend the perpetual worthlessness of Democrats, you are the problem. If all you can do is “Trump bad”, you are part of the problem. If you are a “blue no matter who”, blue maga democrat, you are why Democrats keep losing elections. Its not strategic voting if the strategy costs you elections. And you literally just cost us 2024 running a campaign based on this rhetoric, so as the part of the Democratic party that actually wants to win elections, we kindly ask you to shut the fuck up and take the back seat. Because you lose us elections with that voter blaming blue maga shit.
Its not worth my time to explain this, yet again, when I spent 2 years telling people that if they tried this approach again, and its an incredibly well trodden issue, but I can assure you this, if the rhetoric you are approaching this conversation with is the same that you approach voting with: I consider you to be the reason Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024.
Anything to avoid personal responsibility, right?
So fucking absurd.
"no u!” please.
Are you talking about people that’s been blaming everyone else after losing to a fucking racist criminal?
Like the party was so incompetent while running against a fucking felon, that their best retort was “we told you so”?
The responsibility now falls on the people to elect a party that couldn’t convince people to vote for them instead of a bankrupt asshole?
Is this kindergarten playground?
I’d love for you to define blue-maga and explain how you think it applies to me.
I gotta be honest, its fucking exhausting constantly having to explain to the people who just threw the election to Trump why they are the problem.
And honestly, if you don’t know what Blue Maga is, or why that may apply to you, why the fuck do you think its my job to educate you? You are in a politics forum. Go google it. Heres the kym, though it could be updated.
And here is Jon Stewart, in a longer form segment, explaining it further:
The reason you get put into this camp, is the apologetics. Its the approach to rhetoric. Its approaching the issue with the argument “other side worse” as if thats an argument for your positioning. Its Joy Ann Reid saying she’d vote for Biden if he was in a coma. Its Whoopi on The View saying she’d vote for Biden if he was shitting his pants on stage. And when you make these kinds of arguments, like the one you are making, you end up with a candidate who is practically in a coma and is basically shitting their pants on stage: and that loses the election.
Its an approach to electoralism that excuses the consistent and perpetual failure of the Democratic party by trying to shift the focus to how bad Trump is, and it handed the election to Trump. Twice. You don’t win elections this way, you literally push votes away from the party in using this argument. 2024 wasn’t lost because Trump was some amazing candidate. It was lost because Blue-MAGA Democrats told the entire voter base to shut the fuck up and let them run the milquetoast Democrats.
I and (at risk of speaking for others) many of the other commentators agree with at least 80% of what you have written and close to 100% of the spirit of your argument. But a few points to reflect on:
Oh I am though, I promise. This is the one thing I do know without a doubt, because I’ve watched the entire narrative completely flip. And I know whose minds have been changed and I’ve seen how severely weakened the ABWD/ Blue MAGA side has become. I’m also not basing this off one thread or one comment, but all of them, and the complete shift in narrative we (its not just me) have been able to drive by being right in the first place and consistent with where we place our criticism. We made these critiques before it was obvious they would lead to failure; we made them while the process was leading to failure; and we make them again, now that the process has been demonstrated to lead to failure.
We may not be winning over those who are so irrationally committed to a team sport their brain is broken, but what matters now isn’t “winning them over”; its inoculating the rest of the community against listening to them. Those people are lost, broken-brained individuals, those are Blue-MAGA, and like traditional MAGA, its a cult we can’t really expect their heads to ever become fully removed from their own asses. But there are two outcomes to consider in this case. Either A) we don’t need to worry about those voters, because, if they are truly blue MAGA/ ABWD, they’ll just have to vote for the candidate who is going to speak to a populist progressive agenda and get along. Or B) they are voters you were never going to be able to rely on in the first place, and assuredly shouldnt base your campaign around. In either case, basing campaigns around them is a surefire recipe for disaster, as we’ve seen, repeatedly.
To your other points, they are entirely straw men and not worth responding to. You are effectively doing exactly what I’m accusing Blue MAGA of doing. Its a effort to use group identity to silence criticism of that identity.
Friend.
You write two paragraphs responding to my comments on the effectiveness of your rhetoric and have nothing to say to respond to what you derisively refer to as “straw men” for the other three points I raised in (online) discussion with you.
I’m forced to roll my eyes a bit as I feel vindicated in my point on rhetoric.
I would close by saying, I haven’t seen you assert a compelling positive solution to what you problematize correctly, other than don’t vote / vote 3rd party (which no one sees as the answer, maybe not even you?).
If I may be so bold, some reflection on a solution on your side would be helpful - as would articulating it at the start of your attempt to converse with fellow left/left-leaning internetizians you are seeking to influence
Where did I assert that? Show me. You (and a multitude of others) make that assumption because I point out that when Blue MAGA brigades against those themselves who may want to discuss a third party, or not voting, that drives people away from the party. Do you see your strawman more clearly now?
And I agree with the sentiment of the biline, I am proposing a solution, at least implicitly:
Stop defending shitty Democrats or the shit polices they insist on. When they are doing dumb shit, call them out on it and stop just carrying water. Hear, acknowledge, accept and support the critique. Demand better candidates, better policies, and better governance from Democrats. Stop engaging in a rhetoric that has results in a race to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to candidate quality among Democrats. When you silence criticisms or try and pretend that voting is a binary, you hurt Democrats ability to win elections. When people tell you they can’t or don’t want to vote for Democrats, hear them, and try to understand why they are saying that, and instead of trying to change the voters opinion to support a lower caliber of candidate, demand more from the candidates themselves.
You can’t move an electorate over the course of a campaign. It makes no statistical practical sense. Projects like that take decades. You always need to meet the electorate where they are at, and if a candidate is insufficient to do so, the candidate or their policies are what needs to change. When you tell voters they’re the ones who need to change their priorities to support a candidate who doesn’t support them, you just lost us another voter, and you perpetually make it harder to get Democrats elected.
ABWD/ Blue MAGA loses us elections. The “strategic voting” trope that tells voter they need to accept less loses us elections. Campaigns that work to tell voters they need to compromise instead of working to change candidates lose us elections.
I know what blue maga means. That’s why I asked you to explain why the hell you’re so eager to lump anyone who ultimately makes a pragmatic choice in the general election, after all other choices have been exhausted, in with the crowd that has spent months/years actively pushing to ensure the worst possible option is running against a fascist.
The wildest part is we dont even disagree, so save your fucking smugness.
Unfortunately we all suffer the day that got voted in.
Edit; sorry hit reply to the wrong message 😋