It’s just that most of them have not read history and none of them have lived through war or fascism to understand what they are signing up for.
They will all learn their lesson.
So far so good…
so far so good…
How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
Because:
A) It was all based on "vibes" and beliefs, not their own actual reality (the gap between "how well off are you personally" and "how do you think others are well off" was wild)
B) Voters lie and the economy was, like in 2016, the fig leaf for the true driver: egoism and cruelty. If Trump's tarriffs destroy their wellbeing, there will be no outcry, because "the cruelty is the point", to the point of self-harm as long as "the others" are harmed even more.
People don't "learn their lesson". Accelerationism always fails. Suffering, fear and looming threats are what enable the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy, not what helps overcome them. Fascism is rarely overthrown by a popular revolt that establishes direct democracy and egalitarianism. It's usually overthrown by a military junta or gradually coalesces into an oligarchy that reintroduces the trappings of liberal democracy to placate the masses.
As much as the American right loves to call the Democrats "radical leftists" or "socialists", the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering. The Republicans can at least lie through populism: claiming to be opposed to "the swamp" while installing their own loyalists and family members in positions of government, claiming to fight the "coastal elites" while implementing the whims of billionaires, claiming to defend "freedom of speech" while prohibiting government agencies from using progressive terminology, etc etc. But the Democrats can't even do this because at best they can offer half-measures or compromises. They couldn't even pass the Green New Deal and now the Trump government keeps referring to it as if it had actually been implemented.
This isn't a uniquely American problem. The social democrats in Germany have recently come out in opposition to voting on initiating the process to investigate the far-right AfD party (which Elon Musk has been actively supporting btw, which is an unprecedent level of foreign influence) for qualifying for a trial to be banned as unconstitutional (i.e. roughly equivalent to proposing a grand jury with the outcome being a constitutional court trial being launched or not). Why? Because if they would participate in such a vote and support it, "all democratic parties" should support it but there's a good chance the conservative party would vote against or abstain and this would "hurt the democratic parties" by making them no longer unified in their opposition to the AfD - or that if the conservatives were to vote in favor, this might radicalise some of its supporters to vote for the AfD instead. Mind you, the conservative party has already repeatedly cooperated with the AfD and they have supported each others' proposals, although the conservative party is officially ruling out any potential coalition with them while incrementally adopting their rhetoric. The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
What an incredibly sharp phrasing there!
Your analysis overall seems really astute too, but what you just articulated there is too good. I almost want to try to compressing it even further -- what is needed most of all is short, concise rallying cries that draw attention and raise consciousness, and that's gotta be a great example of one.
I wonder what else could be said to really draw people's attention to this sort of thing, to try to achieve any sort of reform among liberals, to wake them up from centrism and complacency.
WTF? The Democrats are the ones with concrete offers to ease people's suffering. Literally. Stuff like Medicare for all.
For example, Clinton offered coal miners retraining and income support in order to ameliorate the inevitable. Trump offered empty impossible promises. People voted for the empty promises rather than the concrete reality. Coal miners lost their jobs without the support Clinton would have provided.
99% of economists were predicting recession during the multiple crises of the Biden term. 99% of economists were wrong because we had skilled leadership at the helm. How much suffering did that prevent?
No. Democrats have concrete offers. The Democrats don't. The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
There's a massive difference between the ideals of a few activist politicians running for office and the actual policy decisions of a government led by that party.
Also, I already acknowledged that the US handled the recession remarkably well. But that still doesn't change that generally things are pretty rough and "doing largely the same for 4 more years" isn't a very attractive position to the masses when the other guy is appealing to the base instincts of "strong man will fix problem" - especially in a cultural environment where "hard problems require hard solutions" (i.e. that morally repugnant actions are often necessary to help people in the long run) is often accepted without questions.
But better than everywhere else in the world. Virtually every other country did worse over the last 4 years than the US did.
> The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
They had 2 opportunities to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass far-reaching reforms. They chose to use those two opportunities to fight inflation and stabilize the economy.
It literally doesn't matter how much the Democrats have prevented things from being worse in the past because their messaging is what ultimately allowed Trump to win. Twice. This isn't the 1990s anymore. People don't want stable. People are sick of stable because what has been stabilized had already not been working for them before. There's been a massive, crippling redistribution of wealth and political power in all Western economies (and the former Eastern bloc but they were less subtle about it) from the people to the billionaire class. You can no longer pretend that's not happening. At least the Republicans had the good sense to actively lie and misdirect and continue to do so while said billionaires are desparately trying to dismantle the system before it can be turned against them.