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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Just remember, none of this was a surprise. It was advertised ie Project 2025. It is the culmination of the 50+ year Republican Project.

And yet we had no opposition to it. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris were more interested in defending and providing material support for war crimes than stopping any of this.

The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.

It’s quite literally “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They throw their hands up and surrender. You want a playbook? Look at what the Republicans did at any point from 2010 to 2016 and just do any of that.

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I think it was definitely bad that Joe held on so long before letting Kamala run but incumbents lost globally[0], not just here in the US. People aren't happy with the effects COVID had, which is valid, but misplaced the blame which is how we got here.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/global-elections-2024-incumbents-...

It's definitely bad that Democrats could not come up with a single candidate, and a strategy for that candidate, but held on to Biden and then presented Kamala as a saviour when she was a meh candidate at best

They need to hold an actual primary.

Who are the "Democrats" that you are talking about? No one held on to Joe Biden, he was president and decided he was going to run for re-election. No one seriously ran against him because people generally don't try to run against a sitting president in a primary and if they had they would have almost certainly lost in a landslide. Biden didn't need anyone's permission to run, and no one could have stopped him from running. Then he dropped out and endorsed Harris no credible person attempted to run against her. There is no secret party leadership who decides on the candidate that we can now blame, and besides some of the efforts to convince Biden to drop out everything was done very publicly.

> Who are the "Democrats" that you are talking about?

...

> No one seriously ran against him

> Then he dropped out and endorsed Harris no credible person attempted to run against her.

It is not just a case of people misplacing the blame. There was massive amount of lying and demonization of anyone not conservative right going on. There was a lot of fearmongering and hate ... all enabled by "moderates".

The movements like these did not just happened because people were unhappy. They are result of long political project that was enabled, excused and defended for years.

No. Since 2016, leftist democrats have promised that if only the democratic party moves far left enough, they will unlock some kind of secret progressive majority. This has been repudiated at every turn, most resoundingly in the last presidential election. The demographics that the leftist democrats had appointed themselves the saviors of went over to Trump, along with the tech industry which had formerly been a huge source of monetary and intellectual capital for the democrats.

Unfortunately, the democratic party seems to be unable to make the necessary adjustment and return to the winning formula of the Obama years because the political hobbyists and professionals that make up the core of the party have purity-tested out anyone with more mainstream views. If they aren't careful, they will end up as a party representing only university HR administrators.

Democratic party did not moved left, not even close to it. Stop blaming left who holds no power for what right does.

Democratic party systematically promotes centrists and measured politicians.

Perhaps the winning formula of the Obama years was the absence of rampant social media use and the spread of propaganda / misinformation at the time. Not saying those things did not exist - but they did not have the ability to spread like wildfire compared to today.

You may not have noticed it, but intel and counterintelligence agencies used Twitter heavily in the Obama era. Arguably, Obama's presidency was the one that put the nail in the coffin of trusting intelligence agency reports over twitter, but I think you could make a case it started with Reagan and cable news.

Basically, our elected representatives picked social media news sources as preferred trusted sources, and the groups interested in getting information and misinformation to them followed suit.

Eh agree in part, disagree in part. In 2016 a bunch of people who would otherwise not be interested in politics were interested in two politicians - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The Democratic party leadership made a concerted effort to drown Sanders' economic populism before it could succeed. That sent a message that it had no place in the party, killing their ability to grow the base, and giving MAGA (via the Bannon faction) control of economic populist messaging. Economic populists left the Democratic party, leaving them to rely on elites and cultural leftists to carry the party messaging, which resulted in what you described. And most of what you described only exists in a Fox News fever dream, but the Democrats opened the door right up for it to happen.

> And most of what you described only exists in a Fox News fever dream

It also exists in the 2024 election results

I never said the election was illegitimate, just that most of the fears of right wing voters were.

> The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.

It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.

This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.

With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.

Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...

The Dems were more afraid of the Israel lobby than they were of an actual Nazi movement seizing power over the country. Money has totally erased any semblance of morality from governance in the United States.

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