Serious The Politics Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
I'm going to say something that is non-standard for politics:

Democrats are behind the times. Their policy nowadays is as if they still think there are "moderate" Conservatives to nickel and dime and win away from the Republicans, but that is just not the reality in 2024.

Republicans are not just insane on Twitter or something, that is just the Youth Conservative movement. Fuck, older Republicans are probably less fascist overall, and my grandpa was a racist FOX watcher at 3am who hated Obama.

The polarization is intense. My brother is 6 years older than me, we both live in a solidly blue state. As we grew up, he was more conservative and I was more left wing, but even before I became a full-on progressive, he was lecturing me when I was 14 about how the public schools were propaganda and teaching kids to be Democrats because I hated Donald Trump during that election.

Conservatives are a lost cause. If you want the people who aren't super politically engaged, you need to get the youth vote. In the last ten years, the youth vote has become increasingly important each election and has become more politically active, and stoking the flame for change within the youth can and will win you the election.

Playing to "moderates" with Conservative policy may seem like a good gambit until you realize the margins for the youth are slim, but if you just motivate your side of the aisle more it's going to be massive gains. Youth are more engaged into politics than ever, but are still less motivated to vote, so motivate them to vote with even breadcrumbs of progressivism.
 
Given Biden was already going to the right on Immigration and also broadly supported the online privacy bill, I don't think its surprising in the slightest, even if it is disappointing, Kamala is broadly backing them. Both parties want to have your data, it just so happens this one also targets LGBT folks. To the donor class though, this matters little when compared to having all the data you can on everyone. Immigration is also a huge swing factor, especially in states like Nevada.

I'm inclined to agree with the above though, that on Gaza, Kamala is at least a bit better, but this is more that Biden was almost uniquely bad in terms of bending over to Netanyahu even compared to past presidents, and this is to her benefit. If Netanyahu himself has been crying to his advisors and the press about how Kamala has been obstructionist (read, actually more aggressively playing cards to stop the infini-war) and going on about how Biden and Trump meetings have been much more fruitful, I'm inclined to believe that Kamala is putting on some pressure. Her campaign rhetoric is also much more politically scornful (as much as you can be to Israel in 2024) by specifically calling to images of mutilated child corpses and the like.

Dems capitulate to the right on policy because they broadly want the same things imperially.
 
Bughouse said:
Turning away from the keys and a bit more back into reality, I'm actually at least mildly worried what Harris signaling a stronger stance on Israel than Biden's will do with respect to the median voter.
Click to expand...
Can we get sources on the statements about the 'median voter' you're making in your post? I'm not rejecting anything you're saying with that, just genuinely wanting sources.

I will say that to the extent that US position on Palestine changes, it will have nothing to do with Kamala Harris 'leading' anything in that area at all. The democrats are entirely opposed to any progress whatsoever in this area, and any changes they make are being forced upon them.
 
The bill passed the senate 91-3 and is named the Kids Online Safety Act. I don't know what you're on if you think any candidate for POTUS would oppose it. Barely any groups are actually opposing it. GLAAD, HRC, and the Trevor Project for example all favored passage.

edit: literally only one D voted no, Wyden.
 
Last edited:
lilyhollow said:
Can we get sources on the statements about the 'median voter' you're making in your post? I'm not rejecting anything you're saying with that, just genuinely wanting sources.
Click to expand...
Here's an example of a poll from May this year

Compare the simple high level questions such as #36 to much more specific questions like #38-49 that reveal much more their actual opinions on the political ramifications to US citizens (realistically, relatively few people will base their vote purely on the lives of non-Americans). People may answer #33 and #34 in saying Israel has gone too far and that there needs to be a ceasefire, but when you press them on it further in #35 it falls apart. The questions also show that they don't actually attribute the blame of Israel's actions on Biden and they still largely support Israel considerably more than Palestine.
 
ant4456 said:
Playing to "moderates" with Conservative policy may seem like a good gambit until you realize the margins for the youth are slim, but if you just motivate your side of the aisle more it's going to be massive gains. Youth are more engaged into politics than ever, but are still less motivated to vote, so motivate them to vote with even breadcrumbs of progressivism.
Click to expand...

They won't do this because young people largely don't vote and and lot of people in the Dem party legitimately in being "moderates". Stop expecting a post-Clinton Dem party to bring about a second New Deal or you'll be inevitably disappointed. We don't live in that era of politics anymore
 
ant4456 said:
Playing to "moderates" with Conservative policy may seem like a good gambit until you realize the margins for the youth are slim, but if you just motivate your side of the aisle more it's going to be massive gains. Youth are more engaged into politics than ever, but are still less motivated to vote, so motivate them to vote with even breadcrumbs of progressivism.
Click to expand...
i thought this was true until the last few years or so. biden won by winning over educated white suburban voters-- (see Georgia as an example), a demographic that reliably voted republican this century until recently. 2022 midterms sort of cemented this to me-- democrats tried to turn as many general elections as possible into "maniac vs someone who generally seems like a human being". i thought it was awful at the time, but it worked (or at least, dobbs happened). a lot of elections in general are more or less won by who is perceived by the electorate to be a more normal human being. the burbs hate weird shit. not a surprise the dems have really leaned into that messaging.

the issue with this of course is you end up really watering down to what extent progressive policy becomes popular within your coalition. the youth vote on average of course wants progressive policy, but, and i hate admitting this, but people our age don't vote. at least not with consistency. the dems have been focusing on a coalition of high-propensity voters (mostly by just pointing over to whats going on on the other side of the fence), and put "courting the youth" vote on priority three, looking at the ROI as suboptimal.

this isn't to say that abandoning the youth vote entirely is a worthwhile endeavor, just that i think this is the rationale behind the powers that be. i do think there is somewhat of a middle ground towards articulating progressive policy and not alienating either progressives or the more conservative components of the current democratic coalition. I think this is one of the understated failures of the Biden regime-- to come up with, literally anything, as a rebuke to terrible trump policy. Particularly with regard to immigration-- dems more or less have just thrown in the towel and said "yea we'll do that and not be literally donald trump at the helm"

israel/palestine is another one where there should have been a referendum on jared kushner's israel policy over the last 9 months. Biden has pretty much just stayed the course on that front. and politically speaking, its a dangerous issue for dems because their coalition includes zionists as well as people rightfully horrified by the genocide of palestine with our backing. i think the needle theoretically exists to thread (namely-- Netanyahu is really hateable, is unpopular in Israel itself (though largely for the wrong reasons), and is not literally the state of Israel all by himself. I have no idea if that would work, and also its basically fanfiction at best considering the dems literally just hosted netanyahu to do a little propaganda party.

i guess what im arguing is that there is rationale here behind what the dems have done, and the issue lies less with the underlying strategy of winning votes so much as their complete lack of opposing trump on an ideological level has put them in this hole
 
myowngamertag said:
They won't do this because young people largely don't vote and and lot of people in the Dem party legitimately in being "moderates". Stop expecting a post-Clinton Dem party to bring about a second New Deal or you'll be inevitably disappointed. We don't live in that era of politics anymore
Click to expand...
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/half-youth-voted-2020-11-point-increase-2016

Literally every study points to youth vote increasing in power, and most show youth vote being around a 15%+ advantage for Democrats.

It is not a stretch to say the youth vote was a massive part of the Democrats' win in 2020. This isn't a "hypothetical", the youth vote matters now, and did, in 2020.

If you get the youth vote energized to vote it will be massive gains.
 
ant4456 said:
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/half-youth-voted-2020-11-point-increase-2016

Literally every study points to youth vote increasing in power, and most show youth vote being around a 15%+ advantage for Democrats.

It is not a stretch to say the youth vote was a massive part of the Democrats' win in 2020. This isn't a "hypothetical", the youth vote matters now, and did, in 2020.

If you get the youth vote energized to vote it will be massive gains.
Click to expand...

It is still the smallest % of the overall voting base by age. In 2022 only 1/3 of them cast a ballot, the turnout is just not there compared to their elders. More are turning out but we are far from the dominant voice in politics, even for Dems. sorry
 
Last edited:
Thank you for the link Bughouse

These questions exhibit common characteristics I've noticed in other polls on this subject. The questions themselves editorialize in such a way that favor's the corporate media's narrative on Israel.

35. Which would you prefer?
A permanent ceasefire that ends the fighting but leaves Hamas in control of Gaza: 26%
A continuation of the fighting until Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza: 34%
Not sure: 40%
Click to expand...
So supporting a permanent ceasefire is tied to the supposedly 'negative' outcome of Hamas being in control of Gaza, while supporting the continuation of the genocide is tied to the supposedly positive outcome of Hamas being not in control of Gaza anymore. Note that it is probably impossible for Israel to accomplish this 'goal,' and if it were possible, it would probably take a very long time. Knowing this fact would surely change people's responses to this question.

Imagine if I worded the same question in a different way:
lilyhollow version said:
35. Which would you prefer?
A permanent ceasefire that ends the fighting and allows Palestinians to return to their homes and rebuild
A continuation of the fighting for an indefinite period
Not sure
Click to expand...
I believe this wording would also have the veneer of being neutral and unbiased. But I think we can see how it makes some assumptions that lead the responder in a certain intended direction.


39. Do you approve or disapprove of Israel invading Rafah — the southern Gaza city where more than one million Palestinians have taken refuge — in order to continue its campaign to destroy Hamas?
Approve: 26%
Disapprove: 41%
Not sure: 33%
Click to expand...
Again, it is heavily disputed as to whether it's even possible for Israel to destroy Hamas. It's also disputed as to whether their goal is to destroy Hamas in the first place. My personal position is that that is not their goal--their goal is extermination and displacement--but looking at it from an unbiased perspective, we can certainly say that it's disputed. Yet this question takes it on as an assumption. So too does question #34

With that in mind, one wonders why they don't have this as a question:
lilyhollow fake poll question said:
Do you believe it is possible for Israel to destroy Hamas militarily?
Click to expand...


---

To be clear, my point with all of this is not to agree or disagree with your point about the 'median voter' and such and such. I'm more making a related point about the polls themselves and their use as a form of propaganda. We can see this right as we speak in this thread: by wording questions in a certain way, or by including certain questions that fit in with a particular narrative ("do you feel the pro-palestinian protesters are anti-semitic") while leaving others absent ("do you feel islamophobic violence has been a problem recently"), or by wording questions in such a way that encourages a particular response, we can produce data that then can be used to legitimize certain policy or rhetorical choices from political leaders on the basis that it's "strategic" or "in line with what the voters want." This is one way of feeding the vicious cycle whereby the ruling class politicians and media relentlessly push a narrative that favors themselves, and then, having helped inculcate that point of view into the population, are free to pursue these harmful policies with the justification that they're "popular."

So we get brutal police violence against pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide student protesters, but the ruling class uses the media to push the lie that pro-Palestinian protesters are violent antisemites. Then we get a poll that asks "are the pro-Palestinian protesters violent antisemites," and, big shock, people tend to believe that now. Then the ruling class can happily pursue greater police repression and, if we are not careful, we may join them in justifying it on the basis that "it's just good politics, these are sadly popular ideas with the people."

This happens with like everything, too, but a quick example I want to also throw out there is China. Immense ruling class push for the past 5-10 years to get westerners to hate and fear China as much as possible, essentially to prepare the population for the possibility of a horrific war with China that would not benefit anyone other than the ruling class.
 
lilyhollow said:
So we get brutal police violence against pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide student protesters, but the ruling class uses the media to push the lie that pro-Palestinian protesters are violent antisemites. Then we get a poll that asks "are the pro-Palestinian protesters violent antisemites," and, big shock, people tend to believe that now. Then the ruling class can happily pursue greater police repression and, if we are not careful, we may join them in justifying it on the basis that "it's just good politics, these are sadly popular ideas with the people."
Click to expand...
This is a big part of my belief that the best relationship between a constituency and their political party is not one where it's just listening to "the margins" and taking centrist stances, it's hearing the basic demands, and pushing different ideas on how it can be tackled.

Communicating back and forth rather than just assuming one or the other. You see this with polls where like 51% of respondents say that a mass deportation of immigrants would be preferable. There are a lot of issues where Democrats don't even give any pushback on literal lies that make them look bad, such as city = crime when in fact, many Democratic cities do not have much crime compared to Republican states, and that immigrants are a strain on the federal budget, which is just not true at all.

But the Democrats don't really have the will to go against these things because they don't actually care. So instead of saying "Actually, Democratic cities are not dangerous," they listen to how most white moderates already think the opposite because conservatives told them that, and go "Yes And, You're correct and we will do better to get rid of crime." Now, our system is already insane where many petty crimes can send people to prison, and we have literal slave prisons, corporations own most of our prisons and make more money for how many inmates they have. If Democrats had a spine, they could communicate with their constituency and show data that people who go to prison are more likely to go back to prison, not just because they were a prisoner before but because we cause people to not have many ways out (at least, it seems that way) rather than doing a crime, especially when things like homelessness are now becoming crimes.

The Dems don't just listen to the margins, they actively push the margins into the pigeonhole the Conservatives suggest, don't want progressive policy and will tell the margins things that get them to not think more critically, and not actually have a real differential policy from the Republicans. They want to stake Democracy every four years on the aesthetics of their candidate, versus insane maniacs like Trump, and that's far easier than actually having to be good at managing the country consistently; don't forget, Hillary Clinton partially funded Donald Trump herself.

It's A Ratchet.
 
ant4456 said:
I'm going to say something that is non-standard for politics:

Democrats are behind the times. Their policy nowadays is as if they still think there are "moderate" Conservatives to nickel and dime and win away from the Republicans, but that is just not the reality in 2024.
Click to expand...

The evidence says that not only do those moderate conservatives exist, they are helping Democrats win in states like Georgia and Arizona. Look at Biden, Mark Kelly, and Raphael Warnocks recent performances vs other Democrats further down the ballot. They literally won because of split ticket votes…

Nikki Haley won 20% of the Republican primary votes after dropping out. Then the group Nikki Haley voters for Kamala emerged and endorsed VP Harris. It is a real thing.

Democrats winning coalition depends on winning 60-70% of self-identifying “moderates.” Some of them are Republicans!
 
Wait, what’s the detail that makes the new legislation bad? If Bernie didn’t oppose and Markey was one of the original sponsors is it THAT bad? Or like some good stuff with a poison pill?
 
Chou Toshio said:
Wait, what’s the detail that makes the new legislation bad? If Bernie didn’t oppose and Markey was one of the original sponsors is it THAT bad? Or like some good stuff with a poison pill?
Click to expand...
Last I heard, there were fears that the definition of "dangerous content" would include information on queer identities and issues. That information would then be censored in the name of "protecting kids," which is so often what politicians hide behind to justify craven policy. A cursory reading of journalism published in the wake of the passing indicates to me that the legislation has been revised to address some of those concerns. Various queer rights groups have apparently dropped their opposition, so make of that what you will.
 
Republicans new strategy appears to be attacking VP Harris’ racial identity. This is only surprising in that they think this is anything other than dumb politics. Madam future President Harris is a black woman and is a South Asian woman. Apparently, Republicans think that her identifying as such means she “chooses” from day to day. These people are weird.

VP Harris went to Howard University (one of the most renown HBCUs) and is an AKA, one of the most prestigious black sororities. I have two Howard grads in my family and four AKAs. If Republicans think this is some kind of wedge issue in the black community they are in for a nasty surprise. Kamala Harris may pull off Obama 2008 numbers among black voters if they keep up this rhetoric.

For those who missed it, convicted felon Trumps disastrous NABJ interview can be watched here.
 
Republican leadership within 48 hours of Kamala becoming the presumptive nominee: okay guys we REALLY have to stop being openly sexist and racist, stick to dogwhistles, this bad press can kill us
(Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735 )

Trump and his team turning the entire discourse into race:

I gotta admit sometimes he's even more stupid than I expect
 
I agree with Sittin-- this is not strategy, this is just them being completely unable to hold down the "scream [n-slur]" impulse. They're trying, I'm sure-- but for MAGA this is like Gag reflex. We're getting a view of what would happen if Trump had run against Obama and Obama had been a woman on top of it.

edit: Also it looks like Trump has just tried to "step away" from Project 2025. looooooooooooool
 
Last edited:
300 days.

Nearly 40,000 dead Palestinians.

1.8 million displaced.

An area the size of Sheffield in England, subject to 82,000 tonnes of bombs in ten months (more than was dropped on Dresden, London, Coventry and Berlin combined in the second world war).

Disease is rife, children are orphaned, amputated, or both.

Worst conflict to be a journalist in, ever. 111 killed as of today.

I could go on, but it’s too horrifying and tiring to keep going over it in my mind.

Our children and our children’s children will ask why we did nothing.
 
Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, made a statement today regarding the recent Israeli assassinations. Not surprisingly, they signal a serious escalation. Nasrallah reaffirms that "The only way to prevent further escalation in the region is to stop the aggression on Gaza," but as that is not Israel's intention, it looks like things are only going to get more out-of-control soon.

https://x.com/i/web/status/1819008805859991910

Full quote since it's cut off:
You don't know what red lines you have crossed. We've entered a new phase different than the previous phase. The escalation depends on the behavior and reactions of the enemy. Today they are the ones who have to wait for the revenge of the people.
Click to expand...
 
RaikouLover said:
Republicans new strategy appears to be attacking VP Harris’ racial identity. This is only surprising in that they think this is anything other than dumb politics. Madam future President Harris is a black woman and is a South Asian woman. Apparently, Republicans think that her identifying as such means she “chooses” from day to day. These people are weird.
Click to expand...
I suspect that being too dumb to understand the concept of being biracial won't be the slam dunk that they think it will be.
 
One day I hope the public gets an account of just how much money the Trump-Republican crime syndicate has laundered in total. This is crazy:

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Click to expand...
 
Please please please please please go for Walz, Kamala, please. While you quite literally cannot do worse than Vance, I think Shapiro could genuinely fracture the left in the exact same way on the Palestine issue that Biden was doing. Meanwhile Walz is preferred by the progressive caucus, Pelosi herself (she is playing hardball this election, wtf), gets along with Biden, and even was the guy who started the whole "weird" messaging. I know it'll proooobably be Shapiro, but I think a win in Pennsylvania might not be worth momentum loss in Michigan, Wisconsin, or even possibly NC/Georgia.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top