• 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Obama got Rat Boy and every other centrist candidate to simultaneously drop out/endorse Biden; Warren was left out of the deal so she could continue to siphon off progressive support for Bernie.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          By the time the fix was in there was nothing that could be done. Spiking the election by running as an independent would have kneecapped the growing leftist sentiment we’ve seen since. Not every situation has a winning move.

          • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            2 days ago

            Indulge me in a silly fantasy but what if he comes out the day after Iowa and announces he is running as a candidate for a new labor party, along with a call for funds and a membership drive backed by his massive infrastructure? Or runs as DSA?

            It doesn’t matter anyway, it’s all water under the bridge, it’s pointless to waste time on hypotheticals

            • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              2 days ago

              Bernie definitely still loses, gets called out as splitting the vote etc, and there’s a good chance Trump wins because the election was so narrow which would just be giving the libs more left-bashing ammunition (does this matter materially? No, but they’d be more annoying).

              • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                2 days ago

                I think you’re right about the results but a labor party with national recognition I think would just collapse the democrats, who have no constituency, this would be the interesting part of the question in my view. Oh well, we are in hell world anyway lol

                • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  2 days ago

                  Dems do have a constituency (boomers who own their home and are pretty racist but not extremely racist), but more importantly they have legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Largely due to propaganda, but counteracting that propaganda machine is difficult, if not impossible. Bernie brought in a decent amount of money from normal people, but you have to consider that between them, the DNC and GOP control all of the mainstream media in the country, and have enough capital to do a decent job at controlling social media as well. Remember the coverage of Bernie during the primaries, and consider that it would just get even more malicious if he was running as a third party.

            • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              It’s way too late. Even pitted against the absurdity of the parties dismantling their entire campaign infrastructure and rebuilding it every four years, it still takes more than four months to set things up.

            • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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              Or what if he makes phone calls to all the people Obama called, saying “if you all rally behind Joe Biden, I will mount a 3rd-party run”?

              Libs would cry about it but they wouldn’t do anything. There’s a chance the candidates would be successfully goaded into maintaining/resuming their campaigns.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    I remember when Biden campaigned on the promise of addressing COVID by following the science.

    Instead he got rid of mask mandates and there is serious discussions about banning masking in US states, biobot is no longer recording COVID data, and COVID is surging in the US.

    But we all just need to trust that he’s going to tell the truth this time around. There’s an old saying in Tennessee

    • Ericthescruffy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Also there was apparently a massive antivax campaign being done by the pentagon that continued for like almost a year under his administration. I know it started under Trump but still…drug his feet stopping it.

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Everyone seems to forget that the largest mobilization of the US masses ever happened that year and at least some of it (if not most) was co-opted by the Democrats. Literally millions of people in the streets being told they needed to vote for Joe or they supported police brutality and he only won by a small albeit comfortable margin.

    I have no idea what they think is gonna happen this year when the only people that are in the streets are fervently opposed to the current administration.

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    They also forgot that the core of his campaign was “I’m not Trump!” and “Anybody but Trump!”

    Now that Trump isn’t president and those campaign slogans have been memory-holed there’s massive confusion as to why inadequate measures to address problems doesn’t seem to be exciting anybody about his running again.

  • Mokey [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    I dont think the people in charge care about winning or losing and I think actually purposefully losing might be part of the strategy sometimes.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      There are too many minor players with career aspirations on the line for “losing on purpose” to make any sense. What we’re seeing is:

      1. No one is “the people in charge.” We keep having these stories about how Biden only wants yes-men around, and there’s no party mechanism that can force a sitting president to resign or drop out, even in an egregious situation like this. We have an imperial executive who’s too senile to be competent, but who can still shout down minions who attempt to steer him.
      2. The movers and shakers in the Democratic Party want to win – hence the panic this morning when Biden’s ineptitude is impossible to keep ignoring – but are too up their own asses to do a decent job of it. Believing their own bullshit is how they ignored this situation this long in the first place, is how they think you can fight fascism in the voting booth, etc.
        • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          It could be more that they want to win but the tools they could use to win are “out of bounds”. They do want to win, but they have to win somehow while giving us nothing since the donors that brought them there will remove their power to do anything the moment they go against their will.

          It’s not that there’s a conspiracy or anything, it’s a simple reason that you already know: the democratic process is thoroughly and completely bought by corporate private interests to the point that it can only work for them.

          • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            they want to win but the tools they could use to win are “out of bounds”

            Makes complete sense. Medicare for All is incredibly popular, and a serious push for it would win a lot of votes, but they can’t do it because it’s not friendly to capital.

  • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    Dem voters only know what they are told to know by the boob tube and right now they know ‘china=bad’ trump=no more vote History is meaningless to them, everything happening is divorced from previous events.

    They know also, because they have been told that by agreeing with the tv they are smart, that disagreeing is only for people who don’t have all the info, or are dumb/racist. They don’t want to be dumb/racist so they agree and defend the TVs lies as their own, as they have been convinced by this trick that their very intelligence is on the line.

    It’s pretty sad, cuz i don’t know how to move one from this headspace. I think maybe those types need to come to some kind of revelation on their own before they can be radicalized. I wish i could do it, because (i think) if those types ever did realize they had been played for fools their absolute fury at this would help communism grow.

  • Droplet [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    It’s irrelevant now.

    Biden has a report card of his performance over the past 4 years. Trump wants to stop the funding to Ukraine and there is no way the bourgeosie is going to let him win because of that.

    The problem for Biden is the concern about his senility and degradation of cognitive ability. He needed a good debate performance to prove that he is still mentally capable.

    But other than that, Biden is still preferred over Trump because he’s the one who proved capable of getting the money out. The only thing that Trump has going for him was his massive tax cuts but that pales in comparison to the cheat code that Biden has found in Ukraine, which allows him to launder an infinite amount of money legally as long as the American people sympathize with Ukraine getting invaded.

    • Ericthescruffy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Trump wants to stop the funding to Ukraine and there is no way the bourgeosie is going to let him win because of that.

      Meh. They’ve run this playbook before. They’ll just override him. If they don’t do it legitimately through congress they’ll go through backdoors.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Trump would flip on Ukraine if someone asked him to, just like he did on every other issue every time somebody talked to him. In the debate, he was saying both that the US supporting Ukraine is bad but also that because Biden is weak Putin would take all of Ukraine.

  • crispy_lol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Sadly the voting populace is so centrist and high on Obama’s shit I think Biden would have won his first election anyway. Coattailing off Obamas legacy despite being completely fake and PR driven, is what won him the election. It’s how he beat Bernie too.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Given how quickly they all went back to brunch and declared COVID over? No. Demonstrably no.

    Furthermore, had the stars aligned to defeat Trump in 2016 it would have happened to under Hillary’s watch and she would have lost in 2020.

    What they still don’t understand about COVID (well, they ignore a lot more) but what they still fail to understand is that the big problem with COVID wasn’t the deaths or the actual real failures. The problem was that it interrupted the Treat Drip required to salve the rather unbearable antisocial reality of living in late capitalism. You could not eat Borgor. You had to wear mask. You had to get vaccine. You could not drink in bar. You could not send your kids to school. You could not go to Thanksgiving to eat Big Bird. You could not watch Marvel Movie.

    And that matters to people for 2 big reasons: first as I said before creature comforts are all you have left when your other material realities are eroding and your planet is dying. The bread was stale and circuses were closed. Second, there is no other vector for criticism because dems agree with Republicans on so many other issues that there is no other thing to discuss! Nothing will fundamentally change, Jack. So this is it. The only game in town. Playing for peanuts on the margins.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      the big problem with COVID wasn’t the deaths or the actual real failures. The problem was that it interrupted the Treat Drip

      This isn’t quite right – you could still have all your food treats (just the takeout versions), besides some delays you still had a wealth of media available, you could absolutely have Thanksgiving or Christmas meals (many people did this with family the same as they always have), sports resumed after a few months, you even had more time to enjoy a lot of these things if you could work from home.

      It was more the long-term state of genuine crisis and uncertainty. Everything was up in the air in a way that (like last night’s debate) was blatant enough that most people couldn’t ignore it.