God, thank you for this Nick. This whole week on Reddit, I've been batting down these LaRouchian BernieBots that keep insisting that he is the answer. Look, these people have resented the Democratic "elites" for not choosing him over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but my question has always been why would they replace the longtime well known Democrat over the man whose only using the party to get elected president because he knows being an independent is a non starter? Its crazy. They've held on to this for so long, they deem it the sole reason that he hasn't been successful instead of the naked truth, that people aren't feeling his policies.
Normally blue voters in blue areas shifted to the right, there is no way warmed over DSA policies fix that. We're probably going back to Clintonite-era Blue Dog politics, with people like Seth Moulton and Jared Golden taking the helm over AOC and the "Patrol" (Can't call it a squad with vanquished Rep's Bowman and Bush.) Our next nominee is probably going to be a white male either from a rust belt state or a southern state. And that person is going to be as moderate as a 92 Blue Dog. Progressivism died last week and these people keep dancing with the corpse. Another "Weekend at Bernies.".
Absolutely. Does anyone think the significant number of new immigrants we have from Venezuela and Cuba would be thrilled with Bernie’s pro-Sandinista record?
If there is one thing ALL Democrats should've learned from last weeks election results, is that Latinos are an ethnic group, not a homogeneous racial group. No way were Latino immigrants voting for a socialist, no matter that he put "Democratic" in front of it to try and clean it up.
That's what I don't get. Where did this idea of treated Latinos who are just Hispanics, mostly white ethnics for Spanish-speaking nationalities. How are Mexican, Cuban, or Dominican ethnics any different that Italian, Croatian or Latvian ethnics?
I always thought this single (Latino) categorization of these different ethnicities as one group as kinda racist in that it appears to be saying they all look/speak the same (i.e. spics).
Remember the incident in 2016 where Clinton supporters were coming out of a building and Sanders supporters were screaming and spitting and shoving signs in their faces? That was the wokesters doing their thing. I said at the time they were maybe going to elect Trump, possibly make him president for life unless Democrats smacked them down, hard. Dems did not. And here we are.
remember when we all got to see X-rays of Israeli bullets in the heads of Palestinian children and then Clinton's husband was dispatched to Michigan to tell muslims that actually this kind of Apartheid is very normal and good
An actual, real, not-imaginary Israeli sniper bullet does not leave the head on a child. No one remembers your fake x-rays from Pallywood and according to the exit polls, nobody cares
We have a real bullet expert over here. "Bullets can't lodge into the heads of children, actually!" They're bullets, not shotgun slugs or cannon rounds. Would you like to take a trip on Google Images for "child shot in head" and see what turns up after enough rummaging around?
Quote - "While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds."
Nizam Mamode, british surgeon, testifying on what he saw in Gaza,
Quote - "What I found particular disturbing, was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area, and then the drones would come down ... and pick off civilians, children"
Personally, I have watched a video of this kind of double tap he describes. It was a wounded child, or young man, laying in the street, after he has been shot - allegedly by a drone. The crowd rushes out to him, only for a missile or other small projectile to explode in the crowd, wounding many more people. I watched a deaf man surrender in his home only to be gunned dead. I have seen dogs picking at bodies. I am so sorry that some of us choose to believe our own lying eyes and ears.
A .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge does not leave the head of a child attached to the rest of the body. No one trusts the Pallywood fakes offered by the New York Times anymore. Grow up, stop gaslighting for terrorists.
A lot of Bernie fans types think the party is putting "wokeness" before economic concerns.. I don't agree. They mostly stay away from it and really just need to fight harder againist disinformation and fear-mongering.
Ironically, the GOP revels in "identity politics."
Independent voters decided the party was putting wokeness before economic concerns because the party platform and the candidate both did exactly that thing. It's not a misinformation problem, it's a fact problem.
It's not Bernie per se. The progressive Left as a whole is deeply unpopular, because they are the very same out-of-touch "elites" that they claim to be fighting against.
The rest of us see through the virtue signaling, intra-elite status competitions, luxury beliefs, and shaming culture, and want nothing to do with it.
The biggest mistake President Biden made was trying to appease those folks. The biggest reason he won in 2020 was because he was the only one on that stage that knew where the people were instead of where they thought they were because of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders can *never* take enough seats. That the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is very real is hardly surprising, given that both are narcissistic old men who lead destructive, grievance-fueled cults of personality. My only small comfort is that I doubt that either “movement” will survive its founder, as neither has a clear successor and their anointed down-ballot candidates continue to underperform.
(As an aside, as a lifelong Pennsylvanian I’m not surprised that Bob Casey lost. He’s a nice guy, but a terrible retail politician who coasted on his name and favorable election cycles for his entire career. He never would have survived, say, a 2010 or 2014 environment, and had he overpeformed the top of the ticket by as much as Jon Tester or Sherrod Brown, he’d be going back for a fourth term.)
I don’t agree with a lot of this. I think a lot of working class people have animosity toward the wealthy, whether they have the same socially conservative values or not. Plenty of poor and working class people throughout the 20th century raged about inequality and oligarchs that hold people down. Some of them were led by religious leaders. Take for example the late Catholic priest Fr. James Cox who was heavily pro labor and led huge march on Washington to protest against the passive Hoover administration during the Great Depression.
The Republicans of the early 2000s that let the economy tank shared conservative values with working class voters, but those voters rejected them vehemently in 2008.
Bernie is correct. Perhaps his followers were mistaken and he should have had a Sista Soulja moment with them. But to say that the working class would be fine with an oligarchy that wants to gut social programs and bust unions is farcical
Maybe, but it doesn't seem to bear out in voting trends. The working class has almost categorically supported richer, better known candidates and policies the support the free market and the right to accumulate wealth.
Donald Trump is basically the working class dream candidate - a rich, billionaire populist supporting tax cuts, cultural conservatism, and American businesses. Bernie is the opposite of what the working class votes for.
Some other examples of good religious leaders who raged against inequality, would be the Catholic anarchist and feminist writer Dorothy Day who spearheaded pacifist aid efforts in the ‘30s, and the Black Baptist ministers Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. All three leveraged civil disobedience and their identities to sustain the left and broaden its appeal in America.
As for whether working-class voters can get behind economic left-populism this year, yes. Lucas Kunce garnered 42% of the vote in the Missouri U.S. Senate race, and Dan Osborn garnered 46% in the Nebraska race. Both are of the working class, strongly pro-union and antitrust (I’m willing to bet Bernie’s influence had a role in this), but also gun nuts, pro-border control, and China hawks. They hold clues to how the Dems should play their cards in ‘26. They are most definitely not the type of people AOC would organize with (the closest she got was streaming Crazy Taxi with Tim Walz), but they’re the kind of folks Joe Rogan would love to introduce to the manosphere (like, funnily enough, Bernie)
Kunce and Osborn may be more conservative but they keep the bottom line: Pro Labor, Anti-Trust, protect our social welfare programs. We have to be more socially flexible to have a big coalition. I mean, for crying out loud, most of the New Deal was only passed because it was green lit by white segregationists in the south. We should be glad we don’t have to do that.
Yeah, I think the Dems should stop the whole circular firing squad for now, and save it for the meritocratic open primaries in ‘28. Circumstances have massively changed from five years ago, when Clyburn toadies shouted Bernie down when he defended his universalist social programs at the She the People forum.
I actually think the party doesn't play up "woke" issues. And to be honest, I don't think most people should have a problem with "wokeness" anyway (other than the extreme kind).
Ironically, the GOP revels in their own brand of "identity politics" and loves to freak out and fear-monger over everything.
Hi Nick, fuck off. We all will forever remember where identity politics came from and that was from "If we break up the banks will we end racism?" hotsauce in her pocket Hillary fucking Retard Clinton.
Americans if they have no banana: "by golly, we just have to pound those savages into dust and do another Chiquita coup" - Americans would kill 600 million mexicans to get 1 banana. what a flattering self-portrait.
The old school populist left, of which 2016 Bernie was a latter-day incarnation, doesn't see this the way you do, Nick. His movement was destroyed by perfidious electoral manipulations by the corrupt Clinton Dems (i.e. "the swamp") on one side and by the 2020 infiltration of identity politics (woke) on the other. They do not see the Dem mainstream as "moderate", they see it as representing the sale of public institutions to the highest bidder, a corruption that dressed itself in scolding self-righteous wokery to disguise its ideological bankruptcy.
Thank you for this. I was an avid volunteer for the Bernie campaign back in 2016. I think that was the moment for his ideas, but for a variety of reasons, not all his fault, he couldn’t prevail in that race. I still believe in much of what he was championing equity-wise. However, both he and the Dem party have changed drastically in the past 8 years. No way I can support him now in 2024.
First of all, Sanders is a postwar socialist. The original socialist-labor movement (SLM) was a working-class movement that mixed in practical demand for improvements to workers lives and theoretical Marxian ideas. The New Deal Democrats created an economy that delivered these desired improvements and many of the more pragmatic elements of the SLM became members of the New Deal coalition. Those left in the SLM were the more purist (and more theoretical) elements. These were the teachers of the Sanders generation of Socialists. Though retaining a focus on labor because of the historical connection with labor, the focus became more on non-class based categories.
So when Sanders, now old and at odds with some of what modern leftists thought (e.g. open borders is a Koch brothers proposal he said in 2015) he found that his tribe now had a different view on what it meant to be left or socialist today. But even if he had forced his followers to toe his line, his economic argument was based in the late 1960's and 1970's diatribes against the billionaire class. It was wrong then and it is wrong now.
In reality, if you want to have a working class politics of the left you have to embrace the New Deal order not socialism.
I don't think the Democratic party should move more to the left or right. What they need to do is be more aggressive in dealing with disinformation and right-wing extremism. Dem politicians also need to do a lot more independent media (from all sides).
God, thank you for this Nick. This whole week on Reddit, I've been batting down these LaRouchian BernieBots that keep insisting that he is the answer. Look, these people have resented the Democratic "elites" for not choosing him over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but my question has always been why would they replace the longtime well known Democrat over the man whose only using the party to get elected president because he knows being an independent is a non starter? Its crazy. They've held on to this for so long, they deem it the sole reason that he hasn't been successful instead of the naked truth, that people aren't feeling his policies.
Normally blue voters in blue areas shifted to the right, there is no way warmed over DSA policies fix that. We're probably going back to Clintonite-era Blue Dog politics, with people like Seth Moulton and Jared Golden taking the helm over AOC and the "Patrol" (Can't call it a squad with vanquished Rep's Bowman and Bush.) Our next nominee is probably going to be a white male either from a rust belt state or a southern state. And that person is going to be as moderate as a 92 Blue Dog. Progressivism died last week and these people keep dancing with the corpse. Another "Weekend at Bernies.".
Absolutely. Does anyone think the significant number of new immigrants we have from Venezuela and Cuba would be thrilled with Bernie’s pro-Sandinista record?
If there is one thing ALL Democrats should've learned from last weeks election results, is that Latinos are an ethnic group, not a homogeneous racial group. No way were Latino immigrants voting for a socialist, no matter that he put "Democratic" in front of it to try and clean it up.
That's what I don't get. Where did this idea of treated Latinos who are just Hispanics, mostly white ethnics for Spanish-speaking nationalities. How are Mexican, Cuban, or Dominican ethnics any different that Italian, Croatian or Latvian ethnics?
I always thought this single (Latino) categorization of these different ethnicities as one group as kinda racist in that it appears to be saying they all look/speak the same (i.e. spics).
I fear you are right. But that way leads to civil war unfortunately.
Josh Shapiro has already started his campaign, no joke.
Remember the incident in 2016 where Clinton supporters were coming out of a building and Sanders supporters were screaming and spitting and shoving signs in their faces? That was the wokesters doing their thing. I said at the time they were maybe going to elect Trump, possibly make him president for life unless Democrats smacked them down, hard. Dems did not. And here we are.
remember when we all got to see X-rays of Israeli bullets in the heads of Palestinian children and then Clinton's husband was dispatched to Michigan to tell muslims that actually this kind of Apartheid is very normal and good
An actual, real, not-imaginary Israeli sniper bullet does not leave the head on a child. No one remembers your fake x-rays from Pallywood and according to the exit polls, nobody cares
We have a real bullet expert over here. "Bullets can't lodge into the heads of children, actually!" They're bullets, not shotgun slugs or cannon rounds. Would you like to take a trip on Google Images for "child shot in head" and see what turns up after enough rummaging around?
Here are the medical scans:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-doctor-interviews.html
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/mam3C
NYT response to denialism against the doctor testimony and the x-rays:
https://www.nytco.com/press/response-to-recent-criticisms-on-new-york-times-opinion-essay/
Quote - "While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds."
Nizam Mamode, british surgeon, testifying on what he saw in Gaza,
https://youtu.be/x3QpRMDw3OY?si=2oXZq1NiXrqldXrn
Quote - "What I found particular disturbing, was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area, and then the drones would come down ... and pick off civilians, children"
Personally, I have watched a video of this kind of double tap he describes. It was a wounded child, or young man, laying in the street, after he has been shot - allegedly by a drone. The crowd rushes out to him, only for a missile or other small projectile to explode in the crowd, wounding many more people. I watched a deaf man surrender in his home only to be gunned dead. I have seen dogs picking at bodies. I am so sorry that some of us choose to believe our own lying eyes and ears.
A .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge does not leave the head of a child attached to the rest of the body. No one trusts the Pallywood fakes offered by the New York Times anymore. Grow up, stop gaslighting for terrorists.
Ultimately, you will be judged before God.
A lot of Bernie fans types think the party is putting "wokeness" before economic concerns.. I don't agree. They mostly stay away from it and really just need to fight harder againist disinformation and fear-mongering.
Ironically, the GOP revels in "identity politics."
Independent voters decided the party was putting wokeness before economic concerns because the party platform and the candidate both did exactly that thing. It's not a misinformation problem, it's a fact problem.
It's not Bernie per se. The progressive Left as a whole is deeply unpopular, because they are the very same out-of-touch "elites" that they claim to be fighting against.
The rest of us see through the virtue signaling, intra-elite status competitions, luxury beliefs, and shaming culture, and want nothing to do with it.
I'm pretty disgusted that I bought his hype in 2020. Sadly Biden did too.
The biggest mistake President Biden made was trying to appease those folks. The biggest reason he won in 2020 was because he was the only one on that stage that knew where the people were instead of where they thought they were because of Bernie Sanders.
Maybe, but Trump is still awful and dangerous.
No doubt
Bernie Sanders can *never* take enough seats. That the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is very real is hardly surprising, given that both are narcissistic old men who lead destructive, grievance-fueled cults of personality. My only small comfort is that I doubt that either “movement” will survive its founder, as neither has a clear successor and their anointed down-ballot candidates continue to underperform.
(As an aside, as a lifelong Pennsylvanian I’m not surprised that Bob Casey lost. He’s a nice guy, but a terrible retail politician who coasted on his name and favorable election cycles for his entire career. He never would have survived, say, a 2010 or 2014 environment, and had he overpeformed the top of the ticket by as much as Jon Tester or Sherrod Brown, he’d be going back for a fourth term.)
I don’t agree with a lot of this. I think a lot of working class people have animosity toward the wealthy, whether they have the same socially conservative values or not. Plenty of poor and working class people throughout the 20th century raged about inequality and oligarchs that hold people down. Some of them were led by religious leaders. Take for example the late Catholic priest Fr. James Cox who was heavily pro labor and led huge march on Washington to protest against the passive Hoover administration during the Great Depression.
The Republicans of the early 2000s that let the economy tank shared conservative values with working class voters, but those voters rejected them vehemently in 2008.
Bernie is correct. Perhaps his followers were mistaken and he should have had a Sista Soulja moment with them. But to say that the working class would be fine with an oligarchy that wants to gut social programs and bust unions is farcical
Maybe, but it doesn't seem to bear out in voting trends. The working class has almost categorically supported richer, better known candidates and policies the support the free market and the right to accumulate wealth.
Donald Trump is basically the working class dream candidate - a rich, billionaire populist supporting tax cuts, cultural conservatism, and American businesses. Bernie is the opposite of what the working class votes for.
Some other examples of good religious leaders who raged against inequality, would be the Catholic anarchist and feminist writer Dorothy Day who spearheaded pacifist aid efforts in the ‘30s, and the Black Baptist ministers Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. All three leveraged civil disobedience and their identities to sustain the left and broaden its appeal in America.
As for whether working-class voters can get behind economic left-populism this year, yes. Lucas Kunce garnered 42% of the vote in the Missouri U.S. Senate race, and Dan Osborn garnered 46% in the Nebraska race. Both are of the working class, strongly pro-union and antitrust (I’m willing to bet Bernie’s influence had a role in this), but also gun nuts, pro-border control, and China hawks. They hold clues to how the Dems should play their cards in ‘26. They are most definitely not the type of people AOC would organize with (the closest she got was streaming Crazy Taxi with Tim Walz), but they’re the kind of folks Joe Rogan would love to introduce to the manosphere (like, funnily enough, Bernie)
Kunce and Osborn may be more conservative but they keep the bottom line: Pro Labor, Anti-Trust, protect our social welfare programs. We have to be more socially flexible to have a big coalition. I mean, for crying out loud, most of the New Deal was only passed because it was green lit by white segregationists in the south. We should be glad we don’t have to do that.
Yeah, I think the Dems should stop the whole circular firing squad for now, and save it for the meritocratic open primaries in ‘28. Circumstances have massively changed from five years ago, when Clyburn toadies shouted Bernie down when he defended his universalist social programs at the She the People forum.
https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/bernie-sanders-put-that-wagging-finger?r=384ha
I actually think the party doesn't play up "woke" issues. And to be honest, I don't think most people should have a problem with "wokeness" anyway (other than the extreme kind).
Ironically, the GOP revels in their own brand of "identity politics" and loves to freak out and fear-monger over everything.
I don't fault Democratic' economic polices for the price of living still being too high. It's a complicated issue with no simple answers.
Hi Nick, fuck off. We all will forever remember where identity politics came from and that was from "If we break up the banks will we end racism?" hotsauce in her pocket Hillary fucking Retard Clinton.
Americans if they have no banana: "by golly, we just have to pound those savages into dust and do another Chiquita coup" - Americans would kill 600 million mexicans to get 1 banana. what a flattering self-portrait.
The old school populist left, of which 2016 Bernie was a latter-day incarnation, doesn't see this the way you do, Nick. His movement was destroyed by perfidious electoral manipulations by the corrupt Clinton Dems (i.e. "the swamp") on one side and by the 2020 infiltration of identity politics (woke) on the other. They do not see the Dem mainstream as "moderate", they see it as representing the sale of public institutions to the highest bidder, a corruption that dressed itself in scolding self-righteous wokery to disguise its ideological bankruptcy.
Thank you for this. I was an avid volunteer for the Bernie campaign back in 2016. I think that was the moment for his ideas, but for a variety of reasons, not all his fault, he couldn’t prevail in that race. I still believe in much of what he was championing equity-wise. However, both he and the Dem party have changed drastically in the past 8 years. No way I can support him now in 2024.
I would really like to see Nick debate this issue with fellow New Yorker Ross Barkan on Substack who appears to be a bit more pro Sanders.
https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/aoc-agonistes
First of all, Sanders is a postwar socialist. The original socialist-labor movement (SLM) was a working-class movement that mixed in practical demand for improvements to workers lives and theoretical Marxian ideas. The New Deal Democrats created an economy that delivered these desired improvements and many of the more pragmatic elements of the SLM became members of the New Deal coalition. Those left in the SLM were the more purist (and more theoretical) elements. These were the teachers of the Sanders generation of Socialists. Though retaining a focus on labor because of the historical connection with labor, the focus became more on non-class based categories.
So when Sanders, now old and at odds with some of what modern leftists thought (e.g. open borders is a Koch brothers proposal he said in 2015) he found that his tribe now had a different view on what it meant to be left or socialist today. But even if he had forced his followers to toe his line, his economic argument was based in the late 1960's and 1970's diatribes against the billionaire class. It was wrong then and it is wrong now.
In reality, if you want to have a working class politics of the left you have to embrace the New Deal order not socialism.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-abstract-versus-the-real-in-left
I don't think the Democratic party should move more to the left or right. What they need to do is be more aggressive in dealing with disinformation and right-wing extremism. Dem politicians also need to do a lot more independent media (from all sides).
You just posted 5 comments absolving Democrats of all responsibility and blaming voters for the outcome of the election.
You really have no idea why Harris lost.