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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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What exactly has Biden done wrong? He may not be as crazy left wing as you'd prefer, but really I don't see why so many on the left are saying he's so bad
Although I think Biden has overall done a good job I am disappointed that they're running someone who is 80 years old. I would also like to see a general shift to the left, but at the same time I realize that the increased political division in the US makes this unlikely in the near term.
Giving up the incumbent advantage at a time like this is short sighted at best, and destructive and dangerous at worst.
People always have some reason ready to roll out when telling you to settle for some shitty candidate you don't really like. I'm done with it. I compromised on Joe Biden to save America from Trump. I compromised in every election for my entire adult life. Now I'm voting for people I actually like. If the US is collectively dumb enough to go back to the GOP then we deserve the consequences of that choice.
You can call that selfish if you want but I've been waiting 35 years for the compromise candidate to be the one from my camp and there's always a bunch of armchair poly-sci experts coming out of the woodwork to explain why that would be irresponsible in the current political climate. Well too bad, I'm not voting for the geriatric anymore.
I really don't understand this attitude after how far the entire country backslide under Trump after 2016.
Like, I get it, I felt the same way in 2016 and pissed away my vote, but you've got to realize how counter productive this is after how much more fucked everything got in four years right? Assuming you aren't leaving the country, you do have to live with the consequences of another Trump presidency and further erosion of your rights.
Must be nice to be a wealthy, single, white man who knows he won't suffer under a Trump admin.
Fuck the rest of the country, right? And our overseas allies.
Like I said, if America is collectively dumb enough to vote Republicans into power after everything that's happened then another 4 years of a boring Democrat isn't going to fix that problem. If we're headed for some sort of collapse I'd rather deal with that now rather than later. Call that what you like but it's not my way of doing things that got us in this mess in the first place so you'll have to forgive me if I don't put much stock in your "keep doing the same things and hope something magically changes" approach.
I personally believe someone in the Bernie Sanders mold has a better chance of pulling in moderate voters than a Joe Biden does.
Ribbit
Thanks for the pointless reply. Next time just downvote and spare people from having to read "I disagree with you" but in dumber form.
He ran on getting kids out of cages and there is still a giant open-air prison for refugees on the border. He busted the railroad union. Those are two pretty big issues for the left. He's further right than Obama, and probably futher right than Nixon, if you compare their platforms. Fighting fascism by moving further right is a really bad way to fight fascism.
Because he's ancient. He's a half century older than the majority of the voting population.
Why is this a bad thing, specifically? Like, articulate reasons that this is bad.
Because he isn't the one that's going to have to living in and running the world in another 20 years or fewer.
Because there are plenty of other choices that better represent the current and future population.
Because he was alive during a time that is so drastically different than the current world.
I don't want a representative of the population. I want someone competent who can accomplish policy objectives I share.
That's a very individualist way to look at a national decision.
I don't understand what you mean. The rest of the population can make the same choice in the same contest
That's what voting is.
Right. And when the rest of everyone votes with the same exact mentality, what's the result?
To say the quiet part out loud, he simply isn't charismatic enough to hold the President position. Common people don't feel their future to be secure under his leadership. Look at GOP's candidates meanwhile (DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Trump) - they are all populist if not anything else.
And like it or not, this perception matters. I can guarantee he'll recieve less votes this time (compared to last year, he can still marginally win simply because of how unpopular the Right has become).
Populists should be fought because populism is a cancer. Biden is exceptionally charismatic, in my view. Significantly more so than most Presidential candidates not named Obama or Clinton.
Populism alone isn't bad. Sometimes, it's the only way to get a perspective or idea out there, and make it not seem like a taboo anymore. And some ideas out there are worth supporting.
Populism is indeed always bad
Do you have any evidence that populism is inherently bad? Yes or no? Incidents can be easily rebuked with incidents where populism has allowed progress or improvement into quality of living. So, if incidents is all you have, simply say no.
Yes I do. Every populist politician in human history.
You're welcome.
So, you don't actually have a case here? Could you please break it down and disseminate that statement in order for it be looked at and with scrunity?
Populism is the appeal to the basest of human emotions, exploited by demagogues to seize power and, at absolute best ignore their mandate and consolidate power for themselves and at worst, the Terror of the French Revolution or its parallels in China during the Cultural Revolution.
It is never, ever, guided by reason, sound policy, or best practice. It is what led to the USSR. It is what led to the Trail of Tears. It is what led to the secession of Southern states during the US Civil War. Populism didn't just give us Trump, it consistently gives us the worst society can be, because it is based off of the worst of society's emotions - fear, jealousy, anger, and resentment.
Please, author any defense of populism. I'm all ears.
I understand this is argument probably coming from some Sandersite-progressive "we only have good intentions" place, but that just makes you an enabler, not enlightened.
If good ideas can stand on their own, they don't need to be driven by resentment or fear of an "other."
What you're arguing is based on the assumption that populism is and has always been used by demagogues, and as populism is rather more accurately described as a political campaign strategy, it only requires one example to tear down the always assumption. All I need to point out is Bernie Sanders and the results of his works makes it so that understanding the questionable aspect of our own society is not to be seen as taboo, and making healthcare more accessible as well as reducing wage gaps is not a bad thing. In fact, he alone enabled a faster rate of political shift to that direction and removed the taboo of those stances. Your stance should be that populism is questionable, rather than a firm always bad as that can be teared down by examples of people trying to raise the flaws of socio-economic structures.
One could argue anything as bad if it has been used by demagogues. Moderation is even a example. You could argue that moderates enables a form of negative peace by allowing structure of society to retain gaps between people, and arguably leads to increase of gaps by simply pushing asides forces that wants to address those gaps. Moderates could be argued to lead to Trumpism due to those observation.
At the end of the day, what matters is the impact of political strategies and whether they have been used to benefit others. It is how they're used that matters at the end of the day.
Bernie Sanders is a perfect example of terrible policies supported by fiery rhetoric, yes. Sanders is not an effective legislator and his policies are DOA. He preys upon people's financial insecurity and frustration to "other" all wealthy people.
He is absolutely part of the problem.
From the brief looks in congress.gov, so many legislature that has been voted on by Bernie Sanders also has passed, so there has been some of his policies that aren't dead on arrival. The DOA legislature thing is like criticizing a legislator for not getting things done when political atmosphere prevents said legislator from getting things done. So, I'm not seeing a good jab here. At the end of the day, he opened the floodgates to discussion of socio-economic structure of our society, and nothing should be closed unless there's a very good reason to do so, and that is indeed a positive result, and yes, it shows populism isn't always a bad thing.
Who exactly isn't a problem to you or haven't been a problem? Given that you haven't really responded to the observation that even moderation can be a problem, I'm guessing a moderate, and it would be very easy to spot a policy that is conservative which leads to Trumpism. And you know you want me to avoid pointing that out, and you probably want me to avoid pointing out negative peace issues.
Your second paragraph (if I'm understanding correctly) sums up my entire point. The Republican party didn't just magically arrive here. Every step on the road to Trumpism came from populist rhetoric. That is precisely the danger I'm talking about.
Sanders is absolutely the same problem from a different direction. Demonizing a faceless problem to rile people up is irresponsible and dangerous, full stop. The Republicans should be a clear warning of the dangers inherent.
Pardon if I misunderstood - had some trouble parsing your second paragraph.
The second paragraph is more about pointing to moderate stances leading into Trumpism. How does it do that? By pushing out rhetorics that shines a light into our structures and by simply hiding problems like systematic racism in the name of order. The second paragraph is not about populism, but as a observation of how anything can be argued to be bad.
You need to demonstrate that it's a faceless problem given that younger people are having far more struggles. So far, you failed to provide that case.
Trumpism didn't come from any specific policy. It was a combination of decades of populist/nativist rhetoric on talk radio leading into the same in mass media/the internet. Couple this with 2010s massive reshaping of congressional districts due to gerrymandering, and the radicals in the party were given the loudest voting "voice." Together, these things removed any barriers to MAGAs ascendance from within the party. As is commonly said, the Republicans who claim to be the "Party of Reagan" would have kicked him out of the party these days
Highly recommend you read "Why We're Polarized" by Ezra Klein for a well cited narrative of how this came to be.
Trumpism isn't really about policies, at it's core. It's about feelings. Feelings of resentment, dispossession, and nameless dread of the future. See any parallels there with how non-conservatives are beginning to feel?
Literally on a front page thread today: https://lemmy.world/comment/1150069
This is not a sign of healthy discourse and it is escalating.
Trumpism did have it roots within conservative policies years ago. You can either trace it back to Nixon, or the observation of the political party switch after the Civil Rights movement. The hatred that are seen within Trumpism has always been there. It isn't populism at all, and I'd argue it never has been any more than other political campaign strategies. And yes, there are Reagan voters that proudly support Trump as the conservative mindset of hatred were always there.
I have no idea what you're talking about in your second paragraph. Can you rephrase that? If it's about how conservatives have steadily fallen into Trumpism then yes, I agree with you, their populist rhetoric and demonization of faceless classes of people led us directly here. That's my entire point.
I don't think Bernie suggesting "Billionayahs" are evil people is productive at all. It's just anti-Semitism without the religious/ethnic baggage. There are ways to effectively argue for necessary reforms without demonizing an "other"
We disagree on whether or not his rhetoric is a good or bad thing.
I'm sorry, but that's a delusional take. A fricking potato has more charisma than Biden.
This comment will stay in the negatives, but anyone who is looking at this objectively knows you're correct. They just don't like it.
It's getting downvoted for the "crazy left wing" part, not the "what has Biden done wrong" part.
Biden has been great. The most transformative policies in 80 years. Great for the world.
dafuq are you on about? Do we already have political shill bots on here?
Being able to see through the RW/Kremlin propaganda fog does not make me a "shill bot." I suppose by your metrics, AOC is also a "shill bot" for supporting Joe Biden? He's the first in a LONG WHILE to promote any kind of true global unity on important issues. Not perfect, but DAMNED good.