People forgot Trump’s COVID policies killed a million people. I agree that it feels frustrating to repeatedly hearing headlines like, “Evil Person Continues Being Evil”, but we are not the target audience. A bunch of people would probably forget that Elon is a terrible guy if they weren’t constantly reminded.
These folks don’t actually wanna leave. Peter Thiel will blow a lot of smoke about how he’s totally gonna leave California because of Communisim or whatever, but there’s a couple things to keep in mind.
The billionaires are spending mad money to fight this tax. This is not the action of someone who plans to leave the state.
The infrastructure that makes the billionaires rich cannot be moved from California easily. A person is easy to move, a warehouse less so. Those assets can be taxed, even if the owner leaves the state.
Fuck these guys. Billionaires do not contribute to the economy; they suck out the wealth and hoard it. Even in the worst case scenario of rich folks leaving the state with their ill gotten gains, the state wasn’t gonna get that money anyways The worst case scenario for California of the mythical “Wealth Flight” is a bunch of parasites moving elsewhere.
These parasites have had it too good for too long. A measly little one time tax is a step in the right direction that I hope opens the door to more aggressive taxation on these dregs of society.
I don’t think that analysis of why Establishment Dems keep losing is advocacy for accelerationism. Most of the people who sit out of elections are not the kinds of people to post on the internet in political threads. If we want to reach the people on the who have become politically apathetic, the most effective method would be a top-down approach where the politicians and leadership change their positions and how they advertise the party.
We already know why these people don’t vote. Yelling at them to vote hasn’t worked for a decade, so we should try something else.
Yeah, hopefully we can do enough to change the Democratic Party so that they stop hemorrhaging voters. If we get to the 2028 presidential election and the Dem candidate is another neoliberal like Newsom, we’re probably cooked. The past decade has shown that voters have become apathetic to the threat of, “Vote Dem or else you get the Republican”, so hopefully, the Democratic Party doesn’t run that losing strategy again.
There are a lot of people like hoppeduponcoffee who are being ostracized by both the Democrats and Republicans. Both parties are effectively communicating, “we don’t need your votes to win”, so it shouldn’t be surprising when those ostracized groups take that message to heart.
These groups have very clearly communicated what it would take to get their support, so why isn’t the Democratic party listening? It’s not like they are asking for much. Protect queer rights. Stop funding genocide. Spend money on improving living conditions. It seems like it would be much easier to change the positions of a couple politicians than it would to convince millions of voters to go against their conscience.
The core difference between our analysis of why Kamala Harris lost is in our understanding of people. I think Kamala Harris lost because she advertised herself as Republican-lite while you think she lost because people are stupid. I would argue that my analysis provides concrete changes that provide a pathway to a better future while your analysis expresses only despair and apathy. My changes require affecting about a hundred politicians while your changes require tens of millions of people suddenly awakening politically.
It aounds like you and I agree that progressive policies are a good idea and should be supported and pushed. However, the Kamala Harris campaign did not agree with us.
Kamala Harris claimed that she would be a friend to immigrants unlike the racist Republican party, but she also repeated racist talking points like the idea that fentanyl is a problem because of drug cartels sneaking it through the southern border. She claimed she would help the working class unlike the business subservient Republican party, but then promised to remove regulatory hurdles to enrich business owners. She claimed to care about the Palestinians dying in the middle east, but promised “unwavering commitment” and “ironclad support” for Isreal.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I knew how terrible a Trump presidency would be, but I am not surprised that many people stayed at home when Kamala Harris was advertising herself as Republican-lite. She spent all her time trying to court the mythical “Moderate Conservative” and completely ignored the people she could have easily won.
One of Kamala Harris’ most popular policies was her promise to go after price gouging grocery stores. According to YouGov polling, it had 80% support amongst the Dem voter base.
Then, Tony West started giving her advice. Tony West, an Uber Exec and her brother in law, was one of the many neoliberal political advisors Kamala was listening to. And while we don’t know exactly what kind of advice she was recieving, we do know that Kamala Harris stopped talking about price gouging and started talking about “increasing the military budget” or “tackling the immigration problem”.
It is difficult to claim that Kamala Harris would have enacted progressive policies when much of her campaign revolved around being friendly with neoliberal and conservative people/ideas while blatantly stamping down on progressive people/ideas.
Kamala Harris would have to make a really hard pivot to progressive policies to convince people to vote for her. I think it’s possible for her to do well, just like it would be possible for any Democratic candidate to do well by making progressive promises.
She’s got a lot of baggage to make up for though, to the point it might not be worth it for her to run. She’s just as unelectible as Gavin Newsom.
Unfortunately, the plague bearers are also plague spreaders.
Yeah, everyone can see the cynicism Kamala is trying for here. She wants a little of that progressive popularity to rub off on her to continue her political career. The silver lining here is that Kamala, representing the Establishment Democrats, sees where the wind is blowing. The Establishment Dems are realizing that they’re gonna have to go leftwards of they wanna remain politically relevant, so we gotta keep pushing left while they are on the back foot.