I read a Reddit (through RDX mind you) post the other day that included the Who we serve page from the democrats’ website. The user noted that men were not on that list and pointed it out as on of the reasons Kamala Harris had lost. Meaning the Democratic Party should pander to the white young men demographic as well. A link to the post (through RDX)
I keep seeing this sentiment over and over again on social media. And I can’t help but make the analogy to the “All lives matter.” as opposed to “Black Lives matter.” Am I wrong to think this? I am not from the United States. Please don’t bite my head off as this is no stupid questions.
I’m just gonna be blunt and accept the downvotes here:
All this “the Democrats failed because [blank]” arguments are just blame shifting. We all saw what Trump was about, what he did while in office, and especially what he did after he lost that office the first time. We all know what kind of threat Trump represents to the future of this country.
The fact that (up to) 15 million Democratic voters stayed home and/or voted 3rd party is a failure on our part to take that threat seriously.
We all know what kind of threat Trump represents.
No we all most certainly don’t. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I have had with people on both sides of the political spectrum haven’t heard of project 2025 or many of his policy proposals. The ones who have heard about them mostly don’t seem to believe then.
The most common response to “watch out we’re marching towards fascism” is always some variant of “This is America. It can’t happen here”
The fact that (up to) 15 million Democratic voters stayed home and/or voted 3rd party is a failure on our part to not take that threat seriously.
But WHY?? This is the one thing I just can’t wrap my head around. How were all those warnings and the fact Trump would run again not enough?? Understand that I am trying to make sense of this election from an outsiders perspective. But it feels like I’m trying to uncover a magic trick.
How were all those warnings and the fact Trump would run again not enough??
In a nutshell:
By that same logic…
People could ask why Kamala insisted on doubling down on support of a genocide knowing it was seriously hurting her chances to stop trump.
If voters always have to compromise and politicians can do what they want with no consequences…
That’s how Republicans got stuck with trump.
Not having standards is not an effective way to fight fascism, especially when the alternative you’re holding your nose for won’t actually try to get rid of fascists because the only other option being fascist is the only reason they can win (sometimes).
But WHY??
Because Dem voters have always needed something to vote for, voting against works for Republicans.
But there’s significant brain differences between the two groups, what’s effective for one isn’t for the other
The problem is the “moderates” running the DNC think like Republicans, and part of that is a reduction in empathy that prevents them from understanding others think differently. They legitimately have no idea what went wrong right now, their brains can’t comprehend another person’s point of view.
So we’ve got two political parties ran by conservatives, it’s just only one actually understands how their voters think. So they keep winning even with trump.
I kinda thought they would learn from Obama’s success in promoting hope and change, but no, they are right back to trying to peel off Republican voters instead of motivating the unengaged voters like he did.
That wasn’t success for them, it was almost their deathknell.
If Obama had appointed progressive leadership in 2008 shit would be a lot different and Bernie would likely be leaving his second term right now.
The people running the DNC retain power when a moderate Dem wins because they’ll stay the course and appoint the same DNC leadership.
They retain power when a republican wins because they vote for their own leadership then.
The literal only way they can lose is if a progressive becomes president and doesn’t decide to ignore the DNC like Obama did.
That’s why they’d rather have trump than someone that wants to ban fracking.
The DNC isn’t fighting fascism, it’s just the left boot.
Because Dem voters have always needed something to vote for, voting against works for Republicans.
Technically Republicans are voting for something when when they are voting to destroy the government. Their goal just happens to be destructive.
Nice way to say it
How were all those warnings and the fact Trump would run again not enough??
Because a bunch of whiny little bitches decided to become single issue voters.
“WAAAAAH, PALESTINE!!!”
Refuses to vote or votes 3rd party, guaranteeing the guy that will allow Palestine to turn to dust becomes president.
“WAAAAAH, STOP GIVING MONEY TO UKRAINE!!!”
Fails to understand that we’re doing that to keep our adversary from expanding their borders and threatening Europe/NATO.
“WAAAAAH, DEMOCRATS DIDN’T ENSHRINE ROE INTO LAW!!!”
Refuses to vote or votes 3rd party, guaranteeing the party that literally repealed Roe controls all aspects of our government.
The real answer to your question is that Americans are STUUUUUUUUPID. Clinically stupid. Uneducated. Uninstersted in informing themselves responsibly. STUUUUUUUUUPID.
Which is why we’ll suffer and are likely to be locked in to a long period of serious decline. Sucks to be us.
Yes, thank you. Every generation “discovers” the Palestinian issue and then some act like its a new problem. And then some dumb-asses in America choose that as their hill to die on. To the point where they helped Trump get elected this time.
The Palestinians have been locked in a death embrace with Israel for 80 years and no amount of whining by privileged American protesters is going to change that. Do they really think that more river-to-the-sea terrorism is going to make the Israelis just give up and die? No, a two-state solution where all the Palestinians move to the West Bank and all the Israeli settlers move back to Israel is the only viable solution. Every generation eventually figures that out, too. Also, Gaza is finished this time. It was always a dumb idea to have two separate Palestinian enclaves.
It is down to the practical matter of separating the two sides and imposing a peace since apparently they can’t do it for themselves. If that sounds harsh, it is almost certainly better for the Palestinians than letting the Israelis settle it the Roman way. And that is on the table now, since I’m sure we can all agree that Trump doesn’t give a single shit on his golden toilet about the Palestinians.
Yup.
I don’t want bad things to happen anywhere in the world, but the bottom line is we have our own shit to deal with and jeopardizing our own country by becoming a single issue voter over two countries in a neverending religious conflict on the other side of the planet is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.
We’re literally going to be in a state of decline for an unknown period of years now partially because we chose to place another country over our own by voting for the guy that made it clear he would allow that country to turn to dust.
It sounds stupid because it is, in fact, unbelievably stupid.
We all saw what Trump was about, what he did while in office, and especially what he did after he lost that office the first time
It’s worse than that though. He and those around him literally told everyone for years what they were going to do to subvert the process. At the start of the election he said he already has all the votes he needs, before voting even ended anywhere he said this. He outright announced he’d already subverted it and nobody who can called it out.
This isn’t blame shifting, it’s pure gaslighting.
Yup.
You can blame the Democrat party all you want. Wasn’t their fault. It was American voter’s fault.
We are an unbelievably stupid electorate. And the suffering we’re about to experience is no one’s fault but our own. I’d like to say we’ll learn from it. But we won’t. Buckle up. We’re about to embark on a long decline.
The entire point of a political campaign is to motivate voters to vote for the candidate…
If not enough people voted, then it’s the fault of the campaign/candidate.
Like imagine if you sold cars, you could blame not selling on potential customers not wanting to buy a car, but your manager isn’t going to listen when the other guy can still sell cars despite being a giant piece of shit.
You’ll be called a bad salesperson.
And if you don’t improve in almost a decade, it would be crazy to keep paying you to not sell cars.
“All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” both advocated against new police accountability practices.
This is why I think Black Lives Matter should have just called itself the Police Accountability Movement, take the wind out of the racist sails, but everybody kept downvoting that suggestion.
- Young white men are included under “Young People and Students.”
- Old white men are included under “Seniors and Retirees.”
- Many white men have disabilities and are covered under “Americans with Disabilities.”
- Many white men are covered under “LGBTQ+” - trans men, gay and queer men. Heck, some even include allies under the umbrella.
- Many white men who are neither young nor old (or members of their family) are members of unions, or would like to be, and thus covered under “Union Members and Families.”
- Likewise, many white men are covered under:
- Faith Community
- Rural Americans
- Small Business Community
- Veterans and Military Families
Economically, Democratic policies favor poor and middle class people, which statistically makes up the majority of all white men. And there aren’t any policies that oppress white people or men the way that Republican policies oppress women or reduce support for all of the groups that Democratic policies help support.
In other words, unless you get off on the oppression of those groups, almost all white men are served by the Democratic party, even if they can’t find themselves on the list you shared.
“Black Lives Matter” was a response to black men and women being murdered by police at higher rates, of the news stories of those deaths being under-reported by comparison, and of the victims being blamed more than people of other races, particularly white people.
“All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” missed the point. It’s “Black Lives Matter, too.” If all lives mattered, people wouldn’t have needed to protest the killings of black people in the first place.
Imagine if you were at a restaurant and everyone around you got their order but you, so you said “Hey, I need my order.” If the server responded with “Yes, everyone needs their order” and walked off, that would be about the equivalent to saying “All Lives Matter.”
So, is there a parallel between thinking that white men should be pandered to and saying “White Lives Matter?” Absolutely.
Young white men are included under “Young People and Students.”
Old white men are included under “Seniors and Retirees
White straight able bodied men age 25-64 who are no longer students but have yet to retire, and a union doesn’t exist in their industry (as far as they know)? Fuck 'em lol. Wait are they religious, rural, a business owner, or a veteran? No? Ok yeah fuck 'em!
White straight able bodied men age 25-64
25-36 is still “young” by their definition.
and a union doesn’t exist in their industry (as far as they know)
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re working in if you’re interested in that industry having a union. Making unions more commonplace was part of the point. The second sentence in the Union Members and Families section reads “Democrats will make it easier for workers, public and private, to exercise their right to organize and join unions.”
But sure, if you don’t believe unions have value, this wouldn’t include you.
Fuck 'em lol. Wait are they religious, rural, a business owner, or a veteran? No? Ok yeah fuck 'em!
You and I must have different definitions of “fuck ‘em,” because I clearly said:
Economically, Democratic policies favor poor and middle class people, which statistically makes up the majority of all white men. And there aren’t any policies that oppress white people or men the way that Republican policies oppress women or reduce support for all of the groups that Democratic policies help support.
So sure, if you’re a white man with wealth that puts you in the top 1%, the Republican’s economic policies will be better for you. For the other 99% of white men - no. And for the specific issues called out in the original post linked (on Reddit):
- Men account for 75% of suicides in the US
- 70% of opioid overdose deaths are men
- Men are 8 times more likely to be incarcerated than women
- Young men are struggling in schools and are increasingly the minority at universities, opting out of higher education
- 1 is addressed under “Investing in Mental Health” in the Party Platform as well as indirectly by gun safety policies (since 50% of suicides are by gun, 60% of gun deaths are suicides, and 87% of gun suicides are committed by men)
- 2 is explicitly addressed under “Faith Community (“respond to the opioid crisis”) and under “Beating the Opioid Epidemic” in the Party Platform.
- 3 is addressed under “Criminal Justice” in the Party Platform
- 4 is addressed in multiple ways, under “Good Jobs” (“you shouldn’t have to go to a four-year college to live a good, middle-class life.”) and under “Education” (investing in K-12 education, providing free, universal preschool, investing in other forms of secondary education - e.g., trade schools, community college, registered apprenticeships)
Democrats need to work on their messaging, obviously (and the comments on the Reddit post touch on that), but the problem isn’t that their policies don’t help white men, because they obviously do.
Americans are dumb.
Democrats could have done a better job, no doubt about that. But it isn’t their fault Americans are dumb and too lazy to inform themselves responsibly. The data is all there. It’s freely available. Americans chose to vote based on feelings and allow themselves to be captured by propaganda instead of looking at the facts and they made a horribly uninformed decision.
No change in the Democrat’s strategy changes that Americans are just plain dumb.
Anti-incumbent voting is way up across the globe. People are pissed off about inflation (corporate greed) and they just knee-jerk “vote them out”.
Please remember that most people don’t pay attention to the details of economic policies or politics very much. They only get a general “vibe” from whatever bubbled media and bot content they consume. People have voted against their own interests for generations because of this phenomenon.
I’ll never forget years ago when my father was listening to Rush Limbaugh and that asshole Rush said, “I understand my listeners are hard working people who are very busy and simply don’t have the time to pay attention to these political things so that’s why you can just get your information here, I will tell you what to think.” Not an exact quote, but close enough. That type of thing has been going on for generations.
I think it’s less that young white men actively supported Trump because the Dems didn’t pander to them, and more that young, upper-middle class, suburban white men were altogether uninspired to vote because in either scenario, they wagered they’d be okay.
The lesson seems to be a very clear and unfortunate rebuke of women as presidential candidates, but very specifically black women, as Harris seems to have gotten even less support in this demographic than Clinton did. It’s shameful, but I believe that if Newsom had been the nominee and ran a near identical campaign, Israel and all, that he’d likely be president elect today.
The “All Lives Matter” retort wad nothing more than an attempt to dilute the issue of police brutality and wrongful killing of black people. That was it, nothing more.
Right wingers invent retorts to everything, even if it goes into extremism and silliness. Eating horse paste instead of getting a vaccine, drinking their own urine instead of getting medical care, destroying their own personal property as a protest against numerous companies for imaginary slights, nonsensical boycotts, and on and on.
The founder of the Proud Boys terrorist organization once shoved a butt plug up his own ass on video just to “own the libs.”
Btw just a heads up, Ivermectin is prescribed to horses, yes, and humans. Kinda like Ketamine, or the Gabapentin I was prescribed to ease my cat’s transition to the afterlife (RIP my dude.) It’s also a pill, not a paste, I actually have a couple packs from when it was in the news because my friend thought it was funny and grabbed me some lol. It’s a dewormer though not an antiviral, so if you get worms or other parasites you may get prescribed it but definitely not for any virus. It’s like trying to take penicillin for a runny nose, like, yeah, penicillin is prescribed to humans and animals, but not for that.
I understand not being from here you aren’t as familiar with these slogans and their context. Black Lives Matter as a movement is a movement against police violence that disproportionately impacts young men who are African Americans. Hispanic men and other minorities are also targeted by police, but to a lesser extent.
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-the-data-shows-about-police-use-of-force-by-race/
So the slogan Black Lives Matter is a specific condemnation of this situation. Black lives are disproportionately fucked up by police violence, they matter, ergo we need to do something about police violence.
All lives matter as a phrase, wasn’t used as a slogan or anything until after Black Lives Matter. It exists almost entirely in the context of Black Lives Matter, and is used almost exclusively to advocate against reforming the police and lowering the use of force against Black Americans. Its sole purpose is to try and discredit the motives of people advocating for less police violence in Black communities, by implying that by singling out Black lives is not ethically correct. The police act as though Black lives don’t matter, so by responding to that by saying All Lives Matter, all you are doing is trying to paper over the problem.
With those explanations out of the way, I think that Dems should not be saying All Lives Matter. It may work better among young white men, but you do so by ignoring a very real and dangerous aspect of the problem. If the Dems want to reach those young white men, I think the answer isn’t to water down the existing slogans, but to add legs of the platform to address separate issues.
Show young men how police corruption fucks their lives too. I remember growing up hearing how much worse ticketing and traffic stops are for young men, so that could be a way to push back. Police will do violence to your black friends, and on top of that they issue tickets to men at almost twice the rate they do to women. If that isn’t an in to get young men on board with police reform I don’t know what could be.
Please don’t take that as me saying women have it easier in traffic stops. Cops are horrible, and when cops are sexual predators they are just as dangerous as other predators but alsoalso have state authority to abuse. There have been stories of cops using police databases to stalk women and more, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring up men’s issues here too. Black lives matter, women need to be protected from cops abusing authority, and men shouldn’t be unfairly burdened by traffic tickets. Dems need to learn to find those parts of the problems and speak to them because all three problems can be tackled together.
Yes. It’s a very wrong perspective.
So let me break it down, and I’m not trying to be alienating or picking a side in the arguments of sex, gender, or color.
In the US, at least, it’s very close enough to say that it’s a half split on biologically born male and female.
Around 25% of those people identify to associate with the LGBTQIA+ group.
Around 32% of Americans are black
19% are Hispanic
7% are asian
And I’m adding this for effect: 58% are european
Now! If we look at the multiple demographic and ethnic ideas and peoples, then we see a different perspective, idea, and solutions.
I didn’t even mention religious or political ideologies, which would make the breakdown even deeper.
My point is that “who we fight for” is not a thing that we can identify with our eyes anymore. We should fight for affection and life. The hardest part is seeing people oppose what looks like who we/what concern ourselves with. That should tell you that not everyone who looks like the person who opposes you might not be your enemy. We have seen what happens when fear and hate control our emotions. Yet very few people want to do anything about it
Well…yes and no.
Yes there was a point, but that wasn’t the correct time to complain about that problem. It’s silly to me to try to compare police violence against white lives vs black lives. There is a biased based on facts. Black Lives Matter highlighted this difference, but people argued ‘against’ the message with a bad faith argument of ‘All Lives Matter’. The whole point was black lives are being killed more often than they should be, so black lives matter, also. Not that the are the only lives that matter. To paraphrase Michael Che, if you see someone with a 9/11 never forget shirt just say “excuse me, but all buildings matter.”
Dem outreach to whites or white youth is a different topic from police reform. It should be anyway.
deleted by creator
Thanks for typing this up so I didn’t have to.
Bah, I lost my nerve and deleted it almost immediately after posting it. I also wasn’t sure if this was the right place to post it. Should I repost it?
I’m just saying that you did a good job of summarizing that:
- young people in general feel disenfranchised, young white people as well, but the Dem party only focuses on culture war issues, so they are explicitly not fighting for you or even trying to represent you if you are poor and white
- that does not mean All Lives Matter wasn’t just a cynical attempt to muddy the waters around the police regularly murdering black people
No, it means that people really want there to have been a point to the All Lives Matter movement
Anyone concerned with whether the democrats “who we serve” page mentioned men specifically was unlikely to vote for a woman of color anyway.
