Not the left. The Democrats. Big big difference.

I’ve heard the argument from practicality for decades, but it just doesn’t pass the laugh test. When George Bush started the Iraq War, was that practical? No. When Donald Trump did everything Donald Trump does, was that practical? No. But they made big changes. Bad changes, but big changes.

So why is it that only the Republicans can make big changes? I think it’s because your position is the coward’s position. If you never try to make the country better in a major way, because you’re convinced it’s impossible, of course you’re always going to fail. And voters know this. We understand why people are afraid to take big steps, but we don’t respect it.

No you don’t have to explain that. Biden has to explain that. Biden has to explain why he did so little, and even when he did good things, he and his colleagues did such a bad job of bragging about it that a lot of people didn’t see.

Of course it’s not just Biden, but you don’t get to start off by blaming voters for being ignorant when in fact the president himself did a s***** job advertising.

Ah, but didn’t Biden throw the train union under the bus? I think he did. And neither Biden nor Obama pushed to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, and also to key it to the cost of living.

Even though Biden’s regulators did take some positive action, a lot of that was this calendar year. Why did he wait so long? A cynic would say he didn’t believe in what he was doing, but even a non-cynic would say that it was a bad way to campaign, because you can’t erase 3 years of incompetence with 1 year of regulation.

It’s not hard to explain. It’s not about vibes. The DNC is pro-corporate, which means they’re anti-worker. They push few policies that benefit the average person.

Take the housing plan, for example. Raise the limit on the tax break for first-time home owners. Is that good? Sure it’s better than nothing, but if a home that used to cost $200K now costs $800K, an extra $30K won’t make it affordable. But more money might help the banks a little bit. Or take the federal minimum wage. It should be $25, but it’s not, because the DNC just doesn’t care, and they never will.

Maybe so, but if it’s guaranteed shittiness vs. possible improvement, obviously people will make their own decisions about gambling.

I think it’s a bad gamble, but I understand it. And also, one major point is that many people think “it’s going to suck either way, fuck it, I’m staying home”.

Of course you didn’t provide your own. That’s typical, sadly enough. We all know there are varying definitions, and if you’re going to undercut someone else’s, which may be a reasonable thing to do, why not bring yours to the table? … But only if you care to continue the conversation.

It’s legally unclear if he’s able to pardon himself for state crimes. He’s the president of the United States, not the president of New York.

But I hope he tries to pardon himself for anything, just so we can get this before the Supreme Court, because I think they would side with him but I sure want to see it play out. In reality he’s in such bad health and so old that I think he’s probably going to die before he would face any prison time, so the best we can hope for is that the Supreme Court makes greater fools of themselves, or somehow miraculously surprises us and does the right thing, which I don’t expect but you know it’s theoretically possible.

It’s so fun to blame one single group for a national failure. It’s fun, but it just doesn’t make any sense.

The sad thing is that we all predicted this blame game would occur. And you can use almost the same words and almost the same reasons and blame a different group, and it sounds about as convincing.

What Harris could have done is besides the point. What she did and didn’t do is a matter of record.

But look, focus on what I wrote. If it’s your friend or family member then of course you are going to have a simple and strong reaction. It’s fine to try to explain away the badness, and there is some truth to what you wrote, but if someone just lost their cousin, or their daughter’s house was just bombed, they aren’t going to listen to you. That’s natural; that’s reality.

I said the same thing about people like you before the election, and I’ll repeat it again. The laser focus on single issue voters was and will always be mostly an excuse to blame someone else.

To look at it another way, if this one issue actually decided the election, why didn’t Harris change her strategy two months ago? … Maybe it’s because this wasn’t the determining issue. Or it was, and her staff was incompetent. Take your pick.

I understand the general feeling you’re presenting, but I encourage you to be far more precise. You said everyone lets their civic duty go, and that’s just not true. I know many people, including myself, who have tried hard to effect change for the past few years or decades. Basic honesty suggests that you shouldn’t diminish our existence simply because we didn’t get the results that you wanted.

Well yeah. Trump was campaigning on discrimination. I don’t know how you can measure what percent of it was racism and what percent of it was sexism plus a little bit of xenophobia and various other such b*******.

I do think there is hope for women candidates because there’s a lot of women in the country and you don’t need to get the majority of men to vote for you. If Harris or Hillary had a platform as good as Bernie Sanders, I think either of them could have won, easily. Of course that’s just my opinion, and the only way to actually find out would be to give that a go next time around.

I don’t think I agree with you about deficit spending because actually it’s not clear that some degree of a deficit is bad. The country does print its own money, so what you have written down in a spreadsheet might look scary but actually be less so.

In other words, what’s true for a business or for an individual is often not true for a country that has its own mint.

You’re not a very good troll are you. It’s well established that there are large numbers of corporate Democrats who will float social issues as important but tend to follow through very weakly.

You know, what happened to abortion? That’s an issue that we knew was coming 30 years ago. We were discussing it in the '90s. We knew that the Republicans were trying to poison the Supreme Court, and the Democrats just went along with it, pretending they were helpless when they had enough power to stop it.

And I could bring up other issues where the progressive stance was just ignored by the majority of Washington Democrats. There are so many major issues. Wars, banks, unions, monopolies, etc. But I don’t think you’re interested. I think you’d rather just do a little bit of name calling. Maybe I’m wrong, though. It’s happened before, happens all the time.

Well we know that’s not true. Harris herself was in fact a Harris voter, she had so many chances to take a clear stance on Palestine, and she waited until the very end to even try.

And you have no idea what the previous commenter has done with their life. It’s easy to say that someone on the internet never did anything other than vote third party or stay home, but you just don’t know. There are many wonderful human beings who don’t vote how we might appreciate but actually are working hard to make their community a better place.

I agree with you, but if you look at the above comment, so many downvotes indicate that many other people wildly disagree with you. They honestly believed that the election would swing on single issue Palestine voters, they swore up and down that was the case, and I don’t think they’re going to take a look in the mirror tomorrow.

That’s just not true. You have no idea what the people who stayed home would have done if they were forced to vote. You have no idea how the campaign would have turned out if Harris had tried to win the popular vote.

Yeah that could be true, or it might also be true that people don’t like corporate Democrats. Or maybe other issues are important. Maybe Harris was weak on Palestine. Maybe it mattered that the old man took so long to get himself out of the race. Maybe the fact that felons can’t vote played a role. Maybe the electoral college was a factor.

Wait a second, we can go on and on and come up with all of these reasons that you don’t think matter at all, but everyone else knows they do.

If you have a friend or family member, living or dead in Palestine, how could you vote for her? Even knowing Trump would probably be worse, it’s hard to imagine the pain it would cause to choose her name, knowing what she supported, and would have continued to encourage.

(Others mentioned other reasons, and I won’t repeat theirs.)