#Election Day 2012

[barbiewds]

I can’t believe there are only 5 days left until Election Day 2012! A special thanks to all the dolls who downloaded a glam-paign button to show their B Party support. Can’t wait to hear more of your fab views before the big day!

[forgetful-nerd]

I’ve got the feminine urge to douse myself in glowing (possibly radioactive) chemicals, crawl down into the NYC sewers, and wait out the next four years.

[soft-girl-musings]

it's been 11 years and i don't think many (if any) mcu projects are nearly as quotable as the avengers

like they've been trying for a decade but you just can't replicate that

[gobbluthbutagirl]

i remember doing the mock election in school in second grade(2004) but i have no idea who i voted for for president because my main memory of that event was just going through the entire down ballot picking any name that sounded like it might belong to a woman. then in 6th grade(2008) we did the mock election and i voted for obama on purpose. and i think he actually won at my school and let me tell you. the rednecks were NOT HAPPY!

[fairytalesandfandoms]

after what feels like a hiatus of sorts (and I don't mean the holiday I just came back from) I am back on my superhero BS

no one is safe

[cooking-with-hailstones]

This isn't even slightly an exaggeration though

I was on exchange at an international school in INDIA. One of the American girls at this INTERNATIONAL. BOARDING. school asked me if I was a Democrat or a Republican. And she was completely baffled and shocked that I said "neither??? I'm not American??"

To reiterate. This girl was one of maybe 5 American students at this school. Which was mostly Indian, Tibetan, Nepali, and Korean students. There were Italians and Germans and Russians and Afghani and Bangladeshi and French and Canadian students here. And she was asking everyone if they were Democrat. Or Republican.

everyone in the world is either a democrat or a republican. everyone in the whole wide world is a democrat and a republican and america is the largest and most populous country in the world and america is easily the most culturally diverse country in the world because the middle class white people in my state (like a little country) are very different than the middle class white people over there (another little country, once more called a "state") and you could never understand how bad it is in america, the main country in the world. where are you from again? it's bad in america and america is bad but the way that america is run is the only way a country could possibly be run unfortunately. i don't like it but it's the only right way for a country to be run and you don't get it because the main victims of the main country are all here and you aren't. where are you from again? they never told me about that place. i don't think you get that real people live in america. probably because you're a republican. real people live in america and real people are hurt by america but what can you do? god said america has to be like this. god said this because god is real so god is american. you don't get it because you're over there and we're all here in america, the realest country in the world. where are you from again? how can you talk like this with what's happening in america? you're a democrat, right? where are you from again? my country is so large it stretches over yours and presses down hard. it's not my fault that they never told me about that place. my country covers the world. you don't understand how bad this will be for real people in the real world, the first world, the only world. they never told me—where in america are you from again?

[socialistexan]

Not only is it not true that trans issues are not "80-20" (or 90-10 like Gavin Newsom has said), even the most unpopular trans topic (trans girls in girls sports), the number of support

It's only when ask exclusively Republicans do you get to 80-20 or 90-10, which says much more about Yglesias and Newsom

Regardless, the numbers we see now have moved against trans rights because Republicans have been on an all out blitz against trans people. Hitting us every. single. day. $215 million in anti-trans ads in the past few months of 2024 alone.

And Democrats offered no counter messaging. Zero. No defence. No rebuttal. Not even empty slogans. Kamala Harris didn't mention us on the campaign trail, prominent Democrats actively jumped on with Republicans.

We have a generation of democratic politicians and consultants who believe public opinion is a force of nature, unable to shaped by mere human hands. It must be followed and acquiesced to.

But when they say things like that, remember just 30 years ago, Gay Marriage was an 70-30 issue. Because of the collective effort of millions of people fighting like hell - most of them not elected officials or pundits or political consultants - we moved that to a majority opinion by 2012. Now it's 70-30 in OUR favor.

We will win this with or without them, and don't come crawling to us in 15 years and say you were with us the whole time when we do.

Don't let the bastards win includes people like Yglesias and Newsom.

[batshit-auspol]

So a bit of background first for our international followers: Clive Palmer is one of Australia's many mining billionaires who like to meddle in our country's politics, and as such he is utterly despised by all of Australia.

Picture for context:

He is most commonly known online by the title "Fatty McFuckhead", (problematic as it may be) because he tried to sue a youtuber for $500,000 for calling him that - and he lost. So the name stuck.

Up until his most recent foray into parliament, the legally certified Fuckhead was best known for his batshit business ventures, such as attempting to build "The Titanic 2" (failed) and trying to build a dinosaur theme park (also failed, but at least nobody got eaten by a T-Rex in this one).

For a very long time Clive played the role of sugar daddy to Australia's largest conservative party, the ironically named Liberal Party, until they had a falling out in 2012 after Clive claimed there was too much money influencing politics (lol), at which point he started his own party, days after saying he totally quit and wasn't fired and he only left because he didn't want to be a distraction.

His initial run at parliament was actually kinda successful, with Palmer's group winning 4 seats, plus a member from the "Motoring Enthusiasts Party" joined them too after accidentally getting elected and not knowing what the fuck to do.

Despite this initial success however, Palmer's party (which ran on basically no platform other than "I'm rich") hit an iceberg (titanic 2 achieved) and seven elected state and federal politicians quit within the first year.

By the time the next federal election rolled around, only one Palmer party candidate was still running for re-election. The most successful of this group - Jaquie Lambie - quit to sit as an independant and is still in parliament today.

Here she is with a painting of herself strangling Clive (she sells signed copies of this)

And here the senator is posting about liking sausage:

Anyway, we're getting to the point: which is the yellow posters. By the 2016 election, just two years after forming, the party was in complete freefall. It won just 0.01% of the vote at their second election, and it was announced shortly after that Clive was quitting politics and the party was being shut down. Australia breathed a sigh of relief.

It was, of course, short lived.

Clive, in desperate need of attention, restarted the party for the 2019 election, fielding candidates in every seat and spending $60 million in advertising in an attempt to win votes.

Every single candidate lost.

It was in this campaign however that Australia really started to fall out of love with Palmer, because most of that $60 million went towards putting up the world's least compelling marketing billboards on almost every single free space in the country.

For a good six months this was basically the only thing you would see in Australia if you went outside:

Clearly Graphic design is his passion. And yes, the genius did just straight up try and copy Trump's homework while changing a few words, hoping nobody would notice.

Very quickly these all got vandalised and it seemed the ad companies didn't care enough to replace them.

We could go on posting examples, there are thousands, but the best is definitely the one Ikea put up shortly after Clive lost the election:

In 2022, Clive's party contested the election AGAIN, this time also opting to send millions on spam text messages to every person in Australia begging for people to vote for him, as well as buying almost every youtube ad for a year, at the cost of $100 million.

He won a whopping one seat.

During this election Clive ran on an anti-lockdown, anti-vax platform with the slogan "freedom, freedom, freedom". That message, however, was slightly undermined when his goons, dressed in 'Freedom!' shirts, made national news for trying to beat up a protester who turned up at a rally dressed as an annoying text message, shouting "pay your workers" at Clive.

As if that wasn't bad enough, at another rally Clive knocked himself unconscious while trying to jump up on stage, and then a few weeks later was rushed to hospital with covid, while his anti-vax ads were still in regular rotation on TV, at which point it was also leaked to the press that Palmer had been alledgedly trying to buy Hitler's car.

Utterly humiliated, the party deregistered again shortly after the election.

Can't wait until he runs again in 2025.

Anyway, on the other "Clive tweeting Miss Kobayashi's Dragon" thing, we have no idea what that means but here's a screencap:

[thebreakfastgenie]

This is going to get me screencapped and ridiculed by leftblr but at this point I don't care.

The way people talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg is misogynistic. This post is not about the merits of her decision to remain in her seat. I've discussed that before and I'm happy to go through it again with anyone who is genuinely interested in the complexities of that situation, but for the sake of this post, I am not arguing that it's unreasonable to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that the country would be a in a better position today if Ginsburg had retired in 2012. The issue I want to address is how people talk about it.

People who blame Ginsburg for the current state of the Supreme Court tend to throw around words like greedy, selfish, and ambitious, echoing a familiar form of misogyny. Ambition is only bad when women demonstrate it, and women in politics are regularly punished for ambition. Even more disturbingly, people tend to blame not just Ginsburg, but the women and girls who looked up to her. I've seen the "Notorious RBG" nickname derided as a cult of personality, when the reality is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a trailblazer and a role model to a lot of women and girls. I've seen leftists try to hide behind valid criticisms of some of Ginsburg's positions (and it should, but doesn't, go without saying that you can see someone as a role model without believing they are correct about every issue all the time) but you barely have to scratch the surface to see that the real complaint is that they think women who admire her are cringe. I don't know if people understand how significant she was; she was only the second woman on the Supreme Court and the first, Sandra Day O'Connor, was a conservative Reagan appointee. Even so, Justice O'Connor spoke about the significance of Justice Ginsburg joining her and reality that women faced in their position being more apparent when she could see it happening to someone else. It's the same old anti-feminist story of dismissing women and their desires.

This particular case rankles me because it's underscored by the complete silence about Anthony Kennedy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a judgment call about her health that didn't work out--and barely; she died four months before Trump left office. Anthony Kennedy, a supposed moderate justice who claimed to not want Roe v Wade to be overturned, retired in 2018, knowing full well Trump would replace him with someone who would overturn Roe v Wade. It was Kennedy's replacement, not Ginsburg's, that doomed Roe. The decision was 6-3. If Ginsburg had lived four more months, or retired in 2012 and been replaced with an Obama appointee, the Dobbs v Jackson decision would have been 5-4 in the same direction. Anthony Kennedy was replaced with Brett Kavanaugh, a white man who sobbed crocodile tears when confronted with credible allegations of sexual assault and ultimately faced no consequences. Anthony Kennedy let all of this happen and slunk off into his cushy retirement. Where is the anger for him? He's alive! Being angrier at Ginsburg than Kennedy makes absolutely no sense. There is no logic to explain it, only misogyny.

It doesn't escape my notice that the anger at Ginsburg goes hand-in-hand with blaming women for their own suffering as a result of the Dobbs decision and with blaming Hillary Clinton for the 2016 election, while making any excuse for not voting for her or deriding her for months. It's emblematic of a political system that does not care about women and despises women trying to speak up and make our issues known.

[acindra]

Joe Hills and ZombieCleo from Hermitcraft

Cleo Doll Notes: -I'm undecided on the permanent positioning of the snakes still so I haven't pulled in all of the yarn tails yet. -The dress design was partially based on @weaselmcdiesel's art here. -I did try to make hats for the snakes but they ended up looking too undefined. -I could not figure out how to show a rib hole in a stuffed doll without making the doll much much bigger.

Joe Doll Notes: -The first time I intended to make a Joe doll it was going to be based around the various arts from Joe winning the mcyt sexyman tourney but time got away from me. -This time I intended to make Joe in the puppet style when the juppet was made (with the mouth neck and everything) but then the court case happened. -This Joe doll is specifically based on how @judas-iscaryot drew xem in this art because I am absolutely enamored with the design.

Check out more of my creations here!

Bonus Sentimental Thoughts about Joe Under the Cut:

I've actually wanted to make Joe many times over the years since I found xem through Super Hostile in 2012. Xyr videos taught me how to play Minecraft and I've always wanted to commemorate that because it became such a big part of my life, I just didn't want to make Minecraft Steve with an @ on his shirt, yanno? Especially with how much xe has affected my attitude on life.

We talk about "keep jumping on boxes" a lot but the thing that always stuck out to me the most in the early years was Autumnification (and the other iterations of it). Just the concept that even in a static world you do not have to be beholden to that stasis- you can implement small changes to create a story or to do something nice for your community or even simulate the passage of time if you're willing to put in the effort. It really means a lot to me (especially with how the world is right now) to remember that even small changes build up into something bigger and can make a world of difference.

I hadn't been intending to make these dolls so soon but then the election happened and I found myself at a loss of how to handle it so I started crocheting. I'm so grateful to Joe (and Cleo) for streaming the TCG signing during those days. I'm almost never able catch the streams live nowadays (and xe has stopped letting us access vods, which I used to watch all the time) so I'm very glad I was able to listen to these ones because even if it was an awful realization how things were going it was comforting to know we aren't alone.

(Also don't get me wrong I have many sentimental thoughts about Cleo too I just wanted to share the Joe ones specifically because these dolls came about now due to xyr election day TCG signing stream)

[reasonsforhope]

Note: I super don't like the framing of this headline. "Here's why it matters" idk it's almost like there's an entire country's worth of people who get to keep their democracy! Clearly! But there are few good articles on this in English, so we're going with this one anyway.

--

2024 is the biggest global election year in history and the future of democracy is on every ballot. But amid an international backsliding in democratic norms, including in countries with a longer history of democracy like India, Senegal’s election last week was a major win for democracy. It’s also an indication that a new political class is coming of age in Africa, exemplified by Senegal’s new 44-year-old president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

The West African nation managed to pull off a free and fair election on March 24 despite significant obstacles, including efforts by former President Macky Sall to delay the elections and imprison or disqualify opposition candidates. Add those challenges to the fact that many neighboring countries in West Africa — most prominently Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but other nations across the region too — have been repeatedly undermined by military coups since 2020.

Sall had been in power since 2012, serving two terms. He declined to seek a third term following years of speculation that he would do so despite a constitutional two-term limit. But he attempted to extend his term, announcing in February that elections (originally to be held that month) would be pushed off until the end of the year in defiance of the electoral schedule.

Sall’s allies in the National Assembly approved the measure, but only after security forces removed opposition politicians, who vociferously protested the delay. Senegalese society came out in droves to protest Sall’s attempted self-coup, and the Constitutional Council ruled in late February that Sall’s attempt to stay in power could not stand.

That itself was a win for democracy. Still, opposition candidates, including Faye, though legally able to run, remained imprisoned until just days before the election — while others were barred from running at all. The future of Senegal’s democracy seemed uncertain at best.

Cut to Tuesday [April 2, 2024], when Sall stepped down and handed power to Faye, a former tax examiner who won on a campaign of combating corruption, as well as greater sovereignty and economic opportunity for the Senegalese. And it was young voters who carried Faye to victory...

“This election showed the resilience of the democracy in Senegal that resisted the shock of an unexpected postponement,” Adele Ravidà, Senegal country director at the lnternational Foundation for Electoral Systems, told Vox via email. “... after a couple of years of unprecedented episodes of violence [the Senegalese people] turned the page smoothly, allowing a peaceful transfer of power.”

And though Faye’s aims won’t be easy to achieve, his win can tell us not only about how Senegal managed to establish its young democracy, but also about the positive trend of democratic entrenchment and international cooperation in African nations, and the power of young Africans...

Senegal and Democracy in Africa

Since it gained independence from France in 1960, Senegal has never had a coup — military or civilian. Increasingly strong and competitive democracy has been the norm for Senegal, and the country’s civil society went out in great force over the past three years of Sall’s term to enforce those norms.

“I think that it is really the victory of the democratic institutions — the government, but also civil society organization,” Sany said. “They were mobilized, from the unions, teacher unions, workers, NGOs. The civil society in Senegal is one of the most experienced, well-organized democratic institutions on the continent.” Senegalese civil society also pushed back against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to cling to power back in 2012, and the Senegalese people voted him out...

Faye will still have his work cut out for him accomplishing the goals he campaigned on, including economic prosperity, transparency, food security, increased sovereignty, and the strengthening of democratic institutions. This will be important, especially for Senegal’s young people, who are at the forefront of another major trend.

Young Africans will play an increasingly key role in the coming decades, both on the continent and on the global stage; Africa’s youth population (people aged 15 to 24) will make up approximately 35 percent of the world’s youth population by 2050, and Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion during that time. In Senegal, people aged 10 to 24 make up 32 percent of the population, according to the UN.

“These young people have connected to the rest of the world,” Sany said. “They see what’s happening. They are interested. They are smart. They are more educated.” And they have high expectations not only for their economic future but also for their civil rights and autonomy.

The reality of government is always different from the promise of campaigning, but Faye’s election is part of a promising trend of democratic entrenchment in Africa, exemplified by successful transitions of power in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over the past year. To be sure, those elections were not without challenges, but on the whole, they provide an important counterweight to democratic backsliding.

Senegalese people, especially the younger generation, have high expectations for what democracy can and should deliver for them. It’s up to Faye and his government to follow."

-via Vox, April 4, 2024

[dostoyevsky-official]

Trump administration disbands taskforce targeting Russian oligarchs

A memo from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued during a wave of orders on her first day in office but not previously reported, said the effort, known as Task Force KleptoCapture, will end as part of a shift in focus and funding to combating drug cartels and international gangs. The taskforce brought indictments against the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and TV tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev for alleged sanctions busting, and seized yachts belonging to the sanctioned oligarchs Suleiman Kerimov and Viktor Vekselberg. It also secured a guilty plea against a US lawyer who made $3.8m in payments to maintain properties owned by Vekselberg.

Trump Green-Lights Bribery and Corruption With New Executive Order

President Donald Trump has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause prosecutions of companies that bribe foreign government officials to win business. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been “stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States,” hurting American competitiveness, Trump wrote in an executive order signed Monday. [...] The order’s legality was not immediately clear. Generally, the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws” passed by Congress “be faithfully executed.” Presidents do have some enforcement discretion, but they cannot override laws, according to the ACLU. Major companies such as Goldman Sachs, Glencore and Walmart have all come under FCPA scrutiny, according to Reuters.

///

"It's going to mean a lot more business for America," Trump told reporters while signing the order in the Oval Office on Monday. Trump wanted to strike down FCPA during his first term in office. He has called it a "horrible law" and said "the world is laughing at us" for enforcing it. Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said FCPA made the United States a leader in addressing global corruption. (x)

///

“It sounds good on paper, but in practicality, it's a disaster,” Trump said. “It means that if an American goes over to a foreign country and starts doing business over there, legally, legitimately or otherwise, it's almost a guaranteed investigation indictment, and nobody wants to do business with the Americans because of it.” [...] Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., said Trump’s order “diminishes—and could pave the way for completely eliminating—the crown jewel in the U.S.’s fight against global corruption.” [...] In one of its most significant victories, the Justice Department announced Oct. 16, three weeks before Trump’s election victory, that mega-defense contractor Raytheon Company of Virginia would pay over $950 million to settle foreign bribery and related charges in a scheme to help foreign governments purchase PATRIOT missile systems and operate and maintain a radar system. In one of the schemes, Raytheon engaged in a campaign from 2012 and 2016 “to bribe a high-level official” within the Qatar government’s military “in order to assist Raytheon in obtaining and retaining business” from it, the DOJ said, citing admissions and court documents filed in the Eastern District of New York. [...] Raytheon’s “criminal schemes to defraud the U.S. government in connection with” the contracts “erodes public trust and harms the DOD, businesses that play by the rules, and American taxpayers,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division also said at the time. (x)

this is the most relentlessly pro-corruption administration in american history. the guiding animus seems to be how much corruption can we do, how can we help others get away with corruption, how can we halt justice, etc

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ryan Burge at Graphs About Religion:

What in the world happened in the 2024 presidential election? It’s a question I’ve been asked by dozens of media outlets over the last six months. But I had a big problem: no reliable data that would aid me in answering such a question. The exit polls, no matter what anyone tells you, should not be considered gospel. There are a number of fundamental flaws in their design that make it impossible to rely on them to construct an accurate portrayal of what actually happened on election day. Their real purpose? To fill air time on election night while the major networks wait for the results to pile again across the United States. But all that’s changed now and my goal over the next couple of months is to tell the story of the campaign between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris using data from the newly released Cooperative Election Study. This survey indicates that 22% of all American adults align with an evangelical denomination. Seventeen percent of the sample are white evangelicals and just over 5% are non-white evangelicals. Among those non-white evangelicals, 38% were Black and 28% were Hispanic.

It should come as no surprise that evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2024, because they gave him a tremendous amount of support in both 2016 and 2020. But, it’s noteworthy that Trump continued to make inroads among evangelicals - his share of the vote went from 70% to 75% in the last three elections. The Democrats have not done well at all with evangelicals. Their best effort was in 2012 when Obama got 30% of their votes. But Harris did slightly worse than Biden - 23% vs 25%. But it’s notable that Biden got the same share of the evangelical vote as Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of course, Trump’s real base of support is specifically among white evangelicals. In 2016, Trump’s vote share was no different than McCain in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012 - about 77%. But in 2020, Trump ran up the score just a bit - garnering 81% of the white evangelical vote. The data from 2024 says he continued to win over the white evangelical vote at 83% - the highest on record. However the breakdown of the non-white evangelical vote may tell the story of the 2024 election when it comes to religion. Republicans have historically struggled with this group of voters. In 2008, Obama enjoyed an 18 point advantage and that expanded dramatically in the next couple of election cycles. In 2012, the non-white evangelical vote was D+30 and it was D+25 in 2016. But then in 2020, Trump managed to make some inroads - getting back to 40% and narrowing the gap to 18 points. But look at 2024 - a huge shift. The non-white evangelical vote was essentially split in 2024 - Harris 49% and Trump at 48%. Harris lost at least ten points with this constituency - a huge blow. [...] There’s a lot going on in this graph but I think that the big narrative is how Trump just continues to make gains among evangelical voters. Between 2016 and 2024 he gained five points among yearly attending evangelicals, eight points among monthly attending evangelicals, seven points among weekly attendees and eight points among those who attended multiple times per week. However, Trump didn’t actually lose ground with those who attend less than once a year. What about those non-white evangelicals? I would direct your attention to the bottom right of the graph. Donald Trump made really sizable gains with the high attenders. Between 2016 and 2024, Trump’s share went from 33% to 47% among non-white evangelicals who attend church every week. He did thirteen points better among those who attend religious services multiple times per week. But there are also increases among yearly attenders and monthly attenders, too.

Ryan Burge writes in Graphs About Religion on the 2024 election post-mortem on the evangelical vote. While White evangelicals lopsidedly backed Trump, non-White evangelicals were nearly split [49% Harris to 48% Trump].

In previous elections, non-White evangelicals voted Democratic by a decent margin, but the margins were nearly wiped out, and that was driven mainly by Hispanic evangelicals swinging hard to the GOP.

[deadpresidents]

It's Presidential Debate Day and it's a historic one (and probably going to be the craziest one): -The first debate between two Presidents. -The earliest debate between two general election candidates ever. -The two oldest general election candidates ever (again). -The first debate between general election candidates to take place before the party conventions. -The first time a convicted felon has participated in a Presidential debate.

Previous Presidential debate matchups: •1960: Vice President Richard Nixon vs. Senator John F. Kennedy •1976: President Gerald R. Ford vs. former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter •1980: President Jimmy Carter vs. former California Governor Ronald Reagan •1984: President Ronald Reagan vs. former Vice President Walter Mondale •1988: Vice President George H.W. Bush vs. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis •1992: President George H.W. Bush vs. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton vs. Ross Perot •1996: President Bill Clinton vs. Senator Bob Dole •2000: Vice President Al Gore vs. Texas Governor George W. Bush •2004: President George W. Bush vs. Senator John Kerry •2008: Senator John McCain vs. Senator Barack Obama •2012: President Barack Obama vs. former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney •2016: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump •2020: President Donald Trump vs. former Vice President Joe Biden

[centrally-unplanned]

Let's see if I have one more election take in me:

I am deeply sympathetic to Sam Kriss's rage against the Democratic corpo-political shibboleth, and not just because we are both deeply enmeshed in the grand tradition of dissident Oxbridge-style cantankerous internet rants. He is right that Kamala was a weak candidate, for one. But more importantly, I still feel what he feels deep down. I remember the starry idealism of my halcyon youth, of believing that conviction, that vision, that the zeal only a platform birthed from authentic principles, tempered by struggle and sweat, would carry the day over crass, paint-by-polling-numbers incrementalism. When he describes Harris thusly:

"She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level."

I see my own reaction to her when she first stepped into the 2020 limelight, and low-key hating her for it. I feel his heart, for it is my heart.

But it is not my brain. Because I am not a teenager anymore, and his critique is fucking bullshit.

He says all this stuff like:

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy.

And how the electorate is seen as but ants from inside the towers of the Machine, like the Dems just invented "not running a primary" this time as a lark. As opposed to neither party in America ever having primaries against incumbent presidents! Because they are normally popular, and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do that! Could you imagine, launching a real primary against Obama in 2012? And possibly sabotaging his brand a bit for absolutely nothing? It is a reasonable policy, particularly when incumbents used to have an advantage for being so. Now they clearly don't, Biden was unpopular and too old, and the Dems took too long to realize it. A costly mistake, but it is a purely strategic error. Big orgs have inertia, and the Dems fucked up. It has nothing to do with an "allergy to democracy".

And Kriss can go off summarizing how the Harris campaign was offering voters nothing:

But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be. [...] Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters.

Which sounds neat, but he made it up! I remember Kamala's actual campaign speeches, ads, and platforms, which she repeated so monotonically in her tightly-scripted campaign appearances: protect abortion rights, expand the welfare state, provide better child care support, lower the cost of housing. And most importantly, she ran on Biden's record of a strong economy and promised to deliver more of it. What does even mean for this to not be a real platform? Beyond not having some synthesized, totalizing "Critique" of modernity that packages it all into a beautiful, systematizing little box.

Because I promise you, voters synthesize jack shit. None of this is why Harris lost - voters have made that pretty clear:

You can find other data ofc, this or that point varies, but the story is not opaque. They didn't like Biden! They didn't like his inflation. They didn't like immigration, or they didn't like his liberalism, and they thought Kamala was too similar. She had too much policy baggage. And she wasn't charismatic enough to dig herself out of that hole - no disagreement from me on that front.

Though even then, by that we mean she lost an election by ~3-4% margins after getting subbed in at the 4th quarter while down by ~8% in the polls. That ain't bad!

None of the voters who matter share Kriss's sensibilities, and he cannot hide his disappointment in that. So he pretends that Donald Trump, the guy who promised 20% tariffs on everything to fight inflation, is giving them a real vision:

That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them

I don't know man, I think swing voters just don't like the last four years and think 2019 was better. I don't think the promises of orgastic violence against democrats are why Trump won! Actually a bit of an unforced error on his part.

But since Kriss presumes to value democracy, that thesis can't hold - so the lack of reality delivering on what his vision for democracy should be is displaced onto Harris's mistakes. The voters can never fail you. You can only fail to elevate them with the right candidate. Which, tactically? Sure, why not. But you can leave the moralism at the classroom door.

This ties into our dreaded media discourse debate, so it is time to bring in another explainer, by Michael Tomasky:

The line-by-line isn't interesting here; instead I want to focus on this quote:

Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

To which the immediate reply is: my dude, what are you talking about??

A 56 percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results through false claims of voter fraud, including 40 percent who believe he is “definitely guilty.” Republicans are less united than Democrats. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats believe Trump is guilty, while nearly 7 in 10 Republicans think he is innocent. Among independents, nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.

You know how when you ~13 years old, and you have that friend who is just old enough to start taking Dungeons & Dragons books filled with splash art of succubi into the bathroom with him, but not yet old enough to get that "talking to girls" is an acquired skill? And they are blatantly, openly salivating over the first chick in the 7th grade class who discovered what power the combination of a camisole and a push-up bra holds over the male gaze? And she just completely ignores his faltering attempts at ~casual conversation~, so his brain script-cycles through its backlog of tween sitcom plots until it lands on, "Hey, what if I confess to her? Then she will know about my feelings!"

And you have to pull him aside and gently explain that, bro. She knows. That is not your problem.

Kriss is too intelligent a thinker to not understand this, but our dear Tomasky - and so many like him - has stuck his 14-year-old head in the sand over this. Swing voters know Trump is a scumbag! They know he lost the election, they know he raped a few women in his day, they know he is a serial fraudster. Even a bunch of those Republicans who, in polls, go "oh it's all a Dem conspiracy"? They know too; they just have the decency to lie about it. How could they not? Every media outlet in the country has been repeating it for a fucking decade! I might think voters are morons but even I won't stoop this low; they have eyes and ears, they aren't illiterate.

They just don't care.

Not enough at least, not enough to make it the only thing they consider. And here is the rub, here is the grand mistake Kriss & Tomasky are making - they are at least somewhat right to not care. The height of the Democratic privilege is that they get to play this card because they don't have to deal with it being turned against them. Kamala is a political chameleon but she is a decent person. She would never take a bribe from a foreign government, she would never assault a coworker, she would never, ever, deny a free and fair election.

Which means you don't have to choose between voting for a rapist and voting for someone who is going to shove a bullshit interpretation of the 14th amendment down your throat via a stacked court to ban abortion nationwide, forever. Pro-life people think abortion is genocide against babies! Why are you surprised they aren't voting for the pro-baby-genocide person because she is nice? How sure are you that you would do the same when that is reversed? I guess those boycott-Harris-because-of-Gaza people got some cred, but I think we all agreed they were dumb, right?

This is the rub of why outsiders always have so much difficulty understanding how people like Berlusconi, Trump, Le Pen, etc, get so much vote share - they have no stake in the political struggle beyond the vague idea of democratic norms. It is easy to say "Italy, choose a non-crook!" when you don't have to live with the policy programme of the other guy. From the inside the price of those principles is far, far harder. It isn't shocking that most choose not to pay it.

This isn't to give voters like a moral pass - Trump's conduct is truly disqualifying, I would vote Republican if the shoe was on the other foot in this case. My point instead is that they generally won't as a simple fact of life, and blaming them is futile. If you have wound up in a situation where the political system has taken its pool of hundreds of millions of potential candidates and narrowed it down to two for the voters, and one of them has "launched a coup but will say go to hell to the inflation guy" as a bundled package, someone fucked up and it isn't the voters.

You need political elites to do their part in the system - Republicans never should have let Trump be their candidate in 2016. Open primaries with no organizational thumbs on the scale are a mistake, actually, allowing arbitrary minorities to generate subpar candidates. The decision to let Biden run again was, fundamentally, born from the same impulse - the Democratic Party had no leadership capable of telling him no, because they outsourced that job to "primaries". The Dems are not "allergic" to democracy; democracy is allergic to too much of itself.

But the cat is out of the bag now! These changes happened for a reason after all. Which I won't dig into here - I will keep my point as focused as something as sprawling as this can be. Voters will not save you, and you should not be disappointed when they don't. It was never their job.

[socialistexan]

I'll be honest, today might be the best and upbeat day the Democratic party has had since the 2012 election cycle.

Even the 2020 inauguration had a dour feeling hanging over it after January 6th. I genuinely can't remember a better day for the whole party. Bernie winning New Hampshire and Nevada were up there, but that was just for progressives, this was for the whole party.

I haven't felt the energy and unity of the party in a long, long time.