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What exactly were the Dems and GOP supposed to do about this? Candidates are selected ~democratically (I suppose it's fair to criticize the Democrats for just...skipping that step this election cycle); Trump developed a huge base in the GOP; "wokeness" has a decent base in the Democrat party. And many GOP "adults in the room" DID criticize Trump, and got ran out of the party for their troubles.
Let me try to answer my own question:
I think the effort to head off Trump needed to happen in the primaries for the 2016, and it needed to take on the form of some of those 1,492 GOP candidates dropping out earlier to consolidate the anti-Trump base of support, and it needed to take on the form of denouncing the foreign policy misadventures of the Bush-Obama years (which were becoming unpopular, but were still often not criticized in the GOP in 2016.) But it's not the fault of "the Republicans" that this happened; they couldn't force candidates to drop out on the optimal timelines any more than they could force Trump not to throw his hat in the ring.
Heading off wokeness, I think, is easier – Democrat elites could have been criticizing wokeness the same way that Republican elites often criticized Trump. But I think this risked seriously weakening the party. We see, now, that the party is critically divided over Israel/Palestine; attacking "wokeness" 4 or 8 years ago (particularly when it was on the ascent) would have run a similar risk, I think.
I guess my point here is that to the extent that it's the fault of "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" it's really just the fault of "the American people" for voting for them. Maybe this is your point.
I'm certainly interested in the potential upsides of RETVRNing to a time when the people didn't have much of a voice in major party's political choices. But until that happens, "the party" will be very much at the mercy of the voters.
What the Dems could have done about it is held their nose and refrained from ratfucking Bernie out of the nomination. But they just couldn’t stand his lukewarm populist vibes so he had to go.
I don't know why this claim keeps coming up, Bernie's path to the nomination required the rest of the pool to cooperate with him to split the vote of the majority position. When it came to having to win one on one he didn't. period. End of story. It's not ratfucking to notice you're splitting a position and stop doing that so someone with minority support who you don't agree with doesn't take the nomination.
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Bernie lost his primaries fair and square. More people simply voted for Hillary, and then Biden. If he couldn’t even win a dem primary he’d been slaughtered in the general anyway.
They were using a mass coordinated media smear campaign against him just like they did with Trump later. And they weaponized the already questionable superdelegate system against him.
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They 'ratfucked' him because they were fully aware a self-identified socialist would get crushed in an American election and stood the chance of poisoning their brand for an extended period of time.
As opposed to:
-The least popular candidate of the last 40 years who was selected entirely due intra-party backstabbing and seniority
-A terminally senile old man who only narrowly won due to a once in century pandemic, and then mentally flamed out so bad he had to drop out of the race
-An incoherent alcoholic apparatchik who somehow manages to be more unpopular than the 2016 candidate, who never won a primary or even placed in the top three, who only has a political career because they are good at giving head.
Gosh, it’s a good thing the Democrats didn’t get Bernie, or their reputation over these last few years might have taken quite a hit!
I would say that Bernie's ideas should have had a chance to be rejected by the electorate and consigned back to the doldrums of obscurity, but now the progressives have a bloody shirt in the form of a stab-in-the back myth that will haunt the Democratic party for generations to come.
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I'm not saying they weren't arrogant about their odds the other way. But Bernie would have gotten whooped by Trump both times, just from airing commercials with him personally identifying as a socialist between the DNC and Election Day.
There's a reason Democrats pretend very hard to be moderates no matter how left wing they are.
Really? I feel like some people on the SSC subreddit said that, had it been Bernie vs. Trump, Bernie would have cleaned it up.
In addition to his general popularity with radical youth, Bernie was a candidate for the very online.
Again, they would have run ads with him calling himself a socialist, all day, every day, for six months before the election and he would have lost by 5+ points.
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There was a very simple way to head Trump off at the pass; say you’re going to do something about illegal immigration, which is wildly unpopular with the body politic, and then fucking do it.
That’s it. That’s the whole game. That would have stopped Trump because he would have never developed his constituency, which wasn’t invented by him but simply ignored by both parties.
There was electoral gold in the streets just waiting to be picked up but a prospiracy driven primarily by rank class hatred blocked it. All it took was one defector.
This comparison may not generalise, but this always makes me think of the first collapse of One Nation over here.
For the unfamiliar, One Nation is/was an anti-immigrant Australian political party. It was founded in the 90s as an expression of protest over immigration, and took some bites out of the ruling centre-right Coalition's right flank. This continued... up until the Coalition adopted a hard-line policy on illegal immigration, communicated that (cf. the Tampa and Children Overboard, both in mid-2001), and by doing so completely smashed One Nation. Without their flagship issue, One Nation's other problems (corruption, incompetence, etc.) became more visible and they declined heavily.
You can defeat the populist/nativist surge - you just have to address the issues that are motivating them.
(One Nation have made a post-2016 comeback, rebranding as a more generic far-right or nationalist party. In the 90s they were basically an anti-immigrant party who worried that Australia was being "swamped by Asians". In the last decade they pivoted to anti-Islam for a bit, and then anti-wokeness, and are generally still flailing boobs. The larger issue remains - One Nation do well when there are issues that large segments of the electorate care about but which the major parties are not responsive to. One Nation are a symptom of political dysfunction. As with most far-right parties, then, it's foolish to try to attack them by attacking the party itself. You have to attack the underlying policy failures that give the party credibility. Once that's done the party's inherent weaknesses tend to come out.)
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