alt Hacker News> If half the voting population elects a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power, that's not the fault of the opposition.
Don't let the opposition off the hook: as you said they lost to "a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power." How does someone fuck up an election like that so badly? It should have been a slam dunk.
It's the fault of the opposition for not doing a better job (at all manner of political competencies). One thing I've noticed over the last ten or so years, is that Democrats/Liberals/Progressives are very averse to admitting to and learning from their own mistakes. They'd much rather focus on blaming someone else for their own incompetence.
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Factually, Harris as a candidate was orders of magnitude better than Trump: a boring, competent, left-leaning centrist. In a functioning society, a reactionary revolutionary like Trump -- complete with Project 2025 manifesto -- should have scraped off maybe 5-to-10% of the vote, almost regardless of his competition.
The problem wasn't really Harris, who got very close to half the vote. The problem is that half the voting population does not think that electing a fascist demagogue is that big of a deal, or compares favorably to electing a boring centrist. This suggests that our civic culture is fundamentally broken at the moment. You can't run a society like this!
You're kinda correct but making the mistake that the democratic party is a uni-party and not a vibrant political group made up of hundreds of different vying interests.
There is only one group to blame and it's the same group that has controlled the party since the 90s: neoliberals. Neoliberals do not have a vision of the future worth fighting for, more corporate control, so it's not hard to see when other opposing forces can simply offer something different.
It's the same problem we saw in the 1920s that lead to growing fascism: pushing for austerity, more corporate control over society, and deregulation are all things that help fascists and authoritarians thrive.
You sure are letting the U.S. voter off the hook here…