Okay, cool. I’m glad I asked, instead of assuming it wasn’t genuine!
I’m not pointing the finger specifically at Biden, but I know there’s some debatable space even regarding him. I also think the rail strike is an example of bad publicity more than anything else. Biden actually intervened to stop the strike AND then pressed the rail companies to concede to the unions. It was actually a pretty big win, but it looked horrible to anyone who didn’t do the work to pay attention to the whole thing (which is damn near everyone).
The things I’m thinking about are party-wide, and they aren’t all recent. Some of it is clumsy communication, though that’s bad because it’s usually due to a big disconnect between policy-makers and regular folk. But, some of it is actual screw-ups that we never even tried to stop or reverse, or even admit was a mistake in the first place.
The Economy vs the economy (recent): Democrats are really proud of themselves for their stock market performance, and all signs point to them actually fixing up the capital-E Economy quite a lot from the devastation (and time bomb legislation) of Trump’s term. But most of us are actually concerned with the lower-case-e economy, which sucks right now.
Grocery prices shot through the roof. My bill went from $800 to $2k/mo over the last few years. We aggressively cut back but things are much leaner now. We can’t eat out anymore. Most of this isn’t inflation, it’s just people charging more, but it’s gone completely unmentioned for years.
Housing prices also shot through the roof. Again, because of megacorporate bad behavior, with giant companies buying up billions in houses and just… raising the prices. Things were already bad here, but this has been a catastrophe.
This and a bunch of other stuff collaborates to create an impression to folks that inflation is high and the economy sucks. But, technically, those cost of living setbacks aren’t actually due to inflation, and technically they aren’t “the economy”. So the Democrat message of “the economy is great!” has a lot of people pretty angry and frustrated.
NAFTA, and the globalization trend (decades of bad policy, here): Huge swaths of legislation which directly resulted in the loss of domestic industry and handouts to megacorporate / Wall St. bodies can be directly traced to Democrat policies. Seriously. It’s not like all policy can be predictably good or bad over a long period of time, but this specifically has never seemed good. Factories began to close domestically the instant NAFTA passed legislation, and we’ve never really recovered.
The problem here is that this is largely due to the Neoliberal / Third Way movement of Democrats. This is a pseudo-conservative corporation-friendly movement that led to Clinton’s huge sweeps in the 90s, and because of that dramatic success, Democrats see corporate lobby/donors as a core pillar of the party now. In fact, the same folks that pushed Harris’ incredibly disappointing play for “swing voter” Republicans are part of this pillar. They aren’t “borderline” conservatives, they are literal conservatives.
Fundamentally, I’m not saying “Democrats are BAD!”, I’m saying that these disconnects and pro-corporate stances are real. To look at the Democrats and feel like they aren’t sticking up for workers isn’t irrational. It makes a lot of sense.
To see what a pro-worker party might be like, think about Bernie (who seems real damn frustrated with the party right now) - as an independent, he establishes a firm coalition with Democrats in order to serve the purpose of mitigating Republican harm, but his entire slate of concerns are so completely different from Democrats writ large that they seem like totally different platforms. And, well, honestly, they are.
Okay, cool. I’m glad I asked, instead of assuming it wasn’t genuine!
I’m not pointing the finger specifically at Biden, but I know there’s some debatable space even regarding him. I also think the rail strike is an example of bad publicity more than anything else. Biden actually intervened to stop the strike AND then pressed the rail companies to concede to the unions. It was actually a pretty big win, but it looked horrible to anyone who didn’t do the work to pay attention to the whole thing (which is damn near everyone).
The things I’m thinking about are party-wide, and they aren’t all recent. Some of it is clumsy communication, though that’s bad because it’s usually due to a big disconnect between policy-makers and regular folk. But, some of it is actual screw-ups that we never even tried to stop or reverse, or even admit was a mistake in the first place.
The Economy vs the economy (recent): Democrats are really proud of themselves for their stock market performance, and all signs point to them actually fixing up the capital-E Economy quite a lot from the devastation (and time bomb legislation) of Trump’s term. But most of us are actually concerned with the lower-case-e economy, which sucks right now.
This and a bunch of other stuff collaborates to create an impression to folks that inflation is high and the economy sucks. But, technically, those cost of living setbacks aren’t actually due to inflation, and technically they aren’t “the economy”. So the Democrat message of “the economy is great!” has a lot of people pretty angry and frustrated.
NAFTA, and the globalization trend (decades of bad policy, here): Huge swaths of legislation which directly resulted in the loss of domestic industry and handouts to megacorporate / Wall St. bodies can be directly traced to Democrat policies. Seriously. It’s not like all policy can be predictably good or bad over a long period of time, but this specifically has never seemed good. Factories began to close domestically the instant NAFTA passed legislation, and we’ve never really recovered.
The problem here is that this is largely due to the Neoliberal / Third Way movement of Democrats. This is a pseudo-conservative corporation-friendly movement that led to Clinton’s huge sweeps in the 90s, and because of that dramatic success, Democrats see corporate lobby/donors as a core pillar of the party now. In fact, the same folks that pushed Harris’ incredibly disappointing play for “swing voter” Republicans are part of this pillar. They aren’t “borderline” conservatives, they are literal conservatives.
Fundamentally, I’m not saying “Democrats are BAD!”, I’m saying that these disconnects and pro-corporate stances are real. To look at the Democrats and feel like they aren’t sticking up for workers isn’t irrational. It makes a lot of sense.
To see what a pro-worker party might be like, think about Bernie (who seems real damn frustrated with the party right now) - as an independent, he establishes a firm coalition with Democrats in order to serve the purpose of mitigating Republican harm, but his entire slate of concerns are so completely different from Democrats writ large that they seem like totally different platforms. And, well, honestly, they are.