plenty of leftists liked the stuff biden was doing on the economy. the lesson is not that the left are ingrates its that tons of extremely-online self-branded American "leftists" are not actually leftists in any real way.
Reposted from
Joseph Fink
I think it's bad that Biden did a bunch of good leftist stuff with the economy, which resulted in exactly the stuff leftists say they want, and the result is that leftists continue to fall for right wing propaganda on this issue and insist it never happened.
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i.e. the Young Turks and their ilk.
It’s true that the Republicans and especially Vance kept hammering Biden and Harris over high price levels, but my guess is the vast number of people upset about price levels would not have been able to link them to a specific Biden policy /1
„Shit is too expensive. Biden is president so it’s his fault“ is admittedly not a very sophisticated policy argument /2
Most of the actual discussion of policy - aside from things like the child tax credit - have been much more in the „he wa dealt a shit hand and played it decently well“ line
Like
He did get those kudos *and then* October 7 happened and it seemed way less relevant for some reason
Neoliberalism has failed us. Democrats have failed to offer an alternative.
Free market economics is a cult.
What if it’s because the policies worked so a lot of people were feeling fine and so didn’t bother?
Get the politicians out of politics.
Get the politics out of politics.
No politics! Just people! Or maybe "The People!”
A Trump vote is just the most recent iteration.
https://www.clevescene.com/news/the-king-of-spin-1503534
remember the “dnc installed white noise machines to drown out bernie delegates” conspiracy theory? (they were wifi antennas)
and that the delegates’ major issue by far was TPP?
Biden failed to engender loyalty, let alone trust in his admin, and four years later there is no logical home for leftist nationally
Well tell you what, if you set it up so that a bunch more people can be accommodated in an emergency, we'll call you the commune's vanguard and give you a pass. 😁
Or just make it an introvert commune where no one has to interact, but there's still teamwork happening!
Which is an old lesson
You can always have friends visit.
The artist, Emily Carr, had a caravan where she lived with various pets, incuding a monkey named Woo.
In early 2020 just before shit/fan, I was walking a precinct to drum up support for a local school tax ballot measure.
It was the 5th or maybe 6th such measure I’d worked in support of in last 2 decades. That’s enough practice to know when a person really supports or…
1/
The zone I walked that year had a strong number of Bernie signs in yards, which I initially thought was a positive sign. Bernie fans are pro school funding, right? Right??
2/
Bernie fans are not pro school funding.
The responses from houses with Bernie signs were almost 100% negative. Most of those were the half hearted sure I support schools with no eye contact and quick door shut but a fair number were loud “no fucking way.”
3/
4/
5/5 finis
The NLRB did some good stuff but his econ policy was not direct enough (demonstrably!) and it's frustrating to be told, "You should be grateful he did anything you'd like."
I, a realist, am happy if things get incrementally better and relieved when things don't get worse.
What's bad is things getting worse, like now.
It's not as if the President says, "Give me something good, but not too good." If the legislature delivers "kinda good," that's what you get.
Incremental change is the most realistic expectation.
That wasn't direct enough?
You don't even have to like Biden! (I don't) but if you like good things happen, the last thing you want is cowardly democrats punished for doing it (or they won't next time)
They cared much less about anything progressive and more about attacking Dems.
Our lists usually consist of things like universal health care, rent control, regulation of banks, UBI, no genocide.
He didn't do much of anything on any of those fronts.
Yes, Trump is worse but that doesn't mean that Leftists are on your "team" when your ideology is firmly pro-capitalist and center-right by definition.
Also, being good for trade unionists and being good for labor aren't equivalent. There are entire sectors of the economy that are not allowed to organize.
Where is my $30/hr minimum wage, abolition of capitalism, universal healthcare, universal housing, and such? He barely did anything the actual left wants, he gave liberals some decent wins. Then he caved to BB and his genocidal regime.
Like the Trump voters who don't believe he'll do what he says and leftists defending neoliberal economics have a lot of similarities
Maybe you prefer price stability to higher employment and wages! But there's a word for that lol
(I guess this is back to "information environment.")
If i wasn't terminally online id have seen:
-Got a letter canceling my student loans then lol sorry
-money for kids then uhh nope, gone
-rent went up
-car insurance doubled
-food went up
-IDGAF about bridges/chips/carbon
What deliverism? For Intel?
My point was if i wasn't terminally online and understood the intricacies of our government, and instead was a normie, id have thought biden didn't “deliver” and instead my life got worse
I have had to explain to multiple people why Biden is the best president of our lifetime. They typically agree after hearing his record.
Also Manchin and Sinema should've been taken out back for the LBJ treatment on Day One.
The means existed but were not used. And that's part of the problem.
And their inability to consider that is damning all by itself.
Leftists & liberals interested in winning elections and governance should ignore those ones, I think.
IMO “leftists” wear the ideology like a fashion accessory, and feel safe to both gate keep AND abandon the position because they feel secure either way. They don’t have skin in the game.
I think his approach was largely correct and would have yielded results over a longer term, probably, but the electorate wants dramatic results, quickly.
https://bsky.app/profile/planetoffinks.bsky.social/post/3lbpk6jocyc2t
I think the way you get more progressive legislation is by building upon small but non-trivial wins, but that requires acknowledging wins that some (not all) won’t do.
But I guess posting through it will save us all.
When I took debate in college, what really got me was it wasn't about being right, it was about winning the argument.
They just got trump elected with Elon goddamnit.
I feel like most American have no idea what they just did... Y'all are seriously undermining this
You are very privileged to be ignorant of the impact such a thing would have.
Very. Very privileged.