They shouldn’t control that much wealth anyway, even if it’s not ‘real’ money

It’s not about me. It’s about how others think, and they don’t necessarily think wealth is a problem.

But it is a problem, so nerfing your messaging and platform in such a way as to avoid addressing it ends up making things worse (not to mention that you end up losing the people who know it’s a problem and are frustrated at the constant running away)

I think you overestimate Americans & don’t know how many think unlike you.

Rubber, glue

At some point, democrats need to start making the case for their platform instead of tailoring it to what they think voters believe. If we believe wealth inequality is the source of the issue and needs to be addressed, then we need to go to bat for that platform instead of shying away from it because some people have been propagandized into believing it’s communist to talk about. Constantly running away from that platform makes it look more like democrats actually endorse the inequality

Merely complaining that someone is rich is oblique

“Nobody should have so much money they can buy their way into a presidential cabinet position”. That’s not oblique, that’s straight to the point

Complaining that they exercise undue power over you & cheat you out of a fair shot makes the point directly.

“This person is abusing power” vs “This person used their wealth to fuck you over”. Both are simple messages, but one is addressing the actual issue while the other is complaining about who is exercising power and not how or why they have that power to begin with

Democrats will not win on the messaging being proposed, because their own base is getting frustrated with the double-speak and impatient with the lack of progress. You can blame those people if you want but it won’t make them any more likely to win.

The… cognitive meaning? Wtf is a ‘cognitive’ meaning?

There is some reason to think criticizing power (elites stacking the deck in their favor like unelected rulers) is more likely to broadly appeal to those folk

And how do you think those elites are stacking the deck?? I think you’re intentionally dismissing something that most americans understand extremely well - that the ‘elite’ are able to stack the deck in their favor because they have obscene wealth. Elon bought his way into trump’s circle and fucked with Wisconsin’s election using his immense fortune and influence. That isn’t a mystery, not even to diehard conservatives.

The other issue with ‘kings’ is that in a MONarchy, there is only one monarch, one King. Even the people you’re claiming to speak for know that the problem extends well beyond Trump, and thinking of Elon and Bezos and Zuck and Gates all as Kings of their own kingdom unnecessarily complicates what is otherwise a clear quid-pro-quo relationship between them and a government they are supposed to be subservient to. Oligarchs may be ‘officially’ less than the governing structure they’re a part of, but they are the defining feature of a government by the name of oligarchy.

I also see an argument for a different tact & same results in rustier, less urban states.

I have family in those states, and even though we have differing voting habits, they have always shared my resentment against those with ill-begotten obscene wealth and influence. It is often one of the few things we have in common politically, and I think democrats just don’t want it to be true.

“People shouldn’t be able to have that much money when everyone else is struggling”

You’re right, that is completely unrelatable, who would ever think like that

People really like first not admitting they didn’t read, then doubling down on absolute nonsense around here.

You speaking for yourself there?

There’s a reason why Marx coined a term referencing ‘dictatorship’ that included elements like ‘direct democracy’. He sought to exclude the capital class entirely from it, and so referred to it as dictatorship ‘of the working class’. Marx specifically saw liberal democracy as one designed for the borurgeoisie, and so using that as a basis of comparison for a socialist project is counter-productive

When liberals accuse China of being a ‘dictatorship’, they’re pointing to the parts of China’s democracy that differ from western democracy that specifically have to do with the inclusion of the capital class. Even a single-party state can be of the working-class and have direct-democracy, as is China’s.

You’re free to disapprove of China’s system of government (I have scruples about it myself), you simply can’t reasonably argue they are a dictatorship by any modern standards(at least, in no other way than in Marx’s own use of the term).

Far from ‘approving’ of their system of governance, though, their state-controlled economy is definitionally socialist.

I don’t see anything wrong with talking about the oligarchs as “kings” as well. I think that language could work just as well with Zuck, Bezos, etc. as it would with Trump.

I disagree, I don’t think people would resonate with that language as applied to other, ‘good’/quiet billionaires like Gates, Buffet, or Page - in fact I think that’s exactly the point of swapping terms because it sounds more specific to how those billionaires utilize their wealth and influence instead of the fact that they have it to begin with.

It’s the guy who is trying to play king

yea… except he’s just the end result of a far broader problem

This is exactly the concern with hand-wringing over semantics- the democrats aren’t losing because they aren’t being vocal enough about their opposition to Trump, they’re losing because they’re actively avoiding the root problem.

Pick another word for oligarchs if you want, so long as the attention is being drawn to the root problem of wealth inequality and the billionare class. Don’t just abandon the issue because you’re afraid it looks like you might be critiquing our economic model when that’s absolutely what we’re doing

Yea but opposing ‘kings’ isn’t even close to the problem of ‘oligarchs’

One is very clearly a result of a capitalist system, the other is a looser critique of authority generally.

If it was really not ideologically tilted she’d suggest ‘billionaire’ instead of oligarch, but the dems are afraid of losing the support of the 'good billionaires

A ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has elements of democracy, but it is explicitly not the same as a liberal democracy (nor is it really the same as a straight-out dictatorship). It’s possible that some people prefer the Trotsky version of socialist states (one where multiple socialist parties might compete for power), but the ML single-party version is still very much within marxist theory.

The Chinese political system is democratic, just not in the same ways a western democracy might be. Western liberals seem to either not know (?) how the Chinese system works, or miss-understand what ‘democracy’ means as it pertains to Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Either way, @explodicle@sh.itjust.works seems to be operating under a liberal-democratic understanding of democracy, but that’s really not a given in marxist theory.

on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party

Yup.

Yes, that famous part of Das Capital where marx coins the term “democracy of the proletariat”

The workers control the means of production?

More than 60% of the Chinese economy is state owned and controlled, and as of I think a year ago they democratized Chinese company structures by mandating assemblies of employee representatives. The state having majority control and direction of the Chinese economy and market is the primary complaint of western trade partners, I don’t know why people are always surprised by this.

I get that people really do not like the authoritarian aspects of the Chinese government, but state-controlled economies are pretty much the exact intent behind ‘worker-controlled means of production’ in marxism.

China is very much a socialist economy

But what I can’t stand is commenters saying that anyone and everyone possessing as much money as him is equally evil. Basically the equivalent of so many school “Zero tolerance” policies.

The existence of billionaires while millions of people are starving and homeless is the evil those commenters are pointing to.

Almost as if those people are upset about a system that valorizes and encourages immense wealth inequality, and not, like, which people get to be billionaires.

It’s not a rhetoric that was used before that much. Electing republicans was always a little bit correlated with stupidity but not like: Go full Trumpler/Hitler, full on conspiracy

You must not be old enough to remember the 2008 election, then. People were accusing Obama of being the literal antichrist, and was among the first to prominently feature conservative conspiracy theorists on national news (Don was calling in to talk shows to accuse Obama of being a Kenyan Muslim and demanding his birth certificate, then his long-form).

Maybe in hindsight it’s hard to make a comparisons, but every election since then has represented the same choice between ‘sane’ democrats and ‘crazy’ conservatives. You can only have so many of those before they start to feel like the norm.

It’s because the democrats simply cannot fund-raise on the kind of populist progressive policy Americans actually want.

Democrats are up schitt’s creek without a paddle - they can’t fund-raise without the support of the large donor-class, and their increasingly populist progressive base are simply not satisfied by the kind of economic policies those donors are desperate to preserve.

If democrats stay this course they will never hold more than 45% of congress again and only win the white house maybe once every 3 or 4 terms.

This was one of, if not the easiest, election we’ll ever have in our lives

If you honestly believe this then the next 50 years are going to be a WILD ride for you

The bottom line is America isn’t going to jeopardize their allegiance with Israel. They’re our most important ally in the Middle East.

Liberals will never, for an instant, ask themselves why Israel is such an important ally - not even when confronted with a choice between standing behind them literally committing a genocide and allowing a felon rapist take office.

‘We can’t abandon our ally’ is the most lazy lie the state department has ever successfully sold their citizens completely unchallenged right next to ‘we’re looking for WMD’s’

Biden had been sitting below 40% approval basically since 2022, they had plenty of time to realize they needed a stronger candidate (OR he had plenty of time to address the concerns of protestors). Instead he waited until the last minute and he pressured Harris to keep his platform.

If you want someone to blame, i’d start there.

It’s sad that people rather don’t vote, and accept the fact that the states drift towards an autocratic system, than just vote for the lesser evil (or engage themselves politically).

Maybe it’s sad, sure, but it’s far from unusual. In the US, average eligible voter turnout fluctuates between 50-65%. In 2020 it was 65.3% (the highest ever recorded), and in 2024 it was 63.5%, the second-highest. Eligible voters end up not voting for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest reason is usually because they (rightly) feel like the choice has little actual impact on their day-to-day life. Even if you’re relying on the ‘most important election of our lifetime’ motivation (the same rhetoric that’s been used for the last 5-6 elections at least), many of those people are white middle-lower-class adults - those people don’t believe they’d be the ones targeted by mass deportations or political imprisonment anyway. Granted, that’s a short-sided reason not to vote, but let’s not act surprised by low-income americans having a bit of an optimism bias (since they are consistently the largest pool of eligible voters).

You simply cannot expect every eligible voter to turnout for you if you aren’t giving them compelling reasons to do so. But even in relative terms, the 2024 election was still only 1.7% behind the highest-ever turnout for a presidential election in our lifetime - american voters certainly did turn out, and many who abstained from voting were engaged. The problem is that they no longer believe the democrats actually represent their interests, and so went shopping elsewhere or didn’t vote at all (or split their ticket). Blaming those voters without asking yourself why there were more of them this election is nothing more than political masturbation.

And just a reminder that the democratic party does actually have members in its caucus that have a higher than 60% approval rating nationwide, but for some reason they chose not to run those candidates