Yeah but this time we surely got’em, right? Maybe if we compromise on voting rights and the Supreme Court they’ll be convinced. If not, let’s keep compromising until that changes.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. - Umberto Eco, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism, 1995
They are doing the same thing with Biden. Watch out! The Biden is getting away with massive crimes and using the deep state to take over the country, but at the same time, Biden is a doddering old fool who is too senile to accomplish anything.
He wants to convince independents and light blue/light red voters that he is doing something because it’s his weakest issue and he is currently being accused of complacency/making the border worse. He’s not trying to go further right than Trump.
He is going to the right though, and a clear issue here is that many independents are actually on the left of. democrats. We’re not a cohesive group or a “party”.
And he is fucking over the border. We know what we need to solve it- increased funding for more clerks/judges/legal aid
But that’s not funding for their salary raises/expenses, or the corporate/billionaire mega donors subsidies and tax breaks. So fuck even trying that.
It’ll put the DNC in competition for the conservative votes, while leaving progressives free to form a legitimate party that’s actually progressive.
For the short term, it means the republicans are just going to further into fascism while the dnc progresses to fascist lite (exactly where the repugnants used to be.)
The only hope is if one or the other parties fails and/or progressives to finally figure out that “lesser of two evils” is exactly how we got here in the first place
I’m going to be honest, there is zero chance progressive are going to form a legitimate competitive party anytime soon, definitely not because of this. I’m willing to put down money on it.
To be clear I do not endorse how the Democrats are handling this. But if we’re talking about political calculus, they are not going to see a large migration to a third-party over this. And certainly not to Republicans. In a few years most people won’t even remember Biden did this and those that do aren’t going to punish a different candidate for Biden’s executive order anymore than they’d punish a GOP president for Trump’s.
I’m not really sure we’re in a position to make a hot take about the political landscape 20 years from now, but I certainly don’t think this executive order is going to be remembered by then. If you argument is “the Democrats are going in a direction that might create a third-party 20 years from now,” well, there’s no way to really prove or refute that right now and that’s a pretty broad bar so sure it’s possible. This is definitely a far cry from your previous comment.
20 years from now, they won’t remember this specific act. But it doesn’t change the shift, and people will remember the broad strokes.
Not sure how that’s a far cry. Short term, democrats are going fascist lite as republicans are full on embracing fascism.
Progressives (and the centrists being passed by,) are either going to continue voting for the lesser evil (which is increasingly fascist…) or they’re going to find other answers.
I just think it’s unproductive, has no basis (feel free to show me some data points on this truly), and requires no risk on your part to make this prediction. I could easily say “based on the long lasting impact of Bernie Sanders just entering the election for a few cycles I predict the democrats will be a far more progressive party in 20 years.” It’s equally valid and safe because like you, I don’t really need to show anything to back it up. I’m just kind of gesticulating at what happened from 2008-2016 with bernie.
I mean this really and truly: feel free to make all the predictions you want, and I hope you push the Democratic party to be more progressive or are currently working to get progressive candidates on ballots. These are good things to do. But these kinds of discussions we are having are really not productive. They’re not even academic or interesting. They’re just so vague and long-term and unsupported that we’re just kind of throwing darts at a bar. Which I mean sure it’s fun I guess but at some point you need to start keeping score and having a basis for how you’re throwing them unless you’re truly just there to kill time, which does not seem like the case for you. You seem passionate about this and like you want to have productive discussion.
He’s trying to prove that using policy on a group that goes on vibes. They won’t be convinced until he starts using undeniably racist statements they’ll insist isn’t racist.
Biden is limiting migrant crossings to 2,500 per day in an attempt to keep migrants from being homeless in sanctuary cities.
Trump forcibly separated parents from children, deported the parents and detained the children in facilities where they were physically and sexually abused, while outlawing immigration of Muslims and “suspected Muslims.”
And this is why the rules based international order was always a farce. Only third world countries need to play by the rules, while western powers just override them and do as they please.
Fucking Biden, you literally need to do one thing correct to beat Trump. Stop giving Israel aid. For some reason people are under the assumption that Trump wouldn’t be doing worse things for the people of Palestine, but at this point Biden’s on the hot seat. Stop calling Netan-baboon Bibi, cut off his aid and let the courts bring him to justice for his crimes against Palestine. An Israeli version of Hitler isn’t a better version of Hitler, just a repackaging. Not to mention that prior to all his actions recently the dude is an absolute piece of shit who has skirted justice in his own country for years by maintaining his vice grip on the Premiership (which is exactly the playbook Trump hopes to follow if re-elected)
Is this true though? Don’t many liberals support Israel? Are there actual polls that show Biden would benefit from taking a stance against Israel? Genuinely asking.
Seems to me that the people who support Israel unconditionally fall into two groups: The people who’d never vote for him no matter what he does (Republicans), and people who have no choice but to vote for him no matter what he does (Democrats). He can’t gain any votes by giving aid to Israel.
Millions of Palestinians are forced to live under Israeli military rule but are not entitled to citizenship or suffrage. If they were of a different ethnicity (Jewish), they would be given those rights. It’s also not a geographical distinction, settlers in the West Bank are given full rights while Palestinians living nearby are not.
Elect a group of far right religious criminals to take over your government, cancel all future elections, and then spend sixty years plundering your vast natural resources, corrupting all institutions and foreign relations, and sending suicide bombers down here, and we can see about that.
This didn’t happen over night. Gaza had chance after chance after chance. Even now: well meaning people there could point out the tunnels, point out Hamas.
No? Okay, they’re obviously comfortable enough with the status quo. Sorry they are brainwashed into being useful idiots for terrorists. Their deaths are clearly on Hamas’s hands.
These lies would be more believable if Israel wasn’t also settling and committing genocide in the West Bank, despite the lack of Hamas. Or if they hadn’t been committing genocide since before Hamas ever existed.
Biden’s really willing to fuck around and let trump win…
All he has do is chill out for 6 fucking months and keep his hands clean, but this is how he’s always responded to people challenging him.
What sank his 88 run wasn’t the plagiarism, it was how he treated reporters that would ask him about.
The more people that protest for him to stop funding a genocide, the more he’s going to lash out like this, and the more voters will equate him to trump.
Which is incredibly dangerous when the most common reason for voting Biden is:
Biden is betting he loses more supporters if he doesn’t defend Israel. I hope beyond hope that he’s right, but I’m not so sure.
The larger problem is that Biden doesn’t seem capable of nuance. This is a complex situation, and it would be cool to have a leader who can acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist, and has also gone too far in it’s war on the Palestinian people.
There are no heroes in this story. Nobody occupies the moral highground. Innocent blood is being spilled, and the people suffering have no agency in the conflict. It’s just politics and victims of political violence.
It’s a safe bet, by a lot, and the calculus doesn’t really change no matter how much nuance you apply, because with every statement you’re always trading some nebulous number of single-issue pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist voters for a much larger group of pro-Israel/Zionist voters.
Then you have folks like the OP who are essentially working as a thinly-veiled propaganda arm of Hamas/Russia/etc., and it really muddies the signal-to-noise analysis on the issue.
It’s a problem for Biden, but there’s no winning. Trump doesn’t have the problem only because he’s not the incumbent right now, so he can hem and haw and try to deflect from the reality that he’s much worse on the issue–like every other issue–for people who align even a little bit with any policies left of center.
So Biden just has to basically take the hit, because the Democrats care about functional government and stable diplomacy and foreign policy relationships, whereas the GOP, as the party of dysfunction, white grievance, and ethno-religious fascism, isn’t saddled with the same considerations. Biden actually tried–and partially succeeded–in slowing down arms shipments to Israel, and the GOP threw a shitfit in Congress because they want those arms shipments: Their donors want them, and they can hang it on Biden’s neck no matter what, because people like OP will continue to go to bat for them.
I’m not exactly sure it’s a safe bet. Hillary was a safe bet over Bernie, right? A few votes in the right areas could tip the election either way. The fact that he can’t find a way to appease both the people who are against genocide and the people who are pro-Israel is worrying to me.
You are definitely right about Trump not having the same problem though. However, Trump could also say literally anything on the issue and still get support because nothing he does actually matters.
It’s a safe bet. The number of voters Biden loses if he were to change positions enough to appease any authentic anti-Zionists (as opposed to agitprop elements, for whom no position would be good enough to silence) would dwarf the number of voters he might gain. That might not mean he gets reelected, but hell, changing positions at all would cost him votes. Like I said: all choices are bad. It would have been a political disaster for any president, because every voter who cares enough about it to be a single-issue voter is entrenched enough to not be swayed at all unless the other side is completely alienated.
He can’t find a way to appease both sides? Well what does that look like? What’s the position that appeases both staunch Zionist voters and the subsection of the anti-Zionist protestors who vote? That’s not a rhetorical question. Every other US politics-adjacent post on Lemmy recently has been OP or one of their comrades criticizing Biden for his position on Israel, and I’m genuinely interested to hear someone articulate the nuanced position that Biden should supposedly take that he’s currently failing at, and how he’s supposed to do that and not immediately lose all prospects of reelection. FFS, even characterizing this as a division between “pro-Israel” and “against genocide” is already throwing nuance out the window. From where I’m sitting, Joe Biden has as nuanced a position as he can, because the nature of foreign relations in the Middle East in 2024 is itself nuanced and, for US interests, profoundly precarious. If you want nuance, you better be prepared to swallow a healthy dose of realpolitik alongside it, and that’s something that as of yet I’ve not found any noble armchair advocates and red-shadowed “patriots” willing to do.
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. The levant is a diverse area with a rich history, and Israel looks to genocide the people that are the result of that and replace them exclusively with a single group of people that haven’t been the majority in the area for thousands of years, if ever. Jewish people deserve security and self determination but Israel isn’t it.
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