This is extremely concerning, not just because of the reality, but the reaction to this news. We should all be terrified, not because young people are too stupid to vote against Republicans, but because Democrats are blaming voters for their fuckups. This is the same fucking bullshit Hillary pulled in 2016, and it’s why she shat the bed so hard and left us with the Cheeto Mussolini.
IT’S THE CANDIDATE’S JOB TO WIN VOTES!!
Joe Biden isn’t a reluctant general lifted out of obscurity by the adoring masses. He wanted this job, fought really hard to get it, and now it is his responsibility to win reelection. And it’s really important that he does, because Trump was a terrible president and will be worse the second time around.
If you’re mad about this news story, you should direct your anger at the party and the candidate. Being mad at Gen Z for choosing not to fall in line is like being mad at drivers in traffic. Sure, if we all slow down and leave more space to avoid excessive braking, we can avoid a lot of traffic and have more time to sing kumbaya together. That’s not a productive avenue for fixing the problem.
Donald Trump is literally on trial for fraud. This shouldn’t even be close. If Biden can’t win in a landslide, it’s because Joe Biden sucks, not because the youth are entitled, bourgeois, ignorant, lazy, or any of the other insults being thrown around in this comment thread.
Counterpoint: If Biden can pass the biggest infrastructure bill since the New Deal, the biggest climate bill ever, erase tens of billions of dollars of student debt, pull us out of the pandemic economy without a major crash, put together a global coalition to help Ukraine fight against Russian imperialism, reschedule cannabis, etc., then I'm going to blame the stupid voters for not (a) recognizing his achievements and (b) not recognizing the threat that Trump and the Republicans pose to our democracy and the global climate.
Biden has a razor-thin majority in the Senate and has no control of the House. Trump has already personally appointed 33% of the SCOTUS, and has another 66% eating out of the palm of his hand. And people are going to hand our country to the Republicans again (even though they are openly speaking out against democracy every fucking day) because... why...? Because there isn't peace in the middle east and somehow that's Biden's fault?
Nope, but that was a nice try to trivialize the actual problems.
The problem is Biden sending American weapons, paid for with American tax money, to another country to use to indiscriminately kill civilians.
I’m not even going to claim that they want to kill all the gazans.
They were too loose with how they were using them. Too many civilians were being killed, 35,000 minus 15,000, using Israel’s terrorist death count, leaves 20,000 innocents killed in about 6-7 months
I’ll accept your premise at face value, let’s say he has accomplished a lot. Personally, I’d like to see him doing more, but let’s set that aside and say that his accomplishments would be enough to win the support of the progressive youths, and yet it hasn’t. The problem is still not with the “stupid” voters failing to recognize Biden’s achievements or the existential threat Trump represents. It’s still Biden’s job to sell it to the voters. It’s up to Biden and his campaign to put those issues front and center, to talk about what he’s trying to do and what his vision is for America. If he isn’t getting the message out, then he is failing at one of the critical aspects of his job.
But really, I don’t think the problem is messaging. I think the problem is that Biden isn’t the guy people want him to be. He’s a moderate neoliberal who backs progressive issues when he believes it will help him in the polls. I think he doesn’t put those issues front and center or push very hard or make persuasive arguments because he doesn’t want to piss off the center (or his donors).
Biden has a problem with the House. Why hasn’t he done more to push progressive candidates in downticket races? Biden has a problem with the court. Why isn’t he packing the court and working to eliminate corruption? We still have a massive infrastructure debt, catastrophic climate change, crippling economic inequality.
Yes, his half measures are better than the swift kick in the balls that comprises the Republican agenda. But he needs to recognize that he isn’t fighting hard enough to win the support of people who are looking down the barrel of extinction. That’s not hyperbole. My generation doesn’t expect to retire, and the next generation doesn’t expect humanity to survive. They’re not having kids because the future is that bleak.
Are they stupid? Sure, of course. Kids are often stupid. We were stupid. Our parents were stupid. If Biden is shocked that he has to convince stupid people to vote, then who’s really stupid? Sometimes you gotta make the airplane noise to get kids to eat their vegetables. Biden isn’t even trying, though. He’s blaming them, calling them anti-Semitic, and acting entitled to our votes.
He needs to win. You think it’s frustrating to see stupid people vote for a third party in protest? Imagine how frustrating it is to watch the Biden campaign drive young voters towards third parties.
If Biden is shocked that he has to convince stupid people to vote, then who’s really stupid? Sometimes you gotta make the airplane noise to get kids to eat their vegetables.
I like this bit in particular.
Biden isn’t even trying, though. He’s blaming them, calling them anti-Semitic, and acting entitled to our votes.
I don't really blame Biden. He's part of a giant political machine that has been shit at messaging since 1980. Democrats seem to be lead by the sort of try-hard, type-A, rule-follower nerds who were in Student Government in high school. They can't relate to normal folks, and then resort to insults and guilt to get them to do something.
I believe, if I were an oligarch, I would want to craft an opposition party that looked and acted exactly the way Democrats have since Carter. I would push out progressives and independents, and I would back centrists and pragmatists who claim we can’t really have anything good unless we first settle for better.
The problem is that, for the first time possibly ever, that is precisely the situation we have. If Trump wins, we’re all of us fucked. Biden is the only man who ca possibly beat him.
And yes I can blame Biden for his failings. He’s been a politician for longer than I’ve been alive. He should be better at this.
I guess we can blame Biden. But it could be literally any Democrat in there doing the exact same thing because the political consultants they hire are so ridiculously out of touch.
It's the news media's job to report the reality of what's going on, not just filter people's explicit-propaganda-created misunderstandings of what's going on through the most slanted methodology they can possibly find and then report it back to us like a money fueled human-centipede loop, but what can you do. We all have bad days doing our jobs sometimes.
The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity. If you expect anything noble, moral, or objective, you’re being naive.
The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity.
Absolutely true, and it's one of the major problems with it in this country, because that's the wrong model for it, and it more or less can't exist in any other form.
It's one among many reasons I regard the OP article with some sadness and suspicion; because I do not expect anything moral or objective (let alone noble) to come out of the US news industry the majority of the time.
If Biden can’t win in a landslide, it’s because Joe Biden sucks, not because the youth are entitled, bourgeois, ignorant, lazy, or any of the other insults being thrown around in this comment thread.
I don’t think “kids these days” are entitled, lazy or ignorant but to a degree both these types of things can be true. Biden is unappealing, yes, but everywhere I turn are people arguing that both parties are the same and that Democrats have done nothing for them. In these cases, when pressed it turns out they just don’t actually know one way or the other. It’s a generalized sentiment of “politicians bad” and many are surprised to learn of even a handful of things Dems and Biden have done that they support.
So I guess you could argue that Democrats suck at marketing. But I’d also argue that many of us suck at understanding politics.
They’re not useless, but they have an error that can be several points larger than the given margin of error. What this is telling is is that it’s a close election. And that’s a big deal
I wish the DNC started treated them as the main chunk of Dem voters and not a bunch of spoiled children for wanting politicians that represent them instead of their grandparents
It should be comically easy to beat trump, but people just don’t like elderly neoliberals, because of their policies, actions, and often lack of actions.
I agree the president is not, and should not be, all-powerful.
But he’s still a politician. He’s still, ostensibly, the leader of his party and his nation. If he can’t convince idiots to leave their homes and vote for him, he’s failing all of us. We’re not failing him. Idiots will always exist, and conservatives never have any trouble getting their idiots to the polls.
America is at the mercy of idiots, by design. We could invest more in education, public healthcare, and income inequality, and we’d have fewer idiots, but first we have to win elections. That’s not my fault. Ignoring that is what got us Trump.
What he finally started kind of halfway doing and not sending the weapons and ammo.
The only things I have wanted since the beginning were: only send defensive munitions( Iron dome missiles) and get more aid in there.
If he would have clearly announced to the world his intentions to put one American soldier per aid truck and driven right through, either they wouldn’t have done shit, and the aid would have got through, or they would’ve pulled a USS liberty combined with a WCK and proved they weren’t our allies.
Either way, this war would be different.
Either we would have safe civilians.
The main thing I wanted from Israel was them to protect the civilians.
I said a long time ago that they could have done exactly what they are doing now, except the tents would have been maybe a kilometer into Israel.
It could have had fences and dead lines around it.
They could have setup a whole are with an, easy, efficient, and safe living area with food, bathing, electricity, medical stations and open live-streamed cameras everywhere.
The us would have fucking paid for those and then Israel could slowly let people in while vetting them carefully.
Would there still have been people that called them concentration camps? Oh fuck yeah, but they would have been easily countered by the livestreams.
Would some hummus members slip in? Yes, but there is only so much they could do in an area where they were searched with body scanners before they allowed in and that cameras are covering every square inch of.
It would have accomplished more, while gaining the Israelis international repute instead of the opposite.
I think there’s plenty he could be doing, but the common thread would be “making the case.” What he can accomplish and what he can fight for are different categories, and the fights he loses with the House can be the talking points downticket challengers use to unseat members of the House.
Kids need better civics education so they can keep their expectations of what our government is capable of as low as possible, that way they don't feel like voting is useless and give up.
It would have been the easiest dunk of his life to go to Manchin or sinema’s districts and hold a rally for legislations that they are blocking and would have garnered support from younger people because he is actually trying and applying pressure. Not just making a statement and saying “owell I tried”.
You want Biden to go into ruby red districts where a dem-in-name-only got into power by the skin of their teeth, and campaign for Democratic policies, and you think those people will welcome him? You think it will be easy??
You’re in a bubble, dude. There’s no silent majority of progressives out there. Just because all of your friends are doesn’t mean the whole nation is.
Manchin got elected because he blocked Dem policies. Not in spite of it.
Then fuck Manchin. If you don’t want to play ball the dems should do everything in their power to make you toe the line. Run as a republican if you want to vote against dem policies.
Manchin is better than a Republican because we can work with him sometimes. You don’t want him to be able to hold up bills? Don’t give us a bare bones Senate majority. Get more Dems in Congress.
Dems have a majority in the Senate but we need to “VoTe HaRder”. Nah you neolibs will come up with every excuse to be goo lite and cry and piss your pants when people don’t want your shitty crumbs anymore.
lol. Okay, “young people.” If you don’t vote for Biden, you get Trump. And it won’t be the “burn it down and rebuild it” you think it will. It will be right-wing totalitarianism for the next hundred years.
I don’t like it any more than you do. But sometimes our choices are limited.
Well, in his defense, the burn it down part is true.
In all seriousness, he’s already caused damage that far outlasted his term. The Supreme Court, District court, and Appeals court appointments will affect them for decades. His environmental and industrial regulations repeals will take over a decade to reenact. His tax reform exploitatively widened the already oppressive wealth inequality. We may not fully recover from a second term in their lifetime.
That’s what everyone kept saying in 2016, but he didn’t destroy the oligarchy. He raided the coffers and shat in the well water. His destruction of the status quo was entirely self-serving, and he left in place all of the systems he could abuse to benefit himself at the expense of everyone else.
Few people realized how much damage he caused until after he left office. He created a noise screen in the news like a magician diverting your attention.
Proof in point: We're still suffering from the lingerings of Reaganomics. Both Bushs caused their own shifts against a progressive society, often by throwing out things built up by the previous administration to improve things. Trump did a lot of things too, but the ironic one is where he dismantled the very things that GWB helped create to fight worldwide pandemics (credit to George there for reading a book, asking his advisors how true it was, and doing something).
What people thinking this don’t understand is how much and how long it will burn.
Certainly all the “burn it all down” voters are going to get is they’ll spend the rest of their life in the fire they helped start. Maybe they’ll watch all the people they care about burn first, via health care, LGTBQ rights, prosection of political enemies, etc.
All it takes is one Supreme Court nomination during Trump’s term and we’re fucked for that much longer. There’s a good chance Thomas dies in the next 4 years, do we really want 40 more years of some young right wing radical in that seat?
I think that’s what young people really don’t get. It’s not just 4 bad years (although even that argument is a pretty privileged thing to say).
Thomas won't even have to die. If Trump wins you can be sure we'll see at least 1 resignation and replacement. They aren't going to make the same mistake that RBG made, especially since they've had their eye on the ball when it comes to packing the courts with conservative judges at every level for decades.
Everything is in place for Trump to perform an autocratic authoritarian takeover of America. People need to be mentally prepared to fight or flight.
I can’t tell if that’s a joke but yes? They’re all relatively young for justices. None in their 70s. Granted, Trump pushed the envelope in terms of age for justices
He repealed 112 environmental regulations in one term and wrote a record 220 Executive Orders, without any familiarity with the job of holding office, and during a pandemic. Imagine how much more effective he’ll be at destroying our progress this time around.
Alito and Thomas are the two oldest on the court at 74 and 75 respectively. So there’s a good chance that whoever is elected in '24 gets a shot at replacing one or both of them.
DEFINITELY whoever is elected in '28.
So, for safety’s sake, we need a D win in BOTH '24 AND '28.
Replacing them flips the court from 6-3 Conservative to 5-4 Liberal.
BUT - then the next two oldest are Roberts, who would be the swing vote, and Sotomayor. Both 69 currently.
So in '28, they’ll be the same age as Alito and Thomas now. Likely to be replaced in either the '28 or '32 cycle.
He had his chance to effect massive change, and he made everything he touched worse. His plan for healthcare was just “undo Obamacare” because everything was perfect before. I’m very glad he didn’t get a chance to touch that.
Burn everything down and rebuild is clearly not the panacea some folks wish. I get it, though. In 2016, most of the pro-Trump voters I knew self-identified as anarchists.
We have to fix this shit without burning it down. Too many people rely on things as they are (for good and ill) to enact dramatic change overnight.
I’ll be real. There was only one candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary that I disliked more than biden. And that was culty gabbard. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the last two presidential primaries. Biden is so far from perfect or what we really need. But has still been astonishingly good on so many things. Granted in our current state that’s a low bar. But I honestly struggle to think what Sanders could have done in a meaningful sense that Biden has not. I’m sure Sanders would have spoken out against the violence in Palestine sooner. It would still be happening exactly as it is now. But he would have spoken out sooner. So that is a plus.
But it really boggles the mind to try to comprehend how people can still be this uninformed. To think everything he touches turns to shit. No it just goes to prove the old adage. The left doesn’t need enemies with allies like the left.
Joe Biden is inept and useless. He wanted to lock down the entire country during COVID until who knows when. His foreign policy shows his incompetence. He has no business being a world leader.
You realize it was Trump who was President during the worst of Covid, right? When a million Americans died and the survivors were fighting for toilet paper in grocery store parking lots?
All Trump.
Having world leaders laugh at him behind his back? Also Trump:
Biden tried to do more than he accomplished, but got shot down by right-wing courts and the two ‘moderates’ in Manchin and Sinema. You think Sanders could have done better, given what Biden faced?
If we get Trump, I’m fairly certain we won’t have another real national election again. It’ll be like Russia with massive “voter fraud” bills and EOs passed that completely neuter the ability to vote. The treasonous Project 2025 would gut the government and we’ll probably get that Schedule F bullshit that brings back the spoils system.
So while Biden is wonderful (he’s done a bunch of good stuff recently at least), Trump is so far down the fascist ladder there really isn’t any choice. I’m not excited to vote for Biden, I’m terrified of Trump being elected.
Ok grampa, it just so happens that condescendingly blaming young voters for Biden’s piss poor policies while in office won’t be the get out the vote motivating factor you seem to think it will. If Biden wants votes, he needs to appeal to voters, not just donors.
Civility seems terribly uneven in this community. I disagree with your decision, but since this is an authoritarian community with no appeal process, there is nothing I can do. Go put a bird on it, Jordo.
Well, I don’t believe for a second that Biden and Trump and tied with Gen Z. Right now, it’s “free” to claim that you won’t vote for Biden or won’t vote at all. At the end of the day, Gen Z and most young people will come out and vote for the one closer to their world view. Angry or not.
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