Snowflakes. Groomers. Cucks.
For years the MAGA movement has approached politics the way a bully would approach a schoolyard, sparring with labels so nasty, they seemed expressly chosen to appeal to the kind of people who stuffed nerds in lockers in sixth grade. And for years Democrats, abiding by the mantra to go high, not low, have responded by trying to be the adults in the room: defending themselves with facts, with context, with earnest explanations that nobody remembers (if they defend themselves at all).
The problem is that taking the high road only works if politics is a sport played mainly by people who act like grown-ups, which it is not. And also: Facts and context don’t make for particularly sticky messaging.
Enter: Weird.
Over the past two weeks, as “Brat” and coconut memes have taken over the internet and Kamala Harris inches closer to Donald Trump in the polls, the Democrats have finally gone low, deploying a bit of verbal jujitsu so delightfully petty it might just work.
Poetic justice for the "fuck your feelings " crowd.
i find weird and creepy to be less name calling and more fact pointing
Have some Lemmy Gold.
i love how there are like 10 different kinds of lemmy gold
Good observation!
Take these!
And these as well!
Gotta catch em all!
They are all as valuable as that other gold too!
Unfortunately, fact pointing doesn’t work.
For Heaven’s sake, someone make this person a Lemmy Mod
Also way less offensive than what they deserve.
If you want name-calling, these work:
Let’s keep up the “name calling” facts
Matt Gatez creepily traffics children
Gym Jordan is, at best, a creepy enabler of pedophiles
Mike Johnson weirdly discusses individual porn movies with his children
(I’m not trying to stick to a theme here)
Lauren Boebert seems to weirdly enjoy public indecencyyes! they key is to use factual words that these very simple, emotionally driven people understand.
Republicans ain’t like us.
Party of family values 🙄
MTG literally feeling-up a cardboard cutout of TFG is SUPER weird. what in the sugar frosted fuck was that??? Southern republicans were fucking weird 20 years ago but god damn
(I’m not trying to stick to a theme here)
Sometimes a creepy pattern just emerges from the data. :shrug:
Back when Michelle Obama said when they go low, we go high–I told my wife “I really wish that worked in American politics, I really do…but it simply doesn’t”. My wife disagreed. Because my wife is a mature, kind-hearted Democrat. She thinks you can bring an informational brochure to a bar fight.
Maybe there is a way to de-escalate things and return to more civil “statesmanship” style in our politics. But my guess is that these things follow some kind of up-and-down cycle, and you don’t want to be on the side that’s lagging.
I saw an article that summarizes people like your wife as those living in a West Wing (TV show) fantasy. I wish we lived in such a world too, but we definitely do not.
I do not mean offense to your wife. I envy people that still have that type of faith.
No offense taken. She has a hard time seeing how nasty it has become. She limits her exposure to the news, which is mostly a good thing.
It isn’t a good thing overall if it means she’s that out of touch.
Out of touch with what? How ducking awful humans really are?
Out of touch with current politics.
Elaborate. Which part of the GOP platform are we going to talk about? Oh, right, they don’t have one. There’s literally nothing to discuss.
The part where she thinks you can take information to a bar fight…?
Removed by mod
I have to upvote Innuendo Studios.
Exactly, we don’t go high because they go low, they go low because they know we’ll go high.
Have to fight back against the bullies to get them to stop.
It’s not just one or the other.
You can’t ignore it, you can’t pick it apart and expect people to listen. Even if they listen, now you’re spending all your time explaining.
What you is dismiss them quickly and broadly, then talk about what you would do.
They won’t waste time trying to talk policy, so they’re reduced to making the same insults and getting the same dismissals.
It makes them look “weak” and the more they fight back the crazier shit they have to make up. It’s a feedback loop.
Biden tried to do it, he just couldn’t string together enough words. Kamala can, but it’s not some master strategy, just the common sense response to the situation
Sure, I hear you and what you’re saying, and it all makes sense. I think it depends on the time, the place, and the audience. I would say in general there has been a sea change here in the Trump post-truth world. And in general, things are much, much nastier as far as the tone and style goes. Things were very nasty when it came to policy and actual backroom deals back when Reagan took over. But at least the evil old bastard was charming and liked most Americans in his own goofy / phony way. He did pit us against each other but more in the grandpa wants to watch the kids wrestle kind of way compared to Trump’s “let’s destroy democracy” kind of way.
I also think it’s very important that the Democrats continue to be for some things and not just 100% against things like the Republicans are.
Meeting in the middle and taking the high ground has worked a LOT in the past. In about 12 years, though some would argue since 2002, things changed. We can return to a more reasonable time, though I am of the opinion that the modern Republican Party needs to be gutted and replaced before we can do that. They are so far right that they’ve done a complete circle and have ended up with various heads in far too many asses.
I’m a big picture kind of person and that large magical totally not a portal painting on the wall points to the party being beyond saving.
I sure wouldn’t miss them.
It’s further back than that. Newt Gingrich in the 90s proved that the “fuck you, I’m gonna break your shit” republican strategy was surprisingly (politically) effective in the context of winning American elections and curbing the (publicly apparent) effectiveness of the Democratic Party. The DNC just took over 30 fucking years to fully understand that, and in the interim, the American public has paid the price.
I considered pushing back even into the late 70s. I think though, the shift to the modern mental breakdown really began happening after Sept. 11th. With 2002 really kicking off the U.S. involvement in the middle east as a response to the incident. As we know now pointing the guns at the more convenient (for us) targets. I’m no historian though.
Yeah I think the winning move is “we can discuss the issues as mature adults whenever you choose to. But until then if you’re going to insist on name calling and fascism I’m going to call you the pathetic weirdo you’re being”
I mean honestly, this is correct. There are likely a few Republicans in positions of some power that disagree with how things have gone. Unfortunately, I feel they are far in the minority. Today it is no longer an issue of mild morality disagreements, or a lack of some fearless leader. The bigots, racists, and fascists have taken over the party.
Now there are ways to change this. Shift the status quo away from their foolish and evil ideologies. BUT it would take commitment from leaders of both parties - NOT assigned leaders, people who are instead well-respected, to step up together. Problem is there is no one on that side of the fence who fits that role right now. Chances are we’d have to vote them in. After all, we can affect that too. If we know a Democrat isn’t likely to take a seat, push for the better Republican. No reason we can’t move left by yanking and pulling in equal measure.
Fully agree except I don’t think it will be republicans who join us there. I think we’ll end up with a Democrat split once the republicans are unviable
They go low, we kick them in the teeth.
Knee to the nose would be my personal go to if someone “goes low”
As a democratic compromise i propose we do both
Republicans are disgusting
https://archive.is/JGSPb Because I hit that wall.
Also, holy shit. That’s the most mind-blowing article I’ve read in awhile. Thank you!
You’re welcome. I did my own research after Trump got elected into the Authoritarian Personality, Dark Triad and the F-Scale.
They’re both weird and creepy in their own ways. The GOP is like a Petri dish that someone smeared rabid monkey shit on, and we’re all watching it fester and mutate.
Regulatory agencies have been captured, scotus is corrupt, women’s rights have been taken, the largest industries are enriching a miniscule handful of Americans, fascism is increasingly coming into style and our noble democrats have only just started a new grand strategy of… name calling?
Forget about getting people fed, using the new immunity ruling, stacking courts, or any serious material change for Americans. We are fucked.
A doomer .ml account. How original.
Seriously. Doomerism and defeatism are just pathetic and detrimental. When has giving up and rolling over in the face of opposition ever led to anything good? Especially when so much is at stake and worth fighting for every step of the way.
Future Presidential debates:
“Shut up you lying little bitch”
“Come make me, fuckface!”
Schoolyard Insults: Presidential Edition
I love how b!t©h is removed but “fuckface” is peachy.
wait is it just straight up removed, or censored like b****?
There’s a hunter2 joke here but I’m too old and tired
Why did you just type a bunch of asterisks in the middle of a sentence?
Only because you’re on ml, my instance gives me the full uncensored text.
Still hilariously arbitrary, no matter who’s dumb idea it was.
…deploying a bit of verbal jujitsu so delightfully petty it might just work
It’s not even petty. It’s just true. Republicans, with their obsessions over what’s going on in everyone’s pants and bedrooms, really are weird and creepy.
Yes, nearly a decade into “Orange Man Bad” as their sole policy platform, the DNC is just now engaging in name-calling like the GOP 🙄 The paper of record!
It is, in fact, bad to sell classified documents that you stash in your bathroom and jeopardize the safety of all Americans. It is, in fact, bad to rape people. It is, in fact, bad to ignore scientists during a global pandemic. It is, in fact, bad to raise taxes on the working class while cutting taxes for billionaires. It is, in fact, bad to be racist. It is, in fact, bad to pay illegal hush money bribes to protect a campaign. It is, in fact, bad to say that democracy will end after you gain power.
I could do this all day.
Wow, you are smart. Guess everyone who was going to vote for Trump isn’t now that you said he was bad!
Would you say that any of the things I listed are good? Or are you just going to not address facts and reality?
Turning a critique of an NYT article as being lazy and dumb (which it 100% is) into yet another instance of a neolib screaming “ORANGE MAN BAD AND THE DNC CANNOT FAIL ONLY BE FAILED!” on the internet isn’t helping your cause, no matter how bad he is. There are millions of voters who would maybe show up if promised something, who simply aren’t going to turn out to vote against Trump for being a rapist. That’s just the reality.
I asked a direct question and you refuse to answer it. Since you can clearly read, I am forced to assume that you know all of those things are bad but admitting it hurts your feelings so you instead rely on avoidance behavior instead of confronting reality.
Edit: I also didn’t say any of the things you claimed I did. You are just lying at this point. It’s pathetic.
God, you blue MAGAs and your ad-hominems… You people really make Lemmy a VERY unpleasant place.
Which of the things I listed is good?
I’ve always found this “criticism” pretty funny.
I get the point of it is to be absurdly reductive, and to insinuate a reflexive, unthinking mindset where it doesn’t matter what Trump does; the response will always be, “Orange Man Bad”. Use of the “orange man bad” criticism ends up being more of an indictment of those who wield it though than it is of his critics. It’s not like there’s a failure to elaborate the specifics of each of his misdeeds. The information is out there and widely available to anyone who cares to take a look. That being the case, when specifics are given and Trump supporters or other malcontents dismiss it as “orange man bad” they are really displaying that they don’t care to see why the complaint exists. It’s a tactic of ignoring a legitimate problem, and hand waving it away under the pretense that there’s nothing behind it. It’s lazy and/or willful ignorance.
Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Trump critic unironically use that phrase. If you’d like to see it though, here you go. Ultimately, this “criticism” fails to take into account that yeah, actually “orange man bad”. Like, that’s the legitimate reality of the situation. Trump is awful and he provides near endless examples of that. The guy is genuinely, unambiguously bad.
I’d like to welcome you out of your coma. Neolibs have no policy objectives that differ from the republicans on non-social issues (and no actual policy on social issues) so they’ve been harping on Trump being bad for a decade while getting into a position where they can’t beat him in an election without a pandemic, which is presumably not their desired outcome, but maybe the strategy is working and this was the plan all along.
I’m undecided as to whether you’re a troll or just an unfiltered idiot. I am sure that there’s not a third possibility though.
I love how the people who claim to want the dems to win the most do the most to turn off voters online. It’s truly remarkable.
If winning an election requires dumbing things down for the idiots to the point that nuance and substance disappears then maybe America is a failed experiment. Either way, you’re obviously not participating in good faith here.
I do a lot of complaining about the Democrats and their offputting tactics, but I’m having a hard time believing you’re actually engaging with any of this in good faith and simply bothered by the unfriendly responses.
These complaints just seem like repeating slogans rather than engaging with the actual failings of the Democratic party because the idea that they have no policy beside “Orange Man Bad” is just obviously untrue. Plenty of real criticisms, but that one’s just nonsense. Add to that that the “Orange Man Bad” refrain originated with and is primarily in use by conservatives and this whole thread just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Obama v Hillary 2008 was over whether we do universal healthcare or card check to massively increase union membership. Name ANY serious non-Berniecrat dem who’s run on anything anywhere near that scale in terms of moving progress forward since then.
And here is the predictable moving of the goalposts. Now the bar isn’t that Democrats have no economic policy, it’s that the primary policies weren’t grand enough. Except in the primary that elected Joe Biden the major topics of discussion were just as grand and the super moderate who won still greatly increased anti-trust enforcement and canceled student debt. The most salient difference being the Democrats had a weak super majority in 2009 and the slimmest possible majority in 2021.
But anyway. Why do you use 4chan alt-right slogans as the core of your complaint, fellow leftist?
Troll. They have a year-long posting history they deleted to try and hide their bad-faith bullshit. They’re just here to be an asshole.
Neolibs have no policy objectives that differ from the republicans on non-social issues
That’s just blatantly untrue. I don’t see any Dem calling for disbanding the Department of Education. Stances on environmental protection are also starkly different between the two parties. Voting rights protections, abortion rights, access to medical treatment for transgendered people, funding of and access to Medicaid and food programs… how many more do you want?
Being against republican policy plans is not actually a prescriptive policy plan and won’t turn out voters who aren’t already 100% with you already. Democrats always lose on Hillary/Kerry “I promise you nothing but defeat for the republicans” platforms without a Clinton/Obama charisma dynamo as an incumbent, and not to downplay Harris’ charisma, but she had to drop out before her home state in 2020 to avoid embarrassing under-performance and isn’t really an incumbent.
The phrase “hold your nose and vote for _______________” exists entirely because voters turn out for candidates who they aren’t 100% with.
You’d agree that the 2020 primary is quite a bit different from the current scenario we’re looking at, yeah? As the Brits say, chalk and cheese.
As far as prescriptive policy, yeah, I’d love to see more, and wish it were more politically viable. That’s the point where we need to start talking about extended strategy, which the US citizenry needs to get a better grasp on if we’re going to claw our way forward. In the mean time harm reduction is a valid mindset.
It’s not just politically viable for the democrats to be more proactive, it’s smart politics. The right wing of the DNC has convinced everyone that to run on a non-GOP platform is politically nonviable. This is a lie, but it persists, and has fundamentally turned the DNC into a conservative party. They’re conserving post-Great Recession America against the GOP’s Fallout-style future 50’s, but it’s still fundamentally a conservative position ill-suited to the age demographics that trend DNC in terms of votes.
I largely agree with this. That’s different than saying that the two parties as they currently exist are mirror images of one another though.
As far as the content of your post, that’s where the need for extended strategy comes in. Until enough progressives/leftists work their way into the structure of the Democratic party on a state and federal level what you’re describing is unlikely to change. Bemoan the two party duopoly as much as you like, but it’s a reality. The way to change it is to infiltrate it and fundamentally alter the mechanisms that perpetuate it. It’s not going to work to just hope for one progressive/leftist at the top of the ticket, and complaining that the person at the top isn’t progressive/leftist enough can frankly be met with, “well, yeah, not much of a surprise there.” The Tea Party is the template. They completely turned their party to shit (well, more so anyway), but successfully infiltrated the party apparatus to reflect their political preferences. If the left does something similar we can actually make 3rd parties viable and no longer be beholden to the Democratic party, but that’s most probably a decade+ long project if we’re being honest about it. It’s unfortunate that the left is as fractious as it is; it only makes something like this more difficult.
So, this guy said he wants to bang his daughter back in 2016 and it took you 8 years to settle with “weird”.
Woah, slow down there cowboy!
No it’s perfect because harsh insults would turn off some Democrats, but saying they’re weird though, it’s just pointing out the obvious and making people think “Isn’t it weird that the guy says he’s here for the common folks but he’s a billionaire?” “Isn’t it weird to support someone who said women should be grabbed by their pussy?”
We called him out on it then. But man, this weirdo just took it in stride like being called a fascist by everyone from historians to neo nazis. But weird, he doesn’t like it when we acknowledge he’s weird.
Finally?
It’s all they have been doing for 10 years, this is just the latest programming as the others have all been disproven to the masses.
Adjectives are not nouns.
I was annoyed at that “when they go low, we go high” rhetoric. No you kick them in the teeth. Politics is a pig wrestling competition and you gotta get dirty.
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Beep boop. This action was performed automatically. If you dont like me then please block me.💔
If you have any questions or comments about me, you can make a post to LW Support lemmy community.More of this bullshit? My god is this weak. No Republican gives a shit about this, nor does anyone not an already solid democrate.
The Republican reaction disagrees with you. It’s oddly put them I’m quite the tailspin, which I personally do think will have an effect on turning off some Republican voters. I don’t think it will pick up many voters, but it may indirectly dissuade some.
No Republican gives a shit about
you do.
I am not a republican lol
lol yes you are. You claim to be a democrat but you’ve got a lot of Republican genes in your beliefs. Also The way you talk is definitely Republican.
Look if you want to “pass” as a Democrat you’re going to have to do a lot more work and maybe hide some of your more Republican tendencies in like a closet or something.
You’ll never be a real dem but you might fool some folks if you keep putting on democratic clothes and practice passing.
But i’ll never accept you, and it’s important to me that you know that, and what that means.
I’m not a democrate either. In the land of sanity I am a left leaning libertarian.
Ah, sorry i don’t recognize that as a “real” political position. Make up all the fancy names for your beliefs that you (and people like you) please, but here in the real world you are Republican. That’s that.
EDIT booo i think he blocked me, sensing somehow the colombo-esque point i was trying to make slooooowly closing around him. Beer says he couldn’t figure out what it was tho, even though i made it pretty blatant.
A pity, soft but clever types like him will never learn their lesson. At least this savant isnt american…
Yeah I’m blocking you because I don’t communicate with the insane.
You’re acting kind of weird.
