- cross-posted to:
- progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
Summary
Democrats must reclaim their identity as the party of the working class to regain electoral strength.
Despite pro-labor policies under Biden, working-class voters feel disconnected, seeing Democrats as defenders of a failing system.
The party’s decline traces back to NAFTA and neoliberal economic policies that favored corporations over workers.
A generational effort to prioritize labor rights, fair wages, and economic security while addressing working-class frustrations are needed.
Without serious reform, Democrats will continue losing ground to populist alternatives.
Joe Biden was extremely left leaning for the average American. He did so many pro union things. He held an EV summit and didn’t invite Tesla, because they didn’t have a union. First president to cross a picket line. https://uwua.net/2023/10/president-bidens-union-record/ Democrat platforms have always been in the direction of higher taxes on the rich to fund more social safety nets. People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough. When the alternative is explicitly anti-worker, anti-union, tax cuts for the rich, destroy social safety nets. This narrative needs to die. It’s not a failure of democrat policies or platform it’s just a failure of the media environment. It is purely a media problem. Democrats just need to start shitting out more tik toks and get more sycophantic youtubers like trump has, to jerk them off so the vibes shift.
It’s more that they’re still all in on incrementalism, while the problems people face are worsening by leaps and bounds, and they’re actively hostile to members of their own party who advocate for advancing the sort of large-scale, structural changes needed to actually resolve the various crises bearing down on the working class. They’re also at odds with their base on major issues, such as healthcare reform, a robust social safety net that isn’t means-tested to death, and their obsession with supporting Israel, because they’ve been captured by the purse strings of their major donors. It certainly doesn’t help peoples’ opinion of them as embodying the out of touch elites who are deaf to the plight of the working class when party leadership comes out against [https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-pelosi-rejects-stock-ban-congress-2021-12?op=1](Congressional insider trading) that our representatives are notorious for exploiting to enrich themselves via privileged knowledge they gain through their positions.
If they didn’t dump millions of dollars into primary challenges to progressive candidates that represent a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal order the Dem leadership so dearly loves, even when it means ultimately losing the race to a Republican, I doubt people would be so hostile to them, and the party would probably be in a better place. When party leadership won’t resolve their issues in a satisfactory manner, won’t listen to and incorporate criticism from their base, and actively fight their efforts to get elected officials who more accurately represent their views and values, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people decide to go elsewhere.
You can’t publish enough TikToks and youtube videos to media manage your way out of a hostile, out of touch group having a death grip on the party and refusing to admit that, perhaps, the present situation is vastly different today than it was 3-4 decades ago when they were first elected.
There are plenty of people, both politically engaged and those who only show up to vote every 4 years, who are legitimately dissatisfied with the Democratic Party’s deafness to the problems facing the average voter, and as long as the Democrats and their supporters continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it’s all down to a hostile media environment, the further down the path to complete irrelevance they’ll find themselves.
Plus by 2024 he had over 90% of Class 1 Freight workers the sick leave their unions had fought for in the strikes earlier in his term.
It’s definitely an issue with the spread of information and not with actual policy stances.