2025: Let's try again

General Chat
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That’s new to me. If you’d ask me which US party plays identity politics, I’d say the Republican party and Trumpists especially. In the European Parliament, until recently the parties that play identity politics were even united in a block called “Identity and Democracy” (they now reorganised under the name “Patriots for Europe”). They are conservative nationalists. You’ll find Orbán, Le Pen and AfD here (basically friends of Trump). Parties in this block tend to be shunned by other parties in national government coalition formations, unless they grow so big that they actually win national elections.

“Classical liberal” parties in Europe call themselves just “liberal”. In the European Parliament they are united in the block “Alliance of Liberals and Democrats”. They are socially progressive (or at least not conservative) and economically centre-right to right-wing (accomodating big corporations rather than workers and favouring less market regulation). I think only conservatives and nationalists would call them left-wing. You’ll find politicians like Rutte and Macron in here.

I’m not sure what “leftist” means in the US nowadays.
If “leftist” stands for politics represented by Berny Sanders, I think it coincides most with social-democrats in Europe (united in the block “Socialists and Democrats”), who are economically left-wing (accommodating workers rather than big corporations and favouring more market regulation). You’ll find Olaf Scholz in here.

If “leftist” stands for politics represented by Jill Stein, I think it coincides most with the greens in Europe, who are socially progressive and economically centre-left to left-wing. These parties tend to be too small to win elections here, but they may be part of government coalitions.

I think Joe Biden was mostly like the christian-democrats in Europe: socially centrist to conservative-leaning and economically center-right. In Europe, Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen are in this camp (and also Friedrich Merz who may win the upcoming elections in Germany).

I’m not sure in which European block Kamala Harris would have fit best. I’d guess she is a bit less conservative than Joe Biden, but still within the christian-democrat range (though she’d probably get along just as well with Rutte and Macron as with von der Leyen).

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I believe @trohde’s point is that this is a clear strawman.

Almost nobody is holding that view, and the few that may are a negligible fringe group. Presenting this as what « Democrats » do is a gross misrepresentation.

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Absolutely not. They are a very loud minority. I would imagine most people who identify as Democrats would not actually ask for what has been done in their name.

I was not attempting to straw man all democrats, just identifying that the group I was referring to was a subgroup of the Democrats.

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If this was put to vote within the democrat side as a motion, do you truly believe it would receive any significant support?

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Probably… because the ones who don’t agree are too scared of the ones who do. If you don’t agree, then you’re a nazi. It’s one or the other with these people, and they’ll happily “cancel” people who were close allies just yesterday.

The country didn’t suddenly get more pro-trump. People who used to vote left just stopped voting.

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I saw something similar as well, but just “online outrage” and I know that there are quite a few people online that think like that, like this white journalist:

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I still do not understand the reasoning behind their outrage though. But maybe that is not surprising since they do not seem to be very keen on making logical sense…

Trying to find an article that recorded the “outrage” I found this:

This is true, but the marketing damage is done. Most people now assosiate “the left” in america, with those vocal group, as the article points out.

This is true, but marketing matters. For example:

That’s “national identity politics” which the right wing usually engages in.
The left in america is more about “personal identity politics” like colour, sexual orientation, pronouns, diversity, equity, inclusion and so forth.

The right in america tends to “mask” their brand of identity politics behind their “protect the borders” rhetorics, so the impression over there is that the left is the one that cares more about “identity politics”, as a term.

It seems that they are not though. To quote the article for those that will not click on it:

The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes.

So, they might not have many voters supporting all that stuff, but the party itself has been geared to support them.
Which is just one of the reasons they lost connection with a good amount of their voters.

It kind of was put to the vote, the article describes the incidents, but here is the video snippets of them:

Even if someone didn’t want to raise hands for that, @BHydden is correct that there is significant peer-pressure to do so in order to “pass the test”.

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Alright then, I guess we just fundamentally disagree.

I must say, like @trohde, I can’t help by seeing such comments as a fascinatingly horrible misrepresentation (all the more strange to hear when the democrat party includes so many proeminent “straight white males”).

This isn’t remotely the same statement though.

Saying “racism and misogyny played a role in Harris’ defeat” can certainly gather significant support, even without any peer pressure. I could easily agree with it.

It is extremely different from stating that " all that matters is being the correct race and gender. Critically, anything other than a straight white man, who are all inherently evil and responsible for all of life’s evils".

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Yes, that is why I said “kind of”.
The first video shows that they do care a lot about personal identity politics and representation and the second one shows that they are primarily focused on issues of identity politics, in order to explain their loss. Remember that even after losing some prominent people went out to claim that Kamala Harris’ campaign was “flawless”. :roll_eyes: Therefore what remained as a reason for losing was exclusively external factors and flaws of the voters, like racism and misogyny.

all that matters is being the correct race and gender.

If you take only that sentence, that is video number one.

Critically, anything other than a straight white man, who are all inherently evil and responsible for all of life’s evils".

I do not think that someone could actually put to the vote something as blatantly racists as the wording that is being discussed. I mean it is politics, a lot of things aren’t meant to be told in such a straightforward manner.

I could agree with that if the race was close and she had won the popular vote and had lost a couple of key swing states for a few thousand votes.
In that case you could argue that such a small margin could be attributed to said reasons.

As it stands the americans elected and re-elected Barack Obama for president (the same kind of election that was being discussed), so racism as a major factor of being “electable or not” is out.
Misogyny is even less important for similar reasons. There is a plethora of female elected of officials in the USA: 26 Senators, 125 House representatives, 96 statewide elective executives, 12 governors and so forth. (source)
So, misogyny is also out as a major factor.

Again, to be clear. If the election result was close, then fair enough. Noone claims that there are no votes swayed by those issues. But this time the Democrats lost even the popular vote by 2+ million votes. This means that they didn’t lose due to such minor issues, in terms of someone’s electability.

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BHydden’s statement also looks grossly excessive to me. However it is true that too much emphasis is put on gender and race equality. I’m not saying that these topics are not important but that’s not what the average voter cares most about.

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I don’t think that should matter though. The quoted statement doesn’t say that race or misogyny are the sole factor, or even the main one. Just that it played “a role” (possibly among many others), which seems a pretty light and consensual stance to me.

Of course I know some democrats have tried to overplay that card as the “main factor” in other contexts, which is a much more controversial view.

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Yes, it is a 30 second snippet. The added context is what is being said all those months about it.
I did put another video source on that, feel free to watch it, it is made by a very prominent voice in the american left, so it is not some “opposing propaganda” or anything.

Yes, I was expecting that :slight_smile:
As I said, politics is usually the art of being circumspect and vague with words.

If it is just “a role” I will inform you that there are also votes in:
a) How you dress.
b) How you speak
c) How you look
and another wide varied of similarly trivial issues, but noone really takes their time to actually talk about them, first and foremost, in a forum. :wink:

We all know that there are bizarre people and voters that have odd reasons for voting or not-voting for a candidate, but when you lose by a wide margin, those do not really matter.

This is what you are missing. That is the mainstream view. :slight_smile:

Go on, try to find some sources on the answer “Why did the democrats lose the election” and show us where this view is “controversial” in the Democratic party. I put sources on the opposite and there is a wide swath of similar content and articles that support that view. Here have some more:

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/07/democratic-women-sexism-harris-trump-00188076

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5024139-harris-misogyny-presidential-run/

Quite the wide variety of mediums, right?

Can you find even a couple articles where Democrats actually discuss/explain/explore the reasons of their defeat and “racism and misogyny” do not come top 3? :wink:

Probably not. Because it is the mainstream position among the Democrats and not a “controversial” one.

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AfD was kicked out of ID and is not part of PfE. Although I think they are still cozy with some PfE parties.

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You’d have to have a pretty narrow view to blame it all on identity politics. Another big factor was the global economy, which led to incumbent losses all over the world.

I’m pretty sure Harris’s short list of VPs was 100% “straight white males” :joy:

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I have an American friend who was deeply saddened and distressed when Trump won and Harris lost.

I was trying to get across how Harris was received overseas (inb4 not by everyone, that’s not my point) and she started telling me how I’m wrong because that was not at all what Harris communicated and presented and she being on the spot could verify.

However, she was very surprised by the result and I was not.

So, maybe we don’t get the actual politics right, us on the other end, but maybe we’re better at gauging the optics of it?

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This isn’t difficult and I find this discussion quite strange… I don’t feel like spending too much time on this, but for instance see here : Democratic officials blame Harris election loss on outside factors | Reuters

  • DNC chair says that “the result fit a global pattern in which 80% of incumbent parties lost seats or vote share in 2024”.
  • Meanwhile “some democrats blamed Biden for not stepping aside earlier”
  • Top Harris adviser, including campaign chair, “said Americans’ post-COVID economic woes and the short 107-day span of the Harris campaign worked against Democrats and the damage caused by two hurricanes in the final weeks before Election Day diverted attention from Harris’ whirlwind campaign”
  • “Senator Bernie Sanders, a former presidential candidate, is among lawmakers blaming the loss on Democrats’ failure to focus on working class issues.”
  • Others have clamored for new leadership, especially after hearing the Harris campaign managers’ explanations.

Overall, a whole bunch of debates and possible explanations from major figures of the Democratic Party, as one could expect from a complicated event that is certainly not easy to analyze. Note that racism or misoginy are not even mentioned once.

In any case, I’m not that interested in analyzing Harris’ loss. This is straying away from the initial statement which I continue to perceive as a horrible strawman.

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Yeah, I lowered the bar to simply finding just a couple. My mistake :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously though…

… I did read all of it and you are right, so I stand corrected on that. :slight_smile:

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I am willing to concede that even with my strong attempts to clarify the problem is not party wide, my comment could still be read as too general.

I am shocked anyone would go so far as to call it a strawman (outside of twitter).

I never said it was their biggest problem. I never said it was the only reason they lost.

It is however a toxic ideaology that a very loud minority hold, and I don’t see enough if anything being done by the main party to distance themselves from that group.

We rightly criticise right wing parties when they are too close to actual neo-nazi groups. I very rarely see anyone criticising left wing parties for their associations with dangerous far-left groups.

I am sure there are some local Americans that are too close to see this, like what Gia described above, but it’s very concerning to hear Europeans refusing to acknowledge the very real problem. Surely Europe is media neutral enough to see the bigger picture.

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I am shocked anyone would go so far as to call it a strawman (outside of twitter).

As I am that one could really believe such statement to be a significant view, let alone be voted as motion.

I am sure there are some local Americans that are too close to see this, like what Gia described above, but it’s very concerning to hear Europeans refusing to acknowledge the very real problem. Surely Europe is media neutral enough to see the bigger picture.

I don’t think Europe has any claim to media neutrality, or that it somehow knows the « bigger picture » (according to whom anyway? Even in this thread there are very different opinions from Europeans).

The overall perception of US politics can significantly differ from one European country to the other, and within a country from one social group to another.

Further, regardless of « neutrality » concern, media are often quick to focus on and promote the most controversial views, making it seem way « louder » than it is.

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I do not think that there is such a thing anymore.
It is in our hands to just try to read various media in order to avoid getting ourselves into a bubble.

Unlike before where you had to keep up with a lot of physical/printed newspapers, which was timeconsuming and costly, now we get access to a lot of media as fast as we like and mostly for free. This also means that we have to wade through a lot more “clickbait junk” articles in order to locate the useful ones, but it is, at least, something that is available to most people that have access to the internet.

We, as individuals, can make the effort to be neutral. The media? Not so much.
Because they have to make money to be there the next day. And having to be profitable creates a bias, whether we like it or not.

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I don’t follow domestic American politics much, outside what gets covered by Dutch mainstream media that I follow. They report about upcoming trade wars, Greenland, Panama, decrees, amnesty, deportations, NATO and such.

I haven’t heard them reporting about progressive ideologists hijacking the Democratic party. Perhaps mainstream media here don’t report about it because struggles within the Democratic party hardly affect the foreign policy of the US for the time being, so they may consider that less relevant for a Dutch audience.

I guess I’ll start hearing more again about the Democrats when the campaigns for the mid-terms get going. But for now it’s all about Trump (and our own government coalition which is struggling again, and the coming elections in Germany).

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