this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Please tell me you didn't vote third party in November...
You keep following me around, straw-manning me, derailing the conversation, making ad hominem attacks. Get lost
Right ...so anyways. Did you vote for Jill or not?
So you've moved on from bullying cross-dressers to bullying… people who ask why we're bullying cross-dressers?
Really selling me and everyone else on how totally justified you were in your bullying.
Right. No anwser suggests you either voted third party, or you're not even American anyways and your opinion on this matter does not matter.
Want to provide any input?
Pathetic.
I mean if they, did, I'm sure you'll see the point in advocating full-throatedly to their demands, since you couldn't stop fascism without them.
That's only a valid argument if you assume more votes would be gained from acceding to their demands than not. Otherwise you still end up with a loss, only now you're looking at the fucking Zionist 'moderates' being the missing piece that we have to accede 'full-throatedly' to, since we can't 'stop fascism' without them.
Yeah this was the hand-wringing the trope they rolled out during the elections. Considering that the majority of Zionists are republicans already, at least in the form of Cristian zionists, we (both now and should have then) can readily dismiss this. It gets the Democratic candidate bupkis.
And a miscalculation (or, depending on your point of view, throwing the game for the opposition) does not mean that the idea is inapplicable.
"They should have leaned more towards anti-Zionists to win" does not equate to "Completely acceding to anti-Zionists in a coalition which includes a large number of Zionists would have brought victory."
Okay, it doesn't fucking matter that most Zionists are Republicans. What matters is that a sizable percentage, even if a minority, of Democrats are Zionists.
Using the term Zionist as you would on here, on Lemmy/the Fediverse, what percentage of Dem voters - who make up a good 1/3 of this country's electorate - do you think are Zionists? How many do you think we can lose? How many dedicated anti-Zionists are out there in the electorate, willing to vote for the Dems if they change position on just this one issue?
I want to push back on this, because I think it does matter, because it speaks to Democratic strategy for the election. Who are you doing a thing for? Its not any different than them heading hard right with their campaign post/ during the convention: Who is the thing for?
And what percentage are Muslim? Or are Palestinian? Or from Mexico? Or.. or.. or... and I can go on, for all the groups Democrats lost with how they approached both governance and the election.
The argument I saw out there was that Harris couldn't break with Biden on Palestine, or else she would lose Pennsylvania. Well she lost Pennsylvania. And in her effort to not lose Pennsylvania, she also lost Michigan. And Georgia and Nevada. Calling it a miscalculation is like.. its a gross understatement.
I can't believe we have to relitigate all of this because Booker has decided that he, one of the least popular Democrats in history, has decided he doesn't want the left to have a roll in the Democratic party.
Its basically political fact that Harris blew it with her support of Israel, and by not campaigning to her base. Instead of pre-blaming voters, the blueMaga contingent should have been actively advocating for policy changes instead of defending positions the voters had made loud and clear, that they would not vote for.
And if you are ABWD/ BlueMAGA, we don't need to worry about your perspectives, because your vote is a forgone conclusion. You aren't gaining voters catering to the sensibilities of privileges liberals. You win elections growing coalitions into groups of voters you either lost or didn't have.
No, it doesn't matter because of what I laid out below - that a sizable percentage, even if still a minority, of Democrats are Zionists.
Less than 5%, on both counts. And with considerable overlap rather than adding up to nearly 10%.
Do you know what percentage of Muslim and Palestinian voters voted for Trump? Apparently, the single issue was not quite the dealbreaker for their vote you're implying it is. I specified Zionist precisely because it is a policy position, and I specified, for that matter, how many anti-Zionists would be gained and how many Zionists would be lost (or rather, asked to consider whether the gain would outweigh the loss, not demanding you to have a specific number ready off the top of your head).
I didn't realize Zionism was such a hot topic for Mexican-Americans.
Man, I don't give a fuck what you call it, I went ahead and fucking specified that you could say it was deliberate for all the choice mattered to the point being disputed.
... and you think people you characterize as "BlueMAGA", especially as such a label is often combined with criticism of party elites who push harder against the left wing of their party than against the GOP, will actually vote blue no matter who?
Just.. Just read through your response. You are arguing that because there is some slight minority of Democrats who identify as Zionists, we have to cater to their views; that they were the electoral segment the Dems could not lose less they lose the election. My point in bringing up Mexico and Muslims is that they too are a segment of the vote Dems could not lose less they lose the election. But because liberal moderates, the BlueMAGA coalition, insists that their identity and sensibilities be centered in democratic politics, the Democrats lost the election. They ran a campaign focused on appealing to white moderates and it fucking lost. The lost ground with Muslims because of how they campaigned. They lost ground with Mexican voters because of how they governed. And they LOST! Thats the entire point. Your argument only holds up if Democrats had actually won with the strategy they used. Pennsylvania was the "could not lose state" that Dems claimed they NEEDED to maintain support for Israel to get, and they lost that state too.
The point is that there was either a) not enough appeal among zionist voters with Democrats or b) that zionist voters weren't sufficient to get Democrats elected: Regardless of the mechanism, it was a losing strategy.
I think it needs to be put to a test and that White Liberals have shown themselves to a net drag on the parties elect-ability when its their approach to politics, when its their identity which gets centered in campaigns. We can't hand-wring about ABWD when the "no-confidence" vote is out there specifically telling you they won't vote D if they support a genocide. They told you what their requirement for voting D was. You should have just fucking listened.
... first, the minority isn't 'slight', and I can cite extensive polling on the matter.
Second, my point is not that the Dems had to cater to the Zionists without any compromise towards anti-Zionists - I agree that the Dems catered too much to the Zionists. My point, as I mentioned, was that the simple reverse is no solution at all - both Zionists and anti-Zionists are part of the Dem coalition, and we don't have the numbers to do away with either, unless you have some radical new coalition to propose.
Sure. I agree.
Again, my argument is not "Dems made the right decision!", I called it a miscalculation at best, and opined that regarding it as throwing the election entirely would not be unfair. My point is that un-fucking-fortunately, Zionists are part of this coalition-of-the-less-fucked too, so the simplistic notion that acceding to all anti-Zionist demands is a path to victory is about as electorally stupid as the near-no-compromise pro-Zionist line the DNC went with.
Zionists are not and were not a new addition to the coalition that were going to save a Dem campaign. The issue is that they're part of the base vote which is presumed in the first place to have any sort of serious challenge to GOP bootlickers marching in lockstep. My point, as I noted, was not that more Zionism would have won, or even that the level of Zionism presented was anything but excessive; my point is that going forward, the coalition is still going to include Zionists, unfortunately, and simply reversing the direction of the mistake will not lead to victory. It'll lead to Zionists sitting out 2028 like anti-Zionists did in 2024, and handing the country over to domestic fascists - assuming that we have meaningful elections at all in 2028, which is far from assured considering to whom power was handed over to in 2024.
As long as Zionists make up a significant percentage of the electoral coalition, the option of "Just alienate the larger group and placate the smaller and less reliably-voting one" is not particularly fucking promising. Anti-Zionists should have been compromised more with, but it's a balance as long as they're both in the same electoral coalition. You want to kick out all Zionists from the more-left-leaning party of this ultra-fucked political system? I'm with you. But that's not exactly an option when we're regularly losing by a greater number than the difference between Dem Zionist voters and Dem anti-Zionist abstainers.
... would you like me to bring up polling on non-negotiable Zionist voting requirements for a candidate? Or does it only count when they're abstaining currently, rather than voting currently?
I'd love to recenter this conversation on the numbers, which are at least material hypotheticals, rather than pure hypotheticals. And because I do want to get better at modeling these things. If you can provide the polling data or links to polls you want to use, I'll happily work up some numbers and graphics, and maybe we can use it to think about where things are going or what could have been.
And I totally agree with you that its not an all-or-none thing, but there is a brain-worm that has utterly corrupted a portion of Democrats who have effectively become an "against the left" coalition within the party, and for which I think BlueMAGA is an appropriate and illustrative term. That brain-worm was operating in full-force in the 2024 election cycle and worked directly to the detriment of Democratic performance, and while it took around a 15 month hiatus, it seems to have reared its ugly little worm head in the previous two weeks based on "centrist" Democrats like Booker and Jefferies and Schumer deciding they no longer want to coalition with the left flank of the party.
They are objectively careening towards some of the weakest possible positions going into the mid-terms and the next presidential cycle, where Democrats as a brand are at their least popular moment in history, yet we have some of the strongest left-wing upsets in history also occurring. The politics within the Democratic party is extremely divided, but that was also true in 2024. Its not clear to me the Democrats can survive as a coalition if they keep catering to the extremist positions of party loyalists.
Less interested in what could-have-been, simply because it is apparent that, despite how mainstream Zionism is, the DNC clearly fucking overshot in 2024. More interested in what we can do going forward - or what we should be prepared to reasonably endure for the sake of not losing a majority or plurality to the domestic fascists.
Like the USA in the 1950s, no one is explicitly running on gay rights, and enough of the public are not convinced for it to be viable. But that doesn't mean that participating or abstaining are equally LGBT-friendly (or hostile) choices.
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5107276-bipartisan-support-israel-hamas-peace/
This was the beginning of last year, and sympathies for Israel have declined further (thankfully, and may it keep declining), but if even only a fifth of those who think that Israel should remain our 'ally' even in the event of a war with Iran (and, again, may that number decline drastically after this fucking insanity actually being kicked off by Israel and the US administration) would regard total anti-Zionism as a dealbreaker, that's a good 5% of the total vote - which is about 7% more than we can lose by the count of the last election. Around 8 million votes, or also around ~5% of the general electorate, was the drop from Biden-to-Harris... but less than half of that regarded the issue of Gaza as of concern to their vote; most, but distinctively not all of whom were pro-Palestine.
Then we're in agreement.
Honestly, I'm hypervigilant about simplistic takes being championed, to the point of finding false positives. It's so easy to just flip the script, because it's intuitive and it feels good to think that the RIGHT choice just has to be CHOSEN, and then everything will finally be okay after millennia of fuckery.
But Christ Almighty. That is a great way any number of tightly-knit ideological groups have managed to isolate themselves and their positions from reality, and then walk out at the pivotal moment either boggled by the lack of enthusiasm for their cause, or ready to become martyrs - or worse, a vanguard.
Fuck, I remember watching Palestinian children getting blown apart in, what 2011, 2012? And watching the fucking polling at home move not-at-inch, even amongst Dems. And then the same story again in the mid-2010s.
Not only do I agree that the Dems were too pro-Israel from an electoral standpoint (obviously from a moral one) in 2024, but public opinion, for the first time in my fucking life, is turning against Israel in the public sphere. Unfortunately, that means we can take better positions, but not necessarily the ones we would prefer... and to be quite honest, I'm teetering on the brink as it is with our fascist government.
Purity is a game people can play when the effects are less important than the narrative to them. Many of us? We have to suffer the effects, and not all of us equally.
I agree entirely, man. I just don't want to encourage or normalize a sentiment of "My way or the highway", the way Dems lost the gun nut vote (by the gun nuts adopting that position, not the Dems, who constantly attempt to 'triangulate'). It's self-sabotaging for everyone - including the cause the uncompromising idealists want to uphold.
This is a big coalition we have to endure when the fascist coalition gets near 50% of the vote, and the other 50% of the vote isn't overwhelmingly socialist. That means accepting that all-out war on every ghoulish position is unfortunately not possible - unless one prefers solipsistic purity to the actual lives we're supposed to be working to save or improve.