Memes of Production

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.

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/

In that same vein, the poll suggests that support for Israel and concern over growing antisemitism at home are both bipartisan ideas. Seventy percent of U.S. adults support Israel’s right to defend itself, and the support is consistently high among Republicans (79 percent), Democrats (65 percent) and independents (65 percent).

What’s more, this bipartisan support extends beyond Israel’s current war with Hamas in Gaza.

Majorities of Republicans (76 percent), independents (57 percent) and Democrats (53 percent) agree that “the U.S. should remain a steadfast ally of Israel and fully support it in a war with Iran.”

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.

And I totally agree with you that its not an all-or-none thing,

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.

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.

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.