this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
378 points (98.0% liked)
Progressive Politics
4713 readers
189 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most of our fellow Americans are massively misogynistic and its been highlighted twice in the last 10 years by the fact that Trump won the presidential election against women. I'm saying this as a massive fan of AOC. I identify pretty strongly with her open aggression towards backwards thinking.
I disagree, I think Hillary and Kamala were bad candidates and covering it up with blaming it on misogyny is actively harmful.
Hillary and Kamala were bad candidates. I didn't cover that up because I agree. They were the equivalent of a hangover fart in a sauna far as presidential nominations go, but I disagree that their loss wasn't spurred at least partially by a growing amount of misogyny in society.
"Growing amount of misogyny" compared to what time exactly?
Compared to when a centrist woman was running. Americans are only conveniently bigots against whichever progressive is running at the time. Sanders in 2016? "75 is too old! No one will vote for him!" Biden in 2020? "How DARE you say that 78 is too old!"
We never lived in a female utopia, but there's an alarming trend of teenagers that are being influenced by the man-o-sphere so 2015 onward.
Ah yes and those teenagers vote in elections right? It's not the boomers who mainly vote?
There's also a not insignificant amount of millennials that are becoming more misogynistic and pessimistic due to the loneliness epidemic coupled with popularized misogyny on social media. Look, if you want to totally ignore the ground swell of underlying issues that got us to where we are, you're more than welcome to. It worked so well when we ignored former Confederate supporters and open racists for a hundred years.
I'm not the one ignoring the reality of the situation, blaming voters for not electing bad candidates and blaming it on misogyny is idiotic and unhelpful.
The reality is the majority of the US has always been misogynistic and those are actively being stoked and amplified by a confluence of factors mostly down to the fact that peoples lives are getting worse /harder and being told x/y is the problem when the true problem is capitalism and its effects/capture of our government.
Compared to Trump?
No, we not only have a misogyny problem, we have a serious propaganda problem. Check out "the necessary conversation" on youtube and witness the power of propaganda and how it harms regular people and convinces them that fascists are not fascists.
You realize the majority of left-leaning people who didn't vote for Kamala/Hillary didn't turn around and vote for Trump in turn right?
This is the "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality but the reality is the majority simply didn't vote because they didn't seem the benefit in doing so. What we need are stronger candidates with clear policy in order to get people excited to vote, or more importantly reform our voting from FPTP so that 3rd party candidates aren't considered "spoilers".
Not voting for Kamala/Hilary WAS a vote for Trump.
Blue Maga always says that and yet they never put forward better candidates to solve the unelectability issue.
Factually incorrect, as evidenced by the fact that Hillary won the popular vote.
The problem isn't running women. It's running women who are unscrupulous and/or shitty at politics. Harris couldn't even make it out of Iowa in 2016, so it was evidently a stupid call to let our brain-damaged former president anoint her as a successor without a primary.
Beware of ANYONE going around spouting the “we can’t run AOC because WOMEN ALWAYS LOSE! Just look at the LAST TWO TIMES!” bullshit
As if Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were perfect candidates offering anything more than “imagine how bad Trump would be!”
“The Most Lethal Millitary”
“Nothing will fundamentally change”
“Pokemon Go!-to-the-polls”
I mean come the fuck on.
"Pokemon Go to the polls" was just a silly meme. I think voters wanted somebody to the left of Obama, and Hillary felt like a big step back to the '90s.
Dissing Bernie's platform didn't help. One key moment I remember was her saying that Medicare For All was something that would "never, ever happen". Instead of adapting her platform to win over Bernie's voters, she just dismissed it completely as foolish pipe dreams. Just really tone deaf and smug about it.
I honestly hope it happens in my lifetime. Just for the sheer delight of gloating at centrists that the default is no longer "siphon your paltry amassed wealth to billionaires and then die."
Here's a fact that makes my leftist friends mad at me(since 2008) ... Hilary IS and was left of Obama. People saw what they wanted to see in Obama because he is so charismatic. A lot of people hated Hilary because of the constant dragging of Hilary in the media for over 20 years.
I fell for the anti Hilary propaganda. And it wasn't until she was a serious contender that I started looking deeply into her record. She's actually pretty amazing. If I ever meet her I will definitely apologize for falling for the bullshit.
She sure seemed to be on the right of Obama during her tenure as Secretary of State. Yes, I know that isn't an unbiased source, but this isn't coming out of nowhere. She was buddies with Kissinger. Like I said, this is all stuff that people wanted to leave behind in 2016.
Secretary of State is a position where you are supposed to represent the agenda of the president. Knowing former secretaries of state and being able to get information from them is an important part of having that job... if you're a serious person, it is a serious fucking job.
It's so bizarre to me that people don't realize what it means to work in these cabinet positions. Or at least what it used to mean. This cabinet is not focused on competence at all, but rather on social media, self aggrandizement and gossiping about and undercutting each other.
Agreed. It's like people think these candidates were above reproach despite the very obvious flaws.
Centrists are happy to hold back all women in order to stop one woman.
George W Bush once said that if the popular vote mattered he'd campaign in Texas.
No shit it doesn't matter, but it does demonstrate a flaw in LDF's point.
Not really. That's kind of the point of the quote. If the popular vote actually counted it would radically change the way elections are run and campaigned in. There's no telling how that election would change if the popular vote mattered.
That election is pretty interesting for instance because Hillary made massive mistakes in not campaigning in certain swing States. Or at least campaigning enough. Michigan being the main one. Now maybe that means in a universe in which popular votes mattered she would win. Or maybe it means in a universe where popular votes matter, Trump would campaign in places that he didn't before and get a lot more votes. The entire concept is altered dramatically by that key fact.
Either way the point is you can't just assume it would be the same because clearly it would not.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. Have a nice evening.
Aight. Cool. Wanna bet democracy on it?
Always with the platitudes.
You were fine with democracy being flushed down a toilet when Hillary was rigging primaries against Bernie or when Dems sue Greens off the ballot at the state level.
Was I? Cause I'm pretty sure I strongly campaigned for Bernie during the primaries even after Super Tuesday when the race pretty much ended. My voting didnt take place until the 15th and I still put his name on my ballot. Then when the presidential election rolled around I voted for Bernie again as a write-in.
You can try to put me into some nice little predefined box, but I've its not going to prove your point. My point is simple. If we for some reason need to run against Trump again in 2028 do you feel confident beyond doubt that swing state voters are going to support AOC or any other female candidate? Cause in case you haven't learned this yet, unless you live in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan...our votes don't really matter. And quite a few of those states are pretty rural.
I mean you also see conservatives vote for people like Boebert and MTG. Misogynists, surprisingly, will reliably prioritize their other ideals over whether to put a woman in power.
Interesting point. I do think there's a sort of power dynamic at play there. They see the way they campaign against women's rights and label them as one of the "good ones" that will show women that they can have higher positions in society if they submit. Maybe, hopefully, my assessment is off base.
Confidently incorrect. Popular vote doesn’t win elections and red state men don’t vote for women.
I say this as a huge fan of AOC, I think she should be Veep and have the POTUS leave at the start of the second admin. Then let her run once (twice?) more.
Red state men don't vote for democrats either. Maybe you should try to win gettable votes instead of making excuses for shutting out candidates you don't want.
Anyone else not buying this?
Hilary and Kamala were dogshit candidates.
Hard agree.
This is such a bad, and bullshit, take. Half of male candidates lose too. The odds of 2/2 female candidates losing is pretty damn high, and one of those candidates didn't even have 99% of the campaign, and she still wasn't that far off.
Those two candidates were just shit candidates. They were even more shit than the average Democrat candidate. They didn't lose because they were women. They lost because they campaigned on status-quo, neoliberalism, pro-corporate ideas that inspired no one. AOC isn't that. The only thing they have in common is being women, and it's a complete fabrication to say there's any solid evidence those other candidates lost because they're women.
Ah, yes, because Biden had such radical forward thinking progressive views. He was in no way a status-quo, pro-corporate candidate that didn't inspire anyone....
Biden actively pilfered Bernie's platform after winning the primary, so he was a forward thinking progressive compared to Harris and Hillary. Harris in particular explicitly ran to the right of Biden; she wasn't exactly subtle about this. Perhaps more importantly, however, he had COVID on his side. Plenty of voters (33% of all voters and 57% of Biden voters) considered competent handling of COVID one of their two most important issues when voting; if COVID hadn't happened or had happened under Biden's watch Trump would've wiped the floor with him.
Biden ran on a lot of progressive policy. Childcare, revisiting the public option, family leave, rescheduling cannabis. They were all lies that killed the party's credibility and made the 2024 bid a hard sell even before the genocide, regardless of which democrat was the candidate.
Biden was able to run on a "lesser evil" platform. He won because he wasn't Trump. Hillary or Harris could have won in 2020.
That and also he ran on a platform of "if you didn't vote for him you weren't black," so I'm sure that helped out. Probably a lot of suburban whites thought they'd leave the booth magically Trudeau'd up.
(Clearly I'm just making fun of Biden's statement with a little jab at Canadian Blackface and white kids, laugh about it it isn't that serious.)
I think it's more along the lines of Hillary and Kamala were just too meh of a candidate to actually get people out to vote. I think AOC even though generally not as big tent as the previous two will still perform really well because of the amount of billing willing to go out and vote for her.
Now that people are talking about a progressive woman running, women can't win. Until such time as Harris announces her candidacy for 2028, then we all must get in line to vote for genocide again.
We weren't given a choice in the matter when Harris was running. I wanted a primary but didn't get it. I had the same sentiment when it was rumored Harris would be the nomination. When it was official, I unenthusiastically supported her campaign and put aside my pessimism to avoid another Trump presidency.
And she's not running now so I'll appreciate it if you don't try to pre-emptively lecture me about how I need to vote for genocide again.
Mature people who understand the political system in the US understand that primaries are where you vote your values, general elections are where you vote for least harm/best outcome of severely limited choices.
If you're not voting in local elections and primaries and pushing your values hard, you are failing at democracy.
Harris won no primaries. Until the party starts running honest primaries, or indeed has them at all in the presidential race, this is just gloating that the party forced a genocidal piece of shit on the voters without their permission.
I voted in my local runoff yesterday morning. Stop lecturing if you ever figure out how.
We had a primary and Biden/Harris won.
If you're complaining that you didn't get a second primary when Biden dropped out, then maybe it would interest you that legally no one but Harris could have taken the significant war chest that the Biden/Harris campaign had on hand. Furthermore, as a term of the deal for Biden to drop out, Harris was not allowed to deviate from ANY of Biden's positions. This is why she had so much trouble with questions about the genocide. She was not allowed to answer the way she wanted to.