Point is: had Americans bothered to show up voting, we wouldn’t be here. Yeah, I know, voting has already been made hard because Republicans only win if fewer people show up because they’re basically a minority, but they are vocal and dedicated. They vote. That’s why they won. Had Democrats or just plainly more Americans back then bothered to vote, we wouldn’t be here.

You may want to recalibrate how you think about the 2024 election. Yes, it had a lower turnout than the 2020 election, but that was a high point of the past half-century in terms of voter eligible population turnout. And as much as an impact that Uncommitted voters has on the Democratic primary, if we presume they all failed to vote in the General, they still would not have been enough to overcome the margin of victory. And given the way that the Electoral College is set up, unless we have geographic data on where those people who didn’t vote are, they may have simply contributed to the overvote that leads to elected presidents who did not win the popular vote (and demoralized voters).

Understanding that there is a concerted propaganda effort financed by billionaires to prop up conservatives across all borders (if you’re not in America, you should be paying attention to the rise of Trump-style politics in your country, too) is vital to addressing the situation. It’s not just people are disengaged, people are being advertised constantly that these billionaires have the common person’s best interests in mind, or, worse, that this cruelty is good and just.

And as much as I’m working to organize in my community and put a stop to this, the rest of the world really ought to be sitting up and taking notice of Venezuela (or the litany of transgressions already committed) and making their own plans on how to address this (and hopefully not deciding to support the tyrannical stooges in their own countries). For whatever reason, the organizations that claim they stood against the forces we’re seeing are not seen to be stepping up now that the moment is here, and this sort of tyranny has no respect for the structures and limits that were supposed to prevent this.

And it’s sentiment like this that makes it clear that the people clambering for people to “just do a general strike” or “just take up arms” have given no thoughts to how to do that without wasting the resources or lives of the people they demand take action. If you take part in union organizing, you learn that you have to make all of your attempts count, otherwise you’re blowing your chances and making it harder in the future by alerting the bosses. Yes, you have to impact their money, but just like “vote with your wallet” is an empty phrase if there’s no mass movement around a specific product/company, to actually deal with the structural issues that billionaires and the companies they represent present, individuals have to band together to create structures that can contend with them. Otherwise, it’s just proposing individual actions to address structural problems, and that plays enough into the hands of these tyrants that they’ll say that’s the “right” way to deal with the problems they cause.

It certainly a convenient place to lay the blame. Makes it real easy to tell flattering narratives. No need to examine what role the party has, since clearly they’re doing what they must to get their candidate elected. Why should they carry any blame? They voted for Harris, after all! Surely, pouring millions of dollars into candidates that don’t resonate with the people and that are unwilling to push the needle against the direction conservatives are pulling it has nothing to do with their consistent messaging that people should just settle for the options they’re presenting the country with?

Clearly, the DNC has some serious misunderstanding of the electorate given their choices over the past quarter century. But something tells me they’re gonna roll the dice on “we’re your only option” again and act surprised when that wasn’t enough to garner support rather than lukewarm acceptance. Maybe if they really hammer how little they’ll do to offset the damage Republicans have done over the past half century and tell us that they just want to get back to “working across the aisle” on “business as usual”, it’ll actually work this time!

Because the Democrat Party pretty loudly told people who supported an end to Palestinian Apartheid that they did not want their support let alone their input. That they thought it was more important to court Liz Cheney and other Republicans and lock the Uncommitted delegates out of the convention despite exceeding their goals by 10 times to show that not listening on this issue had enough votes on the line to close the 2016 Clinton-Trump gap, let alone the 2020 Biden-Trump gap that it got over halfway to. The party said they wanted more support from lean Republican voters than the voters asking for a Democrat candidate who would speak out against genocide, and, even with record turnout in one of the main states for the issue, the there were more voters for Trump then either of his previous runs. But, yeah, blame the voters, they only turned out at the second highest rate since 1908 (with only the 2020 election being higher) and even Democrats had better turnout among the voter-eligible population that any of the second-place candidates since the 60s (and better turnout than more than half of presidents since then as well). If you’re putting the onus on the relatively small proportion of non-voters instead of either the moderate showing of the Democrats, or, you know, the people that actually came out to vote for Trump, then you’re not really focused on the issue.