#Anti-incumbency

[thehansindiaseo]

Know Your MLA: Emerging victorious amidst anti-incumbency

Pocharam Srinivas Reddy (74) is a known face in the political circles of the United Andhra Pradesh and in the newly formed State of Telangana, post-bifurcation of the United Andhra Pradesh.

[expo-newz]

BJP’s Electoral Shuffle: Dropping a Quarter of Sitting MPs for Fresh Faces

In a bold move for its third bid for power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is shaking up its roster by opting to replace a significant portion of its sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Out with the Old, In with the New:

The BJP has unveiled six lists of candidates for just over 400 seats, and notably, approximately a fourth of its sitting MPs, totaling around 100 individuals, have been denied tickets for re-election. This trend echoes the party’s strategy from the 2019 elections when 99 sitting MPs were not fielded. This time, with candidates announced for 405 seats already, it’s anticipated that the number of ousted sitting MPs may surpass previous records as more may find themselves without tickets.

The Modi Factor:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy appears to be centered on mitigating anti-incumbency sentiments by introducing fresh faces. Modi has stressed the importance of the party symbol, the lotus, over individual candidates, emphasizing that no one has the entitlement to demand tickets. Instead, the campaign focuses on Modi’s leadership, his welfare schemes, and the party’s claimed achievements in foreign and economic policies.

New Faces, New Strategies:

Under Modi’s leadership, the BJP is tapping into a diverse pool of candidates. This includes former Chief Ministers and Rajya Sabha MPs, such as Dharmendra Pradhan, Bhupender Yadav, and Rajeev Chandrashekhar, who are now vying for Lok Sabha seats. Additionally, past Chief Ministers like Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Manohar Lal Khattar have been fielded, leveraging their established stature in state politics.

Crossing Party Lines:

A notable feature of the BJP’s strategy is the inclusion of defectors from other parties. Individuals like Naveen Jindal and Ashok Tanwar, who recently joined the BJP from the Congress, have swiftly secured candidacies. This trend extends to prominent figures like Jyotiraditya Scindia and Jitin Prasada, who switched sides in recent years, further diversifying the BJP’s candidate pool.

Changing Tides:

Some sitting MPs may find themselves replaced due to waning popularity or statements that have embarrassed the party. Notable names like Meenakshi Lekhi, Ramesh Bidhuri, and Varun Gandhi are among those facing potential ousting, signaling a shift towards candidates more aligned with the party’s current objectives.

As the BJP reshapes its electoral strategy, it’s evident that the party is prioritizing adaptability and diversity in its candidate selection process. With fresh faces and new strategies, the BJP aims to secure victory in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections

[makingqueerhistory]

A landslide election victory has set the stage for LGBTQ rights supporter Duma Boko to become the next president of Botswana, where homosexuality was decriminalized in 2019. The election was decided on economic issues, not on LGBTQ rights. In the past, as an attorney, Boko has represented the Botswanan LGBTQ rights group Legabibo in its successful fight for official govvernemt recognition. As a candidate, he has supported LGBTQ rights. Defeated incumbent President Mokgweetsi Masisi had also acknowledged the human rights of LGBTQ people. In 2022, he met with representatives of  Legabibo, vowed to protect LGBT persons’ rights and to abide by the court rulings that overturned laws against same-sex intimacy between consenting adults. In southern Africa, anti-homosexuality laws have been overturned or repealed in Angola,  Botswana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. Same-sex intimacy remains illegal in 30 of Africa’s 54 nations.

[txttletale]

Sorry for anon, I'm shy. I think I'm one of the liberals you're complaining about and I don't want to be. If (and only if) you have the time/energy, could you elaborate more on where the Harris campaign went wrong? I promise I don't mean this in a sealioning way - I genuinely want to understand and move towards a better perspective, but I don't even know what to Google to start.

it is extremely conventional political wisdom that running as the incumbent party during an unpopular administration is a gruelling uphill battle--harris was in this position, and i think going all-in on her continuity with biden, who is extremely disliked (for many reasons, ranging from his fervent passion for genocide to a vague sense that He Made The Ecnomy Bad And Woke) was a catastrophic error that any dickhead with a political science degree would have told her to avoid. unfortunatley she surrounded herself with biden's people who in the run-up to him stepping down had already proven themselves to be completely self-deluding and isolated from reality.

the absolute worst thing you can do in the electoral situation harris was in is go on television and say "i would do absolutely nothing differently to the current (unpopular) administration" and she did literally exactly that.

other facts are that the constituency her campaign decided to go all-in on, of, like, sensible moderate center-right republicans who value bipartisanship, basically hasn't existed since tea party birtherism became ascnedant in the republican party if it ever did at all. the idea that there was an election-winning segment of voeters who would vote for harris if she proved that she wasn't "too liberal" through serious policy commitments to right-wing positions was just not founded in reality--like it was a strategy that failed to grapple with the basic reality that the modern republican position on democrat politicians is that they're adrenochrome-chugging child rapists.

in a similar vein her hard pivot to border fascism was morally deplorable but also a total waste of time because donald "build the wall" trump has made his personal brand synonymous with anti-immigration politics and so she was simply never ever going to win anyone over from him on that ground. & finally of course there was the campaign;'s wholehearted and total contempt for her own potential voters, which manifseted most obviously and evilly in their treatment of anti-genocide protestors and their flying bill clinton out ot michigan to lecture arabs about how they deserved to be bombed but also seems responsible for their total lack of consideration of (again) conventional elecvtoral tactics 101 like "energizing the base" or "getting out the vote"

so tldr it was just a disastrous campaign that prioritized the egos of biden campaign staff and biden himself over winning or facing basic reality

[metamatar]

im feeling a lot of relief today, if bjp had gotten another 2019 or better mandate we would really be down the israel path. we can use this anti incumbency for 2029. we can deradicalise people off this cliff. we have a reprieve. chandrasekhar azad won his seat. the bjp is now coming to power in a coalition during a global slowdown.

[qqueenofhades]

Not that anything's a for sure bet but my read on the general situation re: Harris-Walz is that there's going to be a lot less headwind to fight for Harris specifically as opposed to Clinton because the amazing right wing media hasn't had twenty years for poison to seep into the layperson's thoughts about Clinton's "worthiness"

Well, that and the fact that the MAGA crowd are just really, really bad strategic planners (especially since a solid 75% of their strategy is "lol we'll just cheat and win it that way, we don't need anything else.") They howled for 3.5 years about how Biden was too old to serve and should step down, and then when he did, they had zero plan how to run against Kamala and Trump is now practically begging Biden to magically get back into the race and save him. They ran an anti-Shapiro influence campaign by encouraging the antisemitic online left and planning to exploit the issue among Democrats divided on Israel/Gaza, then furiously melted down when Walz was picked and had no plan to deal with him either. Fascism is a helluva drug, kiddos. Don't try it at home.

The reason Harris has been able to rocket so high is simple, which is that she's channeling Obama 08 energy in more ways than one. Obama also came onto the national political scene four years before (with his speech at the 2004 DNC) and four years later, he was the party's nominee. It didn't even matter that he was a skinny brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama, because people were so tired of the chaos and war and incompetence of Bush Jr that they latched onto a simple message of hope and change and the historical nature of his candidacy felt like an optimistic risk worth taking. Why couldn't it be time for the first African American president? Yes, of course, there was incredible vitriol and we are still dealing with that backlash in some ways now, but still.

As I have said before, Trump is technically not the incumbent, but the last 8 years have been dominated by his hatred, chaos, division, rage, and treason in a way even Bush could never quite manage, and when people get to that point, there's a lot of coiled-up energy that has at last come bursting out. We needed Biden's old-moderate-white-man cred to defeat Trump as the sitting president in 2020, when most of his worst scandals hadn't even happened yet, but this is not 2020 (or 2016) and the dynamic is different. We are now on offense and playing to win, people have readily and eagerly embraced the absolute god tier karma that would come from a black female prosecutor finally ending the Orange Menace's reign of terror once and for all, and the Republicans are spitting smoke and spinning gears running frantically through their usual tired old stupid cliche attacks. GAY TRANS EVIL BIRTHERISM SWIFTBOAT FOREIGN FAR LEFT COMMIE LIBERAL HEATHEN!! they scream desperately, trying to find something that sticks. Except this time, no matter how hard the corporate media tries to help them out, nobody is listening. Nobody is buying it. We know exactly what BS they're trying and we're just shrugging and going "Yeah, no. Weird."

It absolutely helps that Kamala is not dragging the ball and chain of 20 years of Republican smear attacks, yes. But there are a lot of reasons why the GOP is imploding before our eyes and it's probably now more statistically likely that there is a blue tsunami than it is that Trump wins. I still cannot, CANNOT, believe it has been barely three fucking weeks. If this is a dream don't want to wake up, etc. Let me goddamn stay in this timeline just a little longer. And if we do the work, we can in fact make it that way, and Yeah. Yeah.

[tanadrin]

I'm not saying the Harris campaign was perfect by any means, or that Harris was the perfect candidate, but sometimes you make no major fuckups and you still lose--there seem to be a fair number of pundits out there on twitter and bluesky who assume that because Harris lost she must have done something monumentally stupid, and I just don't know that's the case. It seems to me like she ran an effective campaign. She did comparatively well in states where she campaigned most. She might have been a suboptimal candidate but the problem there was Biden stayed in the race far too late, and I think just about any VP in her position would have faced the same strong anti-incumbent headwinds.

[reptilia2003]

guess Assad couldn’t survive the worldwide anti incumbent trend

[noonesgaylikegatson]

Here's the thing: Republicans are the party of the rich, but policies that help the rich fuck everyone else up, so they are inherently unpopular. Republicans hitch their wagons to white supremacists and religious fanatics who will gladly vote for them in hopes of bringing their own agenda. Rich people believe that their money is able to keep them unaffected by their social policies that harm mostly minorities.

Present day: Religious Fanatics and White Supremacists have gone too far. Their plans are so corrosive that they will actually affect the rich; Not to mention, there are a lot of nouveau rich who are also these fanatics.

So now, these rich people, "never-trumpers" want to join the democratic party and make it into a party for them. They are anti-progressive because they don't want to pay more taxes and they don't want more regulations. They want a milquetoast white democrat leader, and not one like Joe Biden who has embraced progressive policies and is now further left than 2008.

They don't want Kamala or Pete Buttigieg or Corey Booker or that skater boi from texas. They were to the left of Biden when they ran in the 2019 primary. They want someone to the right of Biden. A more corporate friendly democrat.

And keep in mind, these republicans have always been racist. And have always been white supremacist for them. This departure from the republican party is not a moral one. It's because the oppression that these Trump Republicans want isn't profitable.

These republicans were fine with rounding up Black people on bullshit charges and sending them to prison to do make them money on prison labor. (Biden ended the use of private prisons on a Federal Level fyi). They're not fine with rounding up 20 million undocumented people and putting them in internment camps and deporting them, that would cost so much money that would be better spent giving to them via tax cuts. (I bet you they'll get on board when someone touts the idea of using the undocumented people for unpaid labor)

They're okay with banning abortions or just limiting. They're not okay with stripping all of woman's freedoms (because many of them are women and like to spend the money they have) because women going back into the homes, means the spending power of the economy shrinks.

Less Women and Men of color going to college means less student loan payments. Not to mention, the policies that Trump will enact with Project 2025, would just wreck the economy. Government workers would lose their jobs. Facilities and infrastructure would crumble. The middle class would all but disappear, the gap between the poor and rich would grow, to the point where there is just no more money to extract from anyone in the lower classes. The money would have to come from them.

If trump gets in office by 2028 there will be so many evictions, its impossible to keep up. The rich would have to bribe police officers (made legal by the supreme court btw) to get people evicted. Not all rich people are rich equally. Those who can afford to bribe will be new upper class, those who can't will be suckers.

FDIC will be gone. So imagine you're one of those rich suckers, and the bank you have your money goes belly up cause the new upper class used it to fund their next yacht?

You can't be a tech mogul in a country with poor infrastructure. All that AI requires massive amount of electricity. How can you have any developments if your company shuts off the power every few weeks and there is no policy in place to keep it going, to fix it. Look at texas? Every hurricane gets rid of the power for weeks. Imagine when Project 2025 gets in and there really is no regulation at all.

What is the point of all this? Biden is the correct choice. He is the incumbent, he won the primary, and the election is less than four months away. This talk about replacing him is a bunch of rich assholes trying to take over the democratic party and making it into the new republican party. The literal worst night mare: socially liberal, financially conservative. They are antagonist towards the democrat's base: Black voters, because black voting population support centralized government, regulations, higher taxes, and a robust social safety network (because its literally the best way to govern)

Focus on getting people to vote for Biden or just not vote for Trump.

[kanagenwrites]

So. Tuesday sucked.

We've all had a chance to come down from the "what the fuck" of it all, and we're starting to see the usual circular firing squad. Lots of lib centrists are doing everything they can to throw trans people, minorities, and basically anyone who isn't a finance bro under the bus, as is (very tiresome) tradition after both victories and defeats in the Democratic Party. I will be 42 years old in a few months, so this is far from the first time I've seen it, and sadly, I'm sure it won't be the last. To the lib centrists and those carrying water for them: This never works. Please stop trying it. Trans issues were not a major motivator; I'll get into that below. Sit down, kids, it's time for Auntie Kana's Fireside Dialectics.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of my followers are significantly younger than me. (Imagine that, an audience that skews young on Tumblr.) A lot of you folks probably haven't been following politics for very long, and you've been able to participate in them for even less time than that. For some of you this is probably your first election as an adult, and it kinda feels like everything blew up in your face, doesn't it? I was about your age for 2000, when the election was nakedly stolen by George W. Bush, and not much older for 2004, when despite his disastrous presidency Bush the Younger rode a wave of 9/11-brained racism to the last popular vote victory the GOP had prior to (likely) this year. So I get it. I really do.

If you're living in the USA you have probably had a subpar education in politics and civics. This is largely by design - education is horrendously underfunded and there is a sustained attack on the ability of teachers to even discuss things like the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of slavery in the United States, the genocide this country was founded on, and so on and so forth. Economic education isn't much better; you very likely got a short lecture on basic supply and demand and an argument-from-authority that "socialism doesn't work." All this combines to leave a lot of folks totally baffled as to how something like this election happens.

But it's pretty simple. It's just material conditions. That's it. What the media isn't telling you (because there's no profit in it, and the media is nothing but a clickbait engine when they aren't open propagandists) is that there has been a massive anti-incumbent wave of elections across the world. How massive? Japan's LDP, which has held power almost uninterrupted since the establishment of Japan's postwar democracy, managed to lose their recent election.

And why are material conditions so shitty? That's a complicated question, but a lot of it is the fact that we had a lengthy period of low inflation followed by a period of extremely high inflation due to the absolutely botched response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A bag of Doritos used to be 2.50, and now it's like 6 bucks. That's worse than all the inflation (and naked price-gouging, because there's a lot of that going on too) I experienced in my life prior to 2020, squeezed into the space of a year or two. This smacks everyone in the face every time they buy groceries, and while the government and the Federal Reserve were doing everything they could to manage inflation (and understand what a big deal it is for me, the anarcho-communist, to say that the US actually did an extremely fucking good job of doing it, because every other country on Earth had it worse than we did), they did fuck all to actually improve the material conditions people were experiencing. Wages were not keeping up with the cost of living, and price-gouging wasn't being dealt with.

Remember the 600 bucks Joe Biden still owes you? The American electorate sure the fuck does. Invisible backrooms liberal wonkery does not connect, regardless of whether it works or not, but going back on a promise? People remember that shit.

It's a rare incumbent that could win in an environment like this, especially when tied to a track record of doing exactly fucking nothing to actually help people from the perspective of the vast majority of the population. Kamala Harris was not that incumbent. She was a singularly uninspiring candidate who failed to connect with voters so thoroughly that she was on track to lose her home state in the 2020 Democratic primary. Nobody liked her (except a few very eager and very loud fans in the K-Hive), and speaking as someone who lives in California, I am not surprised she ate shit. She was a terrible choice for VP and a terrible choice of successor for Biden, but because Biden('s handlers) insisted on pretending he wasn't obviously declining before our very eyes, Harris, a singularly uninspiring candidate, had three months to build and run a campaign.

And it was still weirdly close.

Now, there's two possibilities: Either she actually ran an amazing campaign and it's incredible that it was even this close, or Trump is just so loathsome that even in a massively anti-incumbent environment he didn't bring anyone new to the table. Given that Trump is on-track to receive less votes this time than he did in 2020, and how many of those votes seem to have been cast for Trump and no one else down-ballot, I think it's more of the latter than the former. Trump brought the usual suspects, while Kamala successfully drove away voters that even Joe fucking Biden and Hillary fucking Clinton were able to bring home. Not on the left, not in minority demographics, but across the board. After all, if things are horrible and you're being promised that "nothing will fundamentally change," (literally an early-presidency quote from Joe Biden, whose agenda Kamala Harris 100% aligned herself with) and keeping in mind that the average American voter is not nearly so plugged into the minutiae and the day to day of politics (as evinced by the sudden peak in google searched for "Did Joe Biden drop out?" on Tuesday), why the fuck would you bother to vote?

Hopefully you have a better idea how we got here now. The question, of course, is where do we go from here? I will probably continue posting about this from time to time, especially if there's interest, but my advice is this:

We are still here. We will be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and so on. Plan accordingly.

Things will get fucked up. Things will always get fucked up. That is the nature of things no matter who is running the government. Plan accordingly.

Organize. Develop parallel structures of power and assistance, because the government is likely going to be even more useless to directly assist you than it already was. Our greatest strength is each other, and our ability to care for and help one another.

I have been here before. You will be here again. It always feels like it's the worst thing ever to happen. That never really goes away, but your ability to deal with it, to plan around it, to endure it, and to rise up again on the other side of it and say "No, fuck you" is entirely under your control and within your capabilities. And you will get better at it as you do it. And you are not doing it alone. None of us are.

Do not give up. Do not surrender. This isn't the end, or the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning: it just is.

Now go watch a video of a cat doing something cute, or read some smut, or whatever gives you joy. You can't take care of others unless you take care of yourself. That's General Order #1: Take care of yourself.

Solidarity, y'all.

[mariacallous]

Trump is staffing his cabinet with billionaires, who will break the government out of incompetence, spite, or avarice. So why not just go for class politics, and forget about everything else? As the country reaches unprecedented levels of inequality, why not just tear off the oligarchs' masks? Why not present them as merchants of death?

We should all know who they are, how wealthy they are, from what sources, and how they profit from holding power. And, in some better future, we should all benefit from anti-oligarchical policies that make us all more free. We have to talk about inequality, about class.

But America cannot get to social justice only by talking about class. I want to consider the last few weeks and months -- the campaign, its outcome, the CEO assassination -- to think through how an effective opposition might work.

The election itself gives is an important clue. Oligarchy could have been halted at the ballot box. Harris would have been very different from Trump on taxes and redistribution. Sure, she might have run from further on the Left, but she was not herself a wannabe oligarch, and would not have built a cabinet of oligarchs. Had the Democrats controlled Congress, her policies would have continued a trend toward redistribution that Biden had begun. Even without Congress, she would have prevented the Trumpian oligarchical orgy. So if people had wanted to prevent rule by billionaires, they could have done so.

Harris suffered from an incumbency problem. It was a "change" election. Around the world and for several years, post-covid, it has been strikingly hard for incumbents to win. The question, though, is why Trump got to be the "change" candidate. Here is a hint of why just referring to class will never be enough. The candidate who would have changed American society in the direction of equality was not the change candidate. The candidate who was associated with wealth was. This can only be understood as culture.

Rule by the wealthy is not change. The wealthy, putting it gently, have been in charge before. The oligarchs don't actually need the support of the voters to have more than sufficient power in the United States. Why did voters support them? I spent most of October in the Midwest and Great Plains, entirely in states that went for Trump (except Illinois). It is harder and harder to have these conversations, but I think I have some notion.

Trump voters saw their guy as the outsider, even though he has already been president once, and has been very present in media for forty years. For Harris voters, the fact that she is Black and a woman make her an outsider; for Trump voters, or at least for many of the ones with whom I spoke, they make her an insider. And that notion that women and Blacks direct a deep state is a cultural construct.

For Trump voters, or at least many of the ones with whom I spoke this fall, Trump's (supposed) wealth also made him the change candidate. Anyone who is wealthy is seen as a daredevil who broke the rules. The image of Trump as a trailblazer was created by the man himself, not by actual earnings. More deeply, though, the notion of the wealthy person as a hero is an American cultural construct. It makes of voting a cultural act: I want to feel like I am a part of that.

So when people say we need a class war, I sympathize. The grotesque inequality of wealth in the United States is at the root of countless problems. I dwell on this in both On Freedom and Road to Unfreedom. And, of course, in the coming years, cities and states should redistribute wealth and provide social services, thereby helping people to become free. At the national level, though, you cannot just declare a class war, because you cannot decide what class people belong to for them, or tell them what their class interests are. Even basic interests, like staying alive, being safe, or having money, are experienced in emotional contexts. Class anxiety can lead right to oligarchy or fascism or both.

If you are an oligarch, you know this. You win the class war by fighting the culture war. You engage negatively with both class and culture. You never say: "hey, I am Elon Musk, and I care about you, therefore I am writing every American family a check for $5,000." You stay away from numbers and math. You tell a story about how the wealth of the wealthy somehow benefits everyone. And you reinforce the idea that the people who threaten the prosperity of your voters are those who threaten their culture. And so Blacks or immigrants or transsexuals (or whoever) are always presented as threatened both prosperity and identity.

On the other side, those who want democracy rather than oligarchy must engage positively with culture in order to engage with class. That people even have a class identity is not given by nature. It is a result of education, experience, camaraderie. The welfare state was curtailed at its foundation in the 1930s and weakened in the 1980s because of racism. Labor unions became effective at defending wages when they became effective at admitting non-Whites. Americans deny themselves the policies that would serve them because of culture, because of who they see as the real people, the real citizens. And that is why we cannot effectively care about economic inequality without practical, everyday understanding of racial other sorts of inequality.

Orwell said that it is a constant struggle to see what is right in front of your nose. Culture can blind us to the obvious. Non-Blacks tend to project onto Blacks political irrationality and "identity politics." But who in America votes consistently with their economic interests? African Americans, in general. And is this because they are somehow free of culture, and just more rational than the rest of us? Perhaps. Or is it rather that they are not subject to the dominant form of identity politics, and can see through it? And that this knowledge is not just the experience of one life, but generationally transmitted, deeply connected to the actual history of the country? The very notion that African Americans are the savviest voters is practically unsayable in American English.

Let me give a second example of how culture frames what we see. Affirmative action by universities on the basis of race has been banned by the Supreme Court. But the largest affirmative action at universities, as an honest admissions officer will tell you, is on the basis of gender. In college admissions, boys with worse grades are favored over girls with better grades. (Did you have to read that sentence twice?) But it is unthinkable that a woman could bring and win a case at the Supreme Court on the basis of the discrimination that girls inarguably suffer in university admissions. That all of this is practically unsayable is a sign of how the culture works.

When we say "identity politics" in American English, we are usually invoking women, or Blacks, or gender or sexual minorities. That is itself a sign of how deeply culture affects our judgements, and by "culture" here I mean a deeply rooted sense, among many of us, of what is normal and therefore unworthy of comment. The most powerful form of identity politics is Trump's, and it goes something like this: "I am a rich white guy who breaks all the rules and who therefore gets to make them, and so you should enjoy the feel of my hand in your pocket as I pick it."

Of course, we should pass policies that address economic inequality where and when we can. But there are barriers to the success of this at a national level, barriers that the coming Trumpomuskovite regime will raise even higher. The oligarchs understand all this, and those who wish to resist or defeat them must know how to turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one.

The work that has to be done on American racism is hard, and it is part of the work that has to be done on American social injustice. This might seem to make matters harder. But it doesn't, really. The impossible is harder than the difficult, and so avoiding the impossible is a good idea. Trying to do things that are impossible, like addressing class without addressing culture, is not the right use of energy.

And in an important way these realizations makes matters easier. The work that needs to be done in the culture has to be done every day. But that means that it can be done every day, in small ways, by all of us.

Some of that everyday work involves our analysis of the election. Personally, I hold the unpopular view that Harris ran a good campaign, if not a perfect one, and that the reasons she lost -- anti-incumbency, the internet generally, Twitter bias, Musk's money, Trump's talent, media cowardice, U.S. history -- were not things we can really blame her for not overcoming in a few months. I do agree with some lines of critique: I think that she should have let Walz be Walz, and used more grandiose language about her economic policies.

Where I disagree is the notion that Harris lost because of her "identity politics." She did not run her campaign on "identity politics" in the sense that is meant. Harris did not emphasize being Indian, or Black, or a woman. Trump's campaign, however was identity politics from start to finish. Trump ran as a rich white guy and won; Harris ran as an American and lost.

Trump succeeded because of his identity politics, which brings race and class together in a certain way. By connecting the desire for change with emotions that make it impossible, he (and many others) generate, in the end, sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others. Deportations have to be understood in this light: they are a spectacle of the suffering of others. So does mass incarceration.

A test for this, as we have been recently reminded, is health. Persuading people that it is normal to pay for shorter lives is the litmus test of sadopopulism. In America, we do in fact pay exorbitant amounts of money to harmful middlemen who kill us by denying us care that we could afford if their scam did not exist. (It is a sign of our cultural problem that we say "insurance" or "health care" when we mean "death grift.") The recent assassination of the CEO of the misnamed company UnitedHealthcare brought the middleman problem into focus. On the internet, people on the Right joined people on the Left is sharing family stories of expense, uncertainty, suffering and death.

Will it matter that almost everyone agrees? Why did people who want better health care vote for Trump? Why do we not have a single-payer system? Who do we pay so much more and get so much less than other people in other countries? Why was it so hard for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who were very popular presidents, to pass the kind of health care reform they favored? Part of it is, of course, that we have too much money in politics (a class factor, let's say); but part of it is that many people who would gain security, prosperity, and lifespan from a better system don't want it if they have to share it with others (a culture factor, let's say).

How this will play out under the coming Trump regime is a test. If Trump were a true populist, which he is not, he would seize on the issue of health care to gain support from Americans all over the political spectrum (this is an idea I steal from Kate Woodsome). The grifter king must protect all grifts. UnitedHealthcare, a company that makes lots of money by delivering a lethal absence, represents just the sort of capitalism that a Trump regime must celebrate. Indeed, the plan in the middle term (RFK JR.) seems to be to make us all sicker, so that even more advanced grifts are possible.

And so in Trumpomuskovia a way will have to be found to change the subject from health care, to blame the Blacks or the migrants or the trans people for all the lethal dysfunctionality, to connect the assassin himself to some conspiracy of unlikable figures, or something. It's not clear just how this will work -- most likely, the first move will be not to move at all, in the reasonable hope that the policies of January and February and March will be so frightening that people will forget about health care. And maybe this will work.

If it does, we can look forward to a new kind of fascism. In the traditional sort, your children had to die on the front to perpetuate a vision of racial glory. In this iteration, your children have to die of diseases so that people who are already billionaires can become wealthier. The Trumpomuskovian policy will be to keep the death-grift billionaires we have, and create new ones by ending vaccinations and thereby opening the snake oil market.

This is a deepening of class differences, between the wealthy and the long-lived and the financially and existentially precarious. It is possible future thanks not only to greed, but also to a culture in which we don't see our own health care problems as everyone's, and in which we can be easily drawn, by personal fears that activate prejudice, away from seeing ourselves as part of a larger class of people who could be living better and longer lives.

All the same, it won't be enough to be outraged at the terrible injustice in the abstract. Even when the issue is life itself, "class not race" won't work. We need the mode of outrage at the numbers. But we will also need the mode of empathy for African Americans and others whose marginalization has been used to keep health care -- and good policy generally -- from coming about. This is the most important effort, over time. How shock, including the shock of illness, strikes a population depends on how that population has prepared itself. And, yet, we will also need empathy for people who voted for Trump and who get sick. People change their minds, but not usually when they are suffering alone. This is a different kind of move, hard for different reasons, but necessary.

About class, about differences in wealth, we need clarity, and we need outrage. But we will not get far without equal clarity about race. Without empathy for others, we cannot see ourselves. Without empathy, every inequality can get worse, and will. But Trump and Musk and other oligarchs can be stopped when they try to blame our health care debacle on those who suffer the most from it. They can be stopped when they try to ban vaccines and profit from further disease and death. With empathy, health care might just be an issue where the oligarchy fails to consolidate, and the people begin to hear themselves speak.

[griseldagimpel]

How to Punish Democrats in the United States for Being Pro-Genocide

I've seen a lot of posts about abandoning the Democratic party. (Because, really, is Be Anti-Genocide really that much of a fucking ask??)

And I've seen a lot of posts about how not voting Democrat means the Republicans will win, which means we'll end up with politicians that are both pro-genocide and a bunch of other awful shit. (Yep. This is true.)

But I haven't seen a lot of posts going around about other things people could do, especially with primaries literally being next year in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for re-election.

For those not familiar with primaries, they are elections that take place before the general election and are the mechanism for how the general election candidate for a political party is selected. So a primary won't be Democrat vs Republican, it'll be Democrat vs Democrat or Republican vs Republican.

To start, yes, a lot of the below require a lot of time and effort. Yeah, the reality is is that the world's a shitty place because people who want to change it are struggling to exist under late stage capitalism. If there's something on this list you can't do, that's fine. What can you do?

This post is mostly not going to focus on Biden. He's not the sum total of the Democratic party, and if more of the party was against him, he'd have a harder time getting traction. That said, if you do have a presidential primary with him on the ballot, you should absolutely vote against him, just on principle.

Depending on the state, you may need to be a registered member of the Democratic Party to vote in the Democratic Party Primary. And, look, registering as a Democrat doesn't mean you have a legal obligation to vote for a Democratic candidate in the general election. There's no loyalty pledge you have to sign that says you agree with every single position the Democratic Party holds. There's not a membership fee. Literally, all it does is mean that your little voting card says you're a Democrat, which establishes that you want to have a say in how the Democratic Party is run. That's it.

Alright, first step. Who are your two Senators and one House Representative? Here's a link to find that information: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

Second step: Are your elected officials Democrats? (Or Independents that caucus with the Democrats?) And are they pro-Genocide?

If they're a Republican, than your goal is to elect an anti-Genocide Democrat. (Or anti-Genocide Independent who'll caucus with the Democrats. Same difference. I'm just going to use "Democrat" from here on out, and you can substitute in "Independent" if it applies.) You still care about primaries, though. It's just that in the General election, the Republican candidate will be incumbent rather than the challenger.

If they're a anti-Genocide Democrat, send them a letter telling them you appreciate their position, and most of the rest of this post doesn't apply to you.

If they're a pro-Genocide Democrat, is there someone running against them in the primary? https://ballotpedia.org/ is a great resource here.

If they've got a primary challenger, is their primary challenger anti-Genocide? If they are, write them and tell them you appreciate their position. Then write to the incumbent and tell them that them being pro-Genocide is why you aren't voting for them in the primary. If the primary challenger is pro-Genocide or doesn't have a stated position, write to them and try to get them to adopt an anti-Genocide position. Pay attention to town hall events, and don't hesitate to contact the campaign. Primaries don't get a lot of attention, so if you can get a primary challenger to switch positions, there's not a big risk of blow back for them doing so. (In a general election, switching positions can get a candidate labeled a flip-flop, so keep that in mind.)

If there's not a primary challenger or if you need a better primary challenger, who in your community can run as one? Check with your local leftist organizations. Check deadlines and requirements to get a candidate on the ballot. It usually requires getting a certain number of signatures on a petition from people in your area.

Now that you've got an anti-Genocide primary challenger, consider volunteering for their campaign. And, something to keep in mind, turn out for primaries tends to be low, and the smaller the population size of the district, the lower that number will be. It may only take a few hundred votes to swing a primary election, if you've got a smaller district.

While all this is going on, you will no doubt be flooded with messages from Democratic candidates begging for money. For each, check their position. If they're pro-Genocide, don't give them money and then call, email, or write them telling them that their pro-Genocide position is why they aren't getting money. If they're anti-Genocide, and you can afford it, give them a bit of money. Yeah, in the bigger elections, there's ridiculous amounts of money in play, but a primary challenger might not necessarily be rolling in it.

Finally, vote in the primaries.

[girlactionfigure]

the As a Jews of the IRI

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

WHAT IS AN "AS A JEW"?

“As a Jew” is a tongue-in-cheek term Jews use to describe fellow Jews who weaponize their Jewish identities to excuse, minimize, justify, or deny antisemitism.

As in, “As a Jew, this is not antisemitic because so and so…”

WHAT IS THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC?

The Islamic Republic is the fundamentalist Islamist, ultra-conservative, warmongering regime that has been ruling Iran -- and oppressing its population -- with an iron fist since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Many Iranians call the Islamic Regime an “occupying force” because it is culturally foreign to Iran.

According to Iranian-American policy analyst Karim Sadjapour, the three ideological pillars of the Iranian regime are “compulsory hijab, death to America, and death to Israel.”

After the Islamic Republic came into power, over 80% of Iran’s ancient Jewish population fled the country. Today, the 8,500 Jews still living in Iran are subject to second-class citizenship and are constantly under the suspicion of the regime, for which they must tread carefully, never openly criticizing the regime’s implementation of Sharia Law.

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC IS A GENOCIDAL THREAT TO JEWS

Given the Islamic Republic’s commitment to the “destruction of Israel” -- where around half of the world’s Jews live -- it has spent decades establishing proxy terrorist militias around the Jewish state. Among the Islamic Republic’s proxies are Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar Allah, and its most important proxy, Hezbollah.

But the Islamic Republic’s targeting of Jews extends far, far beyond the Jewish state. In other words, no, the Islamic Republic isn’t merely “anti-Zionist.”

The Islamic Republic has planned and carried out terrorist attacks and massacres of Jews everywhere from Thailand to Kenya.

The Islamic Republic’s deadliest attack on Jews in the Diaspora was the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which took 85 innocent lives. Before the October 7 Hamas massacre, which killed 1,200 Israelis, predominantly civilians -- another attack that was planned and funded by the Islamic Republic -- the AMIA bombing was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly dabbled with Holocaust denial. The Islamic Republic’s leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently talked about the Holocaust’s “exaggerated numbers.” Most infamously, in 2006, the Islamic Republic hosted an international Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.

THE TRIED AND TRUE PROPAGANDA PLAYBOOK

Though the Islamic Republic government is deeply conservative, it started exploiting the well-intentioned progressive types to accomplish its nefarious goals before it even came into power.

The rule of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, was characterized by the most horrific human rights violations. He was no liberal and no progressive. He was not anti-imperialist either, hoping to establish an empire of his own. In fact, he believed that “establishing the Islamic state world-wide belong(s) to the great goals of the revolution.” He spoke of conquering the whole world under the banner of Islam: “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”

In 1964, the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, exiled Khomeini and banned his books. As such, the vast majority of the Iranian population was unfamiliar with his more extremist beliefs. While in exile in France, Khomeini downplayed his fundamentalism, presenting himself to the west merely as a fierce opponent of American neo-imperialism and influence in Iran. It was in this manner, for example, that he was able to manipulate Iranian leftists to join him under his banner. In reality, Khomeini despised leftism, and soon after he came to power, many left-wing organizations had to flee Iran. Others were executed.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the saga of the mandatory hijab. During the Iranian Revolution, many Iranian women wore the hijab as a symbol of opposition to the Shah’s policies of westernization. Soon after Khomeini came to power, the hijab was made mandatory. Shocked, liberal and leftist women took to the streets; they had not expected the hijab to become mandatory. In response, Khomeini quickly began suppressing and eliminating all leftist and liberal political groups, figures, and parties, and to this day, hijab remains mandatory in Iran, and women who refuse to wear it face arrest, torture, and even death.

WHAT IS NIAC?

The National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, is the de-facto lobby of the Islamic Republic in the United States. In other words, they lobby on behalf of the Islamic Republic, its policies, and its interests.  

Just as Ruhollah Khomeini did in days past, NIAC has spent years latching onto “progressive” Jewish groups to pursue their nefarious interests...and shield the Islamic Republic from accusations of antisemitism.

Of course the Islamic Republic wants to disarm Israel...because their open goal is to destroy the Jewish state. They couldn’t care less about the suffering of anyone in Gaza.

To the left is Rabbi Abby Chava Stein, who is a member of the “Jewish” Voice for “Peace” rabbinical council. Here she is meeting with the current president of the Islamic Republic.

Press TV is a propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic.

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AND THE NETUREI KARTA

You probably recognize these guys, present at pretty much every pro-Palestine protest in New York City. They are the Neturei Karta. The Neturei Karta is a Hasidic Jewish sect with about 1,000-5,000 members. They are religious anti-Zionists, rejecting political Zionism on the religious basis that they believe no Jewish state should be founded prior to the arrival of the Messiah. While some other Jewish branches, such as the Satmar, hold this position, only the Neturei Karta have gone so far as to establish close relationships with those who wish Israeli Jews dead...particularly with the Islamic Republic.

In 2005, after then-Islamic Republic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews to Germany or Austria, the Neturei Karta issued a statement defending Ahmadinejad.  

In 2006, the Neturei Karta attended a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. For this, the Satmar, who are also religious anti-Zionists, condemned the Neturei Karta, calling on Jews worldwide to “to keep away from [the Neturei Karta] and condemn their actions.” The Satmar (along with Chabad, who are not anti-Zionist) also issued a cherem (i.e. censure; almost like the Jewish version of excommunication) against the Neturei Karta.

THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK

How do you deflect legitimate accusations of genocidal antisemitism? You “befriend” Jews, of course. As in: “how could I be antisemitic?! Look at all these Jews who support me!” Three historical examples:

(1) Leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the United States Olympic Committee was under tremendous pressure to boycott the Games, given Nazi Germany’s horrific treatment of Jews. The head of the US Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was a Nazi sympathizer, who convinced Germany to allow one German Jewish athlete to compete to give the impression that Jews in Germany were being treated fairly. In other words, the Nazis needed a token Jew. They proceeded to select a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, to the German Olympic team. Mayer placed second and gave the Nazi salute on the podium.

(2) In the 1920s, the Soviet Union shut down virtually all Jewish cultural, social, and religious institutions using a Jewish group, the Yevsektsiya, as a cover. According to historian of Soviet history Richard Pipes, “In time, every Jewish cultural and social organization came under assault.” The fact that the Yevsektsiya was “Jewish” was central to its purpose. After all, the Soviet regime couldn’t be accused of antisemitism when those shutting down all Jewish cultural and spiritual life were Jews themselves.

(3) Likewise, in the early 1950s, notorious Soviet dictator Josef Stalin conceived a plan for the mass deportation of Soviet Jewry to prison camps, all under the guise of “anti-Zionism.” Though the plan never ultimately came to pass, given Stalin’s sudden death, Stalin had made preparations to publish a letter to be signed by Soviet Jews “denouncing” Zionism and Zionist Jews. In the letter, Stalin’s “anti-Zionist Jews” would then urge the Soviet state to “take action” against the traitorous Zionist Jews. Jews would be deported en masse to the Ural Mountains, where MGB would instigate discord between Jewish leaders. Later, they would kill the “elites” in the camps, and maybe even follow with the rest of the Jewish population.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

I’ve had my differences with J Street over the years but seeing them shill for the Islamic Republic was disappointing tbh…I expect nothing less of JVP and IfNotNow, but I (stupidly?) thought J Street was better than that 🤷🏻‍♀️

[bauliya]

tbh I honestly think american elections have just become anti-incumbent due to the successive and concurrent neoliberal crises (which is what indian elections have historically faced because of the deep socioeconomic dysfunction) and given the unwillingness of any party to do meaningful structural change it’s just gonna be one term red one term blue for a long, long time

[generallemarc]

Do not kill yourself or harm yourself over this election

I'm a conservative, but 8 years ago I wasn't and was also dealing with massively untreated anxiety and depression, magnified by an abusive relationship. I had the mother of all meltdowns on election night and briefly considered ending it all, so I know the mindset some of y'all must be in. Don't do it. For starters, there's never any good reason to kill yourself. Every single one of you has people who love you, even if your mind tells you you don't, and again I speak from personal experience when I say that, if you lose someone to suicide, you spend the rest of your life wishing for nothing more than the ability to go back and stop them. And secondly, this is four years we've got here. Maybe two, if Congress flips during the mid-terms(which I personally think it will, as the anti-incumbency bias that boosted Trump will immediately turn against him once he's been the incumbent for two years). Without writing an essay on the subject, the Constitution and the court system will ensure that any attempt to tell consenting, rational adults what kinds of healthcare they can and can't have will all die immediately before the 14th Amendment. "Equal treatment under the law" is written into the highest law of the land, and the only way the courts could ignore that is if that amendment were somehow removed. Will some states still try to pass anti-trans laws? Absolutely. Will there still be bigoted jackasses spewing their bigotry? Yes, and they'd have been there even if Trump lost. But suicide won't help anyone, including yourself. I know four years seems like a long time, especially if you're younger, like still-in-college younger. But the average lifespan in America is just under 77 and a half years, and if you don't smoke and don't have any hereditary illnesses or hereditary risk of cancer there's a good chance you'll go above that(and who knows how much medicine will advance all those years from now). Don't deny yourself all those decades because of four bad years. Please. You're worth so much more.