Op-Ed: Losing elections, lazy American style – You get what you deserve

Donald Trump elected US president – Copyright AFP Olivia BUGAULT, Samuel BARBOSA

Liberal “progressives” are now throwing rocks at each other for losing the 2024 election. To quote the author of Parkinson’s Law, blame is the first response of the incompetent.

Add an unbelievably high level of insularity and you’re ready to fail again. The blame game is in full swing, and much good that will do anyone.

The numbers speak for themselves. This was not the result of ideology or the breakdown of some largely fictional and entirely mythical connection between academia and the working class.

You misread everything and you screwed up big time. Their marketing was much more effective than yours. Sanders stuck to the core progressive message, and you didn’t.

The divide was way too big. Liberal progressives and conservatives haven’t really been on speaking terms since the 1960s with the exception of 911. There’s no common ground. There’s no incentive for dialogue. The two sides actively dislike and avoid each other.

Polarization, the recipe, and the marketing

Polarization won this election. It was a weaponized divide and conquer. You were divided and conquered. Desperate people always look for solutions, even if those solutions are far worse than the current problems.

This was and still is a blind spot in progressive politics long before Brexit and the Trump debacles. The polarization of America does have a root social cause, at least to that extent. The divides in American society are more than obvious and easy to exploit. The Democrats and liberal media constantly and consistently misread that situation badly.

The media was the easy leverage for polarization. The conservatives controlled the narrative from the minute everyone else suddenly became the “Left”. The rest of the narrative was just a shopping list for marketing conservative policies.

The next naughty word to exploit was “Woke”. Most people who hate the word don’t even know what “woke” means. It dates back about 10 years. It was also a very easy target for the conservative media and wound up in speeches, rants, etc.

Then there’s immigration. That problem goes way back to the Civil War and the KKK attacking the Irish largely for being Catholics in a pitched battle. It’s easy to point out a group and use it as an excuse for your various insanities. This time it’s the Latinos. Not much has changed and nothing much does in conservative politics.

You couldn’t even beat pet-eating monsters and garbage islands. Ingratiating convicted felons were more important than poverty the cost of living, homelessness, lunatic healthcare, food deserts, dodgy tap water, droughts, floods, hurricanes, or anything else.  

The Democrats simply did not connect at all, in any way, with the other voter base. It wasn’t even a credible attempt.

This is marketing, not politics.

Everybody else knows that, why don’t you?

I’ve been at first uneasy and progressively more annoyed for many years over the failure of liberal progressives to translate ideas into solid working examples.

I didn’t hear a word about fixing real-life problems in the Democratic campaign. No housing solutions, no health solutions, just “Us or them”, and it didn’t work.

Can you really blame broke, scared, sick people for not being too focused? They’ve just voted to make things much worse. Happy? 

You need to show positive examples.

Ideology is worthless unless you can prove you mean what you say.

The keywords are all about reassurance, safety, and almost childhood good words.

The Republicans didn’t even need to say, “back to the good old days”. They simply implied that would happen and blamed everyone else for the mess America has become in the last 60 years.

Another issue – Why do you need to be told this?

This is Bonehead Marketing For The Almost Conscious 101.

You are now due for at least two years of the brilliance of unemployable sociopaths. This was negligence at its most inexcusable.  

Now maybe you’d like to condescend to getting something right for a change?