I was watching the Joe Rogan Trump interview. I came to a conclusion. The Democratic party is the party with all of the nerds who did well in college.
If you and the rest of the Bore don't mind, I'm gonna springboard off your post, Himu, and dump my thoughts about the election.
Since the mid 2010s, the Dem party is less the "nerd" party (I mean, the Repubs now have the first millennial awkward techbro nerd in the White House) and more the "HR Karen" party, imo.
However, that is in no where near the primary reason she lost.
Kamala I think wasn't a strong candidate, but IMO she did pretty damn good for herself even with being handed a terrible deck. The economy/inflation is by far the biggest issue, and although the US handled inflation the best out of all the industrialized countries, and I'm privileged enough to say my 401k has boomed during the era, the fact of the matter is - a lot of the working class people are suffering, the cost of living has absolutely EXPLODED post-covid. While salaries have been catching up slightly, it's still not enough. And a grocery bill increasing by 50% is gonna hurt to those people who were living day-by-day even before the pandemic. I do think Biden and the FED have done their best to mitigate this, but unfortunately it was a shit "unprecedented" (most overused word the past few years) situation causing every single incumbent party to lose.
All the other reasons why people are saying she failed, are much smaller but they did skim the margins of her vote little by little. Gaza, not appealing to the youth, their oblivious celebrity endorsements, being perceived as being too invested in identity politics. I think Kamala did a good job of not getting bogged down in identity politics, however you had a period from the mid 2010s onward where leftist academists and others would be using terms like "toxic masculinity", "white supremacy", etc. These things obviously exist and white people as a whole could stand to be more mindful of others' situations, but when they get harped on by the "HR Karens", you start seeing even your typical college white lib get tired of being perceived as "the enemy" for stuff they probably have at most a tiny hand in perpetuating. Especially the "ethnic whites" i.e. those Ellis Island descendants who still may have slight ties to the old world were a big Dem constituency in the new deal era, but now go pretty hard for Trump. He made some big inroads in the Northeast and outright won the Rust Belt in 2016 and 2024 (where you have a large portion of Ellis Island descendants). Many of these people, whose families have been in this country way after slavery ended, way after the wars against the Native Americans, and who have faced tons of discrimination before being adopted into the "white" umbrella, question why they're getting the blame for atrocities perpetuated while their descendants were still in the old world mining coal in Poland, farming in Sicily, trying not to starve during the Irish famine.
We're having a realignment here - it's no longer a multicultural/multiracial "big blanket" party vs. a neoliberal wealthy white party with large evangelical and military support. It's shifted to a working class (with their uber rich overlords) vs. the "professional managerial class"/"laptop class" or what have you, with some remnants of the neoliberal/military divisions. And the Dem leadership however still thinks we're in the mid 2000s and fighting those same battles, which is a fools errand, since the coalitions within the Obama-era party have fragmented and are now increasingly at odds with one another. The Dems have let the working class slip away as they double-down on the failed neoliberal policies present in American politics since the Reagan era.
So where do the Dems go from here? Well, I think 2028 will be much more favorable to them so they probably can continue to stagnate doing what they're doing. If the tariffs Trump is pushing actually go through, it'll do further economic damage and stifle the tenuous recovery we're in, and then the field would be advantageous to them. Especially so if some of the Project 2025 horror comes to pass. But I'm hoping that Dems go through their own realignment and re-embrace their new deal/leftist roots. Many leftist/large government policies are extremely popular (Medicare for All, lower medicine costs, make the billionaires pay their fair share), while others are absolute poison to the electorate (defund the police, identity politics). But I also think the leftists are terrible at picking-and-choosing, along with messaging (the Right's most iconic and accurate meme is by far "the left can't meme"). The one person on the left who has a clear and concise message is, of course, Bernie. And happens to be the political figure with the highest likeability ranking. Sadly his successor pool is looking pretty thin (AOC is great but pushes some of the unlikable leftist policies and already has the GOP building up a smear campaign against her).
And finally, the DNC absolutely needs an enema.
Great post.
I agree with HR Karen but I think nerd is more apt because nerds are rigid. When I say nerd, I mean overeducated binary "I'm so smart" nerd. While JD Vance is technically nerd (and he is one of us), he has far more better social skills than most nerds and is also charismatic. Most Dems are not really charismatic. They're very robotic and clinical and step by step versus Trump's shoot from the hip approach.
Expounding, Democrats are nerds in the worst sense. The elitist type.
As a nerd, I know nerds. And nerds have awful social skills. That's Democrats and liberals. They're always so caught up in data and empirical metrics they never account for human factor or primal instinct. Over the course of my life liberals have said the following about people that vote right:
- they're dumb and vote against their own interests
- conservatives can't make art because to make art it would require understanding humanity
- fashion dude on twitter outright said just the other day that cons can't make a conservative fashion twitter account because in order to be that fashionable it would require getting past not being seen as gay and conservatives are clearly incapable of doing that
They always think they're the smartest in the room yet for some reason can't fucking win.
They're like *points at this chart and that chart and this graph* and wondering why you're not believing their arguments.
Look at the old Bore posters that left. Mandark, Triumph, Arvie, Glen;etc. all holier than thou moralistic nerds. All of them. They couldn’t handle talking to people with different views than them and abandoned their friends and outcasted others for some moral truth conceding the site to people they deemed immoral. This is the same for Dems in the political arena: they conceded the messaging war to republicans because people like Joe Rogan didn’t fit their purity test because how dare he talk to and platform conservatives like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson on top of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bernie Sanders? How dare he platform people I don’t like. So they decided he was a right winger and basically gave the right a monopoly on messaging. Nerds. They’re fucking nerds.
Just the other day was talking to a Dem/lib about the working class and dude said they don't have a working class problem and their working class outreach is great.
You've seen the way they throw minorities under the bus when they vote Republican.
Look at the way Obama scolded black men. Not making compelling arguments but did so in a "I know better than you" way.
Your examples for them being HR Karen's, while true, is more evidence they're nerds. Nerds are rarely rule breakers. By nerd, I am using book worm study all the time type nerd. They're not rule breakers. Kid wants to copy your homework and you say no because it's against the rules. Emphasis on rules. Liberals make everything about the rules. Don't do this or you're racist. Don't say that or you're toxic. Have different political beliefs and I'll end a decade plus friendship. They're the teachers pet grown up. The hall monitor in political office. They're fucking nerds.
Continuing, you're right. The Dems refuse to accept the new political paradigm. They still think it's the 60's or something and can't accept that MAGA is the new post-racial tent coalition except it's not bonded by identity, it's bonded through shared values and culture and class. I work construction jobs. The guys at a construction job all get along because we are cut from the same cloth regardless of race, religion, country, or creed. We share a similar culture with similar values. You're new and some guy calls you a cigarillo on day one to see how you react. If you get defensive you truly are a cigarillo. If you throw it back and say something back like, something about fucking their mom, you're one of the boys. The guys at the construction site voted Trump even most of the black ones. Democrats have lost sight of America and have no idea what the fuck is going on. Kamala didn't even go on Joe fucking Rogan despite them trying to reach young men. Like what in the absolute shit.
I will give Kamala credit in many avenues. I think she didn't run an entirely awful campaign. I was impressed she didn't rely upon her identity or gender or race to get brownie points. She said outright she wanted to be elected for what she offered not who or what she was. The problem is everyone surrounding her from Obama to the Democratic elite made it about those things. She was given a bad hand.
As for the Dems future, their only hope is for them to go populist, which is bad for the Democratic Party because they abhor populism. Doing so would "break the rules" and as established in my post, Dems hate breaking rules. They're very strict on what they think works. Populism is why they hate Trump, not because they think they he's a fascist, but because he's not only a political outsider, he's also a populist. Dems had their own populist and did everything in their power to try to kill his momentum. In order for dems to win 2028 they will have to fight fire with their own breed of populism, which is precisely why they will lose. Even now in the aftermath of a landslide they refuse to admit they have a problem.
Oh well, I got a new MAGA hat.
