2016 was the portend. 2020 is the result.

[Soph0571]

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. Both the UK and the US had a seismic event in 2016. Based on lies, populism, xenophobia, and bigotry – with lots of help from Russia, our fellow citizens ceded control to far right batshit cray cray ideals. For you Trump, for us Brexit. So here we are, in the midst of a pandemic, our economies in ruins, our family and friend’s dead, people queuing in both countries at food banks. My government has such a majority that they get to break international law with impunity. Your government would not recognise law if it jumped up and kicked it hard in its lardy orange arse.

And so today we see lawlessness on the streets ( I am talking about the boogaloo’s and vigilantes), families barely or not coping under the economic strain that they have wrought and a tribalism from the right that defeats logic every day.

When I stayed up and saw the result of the referendum, I knew that logic had lost to lies, populism, xenophobia, and bigotry. When I stayed up and watched the results of the US election, I knew that logic had lost to lies, populism, xenophobia, and bigotry. Both times I sobbed and turn off the news for 24 hours, cause I could not even. 2016 sucked and 2020 is of course the predicted outcome.

And here we are. Trump trying to steal the election. A no deal Brexit, and all that infers, in the New Year. Deaths and excess deaths beyond despair. We need to get serious about what it means to be progressive, what it means to be liberal, these fucking populists are kicking our arses because they do not care about breaking the rules. And you have to be in power to change shit. 2016 was the portend to the nightmare that is 2020. Gird up your loins, on both sides of the pond it is time to fight to put these last 4 years where they need to be…. 1930’s Germany be like welcome back! They need to go back where they came from. Stat.

We don’t need to go high. We need to win. We go high, they steal democracy from under our noses.

Just sayin’

[alwaysinasnit]

1. Thanks Soph!

[Soph0571]

2. Hiya!

[Cosmo Blues]

3. News freak that I am

I too turned off the TV that night, didn't go back for days. I don't know about your country but I know we outnumber them, in my country, evidently we're just not consistent voters, when Bill Clinton in '92 won we also won the House and Senate, put Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court and got Mandela out of prison, then lost the House in the midterms and didn't get it back until 2006, Obama won by 12 million and we won the House and Senate, got Obamacare save the Auto industry... and lost the midterms and didn't get the House and Senate back for the rest of his six years. You got Brexit and May in 2016, Brexit was a shock to the rest of the world, as well as the win by Johnson. But like you, to me it's their voters leanings that are the scariest. Sorry, I could blather on and on about politics and the little facts that stick in my head. But I'll stop now

[DSandra]

4. I wish we had this understanding four years ago

There was a lot that Dems could have done better in 2016 that would've countered even Russia's influence in the election.

[ehrnst]

5. What specifically could Dems have that would've countered Russia's influence?

HRC did win the popular vote, despite even the usual odds against a party holding the WH for more than two consecutive terms, and rampant misogyny on the right and far left.

But I'm interested in knowing where Democrats didn't do enough of.

[DSandra]

6. Some examples

"Freshman Democratic Sen. Gary Peters admits that he was surprised by the results in his home state, whose largest paper, the Detroit Free Press, mistakenly called the race for Clinton. He also stresses how narrowly Trump won: Michigan has nearly 7,000 precincts, so Trump’s 10,000-vote margin means he basically got just one more vote per precinct than Clinton.

Still, Peters — the only non-incumbent Democrat to win a Senate seat in 2014 — says the Clinton campaign made an array of unforced errors that allowed Trump to take the state. Among the biggest: failing to visit United Automobile Workers (UAW) halls full of union members who didn’t trust her position on free trade and using get-out-the-vote records that were so inaccurate that Clinton volunteers routinely found themselves knocking on the doors of Trump supporters. Those, he notes diplomatically, really aren’t the people Clinton should have been trying to bring to the polls."

-https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/21/14030754/hillary-clinton-michigan-loss-trump-republican-gary-peters

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

“I’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

-https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547

[ehrnst]

8. What's your data that changing those things would have overcom/countered Russian interference

as well as the rampant misogyny on the far Left?

You seem to have an aversion to Democratic leader in general ("Weakocrats" as you put it), so how much does that play a part in your dim view of Democratic campaigns, especially in terms of HRC?

[bdamomma]

7. excellent post

we need to fight for our country.