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Some fantasy about how millions of leftists voters either boycotted the election or voted for Trump because of Biden’s position on Gaza. Complete nonsense of co

Some fantasy about how millions of leftists voters either boycotted the election or voted for Trump because of Biden’s position on Gaza. Complete nonsense of course, but it’s a popular conspiracy theory among certain democrats circles. It was also funny to see democrats suddenly realizing that Arab Americans vote republican. They always have and they always will. Just like how Latino Americans, and generally most immigrants, will always vote republican too. Arab Americans are very culturally conservative. They would rather see a 100 Gazas than accepting that 2 gay men can get married.

lynx97 2y ago
The left pretty much falls into the same trap all around the world. Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning. The typical reaction is to fall back to elitism and claim those immigrants must be stupid somehow.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  Not stupid, just lacking class consciousness
  - lynx97 2y ago
    I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
      - lynx97 2y ago
        No. Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist. In fact, thats the core of my criticism. Political views are a spectrum, and you can't just push someone to the far right just because you disagree with them. This black-and-white thinking is doing far more harm then you might imagine.
        sofixa 2y ago
        > Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist Their methods and their positions make them fascist, not their support or lack thereof for opposing positions. Say, a coup attempt. Or someone in power talking about ignoring term limits. Or getting bribes and favouritism for corporations (corporatism is a heavy component of fascism). Or silencing opposition with brutal and illegal methods (such as kidnapping in the middle of the night by unmarked and masked men). Those all scream fascism, regardless of the fact that e.g. the person in charge of healthcare is an antivaxxer.
      - bluecheese452 2y ago
        Minor quibble but wouldn’t it be a subset?
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        > Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries. Scratch a little deeper on the things popular Republican politicians and members of the current administration have been saying and promoting for the last few years. Conspiratorial movements almost always end up at "it's The Jews", and so do theirs. If you see talk about their opponents engaging in dark "rituals" involving child murder or abuse, you can be 100% sure you've found one that'll get you there. It's just blood libel, keeping reading and listening and you'll see that they're fully at that point before you've had to do much work. It's tedious.
        2y ago
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      I don't know what to tell you, I'm never going to be happy about people voting against my rights or about secret police disappearing people and ignoring the court system
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        You seem to be completely ignoring lynx97's actual point. If you're not happy about those things, stop telling everyone who disagree with you how stupid they are and how they're literal Nazis. Then at least some of those who disagree with you on some issues will be less driven to vote for the people whose positions appall you.
        lynx97 2y ago
        Thanks for rewording my point. You pretty much nailed what I was trying to say.
    - righthand 2y ago
      Decades of name calling and refusing to compromise from the right and it’s the left with the bad attitude that’s dividing people?
      - lynx97 2y ago
        Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.
        righthand 2y ago
        If people judged name callers based on their actions then how did we get here?
      - code_for_monkey 2y ago
        people have absorbed so much american "the left is always evil and the right can do no wrong" propaganda they dont even realize it.
    - nouripenny 2y ago
      I agree, it's a huge trap. The right exploits leftists who insult normal people as dumb. It worked when they insulted George W Bush, who people identified with and found likeable, and was probably coached to bungle sentences despite likely not talking that way at Yale and Harvard; and when they insult Trump and his ideas, though he's perceptive and effective. Many say it works because liberals now represent the professional-managerial class, who often come across to workers/poor as infuriatingly patronizing, slick and humiliating. Whereas many don't know who owns their big corporation, so they don't inspire such visceral feelings. While some may argue that liberals aren't leftists (but are rather good-cop), nevertheless many leftists do this too. The dynamics are explained in Thomas Frank's book "Listen, Liberal", David Graeber's essay "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good", and Participatory Economics's coverage of the coordinator class.
      - lynx97 2y ago
        Army of Altruists, by David Graeber: https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/ https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/ Thanks for the pointer, that was a very interesting read.
    - code_for_monkey 2y ago
      sure this sounds bad, but we also currently have, in the USA, and administration who deports student protestors and does Nazi salutes. Ive been hearing about how "oh, the left just calls us Nazis for any opinion that differs from them" and now they are in power doing Nazi salutes. They were Nazis the whole time. No one is getting called Nazi for their opinions on tax rebates.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, you'll never convince someone swayed by bumper stickers to read and thoughtfully consider your 500-word ultra-concise argument for it. "Vibes" and populism drive voter behavior. Cheap populist messages will always resonate at least as well as even an ultra-simplified "it's all of us versus the owners of capital". Us vs. Them is what populism is, but getting the right Them according to class consciousness is really hard (and it'll constantly be at risk of someone subverting it to something else, probably "the Jews and other child-sacrificing Evil Cultists in their sway" because it's usually that for some stupid fucking reason). Even Bernie had to settle for the shitty and inaccurate "the 1%" to get even a little traction with class consciousness on a mass scale. Right now outright conspiratorial thinkers are ascendant and doing the usual thing of being some of the elites (the capitalists) we should all be against, while painting everything as the fault of other elites (how are they differently elite? Well, follow their stupid threads of "evidence" and you always end up at blood libel, truly, it's so consistent that it's boring)
    - dudefeliciano 2y ago
      > Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, well yea, and Marx is a taboo, nothing new there. Those ideas can be repackaged though, in a way that won't make people foam at the mouth because of the "communist sounding words" (thinking of gary's economics for example). I agree with what you said, it's easier to package an "Anti-something" message, as we see with all the anti-immigrant messaging in the US and Europe, the Anti-Billionaire movement still has not gained even a fraction of the traction though.
      - lynx97 2y ago
        Well, I dont remember any "immigrants for the poor" movements. But I know from personal experience that Lions Club and Rotary people actually sometimes do something useful for the poor with their money... Given that context, do you really not understand that you shouldn't bite the hand that might feed you? Immigrants are never going to feed the poor and disadvantaged. The oh-so-bad-and-evil rich people might at least sometimes.
- Ray20 2y ago
  I think they don't fall into the trap, and their position on migrants is formed not from the assumption that migrants have leftist views, but from the assumption that it is easier to make migrants dependent. And when someone is dependent, it doesn't matter what cultural views they are inclined to.
- wormlord 2y ago
  I don't think you mean leftists you mean liberals. Leftists ostensibly have a materialist understanding of the world, not idealist. Of course many immigrants are right-wing, the US exported counter-revolution globally during the 20th century. I went to eat out at a Guatemalan restaurant the other day and they had a poster for a right-wing ultranationalist paramilitary group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Blanca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Blanca Is it shocking? Not at all. I have heard the same violent rhetoric from petit bourgeois in Colombia and in the USA because the exact same forces of reaction in the USA have been at work globally for decades. > Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
  - lynx97 2y ago
    > The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization. Yes, agreed. I probably saved a few words too much on that sentence. I should have thrown a "some" or "many" in there. OTOH, as a non-native speaker, I will loose every argument that ends up in native-speaker pedantery, so I am kind of unimpressed.
  - code_for_monkey 2y ago
    I would appreciate a broader examination of how this site politics function because no one here seems to understand the difference between liberals and leftists.
    - wormlord 2y ago
      This site is mostly wealthy and older who have benefitted from the neoliberal status quo. It's why many commenters can shrug off the insane shit happening like opaque deportations of random people to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador, it only affects people on the margins who they think they are very far removed from. In wealthy urban areas there are a lot of liberals who don't have a materialist basis for their views and are hypocritical, so the more reactionary on this site think that these pearl-clutching libs are the end all be all of left-wing politics. Meanwhile actual leftists dont really differentiate between ethnic supremacists and YIMBY liberals because they both ultimately support the same outcomes. I am also from a petit bourgeois background but being younger I think it was very clear that the direction we were heading in was not sustainable. There is no path that allows for me to have stable finances (enough money to buy a house and pay for my parents retirement) and also be spiritually fulfilled. The only way I can save up the money to take care of the people around me is to sell my mind, body, and soul to the machine (even then who says the current administration wont tank the stock market and erase all my savings). I think even for Gen X'ers this was the case, it was just easier to keep their heads down since the polycrisis was still a few decades out and would not yet seem "real". Even as a relatively successful zoomer I have to walk a fine line of grinding away at my day job, and doing the community-oriented work that fulfills me spiritually. The market signals that stuff like home ownership and having a family is not "efficient", so I don't bother. Anyways, there's a real disconnect and I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes. If history is anything to go by they most likely never will.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
This is, of course nonsense. The data is clear that Latinos vote majority Democrat, though it was a smaller majority in this election than the previous.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  Citation needed. A lot of the Latinos I know in NYC voted Trump. A few were Democrat voters who grew tired of being insulted by Democrats who casually lump Latinos into a big "left loving Latino pool" when they are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chileans, Ecuadorians, etc; Individuals with distinct cultures and backgrounds. Latinos are also heavily religious which is very influential as well.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Just Google Latino voting 2024. This isn't hidden information.
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      It's a record low for 2024 which is not insignificant. Next election will be interesting.
- tekla 2y ago
  They USED to, it was about 47% for Trump in 2024. Most Latinos I know in NYC voted for Trump.

lynx97 2y ago

The left pretty much falls into the same trap all around the world. Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning. The typical reaction is to fall back to elitism and claim those immigrants must be stupid somehow.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
Not stupid, just lacking class consciousness
- lynx97 2y ago
  I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
    - lynx97 2y ago
      No. Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist. In fact, thats the core of my criticism. Political views are a spectrum, and you can't just push someone to the far right just because you disagree with them. This black-and-white thinking is doing far more harm then you might imagine.
      - sofixa 2y ago
        > Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist Their methods and their positions make them fascist, not their support or lack thereof for opposing positions. Say, a coup attempt. Or someone in power talking about ignoring term limits. Or getting bribes and favouritism for corporations (corporatism is a heavy component of fascism). Or silencing opposition with brutal and illegal methods (such as kidnapping in the middle of the night by unmarked and masked men). Those all scream fascism, regardless of the fact that e.g. the person in charge of healthcare is an antivaxxer.
    - bluecheese452 2y ago
      Minor quibble but wouldn’t it be a subset?
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      > Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries. Scratch a little deeper on the things popular Republican politicians and members of the current administration have been saying and promoting for the last few years. Conspiratorial movements almost always end up at "it's The Jews", and so do theirs. If you see talk about their opponents engaging in dark "rituals" involving child murder or abuse, you can be 100% sure you've found one that'll get you there. It's just blood libel, keeping reading and listening and you'll see that they're fully at that point before you've had to do much work. It's tedious.
      - 2y ago
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    I don't know what to tell you, I'm never going to be happy about people voting against my rights or about secret police disappearing people and ignoring the court system
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      You seem to be completely ignoring lynx97's actual point. If you're not happy about those things, stop telling everyone who disagree with you how stupid they are and how they're literal Nazis. Then at least some of those who disagree with you on some issues will be less driven to vote for the people whose positions appall you.
      - lynx97 2y ago
        Thanks for rewording my point. You pretty much nailed what I was trying to say.
  - righthand 2y ago
    Decades of name calling and refusing to compromise from the right and it’s the left with the bad attitude that’s dividing people?
    - lynx97 2y ago
      Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.
      - righthand 2y ago
        If people judged name callers based on their actions then how did we get here?
    - code_for_monkey 2y ago
      people have absorbed so much american "the left is always evil and the right can do no wrong" propaganda they dont even realize it.
  - nouripenny 2y ago
    I agree, it's a huge trap. The right exploits leftists who insult normal people as dumb. It worked when they insulted George W Bush, who people identified with and found likeable, and was probably coached to bungle sentences despite likely not talking that way at Yale and Harvard; and when they insult Trump and his ideas, though he's perceptive and effective. Many say it works because liberals now represent the professional-managerial class, who often come across to workers/poor as infuriatingly patronizing, slick and humiliating. Whereas many don't know who owns their big corporation, so they don't inspire such visceral feelings. While some may argue that liberals aren't leftists (but are rather good-cop), nevertheless many leftists do this too. The dynamics are explained in Thomas Frank's book "Listen, Liberal", David Graeber's essay "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good", and Participatory Economics's coverage of the coordinator class.
    - lynx97 2y ago
      Army of Altruists, by David Graeber: https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/ https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/ Thanks for the pointer, that was a very interesting read.
  - code_for_monkey 2y ago
    sure this sounds bad, but we also currently have, in the USA, and administration who deports student protestors and does Nazi salutes. Ive been hearing about how "oh, the left just calls us Nazis for any opinion that differs from them" and now they are in power doing Nazi salutes. They were Nazis the whole time. No one is getting called Nazi for their opinions on tax rebates.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, you'll never convince someone swayed by bumper stickers to read and thoughtfully consider your 500-word ultra-concise argument for it. "Vibes" and populism drive voter behavior. Cheap populist messages will always resonate at least as well as even an ultra-simplified "it's all of us versus the owners of capital". Us vs. Them is what populism is, but getting the right Them according to class consciousness is really hard (and it'll constantly be at risk of someone subverting it to something else, probably "the Jews and other child-sacrificing Evil Cultists in their sway" because it's usually that for some stupid fucking reason). Even Bernie had to settle for the shitty and inaccurate "the 1%" to get even a little traction with class consciousness on a mass scale. Right now outright conspiratorial thinkers are ascendant and doing the usual thing of being some of the elites (the capitalists) we should all be against, while painting everything as the fault of other elites (how are they differently elite? Well, follow their stupid threads of "evidence" and you always end up at blood libel, truly, it's so consistent that it's boring)
  - dudefeliciano 2y ago
    > Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, well yea, and Marx is a taboo, nothing new there. Those ideas can be repackaged though, in a way that won't make people foam at the mouth because of the "communist sounding words" (thinking of gary's economics for example). I agree with what you said, it's easier to package an "Anti-something" message, as we see with all the anti-immigrant messaging in the US and Europe, the Anti-Billionaire movement still has not gained even a fraction of the traction though.
    - lynx97 2y ago
      Well, I dont remember any "immigrants for the poor" movements. But I know from personal experience that Lions Club and Rotary people actually sometimes do something useful for the poor with their money... Given that context, do you really not understand that you shouldn't bite the hand that might feed you? Immigrants are never going to feed the poor and disadvantaged. The oh-so-bad-and-evil rich people might at least sometimes.
Ray20 2y ago
I think they don't fall into the trap, and their position on migrants is formed not from the assumption that migrants have leftist views, but from the assumption that it is easier to make migrants dependent. And when someone is dependent, it doesn't matter what cultural views they are inclined to.
wormlord 2y ago
I don't think you mean leftists you mean liberals. Leftists ostensibly have a materialist understanding of the world, not idealist. Of course many immigrants are right-wing, the US exported counter-revolution globally during the 20th century. I went to eat out at a Guatemalan restaurant the other day and they had a poster for a right-wing ultranationalist paramilitary group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Blanca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Blanca Is it shocking? Not at all. I have heard the same violent rhetoric from petit bourgeois in Colombia and in the USA because the exact same forces of reaction in the USA have been at work globally for decades. > Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
- lynx97 2y ago
  > The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization. Yes, agreed. I probably saved a few words too much on that sentence. I should have thrown a "some" or "many" in there. OTOH, as a non-native speaker, I will loose every argument that ends up in native-speaker pedantery, so I am kind of unimpressed.
- code_for_monkey 2y ago
  I would appreciate a broader examination of how this site politics function because no one here seems to understand the difference between liberals and leftists.
  - wormlord 2y ago
    This site is mostly wealthy and older who have benefitted from the neoliberal status quo. It's why many commenters can shrug off the insane shit happening like opaque deportations of random people to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador, it only affects people on the margins who they think they are very far removed from. In wealthy urban areas there are a lot of liberals who don't have a materialist basis for their views and are hypocritical, so the more reactionary on this site think that these pearl-clutching libs are the end all be all of left-wing politics. Meanwhile actual leftists dont really differentiate between ethnic supremacists and YIMBY liberals because they both ultimately support the same outcomes. I am also from a petit bourgeois background but being younger I think it was very clear that the direction we were heading in was not sustainable. There is no path that allows for me to have stable finances (enough money to buy a house and pay for my parents retirement) and also be spiritually fulfilled. The only way I can save up the money to take care of the people around me is to sell my mind, body, and soul to the machine (even then who says the current administration wont tank the stock market and erase all my savings). I think even for Gen X'ers this was the case, it was just easier to keep their heads down since the polycrisis was still a few decades out and would not yet seem "real". Even as a relatively successful zoomer I have to walk a fine line of grinding away at my day job, and doing the community-oriented work that fulfills me spiritually. The market signals that stuff like home ownership and having a family is not "efficient", so I don't bother. Anyways, there's a real disconnect and I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes. If history is anything to go by they most likely never will.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

This is, of course nonsense. The data is clear that Latinos vote majority Democrat, though it was a smaller majority in this election than the previous.

MisterTea 2y ago
Citation needed. A lot of the Latinos I know in NYC voted Trump. A few were Democrat voters who grew tired of being insulted by Democrats who casually lump Latinos into a big "left loving Latino pool" when they are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chileans, Ecuadorians, etc; Individuals with distinct cultures and backgrounds. Latinos are also heavily religious which is very influential as well.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Just Google Latino voting 2024. This isn't hidden information.
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    It's a record low for 2024 which is not insignificant. Next election will be interesting.
tekla 2y ago
They USED to, it was about 47% for Trump in 2024. Most Latinos I know in NYC voted for Trump.