Of course. They don’t want to fix things, they just want to be the ones getting the benefits.
The Democratic Party is so full of collaborationists. Just shows how democracy and capitalism are incompatible. The bourgeois class just buy the politicians.
First part of article title is a bit misleading I think. She thinks “Kings” is a better term than oligarchy because it’s more relatable. She has a plan to fight kings. She does seem to think wokeness is weak though.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has urged her Democratic colleagues to stop attacking the “oligarchy” on Thursday, arguing that the word did not resonate with most Americans and should be replaced with “kings.”
Detailing her plan, Slotkin – a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – argued that the Democratic Party needed to lose its “weak and woke” reputation and “fucking retake the flag,” adopting a “goddamn Alpha energy” inspired by Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell.
“She said Democrats should stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes ‘kings,'” wrote Wren, who reported that Slotkin was planning to deliver a series of speeches in the coming months about her plan.
Somehow this made it worse. “goddamn Alpha energy” - who are these people. All I want is for the dems to not be rich people faking concern for the poor.
God fuck this woman
People recognize when they’re being talked down to, this is a losing strategy.
She’s sorta right. ‘Oligarchy’ is a big college word that Joe Bumblefuck doesn’t understand.
Aristocrats is a good word, but again: “duh?”
Therefore Dems just need to start harping about “rich fucking parasites”
People are clued in on oligarchy even if they don’t quite know the exact definition. After Bernie and AOC started their tour, it was Wikipedia top 5 articles. Slotkin is just a right wing traitor.
Yep. She’s talking about changing optics and messaging to something that resonates with the larger ‘I know very little about politics but I still vote’ group of voters.
The headline feels like clickbait.
Problem Class. Guillotine Fodder.
Fighting Oligarchy resonates greatly. But yes, the dems have focused too much on the culture war in favour of participating in the class war against the working class.
That is definitely something they should put waaaay more focus on. Trump is the cry for help of much of the working class, if people would believe you actually fought FOR the working people in your country, the dems would be unstoppable.
But yes, the dems have focused too much on the culture war
No, republicans focus on the culture war. democrats are playing defense. Well, if you call forfeiting “playing defense.”
kamala never mentioned identity politics on the campaign
Dem Senator Says Party Needs to Stop Attacking ‘Oligarchy’ and Focus on Losing
FTFY
The unfalsifiable orthodoxy. Moving to the far-right and appealing to moderate Republicans win elections. If a Democrat wins, it proves that this works, if a Democrat loses, they just hadn’t moved far-right enough.
Seems to be an unpopular opinion, but she is right. I think the people upset with her in the comments do not live in red areas.
As stupid as it sounds, that is all people seem to care about. The right used to have abortion as a drum to bang. Now that Roe is overturned the right needed a new social cause, and they found ‘woke’ which is WAY more effective than abortion since it seems to excite both religious, and non-religious.
If you go and talk with people in rural areas you will be shocked by how prominent this issue is in peoples minds, and I believe it will always beat economic issues for them.
It’s prominent in people’s minds because it has been spoon-fed to them by propaganda machines masquerading as actual media controlled by… drumroll oligarchs!
Source: I live in a deep red area in TX. It’s scary the shit people believe because they saw it on Fox News, OAN, or a myriad of bullshit online outlets.
100%. When having this debate I always bring up that the actual “woke” legislation being passed is at best minimal and pandering, and has 0 effect on most people lives. It is a fictional boogie meant to fill the void of abortion as an issue.
But right wing media has been extremely successful and making it seem like this is all the left thinks about. In that sense it is true that the AOC/Sanders tour is a great way to reclaim the conversation, but it is also true that the left needs to fight the narrative that they are the woke party if they want to stop America’s rightward drift.
The problem is the electoral system. In a system that allows for voting for smaller parties without wasting your vote, the US would probably have 4-5 parties at least. Red state moderates would not be lumped together with progressives, and main street Republicans with the evangelical wing with MAGA
Democrats win by turning out people who otherwise don’t vote. If they aren’t already turned on by republicans talking like this, will those people see this as anything other than Democrats talking down to them?
Elissa Slotkin can fuck off.
Detailing her plan, Slotkin – a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency…
Oh, she can really fuck off.
Edit:
“I can’t do what she does because we live in a purple state, and I’m a pragmatist,” she concluded.
This is code for not rocking the boat.
Put her near the top of the list to be primaried.
Slotkin is a NEOCON.
THESE are the types of incumbents the DNC does not want primaried?! Holy hell.
And this is why fascism is winning.
Yep. When the ‘resistance’ grand plans are to adopt the fascist framing (e.g. that ‘woke is weak’ and should be surrendered) what’s the point in having an opposition party?
what’s the point in having an opposition party?
To co-opt and prevent real opposition.
They’re winning because of exactly what she said. There’s an issue of perception that people on the left will never fully grasp.
You all have no idea to engage online or publicly in a way that comes off as appealing.
No, she can fuck off.
The oligarchy is killing us, and spinning language won’t change that. Meanwhile, ‘woke’ just means ‘social empathy’, which is ironically the solution to many of the problems the oligarchy is causing (and they’re not shy about this – Musk recently said empathy is bad).
We need more ‘woke’, not less. And being butthurt that the fascists are using ‘woke’ as a slur against us is childish and easy to ignore if you’re not too simple to get it.
Fuck this. I’m woke and proud of it. We all should be.
Woke means understanding we live in an oligarchy in my mind. MAGA calls people sheep while complaining about them being woke in the same breath. They don’t even understand the language they use.
They don’t even understand the language they use.
They don’t have ideas. They just use words as pretexts for bullying and oppression. They worship force.
Woke is not weakness!
It’s funny, because the “Wake up, Sheeple!” line used to be what conservatives screamed at liberals for failing to understand their latest Ayn Rand inspired diatribe.
Then liberals adopted the “Wake up!” phrasing to describe structural racism, the enormous socio-economic cost of the Military Industrial Complex, and the inherent class warfare of privatization schemes. That caused “Woke” to fall out of fashion with the right.
Now it’s totally lost any context. “Woke” just means being visually queer coded or insufficiently religious. Its barely more than a slur.
specifically it was used by AA people in the start, now it has been co-opted by the right wingers and perverted, much like they did with “punisher”
Fine. Then come up with a plan to educate conservatives. Because this thing where the state legislates new norms (e.g. bio men in bio women’s sports) is NOT making sense to them. They are freaking out because they don’t understand it. And we can’t just make laws to make them accept it.
From their perspective they are losing their country. We can laugh and call them backwards, but that won’t help. There HAS to be a plan that is better than, f-you wake up.
We don’t need fucking conservatives to win anything in this country. I’m sick of cowards acting like they just won by 10%. They barely won this election, barely won control of the house, and the main issue in the election for independents wasn’t trans people or minorities, it was the economy.
The economy sucks for ordinary people because the ultra rich have been raiding it since COVID. And everyone, even conservatives, know that’s true. Americans hate these big corporations. Slotkin and her allies know that, and that’s why they’re trying to distract from it.
It’s disgusting how ready some of you are to throw your own neighbors under the bus so you can try to win over a couple fascist votes… Who will never vote for you. You will never win them over. They aren’t going to believe that you suddenly hate gay people and minorities. You will just look like a dishonest weakling to them, and they’ll be right.
We will win the next election by targeting independents with an economic message. If you want to lose then go ahead and make it about “woke” like a complete coward.
“The hell is a dang oligarch?”
“Means hillary can tell you what to do”
Why the fuck is everyone pretending they’re too stupid to know what an oligarch is? Just a couple years ago they said it all the time in reference to Russia
They’ll pretend they’re stupid so they can continue on with believing they’re not horrible people, but they know
I’m not sure about this. People with money spent a lot to tell everyone that these things are problems. If we spent the same amount of money to say the opposite, opinions would differ.
…well they are backwards, they’re only about one-third of the electorate, and they will never ever vote fascist-light; meanwhile there’s another unrepresented third of the electorate just waiting for anyone to offer them something worth voting FOR…
Fuck conservatives. They don’t need to be educated, they need to be beaten. There are more people left of center than right, we just need to prove we’re actually going to fight for them. All of them. Not 80% and then we’ll start to strategize on how many “urban” voters we can lose to pick up white suburbanite conservatives.
They don’t need to be educated, they need to be beaten.
You cannot educate someone who refuses to learn, especially those who reject reason and knowledge. They support fascists because they worship force. They will continue laying waste to everything around them until their murderous shitshow is comprehensively defeated. Throwing sweet reason at them won’t achieve that.
That’s why I get impatient with those who suggest that the way forward is to tinker with the voting system, or to amend the Constitution some more, or to educate the populace. The fascists are at war with us right now. We need to pick our collective ass up off the ground and resist by any means necessary and stop pretending that the system is going to save us, or (like the DNC) that Trump will eventually piss off enough people that the Democrats can win another election, despite all the rigging and voter suppression.
This is an existential situation, the building’s on fire, now’s not the time to be talking about redecorating.
Just to drive this point home for the quiet listeners at the back of the house, I’ve had very long conversations with conservatives (I’m in a red area) who actually get more distrustful the more you relate to them. I’ve been told to my face that nobody cared that much about other people, and I was clearly only pretending to in order to make them listen to me. That it was obvious, because nobody cares that much. That empathy can only be manipulative, and is never real.
It took me years to understand this isn’t a contradiction, but that since they can’t imagine caring that much, I must be fake.
My whole outlook changed once I realised that. It’s insane, but many people literally can’t envision caring, and they think you’re fake and just want recognition for doing so.
Several of these surveys take on a different meaning once you realise there are fundamentally different perspectives like this.
e: and this is one of the biggest divides with conservatives. Simple word choice will not bridge this gap.
That’s a big problem that switching from ‘oligarch’ to ‘king’ won’t solve. Using different words is a very simplistic answer, when what we’re fighting here is not a language barrier but a wide cultural one.
The real issue is complex and multifaceted: conservatives have been highly propagandised through increasingly insulated media bubbles to the point that now there’s very little that can penetrate them, and switching up a few words will not get them to listen. They’ve been taught to be distrustful of facts and reality, and to believe that compassion is weakness.
I don’t know how to fix this, but watering down our language will not help. That’s been tried many times, and it always backfires.
There has to be a relentless flow of propaganda to keep them spun up. We need to shut that down.
And from personal experience, even if you find common ground and get them to recognize something is bad, they’ll sit back down in front of Fox News and revert to the norm before any of it matters. I had a “law and order, national security” type conservative acquaintance who right after the Trump classified documents story broke said Trump should go to prison for it (he also had to add that Hillary Clinton should go too). I’m certain he voted for Trump this time around. And he’s had nary a peep about the multiple war plans chats. They aren’t gettable if you just find the right issue or use the right words. If they’re going to change it’s going to happen on their own and over a long time.
