The left "abandoning" the working class is Clinton telling coal miners "I'll spend $30B on retraining you for new jobs, and building up new industry in coal mining region" vs Trump saying "I'll save your jobs".

Was Clinton "abandoning the working class"? It doesn't feel like it, but it certainly could be construed that way.

OTOH, Trump's statement was a bold faced lie. He didn't save coal mining jobs, coal mining jobs dropped significantly during his first term.

People will take unknowns over the current status. The coal regions are still severely depressed. It likely doesn't matter to those people if $30B was spent if they didn't see an improvement in their own lives from it. Even if you get retrained, you have to leave the area to get a decent job about half of the time, which many don't want.

Sure, Trump's lie was better than Clinton's promise. Which explains why Trump won in 2016.

But it should have lost him the votes in 2024. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I think that depends on what Biden/Harris was promising them. If nothing really improved under Biden for them and Harris didn't have a good value proposition for them, then what was their alternative? Neither Trump nor Biden/Harris helped them, but one option is saying they will help them (or is more aligned with their values on non-economic topics).

Point by point you seem off.

GOP makes poor people. They oppose organized labor and support what Lincoln would refer to as "wage slavery".

No one in government cares about sex and gender than GOP. I've never heard anyone else mention regulating the bedroom, porn, sex, etc. Ever.

Maybe you're somewhat accurate about abolishing police. I wouldn't phrase it that way, but reform is needed and abolition is likely better than our police state.

Opposing Israel's war isn't supporting an Islamic supremacist group. Practically no one in US government opposes funding Israel.

Biden and Obama both deported more people than Trump. They used the existing law s to do it. Trump is spending more, ignoring law, and deporting less.

GOP really wants government to not function so they can steal everything good that's been created.

> “GOP really wants government to not function so they can steal…”

And plunder federal assets (land) and privatize governmental services.

That's what I mean. They do it everywhere. It's the strategy I think Mitch McConnel came up with. Obstruct, break everything, ensure government doesn't work for people, then claim government is bad, corrupt, etc. And move in to privatize and sell everything to the highest bidder.

Where’d you get the idea they shifted to any of that whatsoever? Right wing talking heads claim those things, but democrats don’t govern as if it’s true and those aren’t positions espoused by the vast majority of the party, including all the ones with notable power.

> "No human is illegal" can be reasonably interpreted to imply "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy."

Reasonably? No.

So how was that supposed to be interpreted? "everyone should receive due process?" Why don't they just say that, instead of trying to do a motte and bailey where the sign makes an absolutist statement on immigration policy, that then gets walked back on to something anodyne?

It's a (I agree somewhat silly) rejection of labelling people "illegals".

I assure you that very few of the people with those signs want open borders. That's a position held by almost nobody.

Back to the point: when did the democrats shift to any of these alleged positions? They didn't. It's what the opposition says they did, but they in-fact didn't.

>Back to the point: when did the democrats shift to any of these alleged positions? They didn't. It's what the opposition says they did, but they in-fact didn't.

That's a distinction without a difference. If Democratic voters and activists are pushing for a given position, it's cold comfort to the independent or Republican that it's not an official position of the Democratic party (whatever that might mean). Just look at Project 2025. It was produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank that is technically independent of the GOP. Trump even distanced himself from it during the campaign. Does that mean Democrats aren't right to worry about it, because it wasn't an official position?

>Look at the things you're comparing: a misreading of a somewhat-common yard sign plus what Fox News and Mark Levin say the democrats support

You're over-indexing on the influence of "Fox News and Mark Levin". Most people aren't news junkies. The whole contention is that people who aren't going out of their way to find uncharitable interpretations of "no human is illegal" will think that it's a pro-immigration message. By that I don't mean something like "we should use better names", I mean policies like unlimited migration, or even something like amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the US. You reject this premise[1][2], but haven't really provided any justification for why that interpretation is unreasonable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973117.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973295

>Show me something actually equivalent, and you'll have a point. Find me the most-influential think tank you can that supports stuff like "abolishing the police force" or "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy".

>It's correct to say it's a problem for democrats that people think they hold these positions. It's incorrect to say it's because they in-fact do. It's because of effective propaganda.

>You folks are assigning a caricature of their positions to them and then blaming them for adopting those caricatured positions. WT literal F.

Again, my contention isn't that the Democratic party or left-leaning think tanks hold those positions, it's that they're poorly worded, leading independents and centrist Republicans to misinterpret their message, and pushing them away from the Democrats.

Note the original comment you replied to claims that "those kind of positions are a notable and visible part of progressive/Democratic culture". It says nothing about whether such positions are the official policies of the Democratic party.

> Note the original comment you replied to claims that "those kind of positions are a notable and visible part of progressive/Democratic culture". It says nothing about whether such positions are the official policies of the Democratic party.

No, the claim was:

> The democrats have fundamentally abandoned the working class in favor of stupid wedge issues. It was the "progressives" who chose to shift their campaign focus onto gaining more privileges for trans women, abolishing the police force, endorsing Islamic supremacist groups tale of their own victimhood, and denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy. I don't see how any of this is aimed at the working class.

The only one of the four claimed positions that's even arguably not a fantasy ginned up by Republican propaganda is the one about trans women. The post was blaming democrats for taking positions that they did not take.

An act can be illegal. I don't see how a person can be illegal. Being in a country illegally is an act, not an inherent property of a person.

Trying to say a person is illegal seems like a non-starter for useful reasoning because it seems to absolve people of responsibility for their actions, since nothing can be done about who a person inherently is.

This is pretzel-logic to justify the original absurd claim. No, it’s not reasonable at all.

See my explanation a couple posts away. It means the thing that many on the left often express on this topic, not the thing that almost none ever do.

[EDIT] To ground this, the claim is that it's reasonable to interpret "no human is illegal" as "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy". This is a "reasonable" leap reached by following "what you need to interpret the sign". Not a hostile interpretation by someone who already decided what's what and is working backwards from that.

>[EDIT] To ground this, the claim is that it's reasonable to interpret "no human is illegal" as "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy". This is a "reasonable" leap reached by following "what you need to interpret the sign". Not a hostile interpretation by someone who already decided what's what and is working backwards from that.

I don't get it. Are you conceding that independents and Republicans might genuinely believe that "No human is illegal" means all migration should be legal? By "genuinely believe ", I don't mean a maximally uncharitable interpretation either, but at the same time I also don't expect them to go out of their way to figure out exactly what is meant by "No human is illegal".

> See my explanation a couple posts away. It means the thing that many on the left often express on this topic, not the thing that almost none ever do.

And "abolish the police" doesn't mean literally abolish the police, and it's absurd to think it does, amirite?

> Not a hostile interpretation by someone who already decided what's what and is working backwards from that.

Interpreting "no human is illegal" as implying "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy," is not a "hostile interpretation." In fact, I'd say denying that as a reasonable interpretation requires a pretty high degree of bias and motivated thinking (akin to the attempts to calm the slogan "abolish the police" does not actually indicate support for literally abolishing the police).

The only context where "illegal" was ever used to describe a person was "illegal immigrant" (or the older term, "illegal alien"). It was explicitly about immigration policy.

Yes, in that context. It was extremely common to shorthand that to "illegals", as in, "Bob says he's gotta hire illegals or he can't find anyone who'll shingle houses for him", or, "I don't know why they can't mine the border to stop the illegals" (I guess I can assign that as a position the Republicans "shifted" to and then blame them for it since I've heard multiple actual Republican voters say it, no interpretation required, they literally stated they want a minefield on the border? That'd be more connected to reality than the rest of this nonsense thread).

Democrats have been pushing back on the language of that, because "illegals" had plainly become a slur and tool for othering and dehumanizing. I think democrats focus on that horse-shit way too much—though, then again, shifting language that way as that kind of political tool is something Republicans do and had done in this case, so maybe I'm wrong and they're right for trying to stop it—but that's what the sign's about, it's a topic they've had a bug up their ass about for like twenty damn years.

That doesn't fit with how they've started trying to replace the term "illegal immigrant" with "undocumented immigrant".

You wrote "doesn't fit" and then described something that fits entirely. I'm not following.

>and I think we know that if it were specific or detailed, those details would look extremely racist, xenophobic, classist or a combination thereof.

Really? This time around the discourse around Trump's immigration polices seem to be based around practicalities (eg. American competitiveness, impact on the labor market) rather than principles. Even in the cases where it's based on principles, they're principles like due process rather than "-isms" you listed.

>Trump's rhetoric around illegal immigration has mostly been about how tons of them are violent criminals, about reducing fentanyl smuggling (that's overwhelmingly done by US citizens for obvious reasons, but whatever), "invasions", and gangs, no less so in this campaign than the last. Effects on the labor market get some attention, but nothing like those other aspects.

I meant the discourse justifying pushback from the left, after the policies were enacted.

I follow now! Sorry, I can read good, I promise.

Yes, the economic consequences (long-term to research and researcher-training and the industries that rely on them on the one end, and shorter term to e.g. farm and construction labor on the other) are definitely a highlight of democratic rhetoric against Trump's immigration enforcement regime & priorities, as far as "why we shouldn't do this", second perhaps only to matters of due process now that those have been forced to the fore (which is more of a, "regardless of what we're trying to do, this is an illegal way to go about it").

I suppose the third pillar of the push-back, maybe also more-prominent than the economic argument now that vague concerns have become concrete, is on humanitarian grounds, resisting specifically deporting people who're likely to come to harm if they are sent back, and shipping people to foreign prisons controlled by states with poor human rights records—of course this is heavily tied up with the whole due-process thing, since that's key to settling whether these sorts of claims have merit, if one cares whether they have merit.

It is true that Democrats often claim that a big part of why Republicans are so eager to crack down on illegal immigrants even at the expense of waves hand at paragraphs above is due to various -isms and -phobias, but you're right that I don't see a lot of "the reason we shouldn't do this is because it's racist/xenophobic", but rather "we shouldn't do this because [list of practical and humanitarian reasons]" (perhaps followed up by, "the reason the Republicans want to do this is racism and xenophobia", which I think is reductive and not very useful but is at least somewhat more-accurate than the opposing framing of motivation as, "democrats actively want, specifically, violent foreign criminals in our cities")

The hell it isn't reasonable.

>but democrats don’t govern as if it’s true and those aren’t positions espoused by the vast majority of the party, including all the ones with notable power.

Maybe they're not "governing as if it’s true", but their statements certainly do. See for instance, the "Kamala is for they/them" attack ad? Granted, it was an attack ad and Kamala moderated her stance in the 2024 election, but her statements in 2020 was far left of the average voter, which was why it was why it was so effective.

> If they had "abandoned" them you'd think it would show.

A left-leaning candidate that has "abandoned" worker's causes is still a better prospect than a candidate that openly opposed to them.

I find it odd that so few people vote in the US - like I said, if all candidates are terrible, one is certainly less terrible and your job, as citizen, is to vote for the lesser evil to prevent the worse one to get power.

Working people are effectively slaves. Everyone has children or college debt. Health care is useless in not urban areas and even then it's restricted by insurance or lack of it. There's not much hope to own a home other than through inheritance. Even inheritance is unlikely as health care for aging parents is very expensive.

People are uneducated, don't have time, and rightly feel like politicians don't represent them. No one wants to have no home or the worst health care system except the people taking bribes. There's no incentive for reform.

Still, even if all options are bad, there has to be one that's less bad.

Which is why sane people should vote democrat, even if they're objectively bad. GOP is infinitely worse.

I'll have to strongly disagree, the turnout is way too high if anything. Voting for the "lesser" evil just legitimizes an institution that doesn't deserve it.

There isn't an asterisk next to your vote that says "this person disagrees with this candidate's platform". No, your vote will be used to legitimize that candidate's platform to other people, future generations, and the history books.