this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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It's unfortunate that you see it this way, but you do you.
I prefer to see it as a reminder of things like this:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/06/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-joe-biden-not-same-party-094642
Both sides aren't the same, but there's a big chunk of Dems that are really close to the Repubs, then there are the Dems who are actually working for progress and change. (Which I hear there's an entire study about somewhere.)
There are also the Dems who only support progressive issues when they are convenient.
If what we want out of our Dems is something other than R-lite, it's a distinction to be highlighted more, not less.
For example, when Kamala spent most of her campaign courting R votes instead of D votes, which really didn't pan out well, I hear.
Well there's the issue of defining things and crossing up a bunch of language, trying to smash multiple different points together.
The headline of the original post suggests concern that Joe Biden is basically the same as a Republican. In order to identify whether that is true or not, you need tofirst define what a Republican is and compare that against what the Biden administration actually did (executive orders, appointments, legislation supported and passed, regulatory changes, etc). Accounting, of course, for the checks and balances of the US Federal Government. So for example, Biden forgave hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt, but the conservative (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court shot most of that down. There were limits on what they could pass through Congress without a supermajority. This is even easier to do today because we have several months of Republican government to compare against and the changes are really obvious. You canook at the creation and catastrophic consequences of DOGE, or the foreign policy changes that have abandoned Ukraine and worsened the Palestinian genocide (the handling of Israel is probably my biggest criticism of Biden and Harris, but Trump has been far worse). Tons of government agencies are being refunded, there is a "war on woke". Critical infrastructure that keeps our food and water supplies safe are being abandoned. The EPA has been gutted. The IRS has been gutted and is essentially being forced to stop auditing the wealthy and focus on the poor instead. ICE is being weaponized against unions, trans people are being pushed out of the military, US citizens are being illegally detained and sent to El Salvador, the Secretary of Health is an anti-vaxxer who wants to create an autism registry, tarrif nonsense is destroying US trade, and I'm still waiting for the price of eggs to go back down. Claiming Biden is a Republican is only possible if you completely ignored both Biden and Republicans.
The blurb under the headline is almost completely irrelevant to all of that. It's starting to get to what the article is really about: individuals who self-identity as Centrist or Moderate whose values are truly conservative and often align heavily with the Republican party. Especially with regards to online dating. This is nothing new - it's a phenomenon almost as old as online dating, and may date back to printed personal ads or older (though much better data exists for online dating). Conservative men know that their mispgying views don't make them popular with women, so they are trying to hide that. These people don't have much to do with Democrats or Biden whatsoever.
And then in your response, you lost a picture-of-a-tweet claiming that "Democrats spent 4 years desperately trying to get "moderate" Republicans to break from Trump". First of all, with no source- this is just whoever owns that account saying shit. But if you stop to think about it- there were a ton of "traditional", non-MAGA Republicans disillusioned with their party going after Trump all the way back in 2016. Most of them have already broken from Trump after historically voting for people like Bush and Romney. It would have been foolish to ignore that contingent of people, so the Democrats were absolutely correct in running attack ads against Trump and his followers in red states trying to win those votes.
If the Dems had changed their policies to be more conservative and attract those voters, that would garner some heavy criticism from me. But they didn't. The only policy I can think of that I would criticize them for is their support of Israel, which is moreso because of their wealthy donors who want to do business there than any courtship of Republicans.
If you look at what he accomplished, or if you're lazy and just want to look at an outlet that evaluates presidents for you, there's pretty much unanimous agreement that Biden was the furthest-left president since FDR. Harris ran on a platform of essentially continuing that. And progressives chose to stay home on election day rather than vote for someone who isn't 100% in agreement with them on everything. And that's how you get fascism.
Not this one. I held my nose and voted Harris.
I appreciate your lengthy response, but I disagree with you on some fundamentals, especially but not only your portrayal of Harris' campaign and progressive policies.
I'm not donning a tinfoil hat nor breaking any new ground, nor even veering off from fairly mainstream analyses of Kamala's campaign to say she tried harder for R votes than for D votes. You can disagree, but I don't think you will convince me otherwise. Plenty of articles out there written by folks more eloquent than I break it down better than I could or would try to here.
I keep seeing this point repeated on the internet, that Harris's campaign tried so hard to appeal to conservative voters.
How? What platform did she run on to do so? Did she run on banning abortion fully? Outlawing trans people? Giving billionaires tax breaks? Rolling out environmental regulations? Disemopwering unions? Granting ICE more power? Starting a trade war? Privatizing the post office? Repealing the ACA?
She accepted the support of some of the old traditional Republicans like Liz Cheney who has already been essentially kicked out of the GOP. They ran some attack ads pointing out how ridiculous, theatrical, and hateful MAGA is to try to win over some Republican voters who just want lower income tax. It seems as though the media has run with that, both at the time and retroactively, to paint Kamala Harris as being a fascist?
Here's a very exhaustive 2019 article demonstrating it's not a new concern:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/kamala-cop-record/596758/
And here is a recent article about her campaign, which discusses some of the related points, including her own staffs refusal to admit the same: (more detail within the article) To be fair, it does not claim that was the only factor (nor do I, but IMO it was enough to make the difference, and it was fucking disappointing)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-what-went-wrong-1235183829/
Here's where she agreed to ensure Republicans would have a seat at her cabinet, and a discussion of her Republican-targeted campaign ads in AZ: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/14/kamala-harris-ad-trump-arizona-00183578
Here's an article discussing the national strategy to target Republicans:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/harris-campaign-launches-new-ad-aimed-persuable-republicans-rcna173907
And another:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/politics/harris-rural-red-county-strategy/index.html
Even fox news got in on the action: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/harris-campaign-organizes-target-republican-voters-touts-support-from-gop-dissenters
You can read more about it in your pick of articles here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kamala+campaign+targeted+republicans
And ultimately - you don't have to agree. To me it was readily apparent as it was happening, but if not, I think several of those articles describe the phenomenon persuasively.
Republicans showed their asses all through 2017-2020 worse than they have in recent decades. By any reasonable measure, the party should have imploded. Instead, it compelled the supposed opposition party to move to the right to compete with open faced fascism. That's not OK.
Just one more thing - you may want to do some reading about the history of the Cheney family, and consider whether anyone in their right mind would say "Yes, it's a good idea to put a Cheney up on stage at the DNC while simultaneously disallowing anyone, even elected representatives, to speak for a single moment in support of the people of Gaza." Because no one needed tea leaves to see that was a bad idea even without the Gaza angle.