this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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So sick of the division amongst the left. He is far from perfect, but I'd much rather take a neoliberal over a fascist.
Neoliberals Don't oppose fascists.
He will work with the fascist to come up with a compromise that the fascists can live with. That probably means sacrificing vulnerable groups and rallying around right wing talking points.
He is right wing. Gavin newsom is just right wing. the fact that there's a uneven deeper more belligerent right wing out there doesn't mean that he is somehow an alternative to it.
This attitude is how you ended up electing Trump.
Its bonkers that you guys are spiralling into a dystopian shitscape day by day and just cant bring yourself to acknowledge that any alternative has to be better.
The Democrats refusing to acknowledge the desires of the voters, and actively screwing over workers is how we ended up with Trump. The Democrats are "better", but only in the sense that they aren't going to fix the problems that led to fascism. They've shown over and over that they'd rather support fascism, then fight against it.
This is how I feel. I can’t stand neoliberals but some people on here are delusional for saying they won’t vote for Newsom if he is nominated.
It's not only about voting, but the complaining.
It seems like the problem in the US is getting people to give a fuck. By spreading this narrative that the democrats are just slower fascists or whatever your just encouraging progressive voters not to vote.
Well then maybe the Democrats should do somthing to counter that claim. Maybe something like not supporting fascism, and actually fighting against it when they have the chance.
I’ve been voting for those alternatives for a quarter century and it hasn’t stopped the dystopian hellscape from happening.
That's not really how voting works though.
An election is a poll or test or the collective will of citizens at a given point in time. Granted, in the US you have the electoral college fuckery overlaid on that but still ...
Voting Blue but complaining about them to your compatriots is not the way.
Protesting about Gaza outside Democrat conventions in an election cycle is not the way to secure better outcome for Palestinians.
As long as. I am forced to vote Democratic I will complain about it because it’s bullshit and our government is stupid by design.
So your plan is to encourage others not to vote?
Seems counter productive.
There aren’t enough people like me to make a difference either way.
Progressives and socialists and weirdos are woefully outnumbered in this country, as shown by literally every election in my life.
Even if every single one voted we’d still lose and things would continue to get worse.
That is not true. Slower fascism isn't appreciably better than faster fascism. The you of four or eight years in the future doesn't have any less of a right to not live under fascism than the you of right now. If by choosing the "better" alternative you throw away your ability to actually stop fascism you're missing the forest for the trees.
It's disingenuous to characterise imperfect alternatives like Newsom as "slower fascism". That's a propaganda narrative.
In this case choosing the better alternative means preserving your ability to actually stop fascism.
Did you see the other headline today where your actual president mentioned avoiding elections by starting a war ?
It's this type of "Harris is imperfect therefore the same as Trump" attitude that brought you to this juncture.
Well you still didn't refute it, so you should do that if you disagree with my propaganda narrative.
And where, pray tell, is that stopping? How do you intend to do it? I mean do you remember the wins the far-right got under Biden in red states? You're clutching your pearls without offering a realistic plan to ultimately stop fascism. If your favorite neoliberal can't fix American society such that the fascists don't simply come back stronger four years later, you're just kicking the can down the road and should let the people with an actual plan get to work.
Yes, and who exactly managed to fumble their campaign so bad they lost to this well-known fascist?
And this is all before we even look at Newsom's actual policies. The way that guy treats homeless people is straight up fascism, full stop. If you can't take a stand on that, why the fuck should anyone else take a stand for you?
Oh please. You don't even have the concepts of a plan.
With all due respect, as I understand where this sentiment comes from, that is how Trump gained momentum and won.
I think the blue no matter who approach has failed more than worked considering Hillary failed, Biden did win but really it was more Trump lost, Kamala lost (she got a shit deal yeah but still neolib vs unchained Trump should have been a no contest) and going further back Gore and Kerry lost to Bush. Clinton basically was the centrist Republican neolib that got Dems a roadmap that they keep to this day.
The time for half measures is over and the DNC needs to adapt or they will end up like the Whig Party. If you dont believe me look at their approval right now, No one likes the Democrats
Newsom is an establishment figure and telling the next generation of voters this is going to be a candidate for change won't yield the results you think.
Trump gained momentum and won because the people in this country don't know their ass from their elbow in terms of what is happening, and their whole picture of politics is based on confusion and incredibly effective weaponized propaganda.
You presented a child with a pretty unappealing fast food burger that had gone cold anyway, and a big lump of shit laced with (and labeled as) rat poison, and then he selected the shit and ate the whole thing. And your reaction is, "Well the burger should have been better." I mean, it's not at all an incorrect statement. But I feel like the way it played out should be automatic proof that the burger quality wasn't the core of the issue.
A cold fast food burger would have been miles ahead of what we were offered. Democrats wouldn't even say "Genocide is bad, and we shouldn't support it". They continuously gaslight Americans on the economy. They support the bombing of kids, and torture programs. They expand out the Republican's surveillance programs.
It's not a choice of a burger vs shit, it's a vomit vs shit
I would say the citizens that experienced the fall out from NAFTA that gutted blue collar jobs and created the rust belt would say "the big lump of shit with rat poison" was the Democrats that threw the working class overboard years ago.
Speaking of poison, it is the same reason residents of Michigan would rather vote Trump because the Democratic party and Obama would rather gaslight them about their water being safe to drink instead of charging the corporations that cut costs that polluted the water with federal charges. Obama also bailed out Wall Street and left hard working Americans with a shell of an American dream.
The core of the issue is the Democrats use to be for the everyday man and they lost their way and eroded trust, that will never be gained back. What that leaves voters in fly over states with is a choice to vote their better interest or have a candidate that "tells it like it is" aka lie and get back at the party that screwed them over.
It's not as black and white when you're in the thick of it, as difficult as it is to reason with that base.
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people he didn't exist. The greatest trick the Republican party pulled was convincing people that its most unpopular ideas are entirely Democrats' fault.
NAFTA was championed by, majority supported, and voted in by mostly Republicans. It was ultimately bipartisan, but Democrats were significantly more opposed to it than Republicans (of Republican Congress members, only 10 in the Senate and 43 in the House voted against it; of Democrats, 28 in the Senate and 156 in the House voted against it).
This isn't to say that NAFTA is objectively bad policy; most economists argue that it ultimately benefited the whole country. However it did expose US manufacturing to significant competition, reduced bargaining power for manufacturing workers, and shocked communities which were solely reliant on the sector to support them. Larger cities were mostly unaffected due to their more diverse economies, and in many cases thrived off increased trade and lower prices for goods. As a reminder, urbanites trend Democrat, rural folk trend Republican.
The trope that urban liberals successfully screwed over rural conservatives just isn't true. Instead it seems that, at screwing themselves over, urban liberals failed and rural conservatives succeeded.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1031/vote_103_1_00395.htm https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/1993575
That's called being politically savvy and out playing your competition which is why the Democratic party is always in free fall.
All this back and forth leads to this point: The Democrats are not equipped to handle a full assault of our democracy and thinking Gavin Newsom is the guy with some funny parrot tweets is not a real answer.
Oh, I'm not saying anything about Newsom, just trying to dispel some sadly common misinformation about NAFTA. I've yet to form a solid opinion of the guy, but I'm not without cynical biases, so he's got an uphill battle to win in my mind.
When you don’t have a choice that didn’t back NAFTA then you vote for the ones who are currently saying it sucks. Not the ones pointing to obscure economic indicators and saying everything is fine.
Sure. But let's set the record straight: blue collar jobs in the States didn't suffer because "Democrat bad and hate workers!" That's a myth perpetuated by politicians who would manipulate us for their own gain, Republican and Democrat alike.
In meantime we gotta figure out what to do with a ball of shit filled with rat poison.
It's also relevant that Biden did more for blue collar jobs in the States than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. Along with climate change, it's something he actually took seriously and fought for, and achieved some success with, which made him a massive outlier in the party of Clinton and Chuck Schumer and all those assholes. How he got that through our current congress, I have absolutely no idea.
And, of course, no one really noticed, because our media is awful and people on social media have no idea what they're talking about. Even the "sophisticated" left has still been talking about it as if none of that or the climate action had happened.
When choosing between more worse and less worse, it makes sense to vote for less worse.
What’s infuriating is that we can’t vote for better because it doesn’t exist.
Jesus Christ he hasn’t even announced he’s running yet. Why are we already pretending these are the only two alternatives?
We don’t need to choose a neoliberal over a fascist… we can push for someone better.
I’ve never tried to choose the neoliberal but I’ve never not had to vote for them.
If it’s not Newsom then it’ll be someone else I don’t like.
Do we need to start the purity tests already, though? I don't like Newsom and would vote against him in most any primary but I will absolutely vote for him over Trump or any other current republican. I can't name a single republican I'd vote for at this point because they're all complicit.
Primaries haven't even started yet for the fucking midterms. This is exactly the time for purity tests.
Yes. People won’t vote against him if we don’t articulate our criticisms against him.
He’s a bad governor who is widely disliked in California. This carnival show he’s putting on is his only claim to fame and it depends on democrats in other states not knowing anything else about him or his record.
Like, I don’t understand the implications of what you’re saying here. That we can’t criticize any politician who’s not a fascist? How is that a reasonable strategy?
I'm not saying that we can't criticize but does it need to start now? Can't it wait until we see who the field of candidates are so we can avoid tarring the candidates before they even start debating? I am mainly worried that the democrats are going to rip themselves apart again before campaign season even starts.
I completely disagree. This is the best time to be brutally honest so that bad candidates don’t launch and it’s easier to have a united front once most voters start paying attention during the campaign.
I’ve lived under Newsom (and to be clear, voted for him over republicans every time) so I don’t need to see him debate or anything to make up my mind about him. He blocked more progressive legislation in California than the republicans here did. He’s also a rich, corrupt slime ball who has nothing but disdain for ordinary people. He’s not a good candidate.
Completely agree with 100% of this. I hate that he's sort of the default "big white guy face of the Democrats." But also, I like that he's at least making some substantive effort to fuck up Trump's attempt to seize control of the country and throw all his enemies into the camps. I wish there were a few more people in power who were doing that. If he's only doing it because he's being a ponce who wants to make a name for himself, fuckin' great, I hope he gets turbo narcissism tomorrow and starts doing it twice as hard.
There needs to be a united front to get Trump out. Newsom is welcome to join in, and at least he's bringing the fight to MAGA and not just whining. And I say this as someone who despises Newsom's sleazy corporate centrist politics.
But I'm going to keep pushing for progressives, and even more, for grassroots organizing outside the Democratic Party. The Dems will only change when events force them to.
How about we start with a primary race? When was the last time the democrats ran a presidential primary that didn't come across as a fait accompli? Maybe 2007?
Oh fuck you, you tell the left they can't critisize these people during elections and now we're not supposed to critisize them aftet elections too? When are we supposed to ask for things that keep us from dying then? You're part of the problem.
It's really simple.
You criticise the government of the day, whoever they may be.
You do not criticise your own side when they're not in government or running for election.
He threw trans people under the bus, and there's no way in hell I'm voting for that.
First, criminalizing homelessness is fascism. If you can't take a stand for the homeless how can you expect anyone to take a stand for you? Second, do you intend to repeat the same song and dance that got Trump elected twice? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Third, why are you compromising from now? Like come on it's still 2025, even if you're going to vote blue no matter who, now you should be projecting strength not compliance.
Literally the only time I hear this is from people on Lemmy who are trying to criticize some potential ally by being embittered.
Nobody is talking about voting for Gavin Newsom. We're talking about it being good that he's irritating Trump by taking concrete steps to preserve our democracy. You would be the guy in the revolution who's constantly trying to root out "counterrevolutionaries" in the ranks and snitching people to the secret police because they're not revolutionary enough, right during the run-up to the big battle to see if the movement can even survive.
The article is pretty explicitly talking about that, and the parent comment of this thread is responding to that by saying they'd "much rather take a neoliberal over a fascist." If you're not talking about voting for Gavin Newsom, you're in the wrong thread.
Back in 2023, when this article was written when we were trying to figure out who to vote for, it made perfect sense to talk about that. Now that people are talking about how to not get thrown into concentration camps for being a Democrat, people are talking about something different.
The fact that one of the most infamous of the "anti Biden all the time" trolls elected to suddenly become nail-bitingly concerned about Newsom's progressive credentials, and repost this thing from a whole nother pre-CECOT era as if it was relevant, doesn't change what people are talking about presently, present tense.
I'm aware that you would like them to be talking about various holes and nitpicks in Newsom's agenda and reasons why he is deeply problematic, and change the subject away from reasons why he is in the news, present tense. Who knows, you may succeed, it worked gangbusters in the last election and I see no reason to think it would stop working now.
I disagree with your argument, but more relevantly this whole comment chain is predicated on the assumption that "Newsom is not your friend" is a position worth debating. If you don't agree with this assumption, the place to make that point would be a parent comment, maybe a reply to a parent comment. As it stands your response has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
I'm aware that it has nothing to do with what you're talking about. I'm making a whole different point, directly addressing what you're talking about but from a different point of view (distinct from "what 'we' are talking about" in your parlance). That's generally how it works.
Leftists: "Democratic politicians are feckless. They need to get on social media to call out Trump's bullshit on daily basis! When is a leader going to step up?!"
Somewhere, a finger curls on a monkey's paw.
Calling him out on social media is absolutely not what I want and is definitely feckless.