I’m not engaging with this anymore, you’ve obviously not understood my perspectives here (intentionally or not).

You’re free to choose not to engage any further. But I’d wager to say you haven’t understood my perspective either. At least I’ve tried to make sense of what you’ve said so far, and provide citations to enforce my perspective. I get the sense that you think you have an insight into unions and working class people that I could never fathom, or something like that. Hopefully I’m wrong.

I’m speaking to a very specific material conditions that a particular subset of the electorate is experiencing and liberal policies fail to address, and you’ve dismissed them yet again.

Okay…so you believe that liberal policies can’t address the problems of certain people? That seems bizarre, given what you said a few replies up:

The more socialized benefits available to small town workers, the less pressure there will be to remain employed in a dying industry. That includes childcare, healthcare, housing, food; basically everything they’re afraid to campaign on because republicans will accuse them of being radical socialists.

I figured your main beliefs were in that quote, and that a lot of what you’ve said thus far was just an effort to empathize with conservative-minded workers. Guess you’re a more befuddling guy than I thought.

It’s extremely calloused to ignore the economic hardships experienced by these workers when the industry that supports them and their community is broken into pieces and replaced by another, and I don’t think you’re in the right place to see or acknowledge those.

Buddy, I’m just some guy on the internet, same as you. At the end of the day we don’t really know a thing about each other. At least I’m not assuming you “fail to see” this or “aren’t in the right place to see” that.

Maybe that’s just a function of where we are in the election cycle. A part of the way capitalism works is by holding the means of survival hostage to coerce labor to protect it, and when democrats turn a blind eye to the trap those people are stuck in it solidifies reactionary political perspectives.

Man, I get it, you hate capitalism. That’s okay. IMO economic systems don’t really matter nearly as much as the rules and regulations above those systems. That’s okay, too.

I don’t give a shit what O’Brian’s personal politics are or what Teamsters endorsement or platforming at the RNC means to the democratic campaign. He represents a segment of the population that is experiencing conditions not addressed by current or proposed democratic policies, and he’s using his platform to put pressure on both parties to address them by dangling Teamster’s influence, and I think that’s a fine (good, even) strategy.

I don’t care what it means “to the democratic campaign”, either. I just care that he might help Trump win, because IMO that’s bad for his constituents. Trump doesn’t care about workers, teamsters included, and Harris is the successor to the guy who you can’t deny at least cared enough to give them the largest pension bailout in US history. To me, that’s what’s most practical to care about.