Event as a then leftist, I used to be skeptical of this rhetoric until I saw every single establishment come out the woodwork to smear Jeremy Cromblin for being the minorest of threats to bourgeois power.
Major newspapers with front page news 100% seriously accusing him of being a soviet sleeper agent, the head of the armed forces (who is legally obliged to be impartial) went on the BBC news to specifically criticise Corbyn and talk about how he'll let everyone die to nukes, the notorious BBC moment of portraying him outside the Kremlin in a Ushanka like he's V fucking Lenin himself, not a single major media outlet accurately reported on how the antisemitism report entirely cleared Corbyn, or how the chief UK rabbi fueling the smears is literally a childhood friend of .
I dunno, I could go on forever with examples - But that year I truly lost all hope in electoralism, and truly appreciated the bourgeois hold on fucking everything. I saw the machine come out in full force and it was scary.
That was a Biden campaign promise in 2020- that nothing would fundamentally change. Why shouldn't we believe that? It's the only campaign promise that he's delivered on.
Idk if it's really fundamentally worse, like yeah they're cranking the dials on the misery machine but it's still the same machine we've been strapped into
The election felt like it was going to be a referendum on the banks for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and then those finance jackals that directly contributed to the problem were brought in to oversee the bailout. It was such a transparent "fuck you" to everyone else.
If you're under 30, you've voted before when has voting changed anything except for making things worse, yknow. They didn't even get the weird euphoria of Obama in 2008 (except culturally, obviously, they couldn't have voted yet).
The failure of the transformative, Hope and Change promises of the Obama campaign/administration to materialize is a big reason why younger Americans are more cynical of electoralism and more left-leaning.