> It was massively selfish and incompetent for them not to make major policy pivots with the goal of just annihilating Trump and his movement. Instead they just treated it as a regular election, where the goal was to eek out a victory for their partisans.
It sounds a lot like you actually agree; those are all reasons why every Democrat constituent should be livid with the party "establishment". Instead, any time this point is brought up, people respond instantly with the "it's not a 'both sides' issue" thought-terminating cliché. In this case, one person says, "Okay, but obviously the other people shot themselves in the foot" and the response is "I disagree, here's how they shot themselves in the foot".
I think so. Something more in the Sanders direction would have been way better, though with a keener eye towards not alienating working-class folks (like putting a massive student loan forgiveness plan front-and-center did), with Trump's rejection of free-trade dogma, and jettisoning the social justice activism that loses rural areas and many working-class voters.
> Instead, any time this point is brought up, people respond instantly with the "it's not a 'both sides' issue" thought-terminating cliché
"Both sides" itself is also often a thought-terminating cliche. It is always important to look at the larger context these points are being made in.
Here, the original comment was taking individual Republican voters to task for supporting this performatively-cruel societally-destructive con man with a proven track record. This is something that every individual Republican voter directly did, while Democrat voters did not do and would not have ended up doing [had Harris won]. Harris, for all of her faults and would-have-been letdowns, did not openly run on a platform of destroying our society. Reasonable people can disagree with her policies, but she appeared to be poised to at least lead the country rather than deliberately divide us.
But the comment responding to that then tried to equate that blame to "both sides", going so far as to use the word "collectively" to try and bootstrap personal responsibility from the (obviously terrible) actions of the Democratic party.
So no, that is not an equal criticism in the context of criticizing Republican voters who actively voted for overt evil! The many failings of the Democratic party is something that definitely needs to be discussed, but not in the context of the much larger and more serious problems in the Republican party. Rather, bringing it up here seems like yet another instance of the only-Democrats-have-agency fallacy.
(I presume the downvotes without comment are just the same old fascism supporters who hate my framing because it clashes with the lies they tell themselves about what they voted for. The funny part is I'm no friend of the Democratic party either - I'm a libertarian who actually believes in many of the issues Trump abuses to rabble-rouse. But my country called, so I swallowed my own independent individualist pride and answered that call rather than falling for the siren song of destructionist grievance politics)
It sounds a lot like you actually agree; those are all reasons why every Democrat constituent should be livid with the party "establishment". Instead, any time this point is brought up, people respond instantly with the "it's not a 'both sides' issue" thought-terminating cliché. In this case, one person says, "Okay, but obviously the other people shot themselves in the foot" and the response is "I disagree, here's how they shot themselves in the foot".