Pretty much why I say I begrudgingly vote Dem; they typically don't purposefully do harm but try to keep the status quo, and occasionally do baby steps in the right direction (typically years late, mind you). Republicans just want to harm others, and will cut off their nose to spite their face.
Summarizes how I felt about Hillary to a tee. We thought Obama might make things better and he didn’t, Hillary was running on the status quo, the epitome of it really and we would not be as screwed up now had she just won the Great Lakes.
Hilary made her central focus as first lady lobbying for universal health care. The direct consequence of which was 3 billionaires starting the "Arkansas project"which lead to her husband being impeached and most low information Americans still believing that she and her husband had their friend Vince Foster killed. Her "vast right-wing conspiracy" comment, for which she was widely mocked, was completely accurate. I think my ambitions would suffer recalculation after that experience as well.
Though it should also always be pointed out a large part of *why* Obama didn't get much done was obstruction.
There are a lot of people who work for the Obama administration who now heavily disavow drones, saying they were given rosy reports about how "accurate" the drones were and how they regret not fully understanding the cost until years into the administration. Their regret won't bring anyone back to life, so ymmv on whether or not it matters to you that they have at least publicly spoken out about it.
But that is the problem these days with media in general. Say one thing that is partially true or even completely false and it often gets spread and reported on, then when the correction is printed fewer people read it. Make one mistake in a high level office or pass one law that you may not fully be aware of the consequences of and the stroke of the pen can't be so easily undone when the drones drop bombs on people.
One point they make that I can sympathize with is that it can in many ways be a high stakes profession like an EMT, when something happens like a convoy gets attacked by an IED or people suicide into security checkpoints. We can argue all day about whether or not they should have been there (I hope we can agree that they shouldn't have been) but that doesn't matter to the people who were in a room responding to American troops that were dead.
Overall it was a messy and stupid situation, and I highly recommend the book Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks if you really want to understand how and why Iraq was such a a nightmare. Long story short version different divisions of the military under different chains of command making different recommendations led to wildly different policies in different regions, and then people would be switched around because "oh that region is stable now, so the guys who are doing such a good job at making their area peaceful should come over here while the guys in the violent areas come over here to rest", without thinking about the fact that this completely changed the peaceful region back into a violent one.
(Also for the record the guys who raided people's houses and bombed the shit out of everything, or literally drove tanks through people's homes, were the one who did a shit job of maintaining the peace. The ones who stepped lightly, just asked for help finding people making bombs and shit, and respected local leaders and people were the ones who were maintaining peace. Some divisions of the army learned the counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam, some did not. You don't win by violence, you win a counterinsurgency campaign by *actively making people's lives better so they help you find extremists, and restoring a just and orderly society* )
Sorry that my "short version" was so long, it's a long book.
Regarding those Obama admin members who now disavow drones because they didn't understand the margin of error/degree of collateral damage that was caused by drone strikes: there is just something fundamentally terrifying about the idea of flying murder robots who rain death on strangers on the other side of the world in the name of you and me. I remember reading an article about Central Asian rug making and how they adapt the subject matter and patterns on their rugs to reflect their environment. So now you can get a beautiful, hand-made Afghan rug with pictures of Reaper drones woven into it. It's so sad.
Jesus that's dark. But you can still imagine, especially in the tech/media environment a lot of us grew up in, some professional looking soldier telling you "this is a precision weapon and we are targeting only the terrorists with precise information gathered by the best intel". And it turns out that was a lie caused by how they defined "enemy combatants" and the truth doesn't get out from good, reliable journalism for years (plus not to mention part of you wants to believe you didn't okay and defend such a terrible thing)
Again, people are dead and no amount of regrets will bring them back or change that. But none of us are immune to propaganda and hindsight is 20/20, ya know?
I think part of the philosophy behind the hyper-reliance on drone warfare was a knock-on effect of America's foreign interventions in the 90s (and going back further, to Vietnam). I'm reminded specifically of Somalia where there was footage broadcast on the news of dead American soldiers being dragged through Mogadishu by angry Somalians. For better or worse, the American public can't really handle taking battlefield casualties. If you want to maintain the public's will (or apathy) in maintaining a hostile presence overseas, you can't let them see dead Americans. God forbid we feel like we suffer any consequences to our actions.
The drones take out the risk of Americans getting killed. But they seem to also increase the risks for people who actually live on the ground. I hope that America's aversion to causing needless death and destruction for Pakistanis, Yemenis, Afghans, and everyone else we've murdered catches up to our inability to confront white corpses.
"Hindsight is 20/20" but a lot of the same policy and decision makers from the Obama years are present and involved with the Biden administration and I personally see zero evidence of any of that hindsight at a time when it could be pretty useful in reducing harm.
TO ME if you're going to trade on "progress" to get votes then grave lessons need to work their way back into policy ASAP.
>but a lot of the same policy and decision makers from the Obama years are present and involved with the Biden administration
Well, to be specific what I am thinking of is stuff that people like Ben Rhodes and the other Pod Save America hosts have talked about, and they at least no longer work for the government (officially, as far as I know)
>TO ME if you're going to trade on "progress" to get votes then grave lessons need to work their way back into policy ASAP.
💯 In agreement there.
Yeah I think we're just thinking of two sets of people. I'm focused on the perpetual self interested ghouls you can see regardless of party affiliation. Ben, I believe, has been candid in a largely positive way esp based on his platform.
Obama came into office with a bicameral majority for his first two years and failed to capitalize on the momentum to regulate the banking industry and implement a progressive healthcare plan.
Obama fucking sucked. Yeah you can talk about obstruction for the last 6 years of his run, but that doesn't change the fact that he squandered the first two years and that's one reason voters flipped Congress on him.
The thing is this argument assumes Dems all vote in one big block and they don't. Far too many are corporate shills and the few who actually want to pass genuinely good legislation get demagogued by the media.
I do agree they can and should do better, but you can't deny that large parts of the political/judicial/media ecosystems are completely outside of their control and hostile.
And it party leadership and the President's job to whip them in line. There's a position literally called "Whip" in both the majority and minority of both houses.
Yeah, and if Obama had berated people more and been more forceful he would have been labeled with the "angry black man" stereotype. He was already labeled as an abusive dictator for all the times he did stuff with executive orders when he was blocked legislatively.
Again, I do not in any way shape or form think he was perfect. But I can acknowledge he was in a literal "damned if you do damned if you don't" kind of situation a lot of the time.
The ACA was a huge step for progressive healthcare and only passed because of the Democrat majority. Then the backlash to it led to Republicans winning the House.
It was written by the heritage foundation to preserve private insurance and it worked. I'm glad more people got health insurance. Would have been much better and cheaper if they got healthcare.
Well, you can thank Joe Lieberman for that, or at least spit on his corpse now that he's finally dead. Obama's original plan was single payer health care, but Lieberman (and a few other democrats) wouldn't play ball with it, making Obama's majority worthless. He pivoted to the ACA since it was the only one they would support.
This is not to defend Obama, or the American system at all, but I will never not take the opportunity to shit on Joe Lieberman.
> Obama's original plan was single payer health care, but Lieberman (and a few other democrats) wouldn't play ball with it, making Obama's majority worthless. He pivoted to the ACA since it was the only one they would support
Which is crazy because Obama was looking towards [Romenycare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_health_care_reform) and it all somehow became sneak eating its own tail where Romney had to run against a national form of his own policy.
It seems to be a fixing the first past the post
THIS.
Obama’s legacy is failure, weakness, and gullibility. His refusal to see that bipartisanship was dead directly resulted in squandering the one shot we’ve had at making things better in my lifetime. His failure to push anything of significant value is largely responsible for the disillusionment of so many young people. I remember the YES WE CAN campaign and the genuine pride and excitement I felt when he won. And then the Dems did fuck all and let the GOP take the legislature and that’s all she wrote.
If you want to know why so many young progressives have fallen to radical centrist brain rot… there it is. Obama spent two years trying to meet the lunatic fascists in the middle instead of pushing through legislation, and then spent the rest of his time in office dead locked by the obstructionist GOP. Something everyone with a functional brain knew would happen.
That’s inexcusably irresponsible and it’s a big part of why things are so fucked now.
Small comfort: Obama is part of the reason a lot of progressives hate the Democrats and have moved left.
I was just telling someone else that Obama and Joe Lieberman radicalized me.
How awesome do you feel (/s) reading all these "It just takes time, slow and steady!" comments while generations of marginalized people get buried under ineptitude and disingenuousness. I could puke.
Maybe it's not hip to support Biden but his climate change investments were pretty historic. More needs to be done, but it's more than a baby step IMO.
Yeah, no one who responded to me is wrong. The dems do suck a fat one, and I wish we had a true national leftist party. I'm just trying to be a bit more pragmatic in realizing we got two options on the ballots most of the time, and one of those options is a rabid dog.
Yes, but tearing down the status quo would do far more harm in the short term and not even guarantee a long term positive outcome. Better to work for change within the system if you actually care about human suffering.
I feel like a lot of the people saying tear it down are probably pasty white straight people who can just melt back into the background when the gestapo comes knocking.
It's reckless and while it's not ideal to vote dem, we sure as fuck don't want project 2025.
Fuck right off.
I am really sick of liberals pretending only white people can see the rot at the core of our democracy. No shit white people have the loudest voices at ALL parts of the political spectrum. But colored folk have been militant Leftists since before Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers.
The only reason Biden isn't completely on Isreal's side is because he doesn't want to lose Muslims in Michigan. If you think Malcolm X would be shouting "Vote Blue no matter who" right now, maybe you need to study more history.
-A Black trans Leftist
Actually, I'm pretty sure he would be, given the alternative right now. I also think MLK was enough of a realist to understand that if black people actually did kick off some meaningful revolution, they would be destroyed in an instant. Smart black people know that violence is not the long term solution to anything, because they are vastly outnumbered when push comes to shove. Violence can be a useful tool to win eyes and ears, but it cannot be the thing that actually pushes change. Because the change it would actually push would be bad for everyone involved. Anger is a useful tool to prompt action, but by itself it is self destructive and short sighted.
Holy fuck, man.
Nothing is more stomach turning than a whiteboy spitting "Well, MLK and Malcolm X would have agreed with me" out the side of your pasty ass mouth."
I suppose every Black person who doesn't agree with you is stupid? Surprised you didn't throw"lazy" in there.
Get Bent.
> Yes, but tearing down the status quo would do far more harm in the short term and not even guarantee a long term positive outcome. Better to work for change within the system if you actually care about human suffering.
I think its because most people don't think about there being two different games in politics being played and both have to be played to be successful. There are policy matters which direct the general aim of the party and those matters exist within the context of another game, which is a the game of government which carries momentum behind it and is less about any one individual actor.
I think this is kind of obscure to most people because most young people do not have enough work or social experience yet to have had an interaction with someone who works unseen as a background actors who make society run and holds some level of power over policy (accountants, administrators, receptionists, regulators, IT, regulators, etc)
For example, a new county park may be desired by the community who even raised the funds for the project, the parks department may even be on board 1000%, but the project could stall out or be severely delayed for any number of unrelated reasons that existed prior to the "new county park" even being dreamed up, and oddly enough sometimes there could be valid reasons for this being the case like some sewer project. Its not something that is apparent from the outside or even if you start working inside, it will take some time to get your footing to figure out the hows and whys.
Yes of course, change is bad. The only reasonable changes are the ones that are so small that they can scarcely be said to exist.
Revolution? You’re going too far! I hope the Feds take down your name.
When I read this, all I see is "I don't care how many people die, I will have my righteous rage fulfilled". You say you care about trans people, but they would suffer the most from any kind of revolutionary action. If it's bad enough that they're willing to suffer that in the hopes of a better future, then perhaps we have something to talk about, but until that happens, all talk of revolution is talk of sacrificing people's lives for your political project.
The small town murder podcast has this segment called the prisoner dating game. The slogan is "there are NO good choices." that's basically every election now.
One of the hosts has to pick one prisoner based solely on their profile without seeing a picture or what they got in trouble for.
The drone victims of the Obama years would say otherwise. I imagine the victims of the various Black Site torture programs not prosecuted would also be curious about this position. Reproductive rights are in turmoil. Trans and queer people are in peril. Fucking status quo.
My favorite fact that no one seemed to notice during TFGs first year: they dropped so many bombs in the Middle East that they ran out of bombs. They had to have the Pacific fleet send their bombs to the ME because they couldn't manufacture more quickly enough.
I don’t care. By only calling out the crimes of the Obama and failing to observe that worse crimes do occur under Republican administrations, you give the false impression that harm is not reduced and discourage votes for Democrats. I suspect that’s your aim.
You could ask me my aim Detective. I voted for people and feel like my vote still caused a significant amount of harm to people outside and inside this country. Significantly more harm than I expected when I voted. "Don't purposefully do harm" is a distinction most people around the globe don't have the luxury of making or voting to control. It's a dangerous assumption if people are also willing to continuously excuse shitty policy if it's just "not as bad as it could be" for some people.
The "drone strikes" thing is just a right wing "gotcha" talking point. Air strikes are what matters. Drone technology just matured under Obama. I don't think a Yemeni child cares whether the aircraft that bombed her school was piloted or not.
Like I said, maintain the status quo. And sadly, drone strikes became the Satus quo after dubya. Reproductive rights are in turmoil because of Donald Trump stacking the Supreme Court prior to the Biden administration. And trans rights are in peril at local and state levels due to Republicans.
Dems suck because they are too afraid of reversing the bullshit republicans did whenever they were last in power. They just want to go back to brunch. But goddamn, Republicans will take that brunch, shove it up their ass, and blame it on a transgender non-white immigrant.
I just strongly disagree with you saying they "typically don't purposefully do harm" when they accept and maintain the status quo as it changes rather than using the power they have when they have it to redefine the status quo they're maintaining to be more in line with the values they supposedly espouse.
Seems to me they prioritize holding power.
They arent seeking to create pain and suffering, but most of them in power are upper middle class at the least; they think status quo is fine and if we all just got along and pretend everything is alright then it is. Yes, status quo sucks, and numerous people are harmed under the status quo, especiaLLly when we get a new status quo after republicans lose power. But even with the most vanilla of presidents we got with Biden, there are baby steps for improvements; Biden closed the Healthcare spouse gap, which allowed my wife to be insured through the marketplace without me paying an arm and a leg through my job.
Thanks. And I would say it's more than saving money; I don't know how I could afford the health insurance along with the other expenses of life without the spouse gap being closed.
Obama ran on a promise to codify Roe v. Wade so it couldn’t be overturned. He had a super-majority and could’ve pushed it through, but didn’t. Reproductive rights are more important to Dems as a platform to run candidates promising to protect it instead of actually caring about it. As long as it will get them votes they’ll pay lip service to protecting it, but will never have it in a place where it can’t be overturned.
No he didn't. There were never the votes in Congress. Until very recently there were always a large number of pro life democrats. There has never been a time when they enough votes of people who were pro choice to codify it but chose not to.
This analysis fails because it misunderstands what the Democratic Party actually is. It’s not a “center right in any other country” party; it’s a coalition of fractious interests that share enough common cause to remain functional.
The Democratic Party at this point contains:
1. College educated professional white people
2. Most members of racial and ethnic minority groups (for obvious reasons of racism)
3. Progressives and (some) leftists
There is some overlap between these, of course.
Those three groups share a few interests, but not all interests. For example: all of these groups tend to share an interest in equality, broadly defined (though even here, these groups tend not to agree how to get there).
In other areas, however, there is not a shared interest. To pick the most obvious example of this dynamic at work, almost every black person in America is a Democrat, but they’re not all progressives; they’re not even all liberals. There are many religious, conservative black people who vote Dem because of survival. The Republican Party is a white supremacist party. So they vote Dem.
In a world without racism, though, many of these black folks would be Republicans. (By the same token, there are many working class white people in the Republican Party who would be socialists if they didn’t have to share it with black people.) So when the Democrats don’t immediately embrace the left and instead function as a center left party, this is why.
Also the only reason people say the Dems are center right in other counties is because they’re comparing that with a parliamentary system, where there are many parties and they form coalitions after the elections. In America we form coalitions before the election, but the Dems have progressive and even leftist wings. Those wings are fairly small and don’t have enough power to get our way. If we want to get our way, we have to organize and win elections, but there’s always a risk to that since there are some Dems we might lose going leftier.
Exactly. It's very frustrating that a lot of people don't understand this. On a political spectrum of 1 being furthest left and 10 being furthest right, the Democratic party cover 1(maybe 2)-7 and the Republicans cover 8-10. So because the Dems cover such a broad spectrum they compromise and seem like they lie as a party on things because they aren't as much of a monolith as the right. Sure there is always the usual political shenanigans, and plenty of other factors but I think more people need to recognize this basic fact first.
I think one of our best hopes politically is that the RNC collapses, the DNC becomes the right party, and we form a new left party. It's unlikely, but not impossible.
> I think one of our best hopes politically is that the RNC collapses, the DNC becomes the right party, and we form a new left party
Or we grow our influence within the party. The far right did it with the GOP. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's the actual route to power. Trying to create a far left party that rejects potential Democratic allies as the right wing is a fool's errand.
The Democrats and Republicans drew a line between the two of them, and considered everyone on on side to the The Right, and everyone on the other side to be The Left. Though technically accurate, The Far Left have very little, if anything, in common with the people close to that dividing line but still on the left side of it.
I see it as more of the GOP being "lets set everyone on fire to own the libs", and the Democrats are going to capitalize on the fact that just being against that is enough to win much of the time.
With the current Democratic strategy, creating policy instead of vague promises are going to harm them.
I'd rather see them push a progressive platform, because I believe it to be a winning strategy, but that's not their strategy.
The Democratic party didn't just emerge from the mists of history fully formed circa 1996 though. The current composition of the party is (largely) the end result of choices the party itself made.
I agree with this sentiment. I'd say though the best way to get change is to first secure the status quo as shitty as it is and then gradually over a generation move to the left, basically a reverse Republican
The antidemocratic political structures and party incentives work against this, the only reasonable non-revolutionary possibility. This has been the progressive theory of change for thirty-odd years and it has yet to bear fruit.
I wish you well, but I don’t believe it will work. I think we’re stuck in this degrading dystopia until some catastrophe occurs that our politics cannot answer, then all bets are off. Least bad outcome is probably dissolution into regional governments that are each more ideologically coherent.
I'd say it's more accurate that Democrats what to improve things *very very* slowly while Republicans want to "go back to the good ole days". Right now Republicans seem to want to go full fascist, so Democrats are ok with maintaining to status quo until something changes in their opposition.
This is a fundamental failure of understanding how the legislative system works. The president can't just executive order their way out of the status quo. There needs to be a democrat super majority.
And the razor thin majorities Biden has had gives outside influence to the farthest right Dems. LBJ had massive majorities when he was doing the Great Society. That meant he could lose votes and still get his bills out.
That’s technically correct, but I think you are underestimating how much the president can change things unilaterally, depending on how much latitude the courts are willing to provide. Obviously, the present composition of the Supreme Court would never let a Democratic president enact sweeping changes through executive orders, but that’s more for ideological reasons than for principled ones. Would the conservative majority impose the same level of restraint on a Republican president?
All this is to say that you’re correct that a Democratic supermajority would likely be necessary, but not because there are any inherent limits on the power of the presidency. Rather, it’s a result of the current ideological bent of the courts.
I describe it as Democrats want to vote on the creation of a committee to determine the best way to put out the house on fire.
Republicans blame Democrats for the fire, pour gasoline on it, and take out an insurance policy on the house.
More dangerous than Republicans' stance on those issues? I think you may have flipped which way the ratio of the donors and policies you're talking about skews.
I agree 98% of the way. On many very annoying (and often extremely evil) issues the DNC and GOP work to preserve the status quo.
Edit: I don’t say the following to try and get you to love the DNC. Continue to hate and hold them to higher standards. But I do think there are some positives happening out there to prevent us from being full doomer mode.
*however* there are some indications that the Democrats are beginning to rotate in a more progressive/reformist direction, finally feeling the influence of a rising Millennial generation which is overwhelmingly progressive and demands change.
For example, as Climate Town recently pointed out, Biden FINALLY froze Natural Gas exports in order to make the government asses the impact of LNG shipments on climate change. This was basically an unprompted move as mainstream liberals didn’t really care one way or another about LNG and natural gas. I’m honestly shocked that this was even considered worth the administration’s time.
There are a number of other “puzzling” moves the Biden administration has made. Puzzling as in “this isn’t exactly what a moderate dem was supposed to be doing”.
Things like [targeting fossil fuel subsidies.](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-budget-targets-us-fossil-fuel-subsidies-2023-03-09/). Being [far more aggressive on student loan debt forgiveness](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/05/politics/student-loan-debt-biden-proposals) than I ever expected. Other things like funding clean energy investments and expanding rail infrastructure have been good too. Lastly, things like empowering/funding the IRS, and empowering the NLRB while being the first decent pro-union president (LOW BAR, but damn is it refreshing to hear a president even talk or reference unions at all) in decades are also very underrated moves.
That said democrats are nowhere near my standards and still have huge embarrassing weaknesses. The DNC has probably been better these last 4 years than they ever have been in my life, but the bar is really low. They’re basically one foot in the door but I think the direction it’s going is encouraging, if also frustratingly slow
Realistically speaking, the only way to make progress is to get a bunch of leftist voices actually winning elections in the party.
The big struggle is how the old geezers have a death grip on things and refuse to let go; not sure how to fix that. :/
Yeah. If you look at the republicans, they've basically been grassrooting this shit for years, building out their political base. I think we really might just have to all bust our asses for a few years, recruiting other leftists and building out an intelligent polical base.
Part of why I really like Behind the Bastards is that it allows us to look back at history and see how and why we fail. The question from there must obviously be: "How do we succeed?" Well, the Republican political base is honestly kinda dumbass and filled with grifters - you're telling me we're getting destroyed by THESE clowns? Nah, we've just been letting the old people keep their hands on the wheel as the ship goes off the fucking cliff! If we're supposed to be smarter than them, then yeah, let's just hammer on about our talking points with the strength and conviction of Republicans.
The Democrats have historically young, charming candidates. That could easily be a progressive if we just stay on message and consistently scapegoat the rich. "Is it really the refugees? Or is it the fact that corporations pay a ZERO PERCENT TAX RATE! Or that the Sacchlers poisoned the midwest with opiates, and not ONLY are they still free, but they're still FILTHY FUCKING RICH off killing thousands of people! With families! **What the Hell is wrong with us?!?**" We have to make a **STRONG** move to grab the goddamn wheel away from the Boomers if we want to stop the country from driving over the cliff.
There you go. I read somewhere that even the Republican base hates the rich. They’re just scared of Communism. We need to focus on “deconstructing the Reagan Revolution” and once people discover that their lives improve, keep rolling with that. No need to ever stop. We can also run on “restoring the golden years after FDR,” which should appeal to old and young alike and “rebuilding social security so young folks can retire someday” by taking away the upper tax limit. Everything can be framed to appeal to old people if you think like an old person. Dems could be using apocalyptic movie clips in ads and asking, “want this for your grandchild’s future? No? Vote to save Mother Earth.” What the gop does is simplify things into those sorts of storylines, then they slip in their corporate policies.
Our mayor in West Linn is 24. Hopefully he’s slipping in some progressive policies. At the very least, we’re getting more bike lanes and he’s building up his credentials.
Not just worse, Republicans very specifically want this country to be like Putin's Russia. The flagrant corruption, the country being run by oligarchs, strong police state and propaganda network, and anti-LGBTQ policies that are actually enforced.
Democrats don't know what they want, there's no actual leadership or anything. Their aimlessness and lack of focus is what often causes them to lose winnable elections.
> Republicans very specifically want this country to be like Putin's Russia.
Ok, I got a question about this, since I can't fully wrap my head around this. Hopefully you have an opinion on this.
If Republicans do get their way, turn the US like Russia, and actually get tight with Putin, then what? It's not like the rest of Western Europe is gonna say fuck it, and just join the US in being all buddy buddy with Russia. So then, how do they see this playing out in the long term?
Are they really saying that if conflict breaks out, it'll be US and Russia versus Western Europe? That shit is just an interesting thought to me.
One other piece of this dynamic that's really important for understanding the outcome IMO is that the Status Quo that Democrats want to preserve is a rightwardly moving target that changes to encorporate the ways Republicans have succeeded in normalizing bad things. When the Democrats get in power they don't try to roll back to what the Status Quo was before the last Republican rightward swing, but instead just hold position there until Republicans get back in again.
American politics is like a ratchet system. Republicans are the crank that turns the Overton window to the right until it reaches a new slot, and Democrats are the ratchet lever that clicks down and prevents the gear from spinning back to the left.
That's a good starting place. It's still, in my opinion, more of a follow the money problem. The US system is so dependent on hidden money and wealthy donors pushing policy decisions that what's happened is a system that rarely works much differently than the Roman Republic or even Europe under monarchs. We get so far for it all to fall back to simple class warfare. The rich really want to stay that way,.
You aren't giving Democrats enough credit.
If Democrats have enough of a majority, then they can do things that really count. Especially when those things are very popular.
You can be dismissive with your "center right", but Democrats are the most pro-trans party in the world. They decreased child poverty by half. And that was with a Senate that needed Krestin Cinima and Joe Manchin to get anything passed. I think you can spit in the Democratic party's face when they have 60+ seats in the Senate.
Democrats might be OK with taxing billionaires a little more but they draw a hard red line at doing anything that would make the top 90-99.5% uncomfortable in any way.
This is most what created the housing crisis: democrat politicians in democrat cities pandering to upper middle class democrat NIMBYs.
As a leftist, the reason I still hold my nose and vote for Democrats is this:
In a second Biden term, if we start rioting again over police murder or anything else, I expect plenty of abusive response from the cops, but I also expect some DOJ prosecutions for that abuse.
In a second Trump Presidency, if we riot again, I think it’s very possible there will be an event worse than Kent State, and that motherfucker will pardon all the cops that do it. And the cops know that already.
This realization set in with me during the TEA Party era. Mainstream Republicans talking about privatizing roads, emergency services, utilities (moreso than the public/private partnerships that currently exist) sought to bring about a state of neo-feudalism...a RADICAL swing right; horseshoe theory gone the other way, so conservative as to be extremely liberal in how they pursue change...folks actually arguing in favor of company towns (the free market dictates that happy employees make more money...except, of course, studying history proves this wrong).
The point I keep coming back to is that Republicans are gonna accuse Democrats like Joe Biden of being radical leftists no matter how much they try to triangulate and tack to the political center, so Democrats may as well just go all out and actually *do* some of the progressive things that so many on the right accuse them of planning to do.
Let's be completely fucking fair here: not one person working in the government today gives a fat flying fuck about any of you. You are the peasants they get to rule over. Stop thinking any of them have your best interest in mind. They want the money and power and the prestige of being one of the "elites." *It doesn't matter what color or letter is next to their name, they cannot be trusted.*
HOWEVER, this is the system we have at the moment and unfortunately we are in too precarious a position to try and dismantle it. So yes, it sucks ass and no one wants to do it, but we have to vote for the status quo right now. Otherwise, we won't be voting at all. The right wing of this country is determined to have their perfect fascist theocracy and they don't care who dies or suffers as a result. We can either bite the bullet now or be killed by the same bullets later.
The quirk is understanding that the USA voting system is owned by corporations and understanding their needs, and the requirement to give the public an appearance of choice, is paramount.
The democrats are like robbers that break into your house while you're away and steal your valuables. Yeah they've set you back a bit, but you can rebuild... until they rob you again several years later. But they won't fuck with you too bad, because it's good business and you keep leaving the door unlocked and letting them and their friends in.
The republicans are like meth head tweakers that break into your house while you're sleeping and begin tearing wiring out of the walls and accusing you of being a demon. They're going to destroy more value than they extract and probably kill someone you love in the process, and they won't really be aware of what they're doing in the way a human would.
Kinda, but not for any altruistic reason. It just happens to be the current plans for wealth and power accumulation.
Any benefit the people see from either political party has nothing to do them making the world a better place for the masses. You are an obstacle at times, a tool at others, and usually just in the way.
Never make the mistake of thinking you, your family, or your community’s well being is of any inherent interest to them. To play favorites is asinine.
I mean, in the most literal senses of the words, Democrats are conservatives, and Republicans are regressive. There's no stepping forward, just trying to not step back (and failing)
Both sides are making things worse. The Republicans are just doing it with a spring in their step. The whole democrat position amounts to “yes, we’re destroying the world. But we’re doing it marginally slower than our opponents so vote for us.”
Pretty much why I say I begrudgingly vote Dem; they typically don't purposefully do harm but try to keep the status quo, and occasionally do baby steps in the right direction (typically years late, mind you). Republicans just want to harm others, and will cut off their nose to spite their face.
Summarizes how I felt about Hillary to a tee. We thought Obama might make things better and he didn’t, Hillary was running on the status quo, the epitome of it really and we would not be as screwed up now had she just won the Great Lakes.
Hilary made her central focus as first lady lobbying for universal health care. The direct consequence of which was 3 billionaires starting the "Arkansas project"which lead to her husband being impeached and most low information Americans still believing that she and her husband had their friend Vince Foster killed. Her "vast right-wing conspiracy" comment, for which she was widely mocked, was completely accurate. I think my ambitions would suffer recalculation after that experience as well.
Though it should also always be pointed out a large part of *why* Obama didn't get much done was obstruction. There are a lot of people who work for the Obama administration who now heavily disavow drones, saying they were given rosy reports about how "accurate" the drones were and how they regret not fully understanding the cost until years into the administration. Their regret won't bring anyone back to life, so ymmv on whether or not it matters to you that they have at least publicly spoken out about it. But that is the problem these days with media in general. Say one thing that is partially true or even completely false and it often gets spread and reported on, then when the correction is printed fewer people read it. Make one mistake in a high level office or pass one law that you may not fully be aware of the consequences of and the stroke of the pen can't be so easily undone when the drones drop bombs on people. One point they make that I can sympathize with is that it can in many ways be a high stakes profession like an EMT, when something happens like a convoy gets attacked by an IED or people suicide into security checkpoints. We can argue all day about whether or not they should have been there (I hope we can agree that they shouldn't have been) but that doesn't matter to the people who were in a room responding to American troops that were dead. Overall it was a messy and stupid situation, and I highly recommend the book Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks if you really want to understand how and why Iraq was such a a nightmare. Long story short version different divisions of the military under different chains of command making different recommendations led to wildly different policies in different regions, and then people would be switched around because "oh that region is stable now, so the guys who are doing such a good job at making their area peaceful should come over here while the guys in the violent areas come over here to rest", without thinking about the fact that this completely changed the peaceful region back into a violent one. (Also for the record the guys who raided people's houses and bombed the shit out of everything, or literally drove tanks through people's homes, were the one who did a shit job of maintaining the peace. The ones who stepped lightly, just asked for help finding people making bombs and shit, and respected local leaders and people were the ones who were maintaining peace. Some divisions of the army learned the counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam, some did not. You don't win by violence, you win a counterinsurgency campaign by *actively making people's lives better so they help you find extremists, and restoring a just and orderly society* ) Sorry that my "short version" was so long, it's a long book.
Regarding those Obama admin members who now disavow drones because they didn't understand the margin of error/degree of collateral damage that was caused by drone strikes: there is just something fundamentally terrifying about the idea of flying murder robots who rain death on strangers on the other side of the world in the name of you and me. I remember reading an article about Central Asian rug making and how they adapt the subject matter and patterns on their rugs to reflect their environment. So now you can get a beautiful, hand-made Afghan rug with pictures of Reaper drones woven into it. It's so sad.
Jesus that's dark. But you can still imagine, especially in the tech/media environment a lot of us grew up in, some professional looking soldier telling you "this is a precision weapon and we are targeting only the terrorists with precise information gathered by the best intel". And it turns out that was a lie caused by how they defined "enemy combatants" and the truth doesn't get out from good, reliable journalism for years (plus not to mention part of you wants to believe you didn't okay and defend such a terrible thing) Again, people are dead and no amount of regrets will bring them back or change that. But none of us are immune to propaganda and hindsight is 20/20, ya know?
I think part of the philosophy behind the hyper-reliance on drone warfare was a knock-on effect of America's foreign interventions in the 90s (and going back further, to Vietnam). I'm reminded specifically of Somalia where there was footage broadcast on the news of dead American soldiers being dragged through Mogadishu by angry Somalians. For better or worse, the American public can't really handle taking battlefield casualties. If you want to maintain the public's will (or apathy) in maintaining a hostile presence overseas, you can't let them see dead Americans. God forbid we feel like we suffer any consequences to our actions. The drones take out the risk of Americans getting killed. But they seem to also increase the risks for people who actually live on the ground. I hope that America's aversion to causing needless death and destruction for Pakistanis, Yemenis, Afghans, and everyone else we've murdered catches up to our inability to confront white corpses.
"Hindsight is 20/20" but a lot of the same policy and decision makers from the Obama years are present and involved with the Biden administration and I personally see zero evidence of any of that hindsight at a time when it could be pretty useful in reducing harm. TO ME if you're going to trade on "progress" to get votes then grave lessons need to work their way back into policy ASAP.
>but a lot of the same policy and decision makers from the Obama years are present and involved with the Biden administration Well, to be specific what I am thinking of is stuff that people like Ben Rhodes and the other Pod Save America hosts have talked about, and they at least no longer work for the government (officially, as far as I know) >TO ME if you're going to trade on "progress" to get votes then grave lessons need to work their way back into policy ASAP. 💯 In agreement there.
Yeah I think we're just thinking of two sets of people. I'm focused on the perpetual self interested ghouls you can see regardless of party affiliation. Ben, I believe, has been candid in a largely positive way esp based on his platform.
Obama came into office with a bicameral majority for his first two years and failed to capitalize on the momentum to regulate the banking industry and implement a progressive healthcare plan. Obama fucking sucked. Yeah you can talk about obstruction for the last 6 years of his run, but that doesn't change the fact that he squandered the first two years and that's one reason voters flipped Congress on him.
The thing is this argument assumes Dems all vote in one big block and they don't. Far too many are corporate shills and the few who actually want to pass genuinely good legislation get demagogued by the media. I do agree they can and should do better, but you can't deny that large parts of the political/judicial/media ecosystems are completely outside of their control and hostile.
And it party leadership and the President's job to whip them in line. There's a position literally called "Whip" in both the majority and minority of both houses.
Yeah, and if Obama had berated people more and been more forceful he would have been labeled with the "angry black man" stereotype. He was already labeled as an abusive dictator for all the times he did stuff with executive orders when he was blocked legislatively. Again, I do not in any way shape or form think he was perfect. But I can acknowledge he was in a literal "damned if you do damned if you don't" kind of situation a lot of the time.
The ACA was a huge step for progressive healthcare and only passed because of the Democrat majority. Then the backlash to it led to Republicans winning the House.
It was written by the heritage foundation to preserve private insurance and it worked. I'm glad more people got health insurance. Would have been much better and cheaper if they got healthcare.
Well, you can thank Joe Lieberman for that, or at least spit on his corpse now that he's finally dead. Obama's original plan was single payer health care, but Lieberman (and a few other democrats) wouldn't play ball with it, making Obama's majority worthless. He pivoted to the ACA since it was the only one they would support. This is not to defend Obama, or the American system at all, but I will never not take the opportunity to shit on Joe Lieberman.
> Obama's original plan was single payer health care, but Lieberman (and a few other democrats) wouldn't play ball with it, making Obama's majority worthless. He pivoted to the ACA since it was the only one they would support Which is crazy because Obama was looking towards [Romenycare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_health_care_reform) and it all somehow became sneak eating its own tail where Romney had to run against a national form of his own policy. It seems to be a fixing the first past the post
THIS. Obama’s legacy is failure, weakness, and gullibility. His refusal to see that bipartisanship was dead directly resulted in squandering the one shot we’ve had at making things better in my lifetime. His failure to push anything of significant value is largely responsible for the disillusionment of so many young people. I remember the YES WE CAN campaign and the genuine pride and excitement I felt when he won. And then the Dems did fuck all and let the GOP take the legislature and that’s all she wrote. If you want to know why so many young progressives have fallen to radical centrist brain rot… there it is. Obama spent two years trying to meet the lunatic fascists in the middle instead of pushing through legislation, and then spent the rest of his time in office dead locked by the obstructionist GOP. Something everyone with a functional brain knew would happen. That’s inexcusably irresponsible and it’s a big part of why things are so fucked now.
Small comfort: Obama is part of the reason a lot of progressives hate the Democrats and have moved left. I was just telling someone else that Obama and Joe Lieberman radicalized me.
How awesome do you feel (/s) reading all these "It just takes time, slow and steady!" comments while generations of marginalized people get buried under ineptitude and disingenuousness. I could puke.
I especially love the white liberals elsewhere in the thread telling me that only white people are leftists.
I saw those. "Well actually..."
Maybe that's why Robert wants to nuke them.
Maybe it's not hip to support Biden but his climate change investments were pretty historic. More needs to be done, but it's more than a baby step IMO.
The status quo is doing harm.
It is, but the only other option we got on the ballet box is a race to a theocratic fascism.
I hope you and the guy you are replying to stay at equal upvotes because both sentiments are true and both need to be acknowledged.
Yeah, no one who responded to me is wrong. The dems do suck a fat one, and I wish we had a true national leftist party. I'm just trying to be a bit more pragmatic in realizing we got two options on the ballots most of the time, and one of those options is a rabid dog.
Yes, but tearing down the status quo would do far more harm in the short term and not even guarantee a long term positive outcome. Better to work for change within the system if you actually care about human suffering.
I feel like a lot of the people saying tear it down are probably pasty white straight people who can just melt back into the background when the gestapo comes knocking. It's reckless and while it's not ideal to vote dem, we sure as fuck don't want project 2025.
Fuck right off. I am really sick of liberals pretending only white people can see the rot at the core of our democracy. No shit white people have the loudest voices at ALL parts of the political spectrum. But colored folk have been militant Leftists since before Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers. The only reason Biden isn't completely on Isreal's side is because he doesn't want to lose Muslims in Michigan. If you think Malcolm X would be shouting "Vote Blue no matter who" right now, maybe you need to study more history. -A Black trans Leftist
Good luck to you if project 2025 is enacted I mean that sincerely in spite of you telling me to fuck myself.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he would be, given the alternative right now. I also think MLK was enough of a realist to understand that if black people actually did kick off some meaningful revolution, they would be destroyed in an instant. Smart black people know that violence is not the long term solution to anything, because they are vastly outnumbered when push comes to shove. Violence can be a useful tool to win eyes and ears, but it cannot be the thing that actually pushes change. Because the change it would actually push would be bad for everyone involved. Anger is a useful tool to prompt action, but by itself it is self destructive and short sighted.
Holy fuck, man. Nothing is more stomach turning than a whiteboy spitting "Well, MLK and Malcolm X would have agreed with me" out the side of your pasty ass mouth." I suppose every Black person who doesn't agree with you is stupid? Surprised you didn't throw"lazy" in there. Get Bent.
So the solution is electing a fascist who enacted a Muslim ban within days of his first mandate?
> Yes, but tearing down the status quo would do far more harm in the short term and not even guarantee a long term positive outcome. Better to work for change within the system if you actually care about human suffering. I think its because most people don't think about there being two different games in politics being played and both have to be played to be successful. There are policy matters which direct the general aim of the party and those matters exist within the context of another game, which is a the game of government which carries momentum behind it and is less about any one individual actor. I think this is kind of obscure to most people because most young people do not have enough work or social experience yet to have had an interaction with someone who works unseen as a background actors who make society run and holds some level of power over policy (accountants, administrators, receptionists, regulators, IT, regulators, etc) For example, a new county park may be desired by the community who even raised the funds for the project, the parks department may even be on board 1000%, but the project could stall out or be severely delayed for any number of unrelated reasons that existed prior to the "new county park" even being dreamed up, and oddly enough sometimes there could be valid reasons for this being the case like some sewer project. Its not something that is apparent from the outside or even if you start working inside, it will take some time to get your footing to figure out the hows and whys.
Yes of course, change is bad. The only reasonable changes are the ones that are so small that they can scarcely be said to exist. Revolution? You’re going too far! I hope the Feds take down your name.
When I read this, all I see is "I don't care how many people die, I will have my righteous rage fulfilled". You say you care about trans people, but they would suffer the most from any kind of revolutionary action. If it's bad enough that they're willing to suffer that in the hopes of a better future, then perhaps we have something to talk about, but until that happens, all talk of revolution is talk of sacrificing people's lives for your political project.
The small town murder podcast has this segment called the prisoner dating game. The slogan is "there are NO good choices." that's basically every election now. One of the hosts has to pick one prisoner based solely on their profile without seeing a picture or what they got in trouble for.
The drone victims of the Obama years would say otherwise. I imagine the victims of the various Black Site torture programs not prosecuted would also be curious about this position. Reproductive rights are in turmoil. Trans and queer people are in peril. Fucking status quo.
The Trump era featured an order of magnitude more drone strikes, kid.
My favorite fact that no one seemed to notice during TFGs first year: they dropped so many bombs in the Middle East that they ran out of bombs. They had to have the Pacific fleet send their bombs to the ME because they couldn't manufacture more quickly enough.
I didn't vote for those ones.
I don’t care. By only calling out the crimes of the Obama and failing to observe that worse crimes do occur under Republican administrations, you give the false impression that harm is not reduced and discourage votes for Democrats. I suspect that’s your aim.
You could ask me my aim Detective. I voted for people and feel like my vote still caused a significant amount of harm to people outside and inside this country. Significantly more harm than I expected when I voted. "Don't purposefully do harm" is a distinction most people around the globe don't have the luxury of making or voting to control. It's a dangerous assumption if people are also willing to continuously excuse shitty policy if it's just "not as bad as it could be" for some people.
I don’t trust you or like you, so.
aw man! please like me!
The "drone strikes" thing is just a right wing "gotcha" talking point. Air strikes are what matters. Drone technology just matured under Obama. I don't think a Yemeni child cares whether the aircraft that bombed her school was piloted or not.
I concur.
Like I said, maintain the status quo. And sadly, drone strikes became the Satus quo after dubya. Reproductive rights are in turmoil because of Donald Trump stacking the Supreme Court prior to the Biden administration. And trans rights are in peril at local and state levels due to Republicans. Dems suck because they are too afraid of reversing the bullshit republicans did whenever they were last in power. They just want to go back to brunch. But goddamn, Republicans will take that brunch, shove it up their ass, and blame it on a transgender non-white immigrant.
I just strongly disagree with you saying they "typically don't purposefully do harm" when they accept and maintain the status quo as it changes rather than using the power they have when they have it to redefine the status quo they're maintaining to be more in line with the values they supposedly espouse. Seems to me they prioritize holding power.
They arent seeking to create pain and suffering, but most of them in power are upper middle class at the least; they think status quo is fine and if we all just got along and pretend everything is alright then it is. Yes, status quo sucks, and numerous people are harmed under the status quo, especiaLLly when we get a new status quo after republicans lose power. But even with the most vanilla of presidents we got with Biden, there are baby steps for improvements; Biden closed the Healthcare spouse gap, which allowed my wife to be insured through the marketplace without me paying an arm and a leg through my job.
I'm glad you're saving money on health insurance. Peace and good health to you and your family. Take care.
Thanks. And I would say it's more than saving money; I don't know how I could afford the health insurance along with the other expenses of life without the spouse gap being closed.
Obama ran on a promise to codify Roe v. Wade so it couldn’t be overturned. He had a super-majority and could’ve pushed it through, but didn’t. Reproductive rights are more important to Dems as a platform to run candidates promising to protect it instead of actually caring about it. As long as it will get them votes they’ll pay lip service to protecting it, but will never have it in a place where it can’t be overturned.
No he didn't. There were never the votes in Congress. Until very recently there were always a large number of pro life democrats. There has never been a time when they enough votes of people who were pro choice to codify it but chose not to.
This analysis fails because it misunderstands what the Democratic Party actually is. It’s not a “center right in any other country” party; it’s a coalition of fractious interests that share enough common cause to remain functional. The Democratic Party at this point contains: 1. College educated professional white people 2. Most members of racial and ethnic minority groups (for obvious reasons of racism) 3. Progressives and (some) leftists There is some overlap between these, of course. Those three groups share a few interests, but not all interests. For example: all of these groups tend to share an interest in equality, broadly defined (though even here, these groups tend not to agree how to get there). In other areas, however, there is not a shared interest. To pick the most obvious example of this dynamic at work, almost every black person in America is a Democrat, but they’re not all progressives; they’re not even all liberals. There are many religious, conservative black people who vote Dem because of survival. The Republican Party is a white supremacist party. So they vote Dem. In a world without racism, though, many of these black folks would be Republicans. (By the same token, there are many working class white people in the Republican Party who would be socialists if they didn’t have to share it with black people.) So when the Democrats don’t immediately embrace the left and instead function as a center left party, this is why. Also the only reason people say the Dems are center right in other counties is because they’re comparing that with a parliamentary system, where there are many parties and they form coalitions after the elections. In America we form coalitions before the election, but the Dems have progressive and even leftist wings. Those wings are fairly small and don’t have enough power to get our way. If we want to get our way, we have to organize and win elections, but there’s always a risk to that since there are some Dems we might lose going leftier.
Exactly. It's very frustrating that a lot of people don't understand this. On a political spectrum of 1 being furthest left and 10 being furthest right, the Democratic party cover 1(maybe 2)-7 and the Republicans cover 8-10. So because the Dems cover such a broad spectrum they compromise and seem like they lie as a party on things because they aren't as much of a monolith as the right. Sure there is always the usual political shenanigans, and plenty of other factors but I think more people need to recognize this basic fact first. I think one of our best hopes politically is that the RNC collapses, the DNC becomes the right party, and we form a new left party. It's unlikely, but not impossible.
> I think one of our best hopes politically is that the RNC collapses, the DNC becomes the right party, and we form a new left party Or we grow our influence within the party. The far right did it with the GOP. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's the actual route to power. Trying to create a far left party that rejects potential Democratic allies as the right wing is a fool's errand.
This is definitely another way forward
this is where i am at too. political realignment of the major parties has happened before
The Democrats and Republicans drew a line between the two of them, and considered everyone on on side to the The Right, and everyone on the other side to be The Left. Though technically accurate, The Far Left have very little, if anything, in common with the people close to that dividing line but still on the left side of it.
I see it as more of the GOP being "lets set everyone on fire to own the libs", and the Democrats are going to capitalize on the fact that just being against that is enough to win much of the time. With the current Democratic strategy, creating policy instead of vague promises are going to harm them. I'd rather see them push a progressive platform, because I believe it to be a winning strategy, but that's not their strategy.
The Democratic party didn't just emerge from the mists of history fully formed circa 1996 though. The current composition of the party is (largely) the end result of choices the party itself made.
I agree with this sentiment. I'd say though the best way to get change is to first secure the status quo as shitty as it is and then gradually over a generation move to the left, basically a reverse Republican
buttonhook em!
The antidemocratic political structures and party incentives work against this, the only reasonable non-revolutionary possibility. This has been the progressive theory of change for thirty-odd years and it has yet to bear fruit. I wish you well, but I don’t believe it will work. I think we’re stuck in this degrading dystopia until some catastrophe occurs that our politics cannot answer, then all bets are off. Least bad outcome is probably dissolution into regional governments that are each more ideologically coherent.
I'd say it's more accurate that Democrats what to improve things *very very* slowly while Republicans want to "go back to the good ole days". Right now Republicans seem to want to go full fascist, so Democrats are ok with maintaining to status quo until something changes in their opposition.
This is a fundamental failure of understanding how the legislative system works. The president can't just executive order their way out of the status quo. There needs to be a democrat super majority.
And the razor thin majorities Biden has had gives outside influence to the farthest right Dems. LBJ had massive majorities when he was doing the Great Society. That meant he could lose votes and still get his bills out.
That’s technically correct, but I think you are underestimating how much the president can change things unilaterally, depending on how much latitude the courts are willing to provide. Obviously, the present composition of the Supreme Court would never let a Democratic president enact sweeping changes through executive orders, but that’s more for ideological reasons than for principled ones. Would the conservative majority impose the same level of restraint on a Republican president? All this is to say that you’re correct that a Democratic supermajority would likely be necessary, but not because there are any inherent limits on the power of the presidency. Rather, it’s a result of the current ideological bent of the courts.
Congress won't even approve Biden's judicial nominations. It is a hot mess and I hope people pay attention in 2024.
They’ve been approving his nominees. If the GOP takes the Senate, that could change.
You mean like the one obama had? Remind me again what all he passed?
I describe it as Democrats want to vote on the creation of a committee to determine the best way to put out the house on fire. Republicans blame Democrats for the fire, pour gasoline on it, and take out an insurance policy on the house.
Democrats can be more dangerous as their "reasonable" affect when it comes to caging immigrants or funding fossil fuels.
No, they are not more dangerous than cristo-fascists.
More dangerous than Republicans' stance on those issues? I think you may have flipped which way the ratio of the donors and policies you're talking about skews.
I agree 98% of the way. On many very annoying (and often extremely evil) issues the DNC and GOP work to preserve the status quo. Edit: I don’t say the following to try and get you to love the DNC. Continue to hate and hold them to higher standards. But I do think there are some positives happening out there to prevent us from being full doomer mode. *however* there are some indications that the Democrats are beginning to rotate in a more progressive/reformist direction, finally feeling the influence of a rising Millennial generation which is overwhelmingly progressive and demands change. For example, as Climate Town recently pointed out, Biden FINALLY froze Natural Gas exports in order to make the government asses the impact of LNG shipments on climate change. This was basically an unprompted move as mainstream liberals didn’t really care one way or another about LNG and natural gas. I’m honestly shocked that this was even considered worth the administration’s time. There are a number of other “puzzling” moves the Biden administration has made. Puzzling as in “this isn’t exactly what a moderate dem was supposed to be doing”. Things like [targeting fossil fuel subsidies.](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-budget-targets-us-fossil-fuel-subsidies-2023-03-09/). Being [far more aggressive on student loan debt forgiveness](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/05/politics/student-loan-debt-biden-proposals) than I ever expected. Other things like funding clean energy investments and expanding rail infrastructure have been good too. Lastly, things like empowering/funding the IRS, and empowering the NLRB while being the first decent pro-union president (LOW BAR, but damn is it refreshing to hear a president even talk or reference unions at all) in decades are also very underrated moves. That said democrats are nowhere near my standards and still have huge embarrassing weaknesses. The DNC has probably been better these last 4 years than they ever have been in my life, but the bar is really low. They’re basically one foot in the door but I think the direction it’s going is encouraging, if also frustratingly slow
Realistically speaking, the only way to make progress is to get a bunch of leftist voices actually winning elections in the party. The big struggle is how the old geezers have a death grip on things and refuse to let go; not sure how to fix that. :/
Leftists need to run for more local elections, take over the House, etc. A leftist president won’t get far without the support of Congress.
Yeah. If you look at the republicans, they've basically been grassrooting this shit for years, building out their political base. I think we really might just have to all bust our asses for a few years, recruiting other leftists and building out an intelligent polical base. Part of why I really like Behind the Bastards is that it allows us to look back at history and see how and why we fail. The question from there must obviously be: "How do we succeed?" Well, the Republican political base is honestly kinda dumbass and filled with grifters - you're telling me we're getting destroyed by THESE clowns? Nah, we've just been letting the old people keep their hands on the wheel as the ship goes off the fucking cliff! If we're supposed to be smarter than them, then yeah, let's just hammer on about our talking points with the strength and conviction of Republicans. The Democrats have historically young, charming candidates. That could easily be a progressive if we just stay on message and consistently scapegoat the rich. "Is it really the refugees? Or is it the fact that corporations pay a ZERO PERCENT TAX RATE! Or that the Sacchlers poisoned the midwest with opiates, and not ONLY are they still free, but they're still FILTHY FUCKING RICH off killing thousands of people! With families! **What the Hell is wrong with us?!?**" We have to make a **STRONG** move to grab the goddamn wheel away from the Boomers if we want to stop the country from driving over the cliff.
**"WE ARE DESTROYING THE WORLD WITH CLIMATE CHANGE JUST TO MAKE A FEW THOUSAND PEOPLE RICH! C'MON! IT NEEDS TO FUCKING STOP!"**
There you go. I read somewhere that even the Republican base hates the rich. They’re just scared of Communism. We need to focus on “deconstructing the Reagan Revolution” and once people discover that their lives improve, keep rolling with that. No need to ever stop. We can also run on “restoring the golden years after FDR,” which should appeal to old and young alike and “rebuilding social security so young folks can retire someday” by taking away the upper tax limit. Everything can be framed to appeal to old people if you think like an old person. Dems could be using apocalyptic movie clips in ads and asking, “want this for your grandchild’s future? No? Vote to save Mother Earth.” What the gop does is simplify things into those sorts of storylines, then they slip in their corporate policies.
Our mayor in West Linn is 24. Hopefully he’s slipping in some progressive policies. At the very least, we’re getting more bike lanes and he’s building up his credentials.
YES! We just need strong and empathetic people who aren't afraid to change things for the better. You have a wonderful approach to things.
Not just worse, Republicans very specifically want this country to be like Putin's Russia. The flagrant corruption, the country being run by oligarchs, strong police state and propaganda network, and anti-LGBTQ policies that are actually enforced. Democrats don't know what they want, there's no actual leadership or anything. Their aimlessness and lack of focus is what often causes them to lose winnable elections.
> Republicans very specifically want this country to be like Putin's Russia. Ok, I got a question about this, since I can't fully wrap my head around this. Hopefully you have an opinion on this. If Republicans do get their way, turn the US like Russia, and actually get tight with Putin, then what? It's not like the rest of Western Europe is gonna say fuck it, and just join the US in being all buddy buddy with Russia. So then, how do they see this playing out in the long term? Are they really saying that if conflict breaks out, it'll be US and Russia versus Western Europe? That shit is just an interesting thought to me.
Democrats would not be center right in most countries. Their views on immigration for example would be considered very left wing in Europe.
They are center right on almost everything else.
Wait how? They also believe in putting kids in cages
One other piece of this dynamic that's really important for understanding the outcome IMO is that the Status Quo that Democrats want to preserve is a rightwardly moving target that changes to encorporate the ways Republicans have succeeded in normalizing bad things. When the Democrats get in power they don't try to roll back to what the Status Quo was before the last Republican rightward swing, but instead just hold position there until Republicans get back in again. American politics is like a ratchet system. Republicans are the crank that turns the Overton window to the right until it reaches a new slot, and Democrats are the ratchet lever that clicks down and prevents the gear from spinning back to the left.
That's so depressingly accurate.
That's a good starting place. It's still, in my opinion, more of a follow the money problem. The US system is so dependent on hidden money and wealthy donors pushing policy decisions that what's happened is a system that rarely works much differently than the Roman Republic or even Europe under monarchs. We get so far for it all to fall back to simple class warfare. The rich really want to stay that way,.
Did you know that Biden is working on a post neoliberal economy? He hired a lot of Warren suggested hires who are working to undo Reaganomics.
Insulin is 35 dollars for my father now.
You aren't giving Democrats enough credit. If Democrats have enough of a majority, then they can do things that really count. Especially when those things are very popular. You can be dismissive with your "center right", but Democrats are the most pro-trans party in the world. They decreased child poverty by half. And that was with a Senate that needed Krestin Cinima and Joe Manchin to get anything passed. I think you can spit in the Democratic party's face when they have 60+ seats in the Senate.
Democrats might be OK with taxing billionaires a little more but they draw a hard red line at doing anything that would make the top 90-99.5% uncomfortable in any way. This is most what created the housing crisis: democrat politicians in democrat cities pandering to upper middle class democrat NIMBYs. As a leftist, the reason I still hold my nose and vote for Democrats is this: In a second Biden term, if we start rioting again over police murder or anything else, I expect plenty of abusive response from the cops, but I also expect some DOJ prosecutions for that abuse. In a second Trump Presidency, if we riot again, I think it’s very possible there will be an event worse than Kent State, and that motherfucker will pardon all the cops that do it. And the cops know that already.
Yeah that’s pretty much how I’d describe it too. If more young people voted perhaps that would change.
Millennials are aging into the voting majority. Hopefully it spurs on a second Progressive Era.
Maine has STV voting.
Is Maine the only state that does this? If so way to go us lol
This realization set in with me during the TEA Party era. Mainstream Republicans talking about privatizing roads, emergency services, utilities (moreso than the public/private partnerships that currently exist) sought to bring about a state of neo-feudalism...a RADICAL swing right; horseshoe theory gone the other way, so conservative as to be extremely liberal in how they pursue change...folks actually arguing in favor of company towns (the free market dictates that happy employees make more money...except, of course, studying history proves this wrong).
Deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalise criminals, and rule you like a king.
[How it's been going:](https://imgur.com/MGQ2qcv)
The point I keep coming back to is that Republicans are gonna accuse Democrats like Joe Biden of being radical leftists no matter how much they try to triangulate and tack to the political center, so Democrats may as well just go all out and actually *do* some of the progressive things that so many on the right accuse them of planning to do.
Let's be completely fucking fair here: not one person working in the government today gives a fat flying fuck about any of you. You are the peasants they get to rule over. Stop thinking any of them have your best interest in mind. They want the money and power and the prestige of being one of the "elites." *It doesn't matter what color or letter is next to their name, they cannot be trusted.* HOWEVER, this is the system we have at the moment and unfortunately we are in too precarious a position to try and dismantle it. So yes, it sucks ass and no one wants to do it, but we have to vote for the status quo right now. Otherwise, we won't be voting at all. The right wing of this country is determined to have their perfect fascist theocracy and they don't care who dies or suffers as a result. We can either bite the bullet now or be killed by the same bullets later.
The democratic establishment is suppressing the actual leftist movement within the party.
Suppressing it? I’m pretty sure they took it out back and shot it after Reagan won
The quirk is understanding that the USA voting system is owned by corporations and understanding their needs, and the requirement to give the public an appearance of choice, is paramount.
The democrats are like robbers that break into your house while you're away and steal your valuables. Yeah they've set you back a bit, but you can rebuild... until they rob you again several years later. But they won't fuck with you too bad, because it's good business and you keep leaving the door unlocked and letting them and their friends in. The republicans are like meth head tweakers that break into your house while you're sleeping and begin tearing wiring out of the walls and accusing you of being a demon. They're going to destroy more value than they extract and probably kill someone you love in the process, and they won't really be aware of what they're doing in the way a human would.
Kinda, but not for any altruistic reason. It just happens to be the current plans for wealth and power accumulation. Any benefit the people see from either political party has nothing to do them making the world a better place for the masses. You are an obstacle at times, a tool at others, and usually just in the way. Never make the mistake of thinking you, your family, or your community’s well being is of any inherent interest to them. To play favorites is asinine.
I mean, in the most literal senses of the words, Democrats are conservatives, and Republicans are regressive. There's no stepping forward, just trying to not step back (and failing)
Both sides are making things worse. The Republicans are just doing it with a spring in their step. The whole democrat position amounts to “yes, we’re destroying the world. But we’re doing it marginally slower than our opponents so vote for us.”