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I get the argument, but at this point, nobody is contemplating whether to vote Democrat or Republican. It's between Democrat and apathy.
Comments like these sound as if during WWII the French were saying "well, the French army has plenty of problems, but Nazi German occupation is worse in every conceivable way, so there is no point criticising the French army".
Everyone knows the Reps are Nazis. The problem with the Dems is not that they are not less bad than the literal Nazi party, but that they are unable to effectively fight the Nazi party. The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate that voting for them is better than not voting at all to a large part of the electorate.
A more concise way of putting it is that, if we're going to resist and reject Trump, don't expect meaningful help from the Democratic Party. That's not what it is. Meet your neighbors. Organize at that level. If need be, form cells.
99% of the times Democrats fail to effect change, it's for losing a vote that comes close to 50/50 - be it for presidents, senate representatives, etc.
People do not understand that their only quote-unquote "failing" is that we literally don't give them power in any usable, reliable form, and that they don't represent a hive mind.
I'm not criticising them for not having the votes, I'm criticising them for not writing and standing behind the bills in the first place.
There are three insane third Trump term bills already in Congress, where were the three Medicare for All or police reform, or anti-price gouging or tax reform bills in Congress days after Biden's win? Or Obama's win?
The Trump bills won't pass, sure, but we are here and talking about them. Where were the Dems doing this?
And compounding that problem is people being angry at the Dems for this failure instead of trying to help.
"Clearly you're not worth voting for because you can't convince people to vote for you." Great.
We should be as happy as you are that the only thing Democrats actually stood for in the past 4 years was Netanyahu.
But it's not that. It's "please do something because you're abandoning wide swathes of people and are going to lose, and lose our best chance against the fascists this way".
The problem is that Dems don't like progressives' help, they would rather get help from Cheney than Sanders.
Because forgiving college debt and giving you $50k towards your first house and bringing prescription drug prices down is abandoning you? Fixing our rail system is abandoning you? Repeatedly saying they're going to tax billionaires is abandoning progressives?
It's not like we give them enough to have the power to actually get big things done. When we do give them a little, they have to bring in the vice president to break ties in the Senate.
In this regard, it's not like Republicans wield power any better. They couldn't even repeal the ACA. It's just that they get more credit. First, they get credit for every Dem initiative they stop (even if it's not real). The reverse isn't true. Second, everything the Republicans do get done tends to be negative and stings more than the positives.
I know you want to abandon billionaire money. You want Dems saying the right things to you, in a closet where nobody hears them. Because if you don't have money, you lose elections. Period. That's a big problem that needs to be solved, but it can't be solved by people who lose elections.
The Dems absolutely could have tried to appeal to the progressives more instead of moderates. Clearly, in hindsight, it'd be worth trying something different. But I doubt it would have worked. People weren't happy, and they were going to take it out on the incumbent party. And right now they'd be hearing "why didn't they appeal to moderates?"
My point is that it's more complicated than just "appeal to progressives instead of moderates". The Dems have more realities to deal with than we give them credit for.
Tax billionaires how? Any concrete plans? Any proposed laws that were brought to the floor as much as repealing Obamacare was by the ghouls?
And trying to win by forgiving student debt that they themselves made undischargeable as recently as 2005 is good, but it's just trying to clean up after themselves. Unsuccessfully.
And giving $50k towards a first house, when houses are nearing a million is not going to do anything other than drive housing prices even further up. How much public housing have they built? Have they even proposed putting a tax on large-scale corporate homeownership or price gouging, houses sitting empty?
I'm not even going to mention Gaza.
But the elephant in the room, Joe Biden could have nominated anyone, literally anyone for AG. He nominated known conservative Merrick Garland, who then proceeded to let Trump go after 34 felony convictions and who knows how many hundreds of actual felonies, to become US president.
At least they tried. How many times have Democrats brought a vote to tax billionaires or megacorps, even if it failed, just to keep it on the table?
If money is more important than getting votes in order to win an election, then the US is not and has not been a democracy. That said, the Dems got all the money ever this election. Where is the win then?
Has that ever happened? Once? Or has it been dozens of elections in a row, always appealing to "moderates" - actually wealthy donors - and leaving progressives to rot. And then blaming progressives for the election loss. Damn, Lina Khan, the one woman who was arguably doing her job well was possibly on the chopping block. How do you get people to vote for this?
The Dems have been the perfect Weimar to Trump's Hitler. May they be remembered as "fondly" as them.
Thank you for this, it's speaking exactly the unending frustration I have with these lines of "thought".
Why are you blatantly lying about this? Any chump can look at the wall of CEOs Trump has next to him for his victory speeches and see where the money was backing.
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-fundraising-democrat-president-biden-trump-434a55ea1eb29e5da92cc9b1f9cb401f
I was only repeating what Dems were saying.
"Using their own words documented in reputable sources against them? Republican Russian bot!"
Your justification is that you blindly repeated something? K.
Nothing even in the article you quoted suggests they raised more than Trump - it even says, the latter was quiet about his amounts raised, plus it's never going to track PAC operations behind the scenes by big corps backing him.
It basically says they were pleased with what they raised, and optimistic about their chances. They're not necessarily clairvoyantly capable of seeing how they're being outspent. And the net result, whatever they expected, is obvious: Money gives optimism, but BIG MONEY trumps that.
Exactly. Democrats ran on "vote for a Democrat to save Democracy!" Millions of voters shrugged and asked, "what good has democracy done for me?"
The problem is that a lot of people, also on here equate people saying that "this is going to alienate voters" with saying "this is going to alienate me", and then go into personal attacks of "are Republicans better then?" or "you're the problem because you don't vote".
No, the problem is and was that large swathes of the population that you don't interact with won't vote if you don't give them something to vote for, as they don't see Trump as the threat he is, since people's opinions are saturated with the 24 hour news cycle. Point is "Trump bad", while true, doesn't win elections. You have to do something more, and the DNC is very much tending to do the bare minimum besides fundraising.
Centrists only did that because in all cases, they supported the behavior that was alienating voters and didn't want it to change. Even if that meant trump again.
I wouldn't even say that, it's just there really were a lot of trolls going "whatabout?", especially here, as some people want the US to fall, and honestly Trump is the best candidate for that. Mix in a bunch of other trolls screaming "bluemaga" for the heck of it, and you couldn't have a decent conversation anymore.
I'm just saying we shouldn't fall into the trap of going into a circlejerk again, it's past the election, it would be great to have the conversations that are needed but we couldn't have before the election. There are some great people in the Dem party as well, again, Lina Khan's work was inspiring, and despite recent events, it did make a huge difference. We need more people like her.
And on the other hand, Luigi has shown that there is a broad societal base wanting this constant madness to end. People just want to live, all people, even Republicans.
The "we can't have this conversation right now" thing was a fucking excuse to continue enabling the genocide. Centrists will never admit they were horribly, monstrously wrong to support genocide.
It's all they ever were, and all they will ever be.
That is it though, where are all those "we can't have this conversation right now" people now? This is the time to have the conversation. Hello?
In case you missed it, they're blaming everyone that they told to shut up because “we can’t have this conversation right now”. Now it's too fucking late, and that was absolutely the entire idea. If Harris had won, the line would be "give her some time" until it was "too close to midterms to have this conversation."
There's never time to have any conversation. Centrists just move to the right. They do not listen to anyone to their left, ever, for any reason.
Cool. Let's start with the facts: Netanyahu is committing genocide. He was committing genocide during the Biden administration. Biden supported him and was wrong to do so. Do you accept this as true?
Fuck yes, along with suppressing dissent and legitimate protest about it in likely unlawful ways, and also applying unjust pressure on the ICC to exempt Western aligned war criminals, thus degrading the rule of law all over the globe.
Good. You're not a genocide denier. We can have a conversation.
Do you suppose that the Democratic Party is worth saving anymore? Because I'm very much doubting so after the Biden administration.
That is a very hard question.
Just based on my experience, as I'm originally from a country that was going through, is still going through its Trump phase, it doesn't matter. They will only get out of the way if they are forced to, and time and again they proved they are against third party candidates more than Republicans, and vice versa in fact, the Reps will hit you harder than the Dems if they see you usurping them. This is just as it was in my home as well. No enterprise to "force the Dems to quit" will work because the entire system will work against you.
The only way to break this that I've seen work is that people should join small local mutual aid groups, which are political in nature, but not partisan in the sense of being beholden to the big two. Like the DSA in the US I guess? And wait for the opportunity while helping others and sabotaging the worst excesses of the government.
Or do a revolution I guess, because contrary to what everyone says everywhere, some of them do in fact succeed in creating a better society. Even when they fail. Revolutions got rid of the divine right of kings, not "moderation and slow progress", and revolution got rid of dictators like Ceaucescu as well.
How do we get from "small mutual aid groups" to "fix the genocidal two party system?" If the answer is incrementalism, it is no answer. Incrementalism got us here.
Radical change on the local level. Instead of trying to turn whole states by increment, turn towns and districts radically. Subvert federal decisions locally, and if you provide a schema for others to follow.
I'm still not seeing how working for my local food bank (the nearest pin on the map when I look up mutual aid. Next closest one is like 4 hours away) is going to get anywhere towards changing the bipartisan pro-genocide hegemony.
You can help people, shield then from government overreach and change their minds by talking to them instead of just shouting into a megacorp-censored online void.
That's how the consies get people as well, churches being one of the last places you can socialise and discuss civics.
It will of course take a lot of people doing this, but that's how organising people works. The alternative is doing a Luigi, but that has dire personal consequences.
That's where the propaganda and foreign influence come in. Their entire effort centered around muddying the waters so people couldn't be sure what the reality was. And voter suppression certainly makes it easier for people to say fuck it.
Yes, there was foreign propaganda, influence, psyops, etc.
Look at Luigi. All of that propaganda failed to contain a very wide, bipartisan swathe of the population who was elated at the CEO's death. Even more moderate people agreed that healthcare sucks even if they don't like people, even murderers, gunned down in the street.
And Democrats still refuse to run on a platform of complete healthcare reform. And before you say "but Republicans would vote it down", make them! Put it forward every week, every session, make a presidential run on it, make overreaching executive orders that fuck with insurance companies, forcing them to sue, every week. Have random low ranking Democrats make speeches about "well Luigi was in the wrong, but such things are inevitable in this system" to get in the papers with controversy. Just like Reps did it with the wall and other stupid stuff. Make it every week's topic who exactly is standing in the way of establishing a proper healthcare system.
And there are other issues like that. Cost of living for example.
Fight, damnit, do something, or you will lose your country.
Do you remember Obamacare and Republicans voting to repeal it literally hundreds of times? Where did that get us?
And now we have less control of the government. We can't even force a vote. The speaker can just refuse to allow it. There is no fight we can win. The best we can hope for is slowing the destruction.
You are looking at solutions within the system. Those are not the only solutions. When the system is rotten, go around it.
There is no fight we can win if we acquiesce to the rules imposed on us by the oppressors. That has always been true throughout history. And yet progress is often made.
Until Trump won a second time, there was still a possibility of fixing this within the system. You may be right that there is no solution within the system now. Finding a solution outside the system will bring violence and suffering beyond anything most living people have experienced, so I'm not exactly eager to give up on other methods.
That's my point. Instead of the Republicans voting hundreds of times to repeal it, Democrats should have been voting to expand it, anchoring the debate away from Reps. They should have thrown in a massive expansion, and forced a vote around that, again, hundreds of times.
This is not even going low, just fighting.
You’re exactly right. Instead of going on the offense the Dems just think “well this won’t pass so why bother?”
Meanwhile the Republicans are out here writing bills to give Trump a third term. Do you think the fact that it won’t pass matters one iota to them?
The third-term bullshit is just performative ass-licking.
I agree, but it appeals to their base. It’s blatantly unconstitutional but that makes no difference to the electorate who will eat it up.
The Dems refuse to play the game and then blame the voters when their boring status quo approach doesn’t get anyone fired up. It can’t be all on us little people to do their jobs for them.
73 days. That's how long the Dems held the filibuster-proof trifecta that allowed Obamacare in the first place. They haven't had the power to force anything through since. It took everything they could do just to defend what little progress they made. The tactic you are talking about can't work if the other side can just filibuster everything.
This is the attitude whether we give Democrats a majority to squander or not.