There’s so much Democrat bootlicking in here, the comment section smells of wet leather and shoe polish.
This is why revolution and working class orgsnization is necessary.
Blue MAGA: Its always never the time for criticism.
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." - mlk jr
You can always count on @[email protected] to get most rabbid libs stirred up and face their own contradictions (without taking away any insights from the posts themselves anyway lol)…
Literally every post that just puts the quiet part loud upsets them, lol. Please keep it up, love to see it.
Democrats commit genocide and pretend to be sad about it. Republicans commit genocide and post the 🤣 emoji
Democrats commit genocide and post the🙏 emoji
Republicans commit genocide and post the 🤣 emoji
You had a choice OP
- Vote to maintain a bad status quo
- Vote to make things a billion times worse via fascism
- Start a revolution
Instead you chose secret option d. Make ‘both sides equally bad’ memes to justify the acceptance of fascism.
Always vote against the fascist. Or revolt.
Politicians will never save us. The democrats won’t; the republicans won’t. Anywhere. Ever. Period.
Here is the education that you need to take over the Democratic Party:
David Hogg, the new Vice Chair of the DNC, has allocated $20M to primary out the old, and replace them with youthful progressives to create a true opposition party.
Democratic primaries only see ~20% turnout in congressional elections. 30/50 states have partisan primaries, meaning you must be registered as a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary. This was a contributing factor in Bernie’s 2016 loss.
Rather than progressives and leftists fracturing over third-parties, we need to all block vote progressives into the Democratic Party through primaries and replace the deadwood centrists that have been content with the status quo.
Check your state’s primary type here: https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_election_types_by_state
This was a contributing factor in Bernie’s 2016 loss.
I am from the Bronx. I was a registered democrat my entire life. Somehow when my wife and I went to vote in 2016, after making sure we were registered, we were turned away from the polls because “we weren’t registered”
2 years later I started receiving the letters and was suddenly registered again.
The reason Bernie lost in 2016 is your fucking party threw us off the rolls because of who we are and where we lived. Your fucking party stole that election. You are full of shit and it is you that is a fascist enabler by making an excuse for corruption.
As someone that voted Bernie in 2016, we didn’t have the votes in 2016 for Bernie to make it through the primary. The country itself was not as progressive in 2016 as it is now imo, especially so for the Democratic base.
For Bernie to have even had a chance to win the primary, the election format would have needed to not be First Past the Post. He was a victim of vote splitting found in First Past the Post and then establishment Dems allocated their voters votes to go towards Hillary. I don’t think it was fair what happened to Bernie especially with the DNC, but I realize now it was a flaw of the system itself that makes it extremely difficult for a progressive to win a Democratic presidential primary. I think it makes zero sense why people can’t pick their favorite candidate(s) first and then pick backup ‘safe’ candidates for elections. Also there is the issue of some states excluding people not registered with a party from voting in the primary. I feel it is a bad move to prevent these voters at the primary level since non-affiliated voters are usually the ones that ultimately decide the elections and they can give input ahead of time if they would vote for that candidate in the general election.
Having ranked robin voting, STAR voting, or score voting would help prevent a popular candidate like Bernie from losing by default to a ‘safe’ establishment pick.
It’s not my party. I’ve been left of the Democrats since the 90s. It’s the party that more closely aligns with my values between the only two that can win a US Presidential Election.
I believe you, and I’m sure you’re not the only one with that problem. I didn’t say it was the reason Bernie lost, because I’m fully aware of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Hillary’s collusion, but it was a contributing factor.
I volunteered to direct foot traffic for the general election, and chatted up several other volunteers about the disappointing results of the primary. They told me that they couldn’t believe how many registered independents and no party affiliation voters they had to turn away. Apparently partisan primary requirements aren’t common knowledge, so I’m sharing this information to prevent other people from having the same experience.
It’s not my party
It’s enough your party that you’re willing to do genocide denial for them
What you described is a big issue. I feel it shows just how much there needs to be a push for change nationally and within each of the states to lobby the Democratic Party for change. Some states have open primaries, some have closed, and others have semi-open primaries. It makes no sense for states to not just be semi-open or fully open for primaries, as closed primaries just further alienates the party from potential voters.
David Hogg
Be unarmed if you wish, but don’t choose for other people how they defend themselves.
The Democrats will not defend us, the justice system will not defend us. We are on our own.
Lol, and this was the establishment Democrat response:
Hilarious that Carville claimed progressives have purity tests in the same breath
Yup. Carville wants to preserve the “schism” between progressives and liberals. That’s how you know it’s the right move. We need to shift back the Overton window.
You cannot take over the Democratic Party. It will just change its own rules before you get the chance. The people running it are all feeding from the same donor trough, either as politicians or consultants. You think they will let you just take the trough away? Friend they make the party rules! They will just change them! They already did this against Bernie, an imperialist socdem, someone who isn’t even a real threat to capital (just the insurance industry) and they thwarted that even when it had momentum and kids allowed themselves hope for healthcare without poverty. This is the basic nature of capitalist parties: they are beholden to capital, not the people, and certainly not you or I.
By the time the Democratic Partu is “taken over” by anything, it will be because it has found a way to make capital happy by adopting a policy that costs them nothing. Which means we win nothing of serious value and the spiral of capitalist degrading conditions continues.
In the meantime, what role do these reformers actually serve? If they can’t change what needs yo change, what other effects do they have?
Well, they mostly just convince people to have false hope for the party, delaying its need to crash and burn and be replaced, ideally with something more effective than a bourgeois electoral party.
The Democrats suck but there’s a huge difference between voting for boring corporatists and 100% concentrated evil. Don’t make me tap the chart.
This has to be the most brain dead community on Lemmy, still pulling this “Both sides” bullshit
You might not have noticed but 90% of these posts come from the same user
Look at this guy, believing there’s actually 2 sides
Welcome to .ml, you’ll get the jokes now.
I don’t know on which community we currently are, but this is the most accurate depiction of what’s actually going on. Democrats serve the corporate elite and don’t really bother turning it left.
Stop with this braindead serve the elites meme. Dems last admin passed tons of left wing legislation that benefited everyone.
Intersting, I do not remember any means of production being turned over to the workers? I dont remember a law passed to remove the scehdual F capabilities, I do not remember stuffing the supreme court in retaliation for Roe being overturned. Heck I do not even remember stufing the Postal board of governors so full that it would fire DeJoy and ensure a reasonable PMG for over a decade… Please enlighten me, what left wing actions must I look at
You aren’t wrong in that the democrats prefer the status quo but it’s far from both sides being the same. If we have to pick a side, and if we are still pro democracy, we do, there is only one correct choice.
Now if we can convince that side to then use the victory to change the rules, then so be it. For example, Ranked choice voting would be great, but let’s get more states to use it before expecting the highest office in the land to adopt it.
pro democracy
one correct choice
Pick one.
Now if we can convince that side to then use the victory to change the rules, then so be it.
The democrats are only in power for at most two years, and that’s assuming there’s no quislings like Lieberman or Fetterman or Manchin or Sinema in them. So they’ve barely got enough votes to move the needle on anything, and voting is low on the priority list.
And after two years the Republicans win one or both houses of Congress and maybe the presidency, and then undo everything.
This has been repeating my entire life, and now it’s getting to the fascist endgame.
The system itself is broken and failing. It’s not going to help us.
Now if we can convince that side to then use the victory to change the rules, then so be it.
What if Democrats not only don’t change the rules to improve the democratic process, but they also fail to even talk about significantly improving their constituents’ lives? What if they also can’t be bothered to take climate change seriously? And what if – after all that – they do genocide?
I used to think like you do, but at some point in the last decade or two Democrats stopped being a worthwhile option. The party will have to be either radically changed or smashed in order for any major progress to happen anytime soon.
we are still pro democracy, we do, there is only one correct choice.
Western “democracy” in a nutshell. Catch-22 could only dream of such absurdity.
The most braindead instance is still .world. It’s basically reddit in a nutshell
From what I’ve seen it’s more like republicans fuck everything up, then democrats come in and un-fuck everything. Then the democrats introduce good policy that Republicans take credit for. Rince and repeat.
Sounds a lot like the “both sides are the same” argument with more steps. If people voted left wing then the politicians would go left wing.
“Both sides bad” is why we have Trump.
Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage. Environmental laws have been all Democrats. If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn’t have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.
Things have been getting worse my entire life regardless of who has been in charge. It gets worse more slowly under the dems, but it still gets worse.
Why is it too much to ask for things to get even a little better?
Spoken like a Weimar
The Democrats didn’t do shit for gay marriage. That was the Supreme Court.
Also, Nixon created the EPA.
Accepting gays is definitely the same as funding sex change for prisoners and sending them to a female prison, which was one of the most successful ads in history.
Correct. Not to mention the midterm congressional elections that only see ~20% turnout, and even less in the congressional primaries. People love to complain about term limits and appeasement centrists, but they don’t show up when they actually have a say in who represents them.
Capitalists will never let you vote them out of power. The field in which politicians can operate electorally is already heavily restricted and biased by donors and a donor-focused campaign machine that is further entrenched by ever-changing thresholds for candidacy and redistricting. I encourage you to run as a principled person as a third party and see how it goes. I would encourage you to run as a Dem but the time when a politician learns they are also enemies is after they’ve already helped entrench the party. If you ran as a Dem with principles they would not help your campaign and might fight it. Once in office they’ll stymy most of what you attempt.
Voting for every general election is just picking which of two capitalist parties will dictate policy. And the “good guys” are actually detrimental enough that they make their potential voters apathetic or opposed to thrm, as they cannot resonate with their experiences or needs. You know what folks actually need? Rent cut by 90%. Real estate is a financial legalized crime to create “passive income” for the wealthy. That would be incredibly popular. It would also be impossible for a capitalist party in the US, it is their antithesis.
So the serious, adult question is to state what the existential problems are and then ask what solutions could be sufficient to solve them. And there is at least one thing we know well in US electoralism: just voting for Dems will never be close to enough, abd even believing it is particularly important will just keep you ans others from spending the time to work together and do enough.
that was a very different party than current dnc. today’s dnc is controlled two faced lobbyists pimps like schumer and pelosi, who will have trump win again and again than see aoc being a possibility.
in today’s dnc someone like al gore or obama will be suffocated out of primaries like bernie. heck schumer would probably have obama killed to keep dnc pro-israeli.
i will be surprised if aoc is not pushed out of the party by 28.
Schumer and Pelosi don’t control the DNC.
I 100% agree with you but I’d also like to point out that the EPA was made by nixon in the 70s. theyve done some good stuff too, just less
Socially left on some issues and economically right on all issues isn’t left.
actually, your candidate running a dogshit campaign and telling everyone to the left of them to fuck off is why we have trump. we warned this would happen, too. anyone with a memory span longer than a pet goldfish remembers all of this.
LOL no it isn’t, Trump or someone like him was an inevitability because US elections are fixed and the people who have actual power in your society, Corporate board members, want fascism.
Truth there. I’m from a dark blue area yet city government here couldn’t act any different than if I lived in a dark red state. In some ways I actually think they are worse. All they have to do is put D next to their name & the voters will support them regardless of their actions.
Case in point: the consequences of Dems co-opting the George Floyd protests was tp increase cops at the expense of public services ans to then spend even more on cops because Biden gave them federal funding. They did the “tough on crime” right wing thing and this was forced into the mainstream position.
No “vote blue no matter who” and not demanding actual representation is how we got Trump. People got duped by a con becuase they have never seen the real thing, so anything different can look appealing to the uncritical.
Never let perfect be the enemy of good or some shit.
I love how liberals bleat this because it implies genocide is good.
No it does not. It means do something to move the needle instead of sitting on the sidelines bitching about everything while doing fuck all. I know you guys are great at mental gymnastics but that’s a stretch even by the standard on .ml
Care to explain why people are stuck on the sidelines without a viable political party to represent their interests?
Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.
Gay marriage was legalized at the federal level by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The only time a Democrat acted on same-sex marriage nationally was when Bill Clinton banned it by signing DOMA in 1996.
Environmental laws have been all Democrats.
Nixon created the EPA.
If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn’t have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.
If Democrats passed legislation, Biden’s achievements couldn’t be undone through executive order.
The parties are not the same, especially now that one of them is openly fascist, but you’re giving Democrats credit for things they did not do. Also, the meme doesn’t say they’re the same, it describes the rachet effect, which is an accurate representation of how Democrats behaved on multiple issues. Look at how their economic policies have changed over the last 30 years, or how their views on immigration policies have changed since Trump was elected.
Is there a political community you found on lemmy that understands how this works, like you do. I see way too many Democrat apologists on these popular communities.
Not on .world. I’ve noticed .world is more of a neoliberal, mostly pro-capitalism instance in general.
Note, I’m talking more about the moderation rather than members.
Okay. I don’t understand all the different instances yet. I got instructions from someone on how to navigate it but haven’t sat down to try.
Basically all you need to know is every instance has their own admins with their own rules, and often times you will see instances who are focused on a particular group of people, like my instance, for instance, which is for hardcore computer geeks, but where everyone is welcome regardless of whether or not they are even into computers.
I also like my instance because they explicitly choose to not defederate with any instance. I can choose what to block myself, which is how I prefer it.
There are also instances like db0’s (former /r/piracy moderator) for example, which focus more on individual freedoms/anarchist philosophy.
I started off on .world for a month until I found my instance.
Well, .world has a lot of users who understand this, but the loudest voices (who are often times moderators) are definitely Democrat apologists. Then again, some of the other instances, like .ml, have the opposite problem, and are full-blown tankie/authoritarian apologists, so it’s kind of a, “pick your poison, damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” situation.
I miss Reddit. R. I. P.
Eh, I saw a lot of the same shit on Reddit. I think you’d have to go back at least 7 or 8 years to find a version of Reddit that wasn’t trash.
Nah. I had my feed highly curated to active and sane subs within my interests. It was too good to be true.
Your list supporting Republicans means you must support Trump. right?
I mean you can’t have it both ways. Nixon created the EPA, Nixon was Republican, therefore Republican policy is to put the environment first. That’s what you are arguing.
What a stupid comment
That is absolutely not what I’m saying. I’m correcting objectively false claims you’re making; environmental laws were not all Democrats, the Democrats did not do anything at the federal level to pass, “full gay rights with marriage,” and the meme and OP did not say, “both sides bad.” Those points are a statement of fact, not an argument.
The Democrats passed a law saying that any marriage in any state must be respected in any other state. Marriage is a state issue, so unless they’re going to put it in the constitution, that’s the best they can do. Same with what you are claiming with the EPA: Nixon certainly did not fucking pass it. He vetoed it, it went back to committee and then came back up and passed the House by a vote of 366 to 11 and the Senate, unanimously, with 74 Senators voting yes and then he vetoed it again and Congress had to override the veto.
If you’re talking about the Respect for Marriage Act, that was passed a decade after the Supreme Court established gay marriage as the law of the land. The overturning of Roe made Democrats decide that they should codify gay marriage, since they saw how badly failing to codify abortion rights turned out. It also reopens the door for Civil Unions and passed with large Republican support, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a huge win for Democrats.
As for the EPA, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but you are absolutely incorrect. Nixon proposed the EPA and NOAA through executive order, and it was later ratified by Congress. It’s possible you’re referencing some sort of dispute Nixon had with Congress on how they intended to create the EPA, but he absolutely supported it; it was his idea.
If you have to go back 50 years to find an example of when Republicans were good for the environment, you proved my point.
It’s no different than, “Republicans are the party of Lincoln!”
First reply: “Giving Nixon credit for the EPA means you support Republicans and therefore Trump.”
Second reply: “NIxon was so long ago he doesn’t count.”
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim pointing out a good thing Nixon did means I support modern Republicans while also claiming Nixon happened so long ago that he’s not connected to modern Republicans.
It’s also just factually wrong to say, “it was so long ago, its like saying they’re the anti-slavery party.” Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy. He’s basically the turning point for where the Republicans became the party we know today. He’s the reason it’s bullshit to point out Republicans are the party of Lincoln.
It’s also just factually wrong to say, “it was so long ago, its like saying they’re the anti-slavery party.” Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy.
Those two sentences are in exact conflict with each other. You say “it’s too long ago when Republicans were different” isn’t a valid argument." Then in the very next sentence you say, “it was long ago when Republicans were completely different.”
WTF?
No, dude…just…no. You tried to claim that saying, “a Republican founded the EPA,” and, “Republicans ended slavery,” were the same, even though there was a century of history between those events. More importantly, Nixon is exactly the person you don’t want to make that argument about, since Nixon is the very person who pivoted the party towards its modern strategy of using the politics of racial aggrievement to get working-class whites to vote against their self-interests. Going back to the Civil War, or even the early Civil Rights era, things get ideologically murky, but you can draw a straight line between Trump and Nixon.
You say “it’s too long ago when Republicans were different” isn’t a valid argument.
He didn’t say that. You did.
He pointed out your hypocrisy when you said that stating the fact that Nixon created the EPA must mean he’s a Republican (and a MAGAt one at that), but then turned heel and said that any politicians from 50 years ago don’t matter (likely because the political landscape then is not the same as the political landscape now, which is reasonably true - he makes this same point by saying 1860 Republicans are not the same as 1960 Republicans or 2025 Republicans).
You stated he’s a Republican, then dissolved your own claim by saying support for past Republicans doesn’t matter. You’ve closed your own logic loop.
Why can’t stating facts just be that: stating facts.
Instead, people have to insert imaginations of their interlocutor’s position so they can try to dish an “own” before asking them for clarification first.
And we wonder why discourse is broken in today’s age
If I said Republicans generally support racist policies, a reply could be the fact that Lincoln freed the slaves and was a Republican.
Stating facts like that isn’t neutral. It’s the scientific equivalent of picking out one data point from an entire study to argue against a conclusion.
id like to remind you biden was a conservative running concentration camps for latinos at the border.
deleted by creator
No, the DNC is why we have trump. It’s on them.
Obama wasn’t perfect at all, but his platform was at least change and progress. While he was originally against gay marriage he did listen to the public and change for re-election. If the DNC listened to the public instead of fighting against progress that would be great. But like… Biden was the throw away to conservatives for Obama’s VP to “balance out” Obama being progressive….And now he was their best idea on what to do for a better future? It’s pathetic, and demonstrates the above.
No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump. They’re saying the DNC is what even allowed trump to exist, by being greedy fucks who care more about their handlers than the American people and running the worst candidates they can. “Nothing will fundamentally change” is the dumbest, most “fuck you don’t bother to vote for me” fucking campaign I’ve ever heard.
Its fine let them keep losing. I honestly don’t care anymore. At some point progressives like Bernie, AOC, etc. will finally wake up & realize they don’t need Democrats to win. You want to see people passionate about voting again then it is time to leave the establishment behind. Anyone remember Bernie’s crowds in 2016? It was obvious he was may more popular than Clinton having to pay Beyonce & Jay Z for people to show up at her events.
They absolutely, 1000% need Democrats to win. Maybe not their respective districts, but if they want to get anything done on a national level, they need about half the country on their side, and that includes Democrats.
Now, they can certainly eat the party whole, the way the tea party and MAGA ate the GOP. That involves being more specific than “Democrats bad”. In fact, how did they do it? Did you ever see them telling people to abandon the Republican party?
I understand where you’re coming from, but Democrats need progressives to win. If they leave Democrats, it will be Democrats that will follow them, not the other way around. I don’t think trying to emulate MAGA is such a great idea. I know there are lessons that can be learned there, but I am still confident that a new party with popular progressives & populist policies would do more than trying to change a broken party from within.
It’s always easier to completely rewrite code from scratch than to make small modifications to an existing project.
Bernie and AOC are sheepdogs for the Dems. They are all-in on the party. When people become disillusioned with Dems, they pop in to spread false hope and convince people to come back and believe in the Dems.
It is true that the welfare state is popular and thar is basically what they are selling. The public wants healthcare, not the cruelty and expense of the capitalist extraction insurance industry. So Medicare for All sounds great in comparison. It’s very popular when actually explained to people.
But it will never become policy without turmoil. The health insurance industry is a huge leech excreting profits for the owner class. Dems want to dangle it in front of voters but will never suppory it when in power, they will enginerr a Lieberman or parliamentarian because the party is completely beholden to capital, including insurance capital.
I’m sure you agree with a lot of what I have said. I just want to emphasize that Bernie and AOC are not really outsiders, they are ineffectual refornists whose only current function - one that they embrace - is to keep people that hate the crimes of the Democratic Party, up to and including genocide, to keep voting for them.
No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump.
The meme is Biden did nothing. It’s proveably false. Trump himself proved it by criticizing Biden at inauguration and immediately undoing Biden’s orders.
If it was that easy to undo what biden did, then practically he did nothing.
Much of what Trump has “undone” wasn’t undone legally. Many of the things he did requires congress to rollback and other things are caught up in courts. But in the mean time they happened so it will be potentially unable to be put back even if it is ordered so.
So, again, practically meaningless distinction. Until democrats are willing to use the same tools they leave available to republicans, the democrats are ineffective.
Thing is, they don’t have the same opportunities. The one reason why trump has been able to push things through in this shitty manner, is because the Republicans have stacked the Supreme Court (because the holes from people dying got filled while Republicans were in power) and they have majority control of Congress.
So why wasn’t Biden stacking SCOTUS?
When judges die while democrats have power, they nominate milquetoast compromise judges while republicans just go full far-right crazy. Democrats don’t fight to block the crazy republican judges nor do they even fight to get their own judges in. A great example is when Obama nominated Merrick Garland, an already lame pick, as a “compromise”. The republicans insisted on waiting until the 2016 election concluded and the next president was sworn in and the democrats didn’t fight back at all. Then as some dumb form of symbolism, they make Merrick Garland the Attorney General during Biden’s term and Garland proceeds to not prosecute Trump for four years. That should tell you how great he would’ve been as a supreme court judge.
So even if democrats do get a judge in, it’s a compromised “centrist”. How do you think the court will end up when one side packs in far-right wackos and the other side puts in moderate right-wing losers? Seems pretty clear what the direction would be even if democrats won every election until the end of time.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/democrat-republican-elect-primary-1.6497911
It’s apparently all part of a Democratic strategy aiming to help those seen as extremist Republican candidates to secure their Republican party’s nomination. (Which Mastriano did win.)
The hope for Democrats is that those extreme Republican candidates would be much easier for Democrats to beat in the November general election. But the strategy has raised some concerns about effectiveness and whether it could have unintended consequences.
https://observer.com/2016/10/wikileaks-reveals-dnc-elevated-trump-to-help-clinton/
The memo named Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson as wanted candidates. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the memo noted.
“Both sides bad” is why we have Trump.
You have Trump because you have capitalism and the reactionary political class serves a purpose in it. Liberalism tells you to only think of politics in a vacuum: whatever the last election was and what the next election is. In this vacuum they limit the world of politics down to what the two capitalist parties promise for capital, which varies and triangulates over time. The GOP was originally a party of free states and slavery abolition and the Democrats slavers and Southern white racists. Look at how they shift over time, both parties existing now for over 120 years. If you only ever look at the previous and next 4 years of what the capitalist political duopoly gives you, you will never understand the currents or why your “good guys” are increasingly xenophobic and transphobic or how political choices are actually made, because it is not just every four years at a ballot box proxied through some weirdos in the electoral college.
Anyways, both sides are bad. Have you already forgotten Biden’s genocide in Gaza? Dems’ “tough on the border” pivot? Breaking the rail strike? Being competent stewards of imperialism? I think liberals like to forget Blue Crimes, they are basically told to do so by mass media and it doesn’t comport with parasocially liking the sunglasses ice cream guy if you acknowledge he’s a genocidal racist. It isn’t really your fault to be in that bubble, but it is on you if you don’t seriously listen to others taking the time to explain its problems.
Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.
Absolutely wrong. Gay rights were popularized by left struggle, not struggle from Dems. Dems were dragged there by younger people that were radicalized by the people actually fighting for gay rights. Pride was a riot. The liberal assent and cooption was lagging, not leading. And in the US, gay marriage at the federal level was created by fiat of unelected lords (the Supreme Court) and not Democratic policy, despite Dems having full control of Congress and the Presidency in the neighboring period. Finally, gay rights are not full. I don’t understand why you think they would be. Gay people still face all kinds of oppressions in the US and the law only rarely protects them.
Environmental laws have been all Democrats.
This is simply factually incorrect. Early “environmental” laws were largely implemented by Republicans, including Teddy Roosevelt, also a racist genocidal war criminal. This was in many ways responding to muckrakers and organized labor who saw the environment, living conditions, and working conditions as inextricable.
Nixon signed the EPA into existence.
If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn’t have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.
Democrats don’t do nothing, they just avoid doing the vast majority of things good for humanity in general and even just the US citizen working class. Even when they promise to do so, they have an excuse and whipping boy ready to go. Oh, Ovama and the national platform said single-payer? Sorry there’s Lieberman and we can’t kill the filibuster and oh man no discipline at all. Cancel student debt? Oh sorry there’s a parliamentarian that we can just override and fire and okay we will issue a conspicuously legally weak executive order and then fold at the earliest opportunity.
But Democrats do implement policies, they just do so in the interest of capital. Their platform represents certain formations of capital, the GOP’s some others, and they share many donors. The different formations undo each others’ work when in power. Or at least they don’t flex their muscles until something is intolerable to them.
Democrats didn’t flip on gay rights until Obama, and the Supreme Court did marriage equality. (Yes better than Republicans) Democratic leadership is already trying to send trans people under the bus to try to save face with the Republicans. Both sides are bad! We need to demand more from the democrats and force them to support the working class and to never back down when talking about human rights. Right now. The Democratic party is nothing more than an enabler of our abusive and coercive government/economic systems that allows lessor evils to even exist.
Democrats didn’t flip on gay rights until Obama
And Obama didn’t flip on gay marriage until the end of his first term. Biden came out in favor of it, which forced Obama’s hand, but it wound up being the right move; it energized the base when enthusiasm was starting to wane. Then, under Obama’s leadership, they continued to do nothing to establish gay marriage at the federal level.
“But he said something vaguely positive, that’s exactly like legal enforcement of their rights!”
Decades of lesser evil voting is why you have Trump
Primaries exist. Show up and vote for the boring elections too.
Fr. Midterms are so important, but I rarely hear them talked about
I used to have a friend like you after 2016 who was panicked about Trump. They donated $2700, almost 1/3 of their savings as they aren’t that well off, to Doug Jones in the Special Elections and other politicians in the Midterms of 2018 who swept in to “push back” against Trump. Doug Jones won the senate seat by like 0.001% of the vote. His money may have actually tipped the scales, or at the very least was maximally influential compared to most American political donations. Best case scenario right?
Guess what. Doug Jones voted with Trump over 85% of the time, including on all the controversial and close measures and appointments of judges. Doug Jones turned around and stabbed all his supporters in the back and turned against unions. This radlib gave up a third of his hard earned nest-egg because he was so scared about fascist Trump taking over that he was nearly willing to jihad but didn’t know where to send that energy to be constructive. So he worked a bunch of OT and then sent it into the closest races during special elections and midterms where people aren’t paying as much attention.
Now he is a communist. He learned his lesson. I hope you will too one day and break free of the spell the Democrats have over poor sad sacks like both of you.
Ah, yes, because “nothing” as a course of action will do wonders!
“Now he is a communist”
What part of that sounds like he’s doing nothing? Do you have any clue what communists do? Like, you can go ahead and open What is to be Done and at no point does Lenin say “yes and at this point you wait and do nothing,” feel free to investigate the matter and call me out if I’m wrong.
who suggested doing nothing?
You are so intellectually impoverished you cannot imagine anything outside the strict binary of “do nothing” and “press button that does nothing”
Hey at least pressing the button is doing something cause I’m moving my arm right?
If you want a little hint at what should be done, maybe read some Lenin. Turns out it actually is possible for the masses to “do something” very funny.
All I’ve ever heard from communists are theory and a mythical “revolution” that’ll happen any day now. At least the liberals have done something
yeah like genocide in gaza
Do you think we think revolutions just… happen? That we aren’t working incredibly hard trying to find allies, build the labor movement, build the indigenous movement, the queer movement, the anti-racist movement? That we’re not trying to bring those struggles together under the same revolutionary banner? I understand you might not see much of this as being related to leftists because socialists and communists often put aside their specific political labels when it’s time to organize, but I guarantee that if you go and do something real (not voting) you’ll immediately start coming across the communists. That’s what a communist does, in practice.
Been doing that ever since I could vote.
It isn’t helping.
Sure, show up and vote in a primary that was already decided by AIPAC money, if not the various other super PACs that have the power to decide elections. Trying to cause radical change through elections, via a party that is structurally designed from the ground up to suffocate radicalism, is like trying to stop the spread of STDs by hoping everyone stops having sex. You need a different approach. Join a union, if you’re in the US join the PSL, if you can buy a gun and learn how to use it, and get started on building parallel power structures. You won’t elect away climate collapse and fascism, they will be overthrown by force.
Did you already forget how they literally cheated Bernie Sanders out of the primaries?
And what were the consequences? They all re-won their primaries.
The consequences seem to have been the democrats have swung further to the right than Ronald Regan and every leftist doesn’t even get a chance to run in that party and the same democratic party sues and uses legal maneuvering to remove all other parties like from the ballots.
Their consequences. Voters don’t vote for somebody else other than the geriatrics that thinks everything is peachy.
And what’s this lawsuit BS. The Green Party somehow still exists as Republican lite.
If any US party is “Republican lite” it’s very obviously the democratic party
You live in an alternate reality
The Green Party is to the left of the democrats on every single issue. You realize that right. You are supporting the closer party that is more adjacent to Trump and the fascists.
They did not all re-win their primaries. See Bernie Sanders, Cory Bush, and Jamal Bowman. And you can’t win a primary when the DNC undemocratically cancels it, as it did last year.
📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.
the consequence is trump.
It’s so fucking wild what liberals will simply refuse to acknowledge happened back in 2020. And it could easily be argued that 2024 was even more blatantly and flagrantly the result of corrupt backroom dealings, as a sitting President was deposed following a poor debate performance, to be replaced unilaterally by party insiders.
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-acronym/
“ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors,” Tharp said. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow, Inc, which also has other private investors.”
David Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid who joined Acronym’s board, also distanced himself from the company during an MSNBC panel last night. “I have no knowledge of Shadow,” said Plouffe. “It was news to me.”
But previous statements and internal Acronym documents suggest that the two companies, which share office space in Denver, Colorado, are deeply intertwined.
Last year, McGowan, a co-founder of Acronym, wrote on Twitter that she was “so excited to announce @anotheracronym has acquired Groundbase,” a firm that included “their incredible team led by [Gerard Niemira] + are launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter infrastructure for campaigns.” McGowan also noted that “With Shadow, we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth.” The acquisition was announced in mid-January of last year.
In an interview on a related podcast last month, McGowan described Niemira as “the CEO of Shadow, which is the technology company that Acronym is the sole investor in now.”
What’s more, internal documents from Acronym show a close relationship with Shadow. An internal organizational chart shows digital strategy firm Lockwood Strategy, FWIW Media, and Shadow as part of a unified structure, with Acronym staff involved in the trio’s operations.
In an all-staff email sent last Friday, an official with Lockwood Strategy reminded team members about “COOL THINGS HAPPENING AROUND ACRONYM.” The list included bullets points such as, “The Iowa caucus is on Monday, and the Shadow team is hard at work,” and “Shadow is working on scaling up VAN integration with Shadow Messaging for some Iowa caucus clients.” (VAN refers to the widely used Democratic voter file technology firm.) Acronym staffers also attended the Shadow staff retreat.
A person with knowledge of the company’s culture, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, shared communications showing that top officials at the company regularly expressed hostility to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters. McGowan is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign. There is no evidence any preference of candidates had any effect on the coding issue that is stalling the Iowa results.
Cheated = losing by millions and millions of votes?
Despite what people say online, there are elections every two years. Those centrists in Congress that everyone complains about? Yup. Two year terms in the House. You should be voting twice every two years for national elections alone.
oh great i get to choose between the Zionist Veteran Cop and the Zionist Neoliberal from the Chamber of Commerce. How exciting! Such choice!
Ok I’ll do that if you do the type of political activism I advocate for
I couldn’t vote for Bernie in either primary.
yep apparently iowa and the south gets to decide for everyone who gets to be imperial steward for team blue
I do, I just vote null.
That would be cool if they let us pick people from our own ranks, and not people whose turn it is because they held Joe Biden’s golf bag
You can do useless things that take up very little time all you’d like. Doesn’t bother me.
But if you want to have political agency you will need to do something real with organizing other people who can take direct action as a bloc.
You fool. This is social media where the loudest ignorant voice wins. You should agree with the clowns and farm the upvotes like on Reddit.
The neat part about voting is that even if you do it you can get fascism if the rest of the country are a bunch of fucking idiots.
Democrats certainly have flaws, but focusing on them during an election of such consequence resulted in Trump. And so being “right” was worth it???
Leftists are not liberals. The things that matter to leftists are different than the things that matter to liberals. We have different goals. The things liberals advocate for do not move us towards our goals. We have no reason to support you.
And yet many of us leftists are still calling you out. If anyone needs any more evidence of this, look up who voted for her the most. Black people, particularly black women, Jewish people, and the LGBTQ+ community. Now, who wants to guess which groups have been the loudest voices against capitalism in the US? Who has been the most politically active?
Its generally been us in the communities who are going to die.
But if these communities tend to be liberals then I will gladly be a communist liberal.
Yes, and leftists don’t put the same value in identity that liberals do. We obviously care to some extent, we believe in national liberation, and historically the communist movements have supported black people in the US for example.
You know what those communists didn’t do though? Vote for liberals.
Also if you’re trying to say that minority groups are the most politically active…I’d agree. That’s why leftist groups are represented by large amounts of those people.
I will gladly be a communist liberal.
It is impossible to be a communist/anarchist/socialist/leftist liberal, because communism/anarchism/socialism/leftism are diametrically opposed to liberalism.
Its OK if the point went over your head
Mate you’d need to have a point for it tk go anywhere.
“leftism is when identify politics”
Ok liberal
Lol If leftism is telling the groups who have historically been at the forefront of everything, including fighting against capitalism, that they need to shut up cause theyre just liberals, then I love liberals.
If liberalism is worrying about the communities who get harmed the most, then Im a liberal
But Im so glad to have seen over this last year that leftistism is apperantly thinking of us the same way Republicans do.
I didn’t realise I was talking to the incarnate avatar of “marginalised community”. Are Palestinians included in your metaphysical essence?
Yeah, leftists advocate for and support Trump. What matters to leftists is destroying people’s lives and the planet as long as they get to feel nice and smug.
If you want to save the planet, that takes abolishing the capitalist system. Neither major party is going to implement real measures to fix that. Harris was running on stronger borders too so I really don’t think its a reach to say we’d be getting ICE raids and destroyed lives under her.
In the words of Malcolm X: “If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound…”
Give me someone that wants to heal the wound. I’ll vote for them.
How open are China’s borders?
Did I say anything about China?
It’s where your anti-capitalism ideals come from.
The same Democrats that barely won the previous election by telling people not to focus on them but Trump. Imagine funding the murder of kids, ignoring the housing crisis & then thinking you could just pull out the previous playbook with a dementia patient, then anointing Kamala Cheney at the last minute.
It also still almost worked. This is how subservient and propagandized the US political electorate is. The idea of supporting mass murdering children was only a dealbreaker for a small minority, but enough to do most of the work in tipping the scales.
Kamala probably would’ve won with false promises to end “the war”, some token Arab speakers, and “I see you and hear you” pandering.
It was so sad that the democrats couldn’t even bring themselves to lie to us about Gaza. Maybe they didn’t think trump was worth the effort to stop.
But you just can’t put a price on that feeling of smug self righteousness ya know?
Trump is a consequence of decades of lesser evilism and rightward ratcheting
If progressivism was so popular they could’ve taken over the Democratic party at any time.
The capitalist party that writes its own rules and does not adopt literally any positions via bottom-up mechanism? No, nobody can take it over except other capitalists. So in a sense you are correct, as US progressives are still fundamentally of the political ideology of capitalism.
The party works against you but, ironically, convinces you to help it for your own and others’ interests. Instead, we must work together against capital if we want liberation and justice.
If you’d developed class consciousness, you’d understand why neither party enacts progressive policies despite their popularity. Previously:
The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Sure sure sure. FDR never existed, etc. etc. etc.
Excuses right on cue.
When you have to go back 93 years to the Great Depression to find an example, you’ve made my point.
FDR did what he did to save capitalism from the threat of socialist revolution, and politicians have spent the last three generations clawing back the concessions he had made to socialist & labor agitators. They also purged socialists from trade unions, and they purged and even assassinated communists, to avoid any such thing happening again.
Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour:
The New Deal, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, saved capitalism. It was put in place because socialists were a strong and serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our lifetimes—there was a possibility of a socialist revolution. They did not want to lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said, “Hand over some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution.” And they complied. That is how the government created fifteen million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and public works projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them to pity. They did this because they were scared.
Lol. Yeah, it’s a good thing we live in a Just World.
Progressives either need to win more races or just stfu already. It’s always somehow everyone else’s fault.
Thing is- I WANT progressive policy. But acting as if there is some big majority that’s just waiting for the perfect candidate is foolish. Either it’s not popular or people are LAZY just like I stated before and need to be shamed into voting regardless.
Inconvenient truth for progressives.
Progressives either need to win more races or just stfu already. It’s always somehow everyone else’s fault.
📽️
Either it’s not popular or people are LAZY just like I stated before and need to be shamed into voting regardless.
Lol. Yeah, it’s a good thing we live in a Just World.
