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.
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You didn’t have a choice, the economic system in the US concentrates power in the hand of people with money and they are fascists. If it wasn’t 2024 it would be 2028 after 4 years of congressional stalling. The path the US is on is predetermined, they don’t have to fix every election to the vote, they fix a percentage of them over the course of decades to push the policy to the right.
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But I don’t have it in me to just give up and willingly let people suffer without a fight.
Unless those people are Palestinian, then fuck 'em.
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and has made sure that the Palestinian genocide has only accelerated with the enthusiastic support of the US government under the Trump administration.
No, he hasn’t. The genocide was every bit as “accelerated” and the supporting of the US government every bit as enthusiastic under the Democrats, and you only think otherwise because liberals were engaging in mass genocide denial and apologia when it was their team doing it. In this sense, Trump has been better for Palestine, because at least now liberals are actually acknowledging what’s happening.
This also torpedoes the “lesser evil” argument for me, because how can I trust people to vote lesser evil when they won’t be honest with themselves about the evil the democrats were doing?
Up until the moment we have enough confirmed support for a progressive movement, status quo is a hell of a lot better than accelerated fascism; if only to buy more time to build the aforementioned progressive support. I’m all for actual leftward movement, but gambling on unconfirmed support is stupid. Even the liberals understand that, in their sports-team monkey brain.
The left has no plan sufficient to deal with this. I hear vague rumblings about strikes and revolutions and the power of the working class united, but the working class isn’t united yet. There is no organized, validated plan to effect that revolution. There’s no leftist Project 2025. That’s a natural consequence of the commendable independence of leftists, but it has the unfortunate consequence of being tactically untenable. The right uniform under the banner of their dictator, the left squabbles about trivialities.
It’s not that I wish it to be so; I would vastly prefer the left to have a functional plan to secure power. But it is the reality; I see neither such a lab, nor the necessary organization to implement such a plan. That’s why we vote lesser evil. We strive for the stationary phase of the ratchet to avoid the freewheeling phase, because we don’t yet have the organized strength to break the pawl from its housing.
Once we have that organized strength, and not sooner, we can break the pawl. Sooner, and the ratchet spins freely to the right.
And how’s that working out for you?
A bunch of shortsighted cosplayers with no sense of praxis or political literacy protested the do-nothing Dems and we got the freewheeling fascism MAGAs. How’s that working out for you? How’s the glorious revolution coming?
So it’s not working then?
But I assume you’re going to keep doing it anyway. All while continuing to accuse other people of being short sited with no sense of praxis.
Flagrant hypocrisy! This was your plan, not mine. How’s it working? Did a third party win? Did we end the genocide in Gaza yet? Don’t equate your plan’s failure with our recognition that it failed. You gambled, and this is what we get. Own it, maybe learn something about implementation.
Yup, looks like I was correct; you are going to keep doing it anyway, while desperately projecting your own failure onto others.
Keep up the “I’m rubber you’re glue” act buddy, it’s age appropriate. I wanted Trump to lose, you wanted Harris to lose. You got your wish, this is on you. Or keep blaming everyone else who tried to warn you that it was a stupid idea, how dare they point out the glaring flaws in your strategy. Let’s see if that makes a leftist plan materialize.
Blocking movement to the left is why you’re left with a rightward trend. Not just because the right itself “moves right” but because Dems’ political nature breeds false consciousness and confused disillusionment. Dems promise basic things like a student debt jubilee and then do a little weak attempt at it. So then people leave them behind. Even worse, Dems help create the degrading conditions that provokes an anti-liberal backlash (liberalism being the dominant ideology of capitalism, not just US Dems), and then Dems work their hardest to fight the associated leftward shift. But not the right: their radicals are useful for crushing that new left, as the left is anticapitalist.
Most importantly, the bourgeoisie electoral system provides an illusion of control. You don’t actually choose the lesset evil. You just throw in a vote for candidates preselected for you by capital and the party (a party in which you have no say) who will never actually be able to fight the right or adopt anticapitalist positions, and will therefore never be left. You, and the people, are not in control in this scenario. This scenario just provides consent for what capital wanted anyways, just with two different flavors: genocidal fascism with a good PR team for the theoretically empathetic and genocidal fascism with an okay PR team for braying hogs.
Soooo Dems won’t make it better but least won’t make it worse. If 2 party then easy choice.
Shame people didnt do this 20 years ago and voted gop out of existence.
twenty years ago people gave the Dems a super-majority; they used it to lock in the fascist policies of the Bush admin and give a massive hand out the wealthy.
911 kind of destroy any semblance of reason in the country. Everyone was angry. Tried to talk reason? Just look at Dixie chicks and boondocks version of MLK.
That’s your excuse? Seriously?
“Shame people didn’t vote Dem 20 years ago, the gop wouldn’t be around!”
“They did”
“Yeah, but 9/11 had happened only a decade earlier”
excuse? Hope maybe but now I doubt it with young boys being Tate trolls.
Naa country hadn’t healed yet for 10 years after. Now? I dont think 911 is a factor but nation has other issues made apparent by Trump.
the islamophobia of the 911 years obviously never went away because we have done multiple anti-muslim genocides and killed millions of muslims since and learned nothing
Yeah I think you are right there but I want believe the sacrifices made for “security” are wearing thin. Wanted to talk about privacy rights 16 years ago and they call you traitor. Least fox news would which is what I watched at the time.
So why did you say "Soooo Dems won’t make it better but least won’t make it worse. If 2 party then easy choice.
Shame people didnt do this 20 years ago and voted gop out of existence."?
Cause people keep hating on dems instead of seeing dems for what they are. Opportunists Lesser evils than also need to be removed. But GOP is worst they need to go first. We need Truce with dems until gop is gone. then let’s go tear them apart. But people keep getting angry and shocked at dems bs and then refuse to vote and let gop win. Which is arguably worst outcome.
At least vote third party people!
We need Truce with dems until gop is gone.
Wrong. Aligning yourselves with the “lesser evil” makes you evil as well and compromises your entire project. When you work with the billionaires you don’t have the wheel. You will do their bidding and be smeared for their actions. The only way to defeat the two party system is to attack both parties simultaneously, otherwise you are only reifying it by participating in the back-and-forth stalemate
Good luck convincing the Democrats to agree to a truce.
that insane mindset never ended and still goes on to this day. It’s why Americans can bomb Yemen for 40 days straight and not even be aware of it. It’s why they can kill millions of muslims and arabs in their forever wars and not give a single shit. It’s why they can commit genocide
You need to zoom out. Imagine you’re looking back at this moment from 100 years in the future. If people said “the Dems won’t make it better but at least they won’t make it worse” and just kept the system going, do you think it will ever lead to progress? Will the whole system ever improve?
You need to look for a solution outside of that system. Stop looking for lesser evils in the ballot box. First, look to the people immediately around you and try to join local organizations that might be directly working to improve their conditions (soup kitchens, women’s shelters, etc). Then, organize labor: figure out how to join a union, if there isn’t one read the IWW (or any other big union near you) manual on organizing your workplace and find support to start organizing your workplace. Then from there, your objective should be to take the workers’ struggle to the national and international stage. Change doesn’t come from the ballot box, it comes from building alternative power structures ourselves.
I agree with all you said. No it won’t improve just give time for gop to age out. Since they are actively making things worse. Least dems aren’t trying that hard to deport people or remove renewables.
Though I think change could have happened if 20 mil people voted third party or for Harris instead of sleeping in. Seeing Trump lose twice would have been a great catalyst for changing gop.
Least dems aren’t trying that hard to deport people or remove renewables.
Biden deported more people than Trump 1 did. Biden placed tariffs on solar panels and renewables made in China and continued Trump’s trade war
Well you right on that. sorry I wasn’t clear. I mean deport us citizens not just migrants. If trump does deport us citizens wanna bet a dem will not undo it?
No familiar on the solar tarrifs biden did so I cant speak on it.
Don’t make me tap the sign again
The problem with having 365 million people or so in a sick society that encouraged and rewards destroying each other is that things get worse automatically.
Dems doing nothing makes things worse. Reps doing nothing makes things worse. Its a prisoners dilemma where the only winning move is to kill the cops and hope for the best.
If al gore won we’d have still invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, it would just be in bush jrs first term in 2004 that we invade Iraq.
You are Probably right though im sure gore would have pushed for renewables. Thats like his whole thing.
Soooo Dems won’t make it better but least won’t make it worse.
Obama oversaw the largest decrease in black household wealth in american history
Not because of housing crisis? I seriously don’t know what specifically he did.
From what i read Obama maintained status quo and was not as progressive so the people most to gain from reform became the ones most victimized. He didnt actively do anything good or bad.
Is having the power and doing nothing worst than someone actively taking it away. I want to say yes but I also think the rapist is worst than the guy that just watched.
Bailing out the banks was an actively bad thing. That’s what gave the banks the power to barrel through with the rampant foreclosures that annihilated PoC wealth.
This is like saying FDR was great because he saved capitalism from destroying itself. If they had done nothing at all it would’ve been better in the long run because the crisis would have destroyed capitalism and we could finally move on to a system that puts human need above the acculumation of endless wealth.
Besides, this is completely ignoring the pillaging of Libya that took place under Obama, where Libya went from a forward-looking (yet flawed) democratic country to a failed state ruled by human trafficking operations and various statelets that control oil fields. It’s the only place with open air slave trafficking markets. It ignores the occupation of Afghanistan that also took place under his watch. The expansion of the surveillance state, Guantanamo, the US-Mexico border camps, the support of Israel during 2012’s Gaza bombings, the drone strikes in Pakistan and several other atrocities.
he didn’t close guantanamo like he promised, and there’s a direct throughline from that type of policy to the modern day use of CECOT as a detainment blackbag site. He could have pushed back but he didn’t, he gleefully joined the blob. So now the fascist blob controls everything
So it seems you feel dems are going to make things better vs me saying they won’t make things significantly worse?
The point is to never let ratchet go right at any cost.
But Maybe yall are right and its all too late Trump will push the country sooo far right and next dem will keep it going to no ones surprise. Guess we will find out together.
The function of a ratchet is to make an object go in one direction more easily. Democrats fulfill a function in propeling the country rightward. This was arguably not true 80 years ago but post-Reagan they are part of a process of rightward movement. Voting for and legitimizing them is moving the country right and making things worse.
I get not voting dem so please vote for a third party. And do not sleep on it.
Just never vote gop.
Im not hoping for dems to change im hoping they stay status quo long enough for gop to die.
i can assure you the commies are not implying you should vote GOP
???
25 years ago the Democrats won the election against Bush and then Gore gave up. They personally handed the presidency over to the republicans. Democrats like to lose even when they win. Then 21 years ago the Dems ran on a platform of “we’ll kill Muslims more efficiently than the Republicans.”
Democrats don’t want to win. Their primary purpose is to prevent a left from existing.
Also don’t forget Nancy Pelosi’s statement about the country needing a “strong republican party” last year. These people are ghouls and aren’t to be trusted.
Oh bet they need a strong gop. Of course they do they need thier boogie man. Without the gop guess who’s the most right wing popular party now? Can’t rack in that donation money without them.
No, my friend, you’re wrong. The Washington Democrats do make it worse. They (most of them) are willing participants in making life worse for the average American, and they know it, and they don’t care.
But they did make it worse, their policies led directly to where the US is now.
But they did make it worse, their policies led directly to where the US is now.
It’s so fucking ridiculous!
In the past 30 years Dems were in power 2/3 of the time, so they very obviously did contribute to the state of affairs that led to Trump being elected twice!
Or if the country moved rightward regardless of what team the President represents, then it means voting in this system is only ceremonial and completely useless activity.
Either Dems are enablers of Fascists or voting is useless, there’s no third option.
Well biden won by 20 mil and then those votes went away and didnt even go third party. So seems like disenfranchisement than country moving more than moving right.
Soooo Dems won’t make it better but least won’t make it worse.
So seems like disenfranchisement
So the Dems did make it worse by being terrible at running the country during the 20 years they’ve been in power over the past 30 years?
They fucked up strategically: creating the material conditions for the rise of Fascism
and they fucked up tactically by running two terrible candidates who abetted genocide in Gaza, and couldn’t even be bothered to promise a feeble social democratic programme (which would be less than the bare minimum), and because of this tactical mistake they’ve lost to fucking Trump who is very clearly an idiot.Calling it a fuckup implies that Democrats actually care about winning elections and developing the country, which is debatable after all these fuckups and all their anti-left rhetoric…
So what’s your plan on this?
What do you mean my plan?
The topic is:“Is there such a thing as the ratchet effect?”
Yes, there is.
I’m not American, I just hate both the US power elite and the bootlickers making excuses for them. Fuck them all, because they make the world worse for the rest of us…
I could go on and on about EU neoliberals as well, but that’s not the topic at hand, and they are basically behave like vassals to the US anyway
disenfranchisement
Which democrats let happen without pushback
It’s also extreme disillusionment. Everyone is checked out and realizes Democrats are genocidal frauds now
Well that’s the truth but at least vote third party. If im right then dems will follow the votes. They see 29 mil suddenly happen for third party ill bet my hat they will change tune. Im convinced they go right cause those are the people that vote.
I’m convinced they go right cause those are the people that vote
You do realise that it’s a big part of a politician’s job to mobilise the masses to vote?
historically speaking people with power are dumb dumbs and/or go for low hanging fruit. Hence DNC courting all those republicans voters in last cycle. Old ppl vote more comparatively.
but at least won’t make it worse.
Any arguments for harm reduction were gunned down in the streets of Gaza.
"Gaza? never heard of it.
Lalalalalalalallaal cant hear you. Head in sand.
Genocide? Innocent lives?
No no no insurgents even that baby and those reporting and uh its in the Torah…"
I could do narcissist prayer but It disgusts me to go any further.
Republicans aren’t 100% gun ho about trumps recent (and easily foreseen) fuck ups.
If we replace First-past-the-post voting, we could easily see the republican party get replaced with a more reasonable conservative party like the democrats.
Plus, you know, screaming at people unrepresented in government to vote for your preferred political party isn’t actually democracy.
If Alaska can do it, so can your state!
Electoral Reform Videos
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems
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“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.
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!”
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.
The Democrats didn’t do shit for gay marriage. That was the Supreme Court.
Also, Nixon created the EPA.
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
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.
Spoken like a Weimar
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?
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.
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.
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.
So why wasn’t Biden stacking SCOTUS?
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.
id like to remind you biden was a conservative running concentration camps for latinos at the border.
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.
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?
Decades of lesser evil voting is why you have Trump
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.
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Of course there was some good legislation along the way. Nobody is denying that. But the crisis we face now is there because the Democrats decided to ignore the danger. It really is that simple…
You can start with Citizens United. You can talk about the Dems after 9/11, the illegal drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, how the Dems celebrated the human rights violations then, which leads us to El Salvador today. You can talk about stacking the courts, which was a plan publicly announced in the 90s, that the Dems never seriously tried to stop, leading to the current Supreme Court…
If you want to say, “Well, the Dems are less evil,” then great, many people partly agree. But that’s not good enough. They fucked us all over by not stopping the Republicans from doing really horrible shit, even though we all knew what was coming. Maybe in a few years we can write on Biden’s tombstone “Not quite as evil as Trump.” Would that make anyone happy? Is that something to be proud of?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a stupid comment
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
From an outsider’s perspective it seems like the Democrats behave like that because the US electorate is genuinely right-wing and need pandered to.
The absolute highest priority in American politics should be getting rid of the 2 party system. I’m not going to pretend to know how exactly, but I think a good step in the right direction would be some form of a ranked voting system.
I try to remind people that we have no “Leftist” party or even a “Centre left” party anymore. We have Center right and far right now.
That’s right, everybody knows that the left and the right are perfectly equally bad, and the act of voting to stop the bleeding and starting a revolution are mutually exclusive /s
And then after years of this nonsense, people wonder how the poor voter turnout that got the fascist elected happened.
Primaries exist. Show up and vote for the boring elections too.
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
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.
Did you already forget how they literally cheated Bernie Sanders out of the primaries?
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.
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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.
And what were the consequences? They all re-won their primaries.
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.
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.
You live in an alternate reality
If any US party is “Republican lite” it’s very obviously the democratic party
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.
oh great i get to choose between the Zionist Veteran Cop and the Zionist Neoliberal from the Chamber of Commerce. How exciting! Such choice!
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.
Ok I’ll do that if you do the type of political activism I advocate for
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.
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!
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
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.
yeah like genocide in gaza
“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.
I do, I just vote null.
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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.
As said by a wise man, a silent majority does not exist in policy.
