Every Democrat I know irl is a kind, considerate person with empathetic views.
So it’s amazing to me that the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election, especially really fucking important elections
The DNC doesn’t give a fuck about the Democratic voters as long as they keep voting for their selected candidates
Even if we don’t they pick their candidate anyway.
they made it clear what they think of us when clinton elevated trump in 2016
They care about you less if you don’t vote.
If we want better candidates we should be prepping for 2028 and 2032 now. Not 2024. We have a big chance coming up. So many of the boomers that have been in control of all levels of government for the last several decades. Neocons and neoliberals are all dying out. And being forced to retire. Change is coming one way or another.
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1/3 of all boomers are dead currently. That proportion will grow significantly for each coming year. Effectively reducing the power of that voting block. Which has been outsized for decades. And reducing their hold on the leadership of the parties which has also been outsized for decades. McConnell, pelosi, Schumer, Biden, and many more are all in that generation and all quickly approaching their cutoff.
During the primary isn’t really the time to be introduced to a candidate unless you are generally unengaged and uninterested in politics or the process. So it’s really too late to start trying to run new candidates, especially with Biden as the incumbent this cycle. The next two cycles should be significantly different. And we should start looking for and prepping candidates for it now. There are a number of younger Democrats etc that could fit the bil. But we need to start organizing for that now. Not in 2028 or 2032.
Because the parties don’t represent the people. The parties represent the interests of those with most influence in the party. In the modern system it is those who make the most impactfull and sustained donation efforts. The rest is just marketing used to secure enough votes in the election show according to arbitrary rules they set and change as they see fit.
The parties represent liberals and fascists, when leftists are gaining in grassroots popularity. This grassroots movement must continue to build momentum and make real change.
So it’s amazing to me that the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election, especially really fucking important elections
I think its useful to distinguish between Democrats and democrats. I try to use Democrats for party officials, elected officials, talking heads within the party etc. I try to use democrats for democratic voters.
Democrats do not have the priorities of their voters in mind, and have, since the 90’s, wished that they actually had republicans for voters. Democrats don’t want to be managing a leftwing party (the votership they largely have), they want to be managing a rightwing party. The Democratic party reconfigured its self to be diet Republican after Carter and have been failing forwards ever since.
I lived through all of that and you put it just right: They kept failing forward. If they weren’t the only alternative to the Republicans the party would have died after 1984.
It’s probably obvious we need more choices but how?
Primaries. The people have to show up and actually vote for what they want into the primary (rather than trying to vote according to political strategies). With enough sustained effort and time a coalition of like-minded representatives could be built up to slowly change the system to a more representational one.
I’ve been doing this for 24 years and have the “Kucinich for President” bumper sticker to prove it.
When should I expect it to start working?
Same. Tons of Bernie merch.
You shouldn’t. Your thinking is linear and deterministic, but elections and society structures are not. Voting for X over Y period is not a guarantee of X. It’s a chance at X, assuming an entire host of other people vote with you and a number of other factors fall into place, but not a guarantee.
In other words: I am too weird to ever be satisfied with the results of an election.
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
It’s the system, honestly.
The U.S. government was always designed so that it would be ruled by ‘the top’. Through failures of imagination, inability to build in flexibility, and the entrenched powers doing what they can to grow their power, we’ve wound up with a system where money is power and people are merely numbers that can be shuffled to produce desired end results.
I’m quickly approaching a point of throwing up my hands, but if there is a needle that can be threaded by ‘the people’ to stitch back together our fraying democracy, it’s this —
A state-by-state ballot initiative effort to remove political drawing of electoral maps.
Changing voting (likely also ballot initiative) to remove the first past the poll system, so that we use instant run-off (aka ranked choice) to give people the opportunity to vote for who they want without throwing their vote away.
Removing barriers to voting and establishing a national holiday during election days.
Overturn Citizens United. Overhaul campaign finance. Eliminate unknown funding sources from politics. Eliminate business contributions and PAC’s entirely. Narrowly define acceptable lobbying, and broadly define what lobbying can’t be.
Strong consumer privacy laws that have teeth, so that micro targeted campaigns can’t be used to manipulate people into swinging elections. Case in point - Trump only won the swing states by 11,000 votes (total) in 2016.
And using ballot initiatives to have enough states join the national popular vote interstate compact to render the electoral college moot.Vote for third parties?
Doesn’t work in our system. To do that we’d need to use the same broken system we have to implement some other kind of voting system. But for it to work in time we would’ve had to have started in the 80s.
Not necessarily:
https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
Alaska implemented ranked choice voting after voters approved the measure in 2020
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I suspect the DNC is gonna try another Bill Clinton style southern strategy and appeal to disenfranchised conservatives by shifting further to the right. And current democrat voters will shift to the right with them, defending their right wing actions tooth and nail.
Yeah, it seems with every candidate, we veer further to the right
Feelings aside, Biden is objectively one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we’ve had in modern history.
[Bernie] Sanders said that some of the early goals that the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress were able to accomplish in the first two years of Biden’s presidency were progressive victories, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
“I think the American Rescue Plan that we passed early in his agenda, in the midst of the terrible pandemic, the economic collapse, was, in fact, one of the most significant pieces of legislation for the working class in this country, in the modern history of America,” Sanders said.
I mean, being to the left of Obama and Clinton isn’t exactly hard.
Reread the comment that I was responding to.
No, I know who you’re responding to, but pointing out that Biden is marginally more left-leaning than the guy who repealed Glass-Steagall and the guy who created the assassination-robot squad doesn’t really undermine his point. FDR’s party gutted the New Deal, Biden being slightly more pro-union doesn’t really mean much to the overall trend.
For all of his progressive economic accomplishments, FDR also interned in the Japanese and allowed for the creation of one of the world’s worst toxic waste sites.
The point being that I don’t expect inhuman levels of perfection for my political leaders, and I don’t think you should either. There was much more to FDR’s administration than the New Deal, and when it comes the historical comparison Biden may have fallen short on matching the New Deal (although objectively he passed the biggest infrastructure and progressive economics bill since the New Deal), he has an undeniably better track record than FDR in terms of human rights, civil rights and environmental protection. There’s really no comparison.
(FWIW, it’s also worth noting that FDR had a significantly stronger Democratic backing in congress, with IIRC, a large supermajority in the Senate for multiple years. Historical political context is also important.)
Like it or not, It’s just a point of fact that Biden is the most progressive president we’ve had in at least 50 years, if not a century, when looking at the entirety of his record so far.
This is why their only political message is “vote for us or you’ll be sorry.”
“A vote for our candidate is slightly better than chopping off your nuts with a rusty cleaver and pouring salt on the gaping wound. Vote Blue!”
Yeah, but the other guy is actively campaigning on chopping your balls off for laughs and keeps showing up to rallies with a cleaver and a salt shaker…so y’know…you pick your fucking battles.
That’s a lot of words just to say you’ve got nothing except “the alternative is worse”
That’s pretty bad
If the alternative is worse, the current option is still better. And I’ll take the better choice.
Which choice frees the refugees? Which choice provides universal healthcare? Which choice gives land back? Seems to me both choices are unfathomably bad. Do we have to pick who gets human rights?
Seems less like a democracy and more like a system inspired by the Saw franchise. Fuck this so much.
Fuck this country.
I understand your sentiment, I really do. We also need economic reparations for black people, to redesign the police system, and to ensure LGBT people are represented in society and education.
It’s ironic to me how much I hated the country back when I was a senior in high school, 2012 – and now how it’s in many ways worse today in 2024. There have been advancements, and those need to be celebrated, but there have been significant setbacks and reversion. I never thought I’d live to see an era even more hostile to LGBT people, in many ways.
I’m not going to tell you that I’ve learned to love the country in spite of its many faults – but I have learned to recognize that we are a country that owned slaves, and also freed slaves. We enacted Jim Crow, and we passed the Voting Rights Act. We didn’t let gays serve in the military, then we enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and then we stopped caring if soldiers were openly gay.
America is a story of oppressors and liberators. Those who only let rich white men vote, and those who protested until women and black people could vote. America is all of them. We can pick though who we extol as model Americans, and who we condemn as our worst.
To tie things back to what you’re saying, we need to preserve the human rights we have right now above all else, before we can expand them to everyone who deserves them. In 2016 people were unhappy that we weren’t expanding more, and it led to us losing abortion rights we already had.
We protect those we can, and we wait for our moment. We do our damnedest to make sure we don’t regress, and when the time comes, we honor the woman’s suffragists and civil rights marchers and secure expansions.
Before we can expand, we have to bury these Trump fascists six feet under. Only then can we get around to fixing our many problems.
Correct. The system is fucked. But like it or not, you’ll be stuck with one of them
I’m a trans guy, please vote for the guy who isn’t literally threatening to chop my balls off. :/
“Genocide Joe” is a little crass, but he absolutely deserves to be taken to task for his blind support of the IDF/IOF. That’s more important to me as a voter than hearing circle jerk promises about known positions. We know he’s pro abortion rights, he’s shown that. Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room.
I prefer The Butcher of Palestine
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If you don’t like it, vote in the primary!
(Unless you live in NH, then you don’t get a primary. Also the DNC reserves all rights to ignore any primary election)
Either we get rid of the two party system, or it’s gonna be the death of democracy.
There can’t just be two options picked by private organizations… That’s just the illusion of choice when billionaires and corporations donate to both parties.
Vote in all primaries. Vote in state and local. Vote on your local dog-catcher.
The President isn’t the only office that matters, and really it doesn’t even make up a majority of the importance. It’s just easier to get people to focus on it, and ignore all the other just as important elections.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m very involved locally, have even considered running myself, but then what? We’ve still got immigrants and refugees in concentration camps, still can’t get anyone, especially women or trans youth, access to healthcare, can’t redistribute wealth, can’t give land back to the tribes. I still feel powerless. Now what? Just be content with that?
So it’s amazing to me that the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election, especially really fucking important elections
Can you elaborate on what you mean that “the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election”? Are you unaware of the fact that Biden is the incumbent President?
He was nominated by a wide margin against a dozen other candidates (including over my preferred candidate), and elected with solid EC majority and a record number of individual votes.
To suggest that he was somehow appointed by the party establishment, when he’s simply running for reelection like almost every incumbent President in American history has done after their first term seems like a very disingenuous statement. It’s interesting that nobody leveled that argument against Trump when he ran for reelection in 2020, not to mention every other time it’s happened, considering it’s been the norm for decades.
Let the “majority” of “progressives” bitch they don’t get their way when they don’t even bother showing up even half the time.
Why court someone who doesn’t vote every. Single. Election?
But hey, at least they get that smug feeling of self righteousness.
Did every centrist decide to tediously lecture the left 5 times a day? I’ve voted in every election since I turned 18 and I see at least 10 dipshit centrists lecturing someone to vote or there will be fascism. I’m pretty sure leftists already know about fucking fascism, the thing we’ve been consistently resisting since like 1930. Stop being a fucking nag and we’ll vote for Biden.
Also, it’s also good if someone cares about ethnic cleansing and settler-driven apartheid. It’s kind of horrifying more people don’t. Sorry if I come off as smug when objecting to crimes against humanity.
A lot of us live in states that didnt get to vote in the primaries, and a lot of us show up to every election even when neither option really represents our views (albeit one much more than the other). To say we aren’t getting our way cause we aren’t voting, though undoubtedly true for some, is a bad take
This is not even touching on the DNC putting their finger on the scales in the primaries that did happen
How is it not? There are two options:
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There is a large amount of progressives who support progressive ideals but don’t show up to vote in primaries or push politicians left. Hence- they just don’t show up.
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Progressive goals just aren’t that popular and there is no large cohort abstaining from voting.
Don’t get me wrong- I like some progressive ideals (though not nearly left as some on lemmy notably are.) I support fixing healthcare via single payer or at least some universal scheme with a public option, etc., I agree it’s genocide in the Gaza Strip and we shouldn’t at all be supporting Israel, etc.
But look at the results. Either progressives are sitting out A LOT or the party actually is just representing what the majority wants (like the OP stated.)
I think the general feeling of disenfranchisement comes from the DNC influence in primaries. Who they throw their weight behind in terms of advertising dollars and publicity makes a big difference in how the primaries go. Also very relevant is which states have their primaries when, as most times the primaries are called before every state has theirs. This is also hearsay and way harder to substantiate, but there are also some that cry foul that there isn’t actually much in place to monitor primaries like there are in standard elections and there is significantly higher potential for fudged numbers and misrepresented results.
Of course I would still love to see more left candidates get the nomination despite that, but it is certainly still possible that I am in the minority in that desire.
For 2024, though, it doesn’t much matter if Biden is who the left wants. When running against a literal fascist, there isn’t really as much room to voice complaints about the alternatives. I voted for Biden in 2020 and will again in 2024 even though he is much further right than my political leaning, and even for those of us on the left who are not happy with how Biden has been doing, there isn’t really room to show that with voting because the alternative is so much worse. In this scenario, votes for Biden can easily be misconstrued as support for Biden which is not really the case
Most of your complaints seem to revolve around just presidential primaries. I’m not gonna argue that it’s stupid how they do it but it’s also just one position.
Why are people not voting in every single primary for local and state positions too to get left leaning candidates as the Dem candidate? Congresspeople have far more weight and more impact than just the president. Witness the overton window shifting far, far right due to crazy Tea Party and Freedom Caucus candidates, etc. etc.
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He was also at an abortion rights rally when the protest occurred, which many people are glossing over.
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Because they aren’t guaranteed to show up?
Witness the complaints- “Oh Biden didn’t legalize weed, didn’t implement a whole new healthcare system, didn’t absolve all student loans, etc. so I’m not going to vote for him” disregarding he has tried to do a bunch on those topics and either got some things done or got stopped by SCOTUS. Or just “he is supporting genocide in Gaza so I’m not voting for him” and disregarding that it would be far, far worse if Trump wins.
The guy has had either a razor thin majority OR a minority in government for his term and has still accomplished quite a bit like the biggest legislative bill ever that targets climate change, etc… But if people are going to not vote for him because he can’t turn around the aircraft carrier that is the US government on a dime by executive fiat then why bother courting those people?
My point isn’t that he shouldn’t try to get as many votes as he can- my point is progressives need to show up and vote for the least bad option and be grown ups about it. If you ever want to get change you need to show up every damn time and make your voice heard. And if you want things to go more left, get involved. I’m getting involved in a ballot measure that my state is putting forward for independent redistricting. I vote in the primaries even though I don’t really like the Democratic party as is. AOC didn’t just bitch- she showed up, worked her ass off, etc. and is pushing the conversation left, just like the Squad.
It’s the people who throw their hands up, bitch, and then do nothing that I get irritated at. Don’t like it? Then get involved like crazy and force the conversation left. If your ideas are actually popular then it should be easy to rally support no? So do it. But you can’t blame politicians when people post complaints on a message board and then just…never show up and then wonder why people don’t run totally different campaigns targeted towards them.
We’re held hostage by one party and get literal death threats from the other. It sucks, man.
I know plenty of Dems who voted trump because abortion. I think a lot is the demographics’ religion. I’ve heard too many say they will vote for trump because at least he gave them $1200. And a friend told me in conversation he visited a (all black) church where the pastor said he doesn’t care if trump is elected, because “God has a plan.”
Biden leaves much to be desired, and waited until election year to mention price-gouging, even try to contend with border red states and abortion. Facts are, both establishment parties are on the same Team Gazillionaire, which isn’t us, and they don’t want it to ever be us. It’s time we wake up that one party is just more sneaky about it, and they’re really not that sneaky. And the EC is still in place.
Biden leaves much to be desired, and waited until election year to mention price-gouging, even try to contend with border red states and abortion. Facts are, both establishment parties are on the same Team Gazillionaire, which isn’t us, and they don’t want it to ever be us. It’s time we wake up that one party is just more sneaky about it, and they’re really not that sneaky. And the EC is still in place.
You can’t convince me that a native English-speaker wrote this.
Is there some reason you think people who aren’t native English speakers shouldn’t be involved in American politics? 🤨
No. I do expect coherent and factual arguments from those who do, however. I’ve had my fill of word salad for 2024 already. Am I asking too much?
Is that why you didn’t mention any of that in your comment and instead focused on whether or not they spoke English as a first language?
That’s fair. You’re right.
I just thought it was funnier than going point by point through that incoherent nonsense to try to correct it, because sometimes I feel like it’s better to laugh than it is to try to engage with political talking points that are so mired in bullshit that they are hard to take in good faith. It’s also flawed to assume that everybody who is engaging in conversations around American politics are American citizens acting in good-faith, based on what we know about the history of foreign meddling in global elections, but I digress.
It’s possible that you’ve taken it more seriously than I meant it to be, but ultimately I said something that may have been offensive and exclusionary to ESL speaking people, and for that I’ll just say sorry.
I appreciate that you were willing to hear what I was saying. FWIW I recognize there was a legitimate problem with troll campaigns in at least the past 2 presidential elections and I’m sure already is a problem in the upcoming one, but defaulting to ‘someone isn’t using perfect English, they’re a shill!’ (in addition to being exclusionary to ESL speakers) casts too wide a net and includes a lot of people who legitimately do speak English as a first language (ask any English teacher, lol).
It’s my first language and after four decades of voting, this is what it’s been.
Yeah, and it feels that way all over the world.
For example, the recent election in Argentina was between a Libertarian nutjob and a corrupt center-left party. Unfortunately the corrupt center-left party lost, and now the maniac is wrecking their economy.
Then you’ve got the Labor party in Britain, who despite all of Brexit couldn’t manage to form a government.
It’s like the entire world is trapped between the options of idiotic populism and neoliberalism.
Things would improve if we ate the rich.
Saying that Milei is wrecking the economy is like saying a bulldozer is wrecking a house when it already got hit by a JDAM
Then the audience — made up of many young people & women — immediately started chanting things like “Four more years” & “Let’s go Joe.” Be careful of these stories.
Well, obviously. The audience was there to see Biden because they presumably like him. You think the protestors were going to suddenly win over his strongest supporters after yelling for accountability from their hero? Biden, the audience, and the press covering the event weren’t getting what they wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it.
It was a pro-abortion rally. Probably not the best moment for a pro-Palestine protest.
Why?
Because women having their rights taken away deserves attention too. They interrupted this rally to target Biden, when there’s plenty of other places for them to do that.
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Because there’s probably a good amount of overlap between people who are pro-abortion rights and those who are sympathetic to Palestinian rights. Abortion rights are also an important and immediately critical issue domestically, so interrupting a rally to support those who need access to abortion with a pro-Palestine protest is just going to piss off people at the rally who are already on the side of the protest. It’d be like if a group of pro-choice advocates started a protest at a pro-Palestine rally, it’s just bad form when the group they’re disrupting probably agrees with them.
I get the protest was targeted at Biden and Harris, but even still, it’s a bad idea to protest them at an event that is probably for an issue the protestors also care about. It just signals that there’s no reaching the protestors and they’re going to be unreasonable, even if Biden comes around to their side and stops shipping arms to Israel.
Yeah! If you want to protest, do it somewhere that will cause no disruptions whatsoever! /s
Protests should absolutely be disruptive. What they shouldn’t do is occur at events to support different marginalized groups. Protesting an abortion rights rally is fundamentally different from shutting down a highway. It’s like having anti police brutality protest disrupt a pro asylum rally. How does it help to disrupt an event for an issue the protestors probably support as well?
Again, I get they were there to protest Biden, but do it when he’s at a random campaign event, not when he’s at an event to support a marginalized group.
I love how we’re all so stuck up our own asses that people actually think it makes sense to hamper any sort of attempt at progress because it’s not perfect. This is the same exact shit as single issues voters in the Republican party over guns or anti-abortion. So focused on one thing that they can’t even understand they’re hurting themselves.
Maybe this isn’t you exactly, but it’s what your comments rhetoric represents.
lmao, really!? The “it’s not appropriate” argument?
Please let the protestors there know when they can reach Biden in their home town at a more reasonable occasion.
Should people hold a pro-choice protest at a rally to support Gazans, shouting over the speakers? It’s not convenient but after all that’s the argument right? Disrupt every possible occasion?
Abortion rights and a free Palestine!
imagine protesting a really for reproductive freedom given by a guy who isn’t even prime minster of israel.
it increasingly feels like so called palestinian protesters are just russian psy ops
I hate it when people play dumb like this. Biden can tell Israel to stop now and they’d have no choice except to stop.
Biden has done that and Netanyahu said no
Did holding back aid, or even attaching conditions to its use, come up anywhere in that conversation?
foreign aid is approved by congress; you’re suggesting that biden do what trump was impeached for?
They have been bypassing Congress to get “emergency weapon sales” to Israel. So yeah Biden could just stop doing that at a minimum.
Biden has bypassed congress to provide aid to Israel.
You can only play dumb and act like Biden has no agency for so long before people realize you all are full of shit. Every time Democrats recycle this lie more and more people are able to see it for what it is.
The democrats have been playing this “there’s nothing we can do” game with leftists for years and its going to bite them in the ass at some point.
Biden does not deserve peace, and he should be held accountable for his role in genocide. Responding to anti-genocide protesters with 4 more years is some cultist ass shit. Literal human lapdogs.
“How many more kids will you kill?!” … “Four more years! Let’s go Joe!” So cultish
Edit: Whoops, replied to the post, not the comment.
Oh, I wasn’t ignoring the intent to eliminate an ethnic group; I know that it’s necessary for for proving a genocide, and will be the most difficult part of South Africa’s case. Maybe they’ll find something that can clarify Israel’s intent, like an official calling for Gaza to be completely reduced to rubble, or a member of the Iraeli parliament calling on for nuclear strikes to, “crush Gaza,”, or a cabinet official calling what’s happening in Gaza an ethnic cleansing, or an Israeli minister calling for settlers to illegally take control of the territory. (Of course, this is just a few recent examples from this war. You could go from the Nakba all the way to the illegal West Bank settlements if you wanted to give the intent in a historical context.)
Anyway, you’ve really illustrated why the American centrist is so ridiculous. You honestly want to argue that a nuclear-powered (yes, Israel has nukes, even if they don’t admit it) military with a $20 billion budget that is systematically destroying a civilian population couldn’t possibly be committing genocide because none of their founding documents say, “genocide.” Meanwhile, you also want me to accept that a terrorist organization with homemade rockets, that controls an area the smaller than Detroit, with a military budget of $350 million, is just as capable of committing genocide. Not only that, any deaths they cause are a genocide, because their charter calls for genocide (which is obviously ridiculous; by this logic, Dylan Roof committed genocide). You are a deeply unserious person and I’m done with this absurd exercise.
