Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
Ocasio-Cortez/Sanders 2028
if Americans are going to just sit and wait, the US won’t be recognizable in 4 years, and there sure as hell won’t be a free and fair election
We can do this the easy way or the hard way - not that a pressure campaign to reform the Democratic Party will be easy, but it’d be sure a hell of a lot easier than trying to primary them out or form a new party. We should try to change them but we need to prepare for every eventuality.
The fact is that nothing is going to change if we can’t change or replace the Democrats first.
They need to understand that they are fighting for the country. And when they don’t treat the Republicans and billionaires as the enemy they deprive us of the power to fight at the ballot box.
So we have to go to the soapbox. Like lemmy.
And when that fails, many of us (not me) will find they have nothing else to lose and go to the ammo box, like mangione is accused of.
And the rest of us will go to the jury box and vote not guilty.
I don’t see people screaming at Bernie, AOC or Tim Walz. Wonder why that is…. Oh maybe it’s because they’re actually willing to notice the frustrations of their base.
“Wait you want us to fight for your rights, like you elected us to do? I dunno, that sounds like effort. It’s much easier to agree to what Republicans want and it theoretically looks good on paper that we wanna work with Fascists. Maybe we’ll get some of their voters this time!”
“I know we campaigned on fighting fascism but that was more of a ‘if we win’ thing”
we’re holding up ping pong paddles, there’s nothing else we can do!
"As we all know, we only do what we want when we win. Your house rep doesn’t still work when they win their seat, right? …They do? They still try to get things done?
Well, uh, you know you can’t do what you want when you’re in the minority of Congress. Wait Republicans did exactly that for 15 years? And got all their demands with the filibuster and delaying?
Well republicans would just use that as ammo for their messaging. Please ignore they’ll do anything we do as massaging, from tan suits to mustard. We have to give them what they want, there’s nothing else we could do!"
Time for the neoliberal world order to end. Want Republicans to actually be scared of Democrats? Fill the party with socialists.
This is correct. Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries. Not town halls or performative third party voting, but filling the party up with people who think differently.
If I stay home, that’ll show those Democrats
But the corporations that donate to the party don’t want this.
All you have to do is raise money without corporations.
How hard could it be?
And as long as privately ran organization owned by those rich people (the DNC) controls the primaries then they can choose what ever candidates they want. Like how they chose Hillary despite Bernie having more support in 2016. This is why the DNC has stopped doing primaries.
Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries
And that means it’s time for everyone to actually give a shit about voting in primary elections instead of just old people who keep choosing the worst candidates.
Not just voting, but running for election.
While I agree, I’m a “child of the internet” so pretty much any opposition research on me would have me murdered by probably everyone.
Maybe I should run. I could unite the left and right in their disgust of me lol
Maybe the real Modern Warfare was the blackmail material we created on ourselves along the way
Oh! NOW I remember why I didn’t give my real name and all my friends and activities and locations and menstrual cycles and everything to BlackmailBook when they demanded it of me to view the link my grandma sent me.
JFC Why won’t this fucking thing burn to the ground.
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said it won’t be fixed through primaries and was genuinely flummoxed as to what you thought primaries were for.
Having read what you actually wrote – now –, the world is much more coherent.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We’re now 0/3 on that front, so… yeah. It’s not impossible, but they’ll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
At the presidential level, yes the DNC has been terrible with candidates. However they aren’t in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can’t stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between. They can make it harder for these people to win, but they can’t stop or control city, county, or state elections. We need a base of elected officials pushing them to change their tack.
However they aren’t in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can’t stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between
Okay I could be wrong, but can they not make up excuses bar whoever they don’t like from primaries? Or make up other excuses and run their own neoliberal candidate and split the vote anyway? They just… nominated Harris in 2024 so clearly they’re not obligated to even hold primaries.
Presidential primaries are the weird ones because they’re spread over all the states. Otherwise candidates just need to do whatever to get on the ballot(usually gather signatures) and then win the election. Parties can throw their weight behind one candidate in particular but that’s not the same as declaring a winner. AOC got into Congress by beating a party backed incumbent in a primary.
Yeah people forget that the Democrat party doesn’t need to even hold primaries, let alone respect the outcome. The DNC admitted to pushing Hillary to the forefront and were the ones that dragged Biden out of retirement because it seemed like Bernie might win the second time. The good politicians seem like exceptions.
Need to start promoting working families type party.
Not just presidential matters. Local and state are much less fucked with. A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united. Division in the American system is just a way to have the other party win. Republicans allowed the Tea party because that is what they wanted as well. Neolibs won’t allow a split progressive/socialist with the exception of Bernie (because how do you fuck with Vermont).
A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united.
If you start local and strategically spread (or create a mass movement and go for the jugular) you can remove the neoliberals from the equation and make socialists and fascists the only two choices.
I’m not talking about Presidential primaries. I’m talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I’d be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it’s not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of… I don’t know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.
You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn’t going to happen. Presidential primary isn’t the place to start.
Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is.
The problem is that they’ll, again, fight you every step of the way. An ideological takeover will have to happen over their dead bodies, and meanwhile they’ll keep demanding concessions so they don’t expel you from the party and disallow you from running for primaries. The crux of the issue with the ideological takeover route is that this contradiction will lose you legitimacy in the eyes of your supporters as you’re forced into compromise after compromise in order not to alienate the neoliberals, and they’ll give you fucking nothing in return.
Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment.
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
That’s exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.
No third party that isn’t self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.
No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again.
Ross did that well because of disappointment with the political establishment, which… gestures broadly. He also had clear issues that held back his campaign, issues that someone running for 2028 or 2032 will be able to fix. Also while the environment of 1992 won’t exist again, the environment of 2025 didn’t exist in 1992. In the words of (maybe) Winston Churchill: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
This is way. Democrat voters want change, but they’re not speaking to the system in a language it understands. The party changes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That only happens when people with different views stand for, and win, lower level positions. Every voice changed lower down on the totem pole changes the presure on the people making decisions further up. Ultimately enough movement lower down means the top eschalons are pushed out and replaced too.
Whether it’s possible to find enough candidates to start filling the party, I don’t know, but just focusing on the primaries (or lack thereof) for the top job is missing the wood for the trees.
I volunteered this election with our state house district committee of the Democratic party. The grassroots is effectively neutered and you can believe that they are carefully managed to be sure nothing rises up that the national party cannot control.
The Democrats are managed opposition.
Thank you for putting the effort in. The party apparatus isn’t going to want to change, but I’m not sure that it’s managed opposition as such, so much as those who are ‘in’ being happy with their lot and doing what they feel they need to to stop that being taken away.
There’s two ways to use that to change the situation, either demonstrate that their comfortable position will be taken away if they don’t change their politics, or take it away by finding a candidate you can rally enough support behind. Neither is easy, and both require getting people involved en-mass at the lowest levels of politics, which is going to be hard work with the party pulling against you. It’s not impossible though, AOC and Sanders are both candidates of a different stripe and have, so far, held their places. Imagine how different things would be if they were replicated even a few times?
A Socialist party would not only not have a chance in hell, the votes it would siphon off would lead to a resounding victory for the Reich Wing. A strong Socialist candidate (or several) in the Democratic Primary wouldn’t win either, but would drag the debate to the left and force/enable the more moderate candidate to support the kinds of goals and programs that used to define the Democratic Party in order to win, without being labeled and dismissed as “Socialist” by swing voters. However, we’ve already seen what happened when leftists decided to sit out the General election because nobody was good enough for them.
No, it changes by having a chair that cares more about beating Republicans than beating progressives…
And we have that now
The fight over the party was over more than a month ago when the Chair election happened.
Neoliberals lost, the party of today is not the same party as 2 months ago, the chair is basically a dictatorship with all the power and zero accountability
Guess we’ll see. The only thing I’ve seen Dems (as a party) do in the past month is roll over and show their belly.
You’re talking about elected politicians.
That is not the DNC.
Party leadership isn’t the DNC.
For the past 30 years they’ve been intertwined, because we kept getting neoliberal chairs and the party leaders are neoliberals. And they worked together to prevent progressives from gaining ground.
Ken Martin wasn’t born yesterday, you can look at Minnesota and what they did under his leadership as state chair, and the type of politicians who got to office with his help.
He’s not perfect, but he won’t stand in the way of progress, and that’s all we need to get a non-neoliberal to the general in 2028.
Time for the neoliberal world order to end
Monkey’s paw curls
We now have a fascist world order.
I mean the “neoliberal world order” was just facism abroad.
…which is the true goal of these “hello there, fellow leftist” bastards who exclusively attack Democrats.
If they occupy the only space to defeat Trump and they do a bad job at it, of course they get “attacked.”
If they don’t want to be criticized, they shouldn’t be public figures. If they don’t want to have people have actual reasons to call them out, they shouldn’t have and keep unpopular policies. If they don’t want to represent their people, they shouldn’t be in office.
I think it’s the true goal of these “actually Joe Biden is great and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise” bastards who exclusively attack leftists. Thinly veiled reverse psychology designed to piss people off into not voting or voting third party.
I’ll never get how they think critizing Democrats is a personal attack on them. I’ve never considered it despite being registered Dem for 99% of my time as a voter.
Agreed.
The democrat dinosaurs will panic, telling us the large donations will dry up, without which a campaign cannot be won.
Then we need to remind them that they’re not doing a whole lot of winning at the moment.
If I want a paycheck I have to do my job, if I don’t do my job I won’t get paid.
If they want donations they’re going to have to earn with with actions, not plans or promises.I mean, they are doing their job. It’s just that their job is to keep the left down, not to win.
Far out
Sounds great. But maybe you should get out of your bubble every now and then to realize that a party full of open socialists would 100% fail in the US.
I am aware of how popular Bernie’s policy goals are. It does not matter.
You might be right, but I also submit that, when talking to Trump voters (older family members of me and my friends mostly), instead of “proving them wrong” about Trump, I’ve been redirecting the conversation toward “isn’t all that bad stuff the fault of rich people?”, and it has had a 100% success rate so far. They fucking hate the wealthy too. They ain’t waving the red flag, but I bet a lot more of them would vote for someone just to screw over the rich than most people think.
Lately my emotions have tended toward anger at the apathetic middle, not the cartoon villains of the Penguin Administration.
I know it’s a minority view but I blame all this on the nice normal people that thought they had better things to do than pay attention to politics.
If you do not see the need for aggressive responses to lawlessness, you let this happen and I find you boring.
This is what Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is about. A book about the rise of fascism in the US written in 1935.
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can’t pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your “meaning” is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
To be fair to some of those people, they’re not all being unintentionally malicious. I used to call myself a centrist but that was in the transition phase between “conservative because everyone I know is” and “I have formed my own beliefs”. For most people that’s what the process of developing their opinions looks like. You don’t swing right from one extreme to the other. You take baby steps along the way. You start to see the cracks in what people around you are saying but you still mostly hear exaggerated caricatures of what the alternatives are so you’re sort of stuck in the middle because you don’t know where else it’s even possible to go.
Centrists are scum, but the truly disengaged “oh I don’t care about politics” people are much worse imo.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
Current events are proof that your preconditions needed for compromise to work do not exist in the real world.
That’s because the democrats refuse to move left and don’t have a backbone.
“my centrism isn’t a problem, it’s DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered”
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren’t wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that’s just me.
You missed the part about ethics. The compromise between murdering and not murdering minorities is to not murder minorities.
That is the dictionary definition of ‘not a compromise’.
The Democrats can’t have a backbone. They are owned by oligarch interests. Asking the Democrats to save you is asking a shark to stop another shark from eating you. They are rotten to the core.
If the democrats won’t do it, then a leftist party is required
Exactly. The Democrats are incapable of being the change we need.
To be fair, they kind of did exist for like… at least ~60 years. Many of us are old enough to remember what life in the 90s was like.
Dude, no. The 90s were better than now because the ball was closer to the top of the hill and hadn’t been rolling back down as long. The strong worker protections, economic regulations, and tax policy that built the middle class during the 50s and 60s started to be dismantled in the 70s because of compromising with economic extremists. They started blaming everything that made a strong middle class possible for high inflation and have been doing it for every economic woe since.
On the other end, the only reason many of those laws were able to be passed in the first place is because FDR and company dragged us there over the objections of the same group.
The best times this country has had economically were never because the neoliberals and their predecessors back through the robber barons were less extreme and more reasonable, but because we had politicians who were up to the task of kicking the shit out of them and overcoming their influence.
I would say the last time they existed was the 1970s when Nixon agreed to create an EPA he really didn’t want to that had fewer powers than its supporters really wanted. The 90s only seemed smooth because scumbag Clinton gave Republicans everything they wanted on welfare reform, criminal justice, telecom deregulation, intellectual property laws, and international trade.
And we still got Gingrich and the contract with America and Ken Starr and Sore Loserman for being so conciliatory
And erased the deficit. Plus the first real attempt at national healthcare.
I mean, there’s good and bad. We could have that or we could have all bad.
Until some of you start running and finding out what it means to win an election we default to whoever they’ve got queued up.
It’s never been perfect, and far from ideal, but it worked. Compare that to whatever the fuck it is we’re experiencing now, and it looks like a goddamn utopia.
I mean, what is the compromise here exactly? Don’t deport all the children with cancer? Only shut down half of the department of education?
Did you not read the ethics part? The ethical compromise between fuck over DoE and not fuck over DoE is not fuck over DoE. Democrats should be moving left
Sorry, I misread your comment.
If “did not vote” was a candidate, it would have won every presidential election in modern history.
I have plenty of anger for both groups.
All that is needed for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing.
On an article talking about how Dems failed voters…
There’s always going to be someone blaming voters and saying asking for representation is undemocratic…
If it’s minority, then I’m right next to you and will gladly stay mad at the 40% that gave fuck all about this election. I fucking hate each one of them. I’ve never hated abstract people before, but in my 54 years, I’ve never been utterly ashamed and sad to be an American.
Democrats hit 27% approval this week…
That’s ironically the level Schumer said Dems would start doing stuff when Trump hit.
No one likes neoliberals, or their policies
It’s just not an effective political strategy, regardless of how you try to look at it. Even ignoring popularity with voters, even when neoliberals get elected, they refuse to do anything.
The entire purpose of it is doing nothing, it’s political nihilism.
No one likes neoliberals
51% of voters consistently vote for Democrats.
Barack fucking OBAMA was a neoliberal.
If you think neolibs are unpopular, you’re in quite a bubble.
Global warming is crushing it right now. Does that make it popular? Tf?
Ocasio-Cortez, at an event in Las Vegas, Nevada, said Trump has “handed the keys to Elon Musk and is selling this country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback.” But she also had sharp words for her own party.
“We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us too,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But what that means is that we as a community must choose and vote for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class.”
Leftists:
So they’ll support the working class now, right?
…Right?
So if I there’s nobody on the ballot who I think will fight for working people I don’t need to vote for them?
No no, you must always vote against your interests, even if the person closest to your values doesn’t like you or your wants for a better future.
No, you need to run
“My plan is to eliminate jobs. People have better things to do” is not a winning message, but it’s the only one I believe in.
Voters have had enough.
