I agree, having that and high taxes on the wealthy were part of the reason the US had such high levels of prosperity for the average citizen back in the olden days. The whole country should be getting connected via high speed rails, I feel. It would open up jobs for people living in more rural areas as well.

The fix is multifaceted I feel, everything you said is spot on for the issues.

I feel a fix requires Universal Basic Income and Housing, along with mental health support. A minimum level of support would at least help a lot of these people to be able to get off the ground or at least live with a modicum of dignity.

Universal Healthcare would help at least with health issues that people out on the streets face.

They chased the money and they lost. Trump had less funding and he won. Aren’t you interested in asking why?

Functionally that was their gamble. Chasing money is a current issue of our system where money and land matter more than people, power-wise.

Trump specifically had more direct funding than Harris since money was also being spent trying to pick up close Senate seats. I don’t think this includes all of the tactics that went in to drive the vote for Republicans such as Elon’s personal PAC, paying people to register to vote, gerrymandering efforts, added barriers for mail-in ballots, or even the fact that people were allowed to legally gamble on the election.

Another question. If it is possible to win with less funding, why do you consider it a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation?

There was lots of specific issues that factored in, but Democrats being beholden to not pissing off the Israel PACs was a big issue. Some of the same PACs that make very misleading ads against politicians that didn’t say they were specifically pro-Israel. Ads so misleading that you question how it’s legal to make those kinds of claims. And PACs so organized that they can tell their donors who to send their donations to directly and their donors listen repeatedly.

I think it is possible to be a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” if you’re at risk of losing a large enough percentage of voters with either choice you make. I think they could’ve done better if Biden stepped in a year before and demanded America lead operations/prevented Israel from attacking indiscriminately and land grabbing. Well that and if many of the greedy politicians didn’t look at this as an excuse to make an arms deal.

I think they were damned for letting Biden dictate Harris’ Israel/Palestine opinion. Harris wasn’t going to follow in Biden’s footsteps in Israel, so she should have made it clear how she was going to get a resolution brought forward.

In hindsight it should be easy to see that they were only damned for what they did (backed a genocide), and would not have been otherwise. Too many people can’t get past their bitterness towards abstainers to consider how this outcome was an unforced error on the part of the DNC, and are seemingly content to repeat the same mistake.

Personally, I don’t blame abstainers, I blame the propagandists that preyed upon people. Many of the Democratic and Republican politicians are owned by money. It’s the reason these corporate Democratic leaders are not backing Mamdani, since he’s both progressive and not lock-step pro-Israel. The corporate Dems and Republicans specifically are the ones at risk of their funding/seats to another corporate politician if they were not condemning Mamdani.

All this to say, change needs to happen from both within the Democratic Party and outside of it as well, such as by changing the voting system locally to get more politicians like Mamdani.

Imo it was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for Democrats; which is exactly what Republicans, Israel, and bad actors crafted the situation to be.

If the public stance was not Democrats being 100% for Israel, then they believed they would have lost the election because of the political PACs and donors flipping to fund the opposition.

Given how much money the lobbies that were pro-Israel were pushing into the campaign trail, any candidate that didn’t take that stance in a close election was for sure at risk of losing their donor vote.

I still think Democrats should have done more, such as saying they would fully step into the situation to prevent the loss of more lives for both Palestinians and Israelis. It also didn’t help that Biden was pro-Israel and expected Kamala to be lock-step with his stances while on the campaign trail.

I agree that we should be doing multiple things at the same time here.

I’m in favor of championing leftists and progressives and pushing back against Dems that are acting in their own self interest. For sure the corporate owned Dems and Republicans that are propping up arms for Israel need to go and for those wanting to throw minorities under the bus.

It sounds like the backlash is at least working and making its way to him. The California capital started flying the trans flag a few days ago.

Reddit Link (Yuck Reddit though)

The voting system needs to change.

As soon as elections stop being just one vote per individual we can actually vote our conscience. New York City has Ranked Choice voting, so does Alaska and Maine. Ideally having STAR, Ranked Robin, or Score voting would be best as the first two are better versions of Ranked Choice voting.

Incrementalism is what sorta helps to get us out as well. By that I mean changing the voting systems like New York City did which helps make it easier to get more leftist candidates in office.

Changing the DNC requires the majority of new voters to continue being left/progressive on issues and could take another decade.

Changing the voting system in our cities and states is the best chance to pull politics left and to actually allow third parties to take root. The last thing we want really is for the spoiler effect to happen, where our preferred candidate(s) and safe candidate lose to the least preferred candidate.

All the more reason to pass STAR or Ranked Robin voting, improved versions of RCV, once he’s out of the governor’s office.

Newsom specifically would never would have won reelection for the governor’s race under ranked choice voting.

Marxism itself wasn’t necessarily tainted, but his ideas of socialism and communism definitely had a social stain associated with them. So by association it had a black mark.

I think it’s pretty clear that we haven’t seen it for what it was supposed to be, when it was weaponized by authoritarians and then attacked by capitalists. It’s supposed to be a grand thing of the people coming together, not stained in blood.

I think you may have misread what I said there about the reformist part. His ideas were revolutionary for the time, but many of the ideas could be applied by reformist.

I think his ideas can reform a capitalist system. It’s probably one of many ways his ideas get off the ground. The big thing was changing the system, it’s not necessarily all about how you get there.

What do you mean? A reformed and reforged system is a new system.

I could give you a multi-hour long breakdown of my views but something tells you’re not interested in a long-form dialogue here.

I think you’re spot on, Marx specifically has a lot of connotations the general, uninformed public is terrified of.

I remember when I had to read it for a class the first time and the vibes in the room was exactly like you’re opening some of book of sin. I was scared of a book, as a college student at the time. Then we actually started reading it, and it was like “wow this guy gets the issues of the system”.

While I personally have agreements and some disagreements with Marx, I think he helped give me a lot of solid ideas that the system itself could be reformed and reforged.

I think it’s a shame that his ideas had carried a public taint to them for so long, due to several authoritarians co-opting his message. I have no clue why it’s not required high school reading at this point, since I feel it’d go a long ways towards helping more people get curious about improving and changing the system for the better.

I think you’re right to be wary on waiting for time alone to save us. I think implementing ranked choice style of voting matters to prevent slipping further. Furthermore, pivoting to make blue states actually more progressive is what we need to do.

I believe blue states have held back on doing more because the belief was that we needed to pass the reforms federally for funding purposes, but I believe now we need to do the opposite. We need to remove the debt limit for blue states, implement progressive reforms, and only then will other states want to follow our lead.

Each blue state should focus on implementing Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Universal Healthcare, free public colleges, and expanding public housing options. For instance, I think many private apartments could be bought by the government for at cost and turned into publicly owned apartments that are not rented out for a profit.

I’m talking about the electorate fam, the voters.

Demographic changes is the only thing going to change the Democratic Party. Either we wait another decade plus for the boomers and Gen Xers to hopefully not make up the majority, or we change the voting system away from First Past the Post. I’m strongly in favor of the later there since that is something we can do to get progressives in power this decade.

I will add that I would appreciate it if you gave me credit here. I’m trying to have a dialogue with you about this since these issues do affect all of us and I am personally trying to change things for the better through breaking down walls.

I mean let’s be real here, why are we treating the Dem politicians like some collective that always acts in one uniform way and are all powerful to enact change? The reality of the situation is there is a lot of nuance, there is real difficulties in trying to enact change. There are barriers to getting legislation passed. I don’t like the reality of the situation as much as you don’t, but that’s why I feel we need to change things for the better.

Do I think lots of current old guard neo-liberals sign checks to fund the military without blinking, if it lets them keep their cozy job, uncontested? No doubt. Are there real people working within the Democratic Party to bring positive change? Of course.

Let’s not kid ourselves with sweeping generalizations though that don’t take that hard look at the harsh reality. Bringing positive change federally looks objectively bleak, Red states hold a lot of power and the fact that left leaning people are leaving these states in droves just concentrates the power in these states.

My point is that the Democratic Party is changing, albeit slowly, by virtue of the electorate itself changing. If you want faster change, then we’ll need a new voting system in each state like Alaska and Maine have done. That’s how we get more progressives like Mamdani in power and third parties as well.

Teaching them about logical fallacies and how to spot them may be the best defense against these types of personalities imo. Many influencers that you’re concerned about try to prey upon these fallacies, so teaching your kids to spot them can help them to realize those people are full of shit.

Curating their content a bit to include more people you want them to be like can help as well, at least then they can have good people to look up to.

If your kids think you have their best interests in mind, I feel they’re less likely to push back and more likely to respect the boundaries you put down.

Agreed. That’s why Biden spent his time helping out his military friends, and bombing the shit out of innocent people, instead of helping American voters.

It’s unfortunate that that’s the society we live in where it’s incredibly easy to rubber stamp arms, but incredibly difficult to rubber stamp aid. The military budget alone is a red flag of sorts for where our priorities lie as a country. I mean, when we have the largest air force and the second largest air force then you know it’s pretty bad.

At the end of the day, Red States don’t want money going to aid, and Red States have a disproportionate amount of power in this country. If it was just Blue and Purple States voting on aid then it would have been passed. There’s a reason that Blue states have progressive programs within the states themselves, but Red states do not have those types of programs. If it was just up to Democrats then we would have more progressive programs in place already.

Agreed, and Biden’s bailouts were another prime example of the Democrats helping their rich friends too.

Is this in reference to the Silicon Valley Bank bailout or US/Israel funding?

They should have tried negotiating, but couldn’t be bothered to. They were busy helping out their friends. Biden also could have extended the covid relief, but chose not to.

Negotiating how though? It sounds like they tried again and again to get Sinema, Manchin, or the Republicans to agree to different stipulations but they were unsuccessful in getting to agree on several points. If they don’t have the votes, they don’t have the power to make those changes. Even if they had 51 votes on certain issues, the Republicans could Filibuster to stop them on specific issues. So there were two main issues stonewalling meaningful change from passing the Senate.

Except for all the ways that would have actually worked. He could have just sent out the money, like he did with Israel. But he slow-rolled it, and sent it to the Supreme Court so they could shoot it down, and he could look like the good guy, without actually doing anything

Biden sent out munitions which were already paid for is the thing, from my understanding. The President is not allowed to spend money unless told how it should be spent by Congress in funding bills. The fact that Trump is refusing to spend money how it was approved is blowing over 200+ years of rule following/checks and balances out of the water.

No, they had plenty of votes, but chose to pretend that they were powerless so that they didn’t have to do anything. Once again, it was clear that they could get shit done when it came to bombing kids, and helping out their rich friends, but couldn’t seem to muster up the energy when it came to the voters.

They had effectively 48 votes in the Senate from 2021-2024, that’s not enough to pass progressive legislation. I agree with you that there is broad agreement on support for munitions or for the military, but there is not broad support among the Republican legislators for more stimulus, aid, or progressive programs that help Americans. The fact that Republicans just passed a bill to take away funds for Medicaid should tell you everything you need to know about their platform and who has a majority in the House and Senate right now.

lolwut? The same party that campaigned with the Cheneys? that said they would keep bombing people oversees? That said they wanted more border controls, and are already backing down on support for LGBTQ+ people?

It’s becoming more progressive each year as more people become eligible to vote. The youth are generally much more progressive that the Baby Boomers or Gen Xers for instance. Both from a socially progressive perspective and from an economically progressive perspective. I’m not saying the people in Congress are more progressive overnight, but each election cycle we get a bit closer to people that vote and feel similar to AOC being in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Yes they did. They just didn’t care because it wasn’t what their donors wanted.

I mean it’s a bit of both, some of the politicians were personally benefiting and others were being paid not to care or change things. There’s more of a consensus these days among Democrats as a whole to push back against gerrymandering, possibly because it’s become a more well known issue that the voters care about.

Pew Research data shows that Xers voted much more conservatively than the other demographics. Even more so than Baby Boomers.

The data shows how they voted; Zoomers and Millennials were both majorities for Harris.

I bring this up because there is data to back this. Gen Xers were more conservative, and since they vote at a larger scale than Millennials and Zoomers we’re much more likely to be pulled into more conservative politics for another decade or two at the least.

I believe it is a cultural thing and a money thing. Exposure to things like unleaded gasoline, microplastics, and misinformation/propaganda at a grand scale likely hasn’t helped.

Culturally more people have been raised to be progressive than they have been in the past.

Money doesn’t leave politics unless we vote in enough ethical leaders to change the laws. That can be more likely under a different voting system throughout the country.

The class struggle requires new generations being pulled into the cause, but if older generations vote more conservatively and have a higher percentage share of the votes then we won’t be able to vote in anything to address or tackle the class struggle for possibly another decade. The more we fail to pass positive change, the more burned out some people get from the process as well.

Organizing, unionizing, and trying to change the voting system to use an alternative voting system are our best bets at the moment I feel.

The war mongers are the neo-liberals on both sides, since they usually have some huge benefits from their districts and from arms sales.

I feel I get that way when I’m out of practice for too long. These days, I just need a bit of coffee and I’m usually good to go with some light small talk lol.