and I want to be clear - this means no aid to Ukraine either. We are broke as it is.
When the lefists replace the establishment by voting in the primaries.
That’s it. That’s all we have to do. You know why Bernie never got a Presidtial nomination? Because most primary voters didn’t support him. Know why Mandami won in New York? Because the primary voters supported him.
It’s not fucking witchcraft. People need to show up to vote in the primaries instead of just bitching about the candidates in November. That’s how you move the party left.
The fascists figured this out and it’s how they’ve completely taken over the Republican party. We need to do the same thing on the left.
You know why Bernie never got a Presidtial nomination? Because most primary voters didn’t support him.
Right, it had nothing to do with the DNC openly rigging primaries against him and then arguing in court that they were within their right to do so. It’s never the system, always the individuals!
The fascists figured this out and it’s how they’ve completely taken over the Republican party. We need to do the same thing on the left.
The elites which run this country permitted the fascist takeover of the GOP because fascism is not contrary to, and can even be beneficial for, capitalist interests - at least up to a point.
Leftist politics are inherently anticapitalist. The elites will not allow it as long as they’re alive.
Why are you going around shitting on everyone encouraging voting? Voting is the bare minimum first step to participating in politics.
You want to try organizing a bunch of people who don’t even bother voting into action? Good luck with that.
I’m shitting on the framing of “voting is the thing you do to take our country back” when that has failed since…
always. You get progress from fighting elected leaders, almost never from just electing them.
I vote and encourage others to do so too. But I vote because it’s easy and can help the actual struggle a little, not because it will save me.
I wasn’t sure about your intention initially. Fair enough, thanks
The article you linked is about a lawsuit that went nowhere because there’s no obligation for the establishment not to prefer one candidate over another.
And they didn’t rig shit. Establishment candidates who had no chance of winning dropped out, and their supporters supported Clinton over Bernie because they preferred the establishment over Bernie.
People make a big deal over how the superdelegates stole the election from Bernie, but they didn’t. He was behind in the primaries when it reached the convention, and the outrageous thing for the superdelegates would have been to overturn the majority of primary voters and give the nomination to Bernie.
And they didn’t rig shit.
From the article: “a DNC lawyer said openly that if the party wanted to do things like the old days and pick a candidate over cigars in back rooms, it would be within their legal rights to do so”
Or from this article:
"Documents released by WikiLeaks in July 2016 showed that Schultz had acted as an agent of the Hillary Clinton campaign, colluding with Clinton as early as 2014 to set up the schedule of debates and primaries to assist her campaign. For example, given her frontrunner status, with no “major” challengers on the horizon until the surprise of Sanders, Clinton wanted few debates and a primary schedule that would allow her to clinch the nomination early.
In the final month of the contest, DNC officials leaned heavily on the Sanders campaign, seeking to pressure him into conceding the nomination, long before Clinton had collected the required majority. DNC vice-chairman Donna Brazile also assisted the Clinton campaign by leaking debate questions ahead of time."
But you believe whatever helps you sleep at night, Blue MAGA. I’m never voting Democrat again regardless of what someone on Lemmy tells me to do lol. They couldn’t stand up against genocide, one of the greatest crimes against humanity, so they’ll certainly never stand up to anything less horrific.
They said they had the legal right to ignore the primary votes and make clalbackroom deals. And they might have done that, but they didn’t even have to because the primary voters, who were not in any backroom conferences, voted for Clinton.
The DNC probably would have tried to tank his nomination, but they didn’t have to because the people voting in the primaries voted against him.
That’s it. That’s all that happened. Everything they may have hypothetically chosen to do had he won the primaries didn’t matter, which is why the case against the DNC went nowhere.
When Mandami won the NYC primary a lot of the party establishment was pissed and didn’t back him, but he still was their candidate and he won in the general because even the butcher establishment voters still voted “D” because they knew it was more important to support a candidate they weren’t in love with over the fascist Republicans.
That’s a lesson the leftists need to learn. When their guy was nominated, the Democratic voters who voted against him in the primaries still showed up to the main event. If the butthurt leftists who don’t get a perfect candidate would just have done the same we wouldn’t have had a single Republican President this century unless the GOP chose to ratchet to the left.
By refusing to vote Democrat when an establishment candidategets nominated, the leftists are the cause of the rightward ratchet.
Mayoral politics are not federal politics, much less presidential election politics.
Still not voting for your preferred genocidal party :(
Every time the Republicans commit an attrocity, people like you are the reason. You should be losing sleep over it, but you won’t because of 1 of 2 reasons:
You’re a fucking idiot who allows himself to be manipulated by the right to keep people from voting against them, or you’re one of the manipultors.
I think that’s because of their capitalist and Zionazi owners, actually.
I don’t vote for people on the right - including Democrats.
Leftist politics are inherently anticapitalist. The elites will not allow it as long as they’re alive.
It’s not the elite who are against anticapitalism.
…Yes it is?
Oh, this is Work Reform. Sorry for barging in, comrades. I have no idea why I haven’t blocked this one yet.
Bye lib!
There’s no lobbyist money in any of that. Do you expect your politicians to be poor just like you?
Short answer is no. Democrats are equally beholden to AIPAC (Israeli) and corporate interests . Until you reverse the United Citizens supreme court case, you americans will continue to be controlled by the billionaires and Israelis.
This primary is proving the opposite. Progressive dems are winning by campaigning on being against AIPAC.
but Democrat “corporate centre” is against these progressives so my answer is still no.
The point is we can replace them.
About the only hope I have left right now.
Was just discussing this with a friend. Establishment Dems are moving center (80s right) and refusing to pursue progressive ideas because they want to court the trump voter. Fuck them all.
FYI, those people lost control of the DNC in 2024.
The real test will be whether they actually deliver anything - particularly on ending aid to ISRAEL, not, as Bernie Lib-Zio Sanders would say, “the Netanyahu government”. My expectation for the genocide in Palestine is that empire would ultimately set up Netanyahu as their fall guy.
As we all know, US politics wasn’t controlled by oligarchs before Citizens United.
Of course it was, but it was MUCH more difficult for them. It is disingenuous to pretend that Citizens United didn’t exacerbate an already bad situation.
In reality, there were two historical moments that changed the timeline: 1) RFK’s assassination, which allowed Nixon to become president and took us down the Dark Republican path that led to MAGA, and 2) The 1974 Tax Code re-write, that first baked Trickle Down Economics into the tax code, created the Oligarch class, and gave them the disposable money to fund political manipulation.
“…RFK’s assassination,”
If only that was true. Typos are disappointing. 😭
Robert F Kennedy Sr., brother of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Sr… He was expected to be the next president after JFK, then later he was seen as likely to be the next president after Lyndon B. Johnson. He was assassinated during the democratic primaries, in which he was the primary anti Vietnam war/pro civil rights candidate.
Johnson remains the last president to oversee major expansion of infrastructure and welfare. Biden tried for the infrastructure, but it was largely repairing as opposed to Johnson doing The Great Society which included everything from the civil rights act and extending constitutional protections to native reservations to Medicare and Medicaid to funding metro rail in several major cities and so much more. Kennedy likely would have continued down this path but with much less killing south east Asians
Noted. Mind, I still would have liked that bullet to travel through time and space into one of our era’s problems.
Rutherford B. Hayes believed the US was a corporatocracy.
Larry Lessig has been arguing since before the internet that the ownership class (including corporations and their lobbyists) get their legislature passed where the public does not. Representatives do not change how they vote according to the demands of the voters.
Reagan opened up Washington to lobbies and special interest groups. Before that, paying off your representative to pass legislation (or block it) was considered bribery and was an imprisonable offense.
So by Citizens United the federal and state governments were intrinsically corrupt.
What the citizens united decision did was open the door to unfettered foreign influence. The local oligarchs at least had to pretend not to hate people so it wouldn’t effect their quarterly earnings. Now anyone can own a piece of our government anonymously.
This is why Election Reform, with the objective of taking money out of politics, is essential. Right now, it takes massive money to win a campaign, so politicians have no choice but to beg for more, and make promises in exchange. That leaves the workers on the outside.
But if money is taken out completely, everyone becomes electorally equal, and the only election currency is every American Citizen’s single vote. That makes the rich guy’s vote no more powerful than anyone else’s, and politicians will be forced to work for the people who have the most votes, and the wealthy will be the smallest voting demographic, whose needs are less important to candidates.
It certainly made it easier, though.
But you have hit upon the problem: We have an oligarch problem primarily. Way more than we have a party problem. Or rather, solving the billionaire problem would be the necessary first step before we are able to solve the party problem. We have many other problems like fascist propaganda, which also need fixing. We’re pretty fucked. But overturning Citizens United will certainly help. Not solve. Help.
What we had before Citizens United is what lead to Citizens United. Unless we overturn the structures that made the Citizen’s United decision possible, we don’t fix anything.
We need a second Reconstruction.
Honestly, I think this is overblown at this point. We’re seeing now that giant ad budgets, while helpful, are not some silver bullet. El-Sayed was massively outspent by Stevens.
What people miss is that there is a certain saturation point for ad dollars. The parties love to spend as much money as possible, as the consultant class takes a cut of everything. But we’re seeing now that mass TV ad spend just isn’t what it used to be. You can persuade some people that way, but once everyone knows your name and general message, each dollar you spend is less and less effective.
The point is that in these big races, we can probably get 90% of the effect with 20% of the budget. This allows candidates to fund their campaigns mostly with small-dollar donations. You only need to take oligarch money if you want to have the massive ad spend.
And taking oligarch money has electoral consequences. We can’t run populist left candidates. We have to run extremely unpopular centrist corporate candidates. They have to carefully choose all their policies to not offend their wealthy donors. The only hope this type of candidate has is through massive ad spending. But if we simply run more popular candidates, the need for ads is low enough that campaigns can be funded by small dollar donors and mass boots-on-the-ground voter outreach. Unpopular candidates also have trouble getting people passionate enough to volunteer their time for the ground game.
My estimate is that the delivering party is going through a similar crisis as the republican party had with the tea party. The republican party ended up absorbing the tea party which led to a further shift to the right.
In a similar vein the DSA is becoming a significant power within the democratic party and even AIPAC money isn’t saving the establishment. The old guard is losing the fight and I imagine in a desperate attempt to cling to power some of them will take some of the DSA positions. I’m sure they’ll try to keep AIPAC funding but I hope people find it such a divisive point that it becomes untenable.
Looking at the polling, that’s also what a large contingent of Republicans are saying.
That’s what most Americans are saying. The biggest voting block in America is independents. Yet we stupidly keep lettings the elites in the margins have all the air in every room so they can pretend-fight over invented talking points as a distraction so we can’t stop them taking our time/money/resources.
Top of the list should be prosecuting the fascists and plugging the holes in the legal system that have allowed this country to get into the state it’s in. Without that nothing else matters because the next administration will just rip it all out again.
The issue is, we aren’t broke. Not even close
Our debt has crossed 100% of the gdp and our budgets are unbalanced to the tune of 2 Trillion dollars. We are paying more to finance the debt than we are paying for the military which costs more than 10 next militaries combined.
And there are absolutely no one proposing solutions.
Oh and the future economic outlook is nowhere near to what it was at the end of the ww2 when us was the last one standing and all future metrics are pointing down as China beating us in our own game. Just wait till they get chips too and comac releases cheap competitor to boeing.People who think we aren’t broke are delusional
You’re funny. You think any of that matters when it’s the government. It they were actually wanting to pay that debt off it could be paid extremely fast.
Lmao what? No, it couldn’t. Do you think the government can just print money and all the other world governments will say “hmm okay sounds good guys”?
And yet we can afford $T tax cuts for the wealthy.
Or I know, maybe there’s a cause and effect here
Uh, yeah we fucking are. The entire country operates at a loss, to other countries, to enormous corporations, to billionaires, and a trillionaire.
But no aid to Ukraine means Europe, your biggest trade partner will be in danger, hence your economy will suffer and you’ll become more broke… There’s a reason why we have the ICC and why we have foreign aid, cause ww1 and ww2 taught us that peace is way more lucrative then getting sucked into a war… So idk foreign aid makes everyone richer imo
Uhm, the USA doesn’t recognize the ICC
and they should sign the Rome institute like 125 other countries in the world did
cause ww1 and ww2 taught us that peace is way more lucrative then getting sucked into a war
LMAO
Is that really the lesson you think America learned after WWII? Is that why they’ve been constantly starting illegal wars of aggression across the planet for 80 years?
I think americans education lacks desperately yeah but after a bad enough war they’ll maybe finally see why we need international rules. Why would anyone not sign it, do they want to be able to make rules that justify crimes against humanity or war crimes? Unless you’re doing shady stuff. And the lobbying of rich companies that want to keep resources poor, so maybe we should start with taxing big companies way more then and limiting the sum amount of assets someone can have, say 1M-10M. Cause the lobbying for human rights and average people seems nonexistent
do they want to be able to make rules that justify crimes against humanity or war crimes?
That is literally America’s MO, yes. They have laws which state if any international Justice system tries to hold an American accountable, they have to invade and go to war. The Hague invasion act.
Exactlyyy. The Hague invasion act is used when the ICC wants to investigate war crimes by america’s army (or israelians army). So america will go as far as to attack a country as soon as they want to investigate what happened somewhere … the ICC just went after Trumps government for sanctioning the ICC, aka international law. Bruh how obvious corrupt do they want to be… Trump for prison asap
America for balkanization. Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Death to America.
Should be MediCAID for all.
I’d settle for proper universal healthcare no matter the name. Medicare for all is not the ideal. I’ll take what we can get though.
Why? Just curious, because I thought the idea was having both systems consolidated under medicare. What’s the tangible distinction?
Medicare has been thoroughly fucked with and partially privatized. Medicaid on the other hand is no copay (even on prescriptions), free at point of use, and still privatized, but less so.
Fundamentally what we actually need is a “federal health insurance corporation” which receives full funding from the federal government to provide single payer health insurance to all citizens and to interface with insurers and payers for healthcare of visitors. Something more akin to the NHS but independent enough that politicians can make them cover something, but can’t make them not cover it. Currently we just really don’t have anything like that. Though Washington, Colorado, and Nevada do have public option health insurers now.
What we really need is for taxes to pay for everything health care related. If anyone is found to be making profit beyond their basic salary, they can be fed feet-first into a woodchipper. If anyone wants to start playing ticky-tack games with what should be covered or not, they too can be fed to the woodchipper.
Not sure, but I think Medicaid pays for more than medicare does. My retired parents still have copays for stuff.
I could be wrong, but I think your Medicare benefits are still somehow tied to your previous employer. My friend’s dad likes to brag about how he paid into some special program that now he has $0 copays, but only if he gets his care at a hospital. As a result, he goes to the ER for everything because he gets free healthcare that way.
And then he complains about welfare queens and homeless people not knowing how to handle money, and that young people don’t want to work and that’s why social security is collapsing.
Whether you start with Medicare or Medicaid as the base, the end result is the same.
If course they won’t listen. If the last forty years have proven anything, it’s that the Democratic Party will never in a million years choose its base over its donors.
The Democratic Party is where progressive movements go to die. DSA can get some stuff done at the local level, and that’s genuinely a good thing, but the DNC is beyond reform.
The Democratic Party is where progressive movements are captured and murdered, or at least neutered. It’s the party’s main function. That’s why they’re fine with throwing an election to Trump and fundraising from the minority for a few years, their donors reward them either way as long as they stop those meddling kids.
What it our citizens were united? Could that help?
Added punctuation to make it appeal to centrist Democrats:
Medicare for All? No. Aid to Isreal! Healthcare over. War!
Sure, this might be what the voters are saying. Hell, it’s what some of the elected officials are saying too, but what they say and what they do are two very different things.
Nothing will change until we get money out of politics and neither party is willing to have the discussion, much less act on it.
Were the only major power without heath care for all, doesn’t make sense. Unless it would suppress wages and or make lots of job loss I’m all for it. I guess the questions, what happens to HSA’s and FSA’s. I have a few thousand in an HSA I’d like not to lose
I really suggest everyone listen to Jon Stewart’s interview with John Fetterman. Fetterman demonstrates what is the rough draft on how establishment Dems will talk about these policies and the people supporting them. It’s not pretty.
Here’s my breakdown after listening to a lot of analyses.
Establishment (centrist) Democrats really would rather be rich than serve the public. Seriously. If they just pass the clauses written for them by corporate lobbyists, they not only get campaign contributions and dark money, but a cushy high-paying job after their political career ends, and they get to join the ownership class. (Thank Reagan for allowing all this to become legal.)
The superdelegates in the Democratic Party are all old guard establishment Democrats.
Also Blue Dog Democrats argue that the Republicans will assert some of the more extreme ideas that the SDA are considering (e.g. abolish police, abolish prisons) which will scare their voters away. The thing is, if their voters are engaged with the far-right propaganda machine (e.g. FOX News) and are dim enough to take Republican talking points seriously, then they’re not going to vote blue anyway. They need to vote red to prove their manhood, own the libs, lock immigrants in torture cages and deny gender affirming care to trans folk.
Harris made this mistake (among many) during her 2024 campaign, trying to get never-Trumpers and Liz Cheney Republicans. All those are still too racist and detest working class folk to dare vote Democrat.
Regular Democratic voters want a platform, things like universal healthcare, a jobs guarantee, higher education for all, support for Palestine (and no support for IDF), immediate action on the climate crisis. A platform draws more apathetic Democratic voters to the polls.
Independents want a better economy, and if they’re not racist then they vote against the incumbent when inflation is high and jobs are down. Right now, inflation is high and jobs are down. (If they are too racist they’re IINOs and actually Republican – some Rs like to pretend they’re independent if they’re ashamed and in mixed company.)
Blue-no-matter-who Democrats see the Republican party and the MAGA movement as an existential threat to the United States, specifically to democracy as an institution (lower case) and the preservation of civil rights. They fight their platform battles during the primaries, and then vote against Republicans (that is, for the non-Republican everyone else is voting for – usually the Democratic candidate, but not always).
To BNMW Democrats, the immediate issues are overhaul of SCOTUS (more than merely adding new bench seats and term limits) and federal restoration of free and fair elections (eliminating gerrymandering, voter suppression and top-down election fraud). Until these things happen, the Republican party, and the captured SCOTUS will continue to be an existential threat. As Larry Lessig points out, we’ve been kicking this can down the road for a long, long time, and now we’re paying the price.
~ We know independents and non-voters outnumber both Democrats and Republicans
~ We know MAGAs are getting dissatisfied, between inflation, the war and the Epstein files. But MAGAs are easy to manipulate
~ We don’t know how big each of these factions are, nor how determined they are to vote. There are local trends. I’m BNMW and know several, but I am afraid we’re actually a tiny bunch.
~ We know that whites in the south are (generally) staunchly Republican
~ We know blacks nationwide (generally) vote Democrat. Especially black women
~ We know municipal areas vote Democrat, and because they’re dense, they win popular elections (they dominate Governor and US Senate races)
~ We know rural areas vote Republican, and they get a boost from the EC. They’re also useful for gerrymandering
~ We know the VRA is gutted and the southern states acted quickly to gerrymander and otherwise suppress the black vote. That will affect House seats and state assembly seats, also the race for President in 2028
~ We know that billionaires are investing hundreds of millions (that’s huge) in key elections to push them red. In 2024 Musk’s $250M contribution made a critical difference for Trump. In elections since, campaign money has helped less.We expect the Democrats will take the House in November, but they will only get fifty Senate seats, leaving the majority to the Republicans. This will inhibit saving Social Security, and allow Trump to confirm bench appointments (including SCOTUS seats if Thomas or Alito retire). If Mitch McConnell remains undead (and still not voting) that will make things interesting… but hopefully the public is pissed off enough to give the Democrats that key one-more Senator.
Excellent analysis, which I agree with, for the most part. I’m an Unaffiliated Independent, but for your purposes, I mostly fit into your BNMW category, including the SCOTUS expansion, and splitting with Israel, which are serious requirements for a future democratic America.
While you are 100% correct that the Dems finally need to give voice to an actual platform, and not just “At least we’re better than those guys!”
But IF the Dems give us a platform we can support, the next wave of Dems politicians will first have to fight a political WAR before we can ever even consider any of those Democratic initiatives that we’ve taken years to convince them to accept. As long as MAGA continues to exist, they will thwart 90% of Democratic initiatives, and later they’ll roll back the 10%, the first chance they get.
MAGA has to be stopped, crushed, and purged from our government and society. It would be great to finally get the DNC to support a real Democratic platform, but it’s useless if we have a literal Domestic Terrorist Organization running around fucking up EVERYTHING. The Biden administration tried to pretend they were just Republican business as usual, and they got savaged for four straight years, and then stole the 2024 election. MAGA will not be ignored.
I want all those wonderful things on the Lefty Wishlist, and I believe they are absolutely possible, with proper economic and tax policies, but we will NEVER get the opportunity to address them until MAGA Treason has been decisively dealt with.
And I believe that the Midterm election is going to be a bloodbath like we’ve never seen before, and seats are going to flip that nobody thinks are in contention, including the Senate. I think the Dems may win the Senate by a seat or two, but there will be several surprise flips in the House. All the gerrymandering won’t save them, it will only mean that it would have been even worse for MAGA without it.
The Dems will come out of the Midterms able to do almost anything they want, and we have to make sure they follow US, not the other way around. They’ve demonstrated they can’t be trusted to lead properly, or at all, so we’ll have to take the responsibility from them, and make them work for US.
IN 2028, the ONLY winning combInation will be a candidate who enthusiastically commits to crushing MAGA, with a TRANSFORMATIVE platform to pursue after they’ve handled the MAGA business.
If the house goes how you suspect gerrymandering will backfire. Pack and Crack gerrymandering like republicans have been doing is the art of building as many pretty safe seats for your party as you can then attempting to shove the rest into as few as possible extremely safe seats for your opponents (if you can ensure none of your voters are in those districts you do it). It’s finangling safety of seats vs number of seats, and republicans seem to be leveraging themselves a bit heavily at the moment.
If it’s a bloodshed election, the gerrymandering will be most analogous to a dam that’s bursting. What it had been holding back it’s now providing an excess in its failure.
