Like:
People should be allowed to exist
Social programs aren’t communism
The system isn’t working for the people
Edit:
I’ve changed my mind on this.
Let the DNC go full MAGA and when they lose, because they will lose, they get the heat and we can eject them forever. At least sit them in a corner.
Progressives, you fight if you want but I don’t believe the elections will be fair so it’s a win win for you.
Apparently (according to some random comment on Reddit where this was posted) this was written by an organization called “Third Way”, that doesn’t actually have influence in the government or either political party
Look everyone! Words! in a meme! It has to be true! Get your pitchforks fellow leftists! The meme said we hunt tonight!
“I like money”
Everyone likes money.
“Ow my balls”
I do agree with the first point. Leftists need to take back the American flag. America used to stand for inclusion. Now it seems like American flags plastered means Maga.
Lol, America has never stood for inclusion. Every new demographic has faced extreme bigotry. People had to fight tooth and nail to be included. They literally had to amend our founding document several times because of it.
We should definitely try to be better, but let’s not pretend that the US wasn’t built on the bodies of people who wanted to be included.
Yeah, basically the only times the US flag was used by the ‘correct’ side of a conflict are the civil war, WWI and WWII. Everything else is basically genocides and imperialism.
Yes every demographic faced bigotry. But the ideal of America was that it’s not supposed to be that way.
So when did Anglo saxons face bigotry in America?
Well yeah, it’s the American Dream, and dreams aren’t real.
That’s because most people don’t have the will, grit or fortitude to work for better they may never see. It’s sad.
It’s unbelievable selfish short sightedness, isn’t it? It’s astounding to think about when you realize that these freaks think they’re doing what’s best because they’re so propagandized to think that worrying only about yourself and your closest relatives is what’s right and good, meanwhile the rest of us are trying to ensure there’s a world for the children of 160 years from now to inherit.
It doesn’t matter. There’s something to be said for doing what you honestly believe is the right thing, even if that means being alone.
Yeah I’m over trying to reclaim the American flag. It’s been entirely lost as a symbol and can never be redeemed.
Listen, you seem to be confused. The Democratic party isn’t there to protect your rights and pioneer progress. They’re aim is to win elections. If appealing to the right is what wins them elections then that’s what they’ll do. It worked for the Republicans so there’s no reason to believe it won’t help the Democrats win too. They’re not there for your benefit. They’re there for their benefit.
They were campaigning with a fucking Cheney
Ok but appealing to the right hasn’t won them any elections. The right hates their guts.
Have you considered they just need to go further right?
But seriously, I’ve been saying this for years now - the GOP is disintegrsting and Democrats are going to become the new right wing party after it dissolves, and something new will reform on the left
But they’re just sprinting right at this point. How long will it take for a new party to form? We have the will, at least I think we do, but we’re not ready yet.
We need a leftist party, I don’t want to pick between fascism and fascism-light for 2 election cycles as we get our shit together. We need to be ready
Their idea to win elections is to try to beat Republicans in a constituency that is already entrenched for Republicans. This plan is dumb as shit without even talking about ideological reasons to oppose it.
OP is right though: the Democrats and the Republicans are not like parties in every other democracy, i.e. expressions of specific political ideologies. They are institutional electoral machines, of an institutionally two-party state. They have their altered their ideological core before: prior to FDR the Democrats were basically just populist racists. They can easily alter their ideological core in the future as well. It just so happens that in the latest party system the Democrats have been the machine used by the American centre and centre left.
Edit: by OP I am referring to the comment I’m responding to, that is heavily downvoted.
That was definitely what I meant, perhaps I didn’t phrase it particularly well lol. My point was ultimately that Democrats arent much different from the Republicans in so much as they will front whatever they have to to gain and hold power. That’s not to say there aren’t democrats who truly believe in equality, equity and the rule of law, or insert any specific belief you like, just that you shouldn’t expect the party to support those values no matter what. If going maga is what gets democratic politicians into Congress and other positions of power then many of them will toe the line.
You shouldn’t hitch your cart to either political party and expect them to always follow your values. Vote into power the people who you believe will stand up for the values you believe in (unless those values are naziistic, racist, homophobic or fascistic, in which case please find the nearest ocean and work out how far you can swim)
The…dominance of small-dollar donors? I wish.
If the small donors are dominating… Why would you abandon them?
And how could small-dollar donors not represent the preferences of the broader electorate?
That’s what I keep trying to figure out
I suppose they count electorate in dollars, not people? Maybe they mean to say “broader capital interests”?
Because they’re not giving the bribes that the big donors give. Politicians expect a high paying effortless lobbying job as reward for selling out their country.
Fuck, if that were true we’d have just gotten done with 8 years of President Sanders 😥
move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors
“Only accept money from rich people.”
Why not? They’re easier to please! Agenda: change nothing.
They have a proven track record already!
Dominance from… People giving you money because they like you? People who can’t call you up to make or break your next election based on how you vote today?
Like even if you take it at face value and pretend it’s all above board… What the fuck could you possibly mean by that?
And at the same time “get out of elite circles”
Democrats are fucking twisted.
Hard to believe this is real. If Democrats were saying not to do anything, I’d believe that. This post couldn’t pour it on thicker
It’s not exactly “real” in the sense that lawmakers are doing this, it’s more “real” in the sense that a lobby group were lobbying at their lobbying office where they work as lobbyists.
It’s from “Third Way”.
I’m sure if they break right then those Republicans they’ve been chasing for the last 40 years will finally vote for them!
Just a bit further now… Soon they’ll be doing the “Roman” salutes too.
The rightwing coup within the DNC. Those staffers and consultants need to be blacklisted from politics. They have done nothing but drive the country into fascism.
It’s hard to even get upset knowing free and fair elections are a thing of the past.
Jesus does this country need to get off of the two party system. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is to get someone elected via the current system who’s willing buck the system that put them into power.
Not quite true. The two party system is an organic result of First Past The Post voting. Since voting is determined on the local level (as opposed to the federal level) it’ll be easier to change to Rank Choice and get somebody new elected that way.
Not “easy” mind you, but “easier”
This is the key component that the “vote third party” people keep missing.
“So it turns out veering gradually to the right just isn’t working for us, it’s probably the ‘far left’s’ fault”
I knew as a European that the US only had two right wing parties, with the democratic party sitting firmly to the right of most of our centrist parties here, but this is just fucking stupid.
The one thing that intrigues me is why nobody filled the actual left and far-left political vacuum in the US? The political axis is so skewed that people like AOC and Samders are considered far-left, even though in Europe they’d qualify as left-of-centre. There seems to be a huge empty space left of them, but I don’t see anyone taking advantage of it and dominate a good third of the political spectrum.
No organization. No trust. I used the words “we” in one post then got accused of being a narcissist. If a stoner can’t get stoned and speak for other stoners, how would we ever be anything other than stoners?
They did. They were kept off the ballot in swing states because Dems sued to do that. They were allowed in solidly red states though. At least mine.
First past the post, basically. Especially in modern times where geography really shouldn’t have as much weight as it does.
In most European countries a Green party gets somewhere between 5 and 20% of the vote, and at that stage they get representation in Parliament and possibly even get to participate in government. In the US they need to get 50% of the vote in a given area to get any type of office, no matter how minor (Mayor, school board, whatever).
So they can’t really build a grassroots to grow politicians for a national stage, and voters know that voting for them is basically the same as staying home.
Also, they need to get rid of Jill Stein, that picture of her sitting at the table with Putin and Mike Flynn isn’t going to go away and shows terrible judgement. You can be critical of US imperialism without hanging out with a different kind of imperialist.
Geography matters because people form identity groups within their geographic areas. People in rural areas have very different wants and needs than city folk. So it’s only natural for them to vote for different representatives.
Because the FBI was created with the explicit purpose of assassinating left wing politicians and activists in the US, and the CIA was founded for the same reason but abroad.
They murdered Fred Hampton
And a whole bunch of others.
Yep, we’re all on the same page. You should link a couple, we could’ve gotten a chain going.
Mlk2
This is the Ratchet effect in action. Democrats did not heed the warnings about extremist right-wing propaganda spreading like wildfire. They now assume the voter basis is inherently fascist, and race to appease them.
Democrats are equally to blame for things, like the modern racist slave trade that is the “corrections” system. This puts them with the camp of critical-race-theory enemies. Many of them are transphobic as-fuck, which also puts them (partly) in the anti-gender camp.
I did not cite genocide and war-crimes in the above paragraph, because so many of you have made clear you are fine with it.
Centrists have made it clear, time and again, that they value middle-of-the-road fallacy above human lives, and they are willing to put those lives on the line to reifytheir trolley problem fetish. The centrist is someone who will literally say to Hitler “I will defend to the death your right to express your hate” and at the same time say to the trans woman “I will have to reduce your freedom of expression, because it is unpopular with my voter base, and we risk devolving into fascism”.
This is how we got here. These mfers come every 4 years begging for leftist and anarchist votes, because the alternative is fascism. But they were themselves fascist the whole time, only with a broader social support. Now they lose that broader social support because 10 years of relentless, ludicrously funded propaganda have shifted the discussion 100 years back, they now bend over backwards to earn that social support again. This in unscrupulous.
In turn, it lends legitimacy to neofascism and shifts the institutional landscape even further. We should not concede one inch to anyone trying to water down human rights for political gain. Human rights are to be taken as a whole, especially at the times that the most illiterate and unnuanced fragile white masculinity reclaims racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism with renewed confidence, this is not the time to let them score popularity points.
In fact, we need to escalate. The more we trigger the fascist voter base the better. Destroy the common sense, of the equal-opportunity capitalism apologist social democrat.
This could tactically work for them, given that the Republican Party has been hollowed out by a transnational crime syndicate, leaving conservatives who aren’t fascists and don’t want to see America burn without a party. Still sucks to be the progressives they’d kick to the kerb, though if this craters the Republican Party, it’ll leave a vacuum to be filled by a second party, the most obvious candidate being the Democrats’ marginalised left wing. So America would end up with a centre-right Democratic Party, which would be somewhere between Eisenhower Republicans and the German CDU or similar, and a new left-of-centre party, which would basically be the Dems minus all the Manchins and Blue Dogs and other spoilers. (Unless there is significant electoral reform, both would be the only viable parties, and each would be a broad church.)
It’s asinine. Hand over the DNC to the people who made the RNC what it is today. OK, but what do you actually win? 100 more people get to clutch power until death wrenches it from their hands?
I’ve lived and worked around enough republicans to know that if given the choice between voting for a Republican and a slightly watered down yesteryear Republican, the Republican voter will always just choose the Republican. Especially because their media sphere is screaming at them about how the democrat is a secret Muslim Marxist who wants to give everyone’s babies to the Clinton’s antarctic adrenochrome base. You know who did at least better with Republicans? Bernie. And I think that scares the fuck out of the big doner class.
Let me restate that: There is, no shit, a better chance of a full-throttle communist revolution than of capturing Republican voters by chasing them.
This could tactically work for them
Lol, it absolutely will not. Republicans are republicans, first and foremost. They are voting republican because republicans are their sports team. It does not matter what the policies espoused by democrats are, they are democrats, and thus verboten for republicans.
Do you not remember the hilarious interviews where democratic (maybe obama specifically, depends on the video) policies were pitched to republicans, and they agreed with them up until the reveal that the policy was from the ‘wrong side’ of the political aisle?
I’ve been saying this for a number of months now you got to kill this party. Abandon it completely. We got to start a new party. We got to start a labor party. A worker party. A party of the people. Whatever we want to call it, but whatever it’s called it’s a party that’s not for the big corporate donors that control the Democratic Party. The Democratic party basically since the late '70s but certainly since the '80s abandoned the people the peoples issues. They’re not coming back.
The system of “parties” and “representation” is a complete joke that’s a root cause of this genocidal empire.
I kind of agree, but it needs to be a serious party that proves itself. I wont vote for some joke party that only runs in presidental elections. They need to put in the work and run (and win) in smaller more local elections before i would consider giving my vote.
Ideally, this party would fill in the gap the republicans left behind after dying.
For the foreseeable future though, i dont have a choice other than to vote dem
So where do we start? Voter registration? That’s easily changeable and easily verifiable information to confront them with.
After that I’m lost, but you give me a shepherd and I’ll be a sheep lol
The usa needs something like ranked choice before that becomes any way viable.
That’s not entirely true. We’ve had change-ups in which two parties are THE two parties before. Noteably, the GOP. But it MUST start at the local level. We can’t just wait until the presidential election and then complain about the voting system when all that’s left to be done is act as a spoiler candidate. We have to start now, in our own communities.
It’s also helpful when there is infighting among factions within one of the big parties. That’s one reason behind the success in getting the GOP off the ground so quickly: they made common cause with like-minded members and currently-sitting politicians of the older, underperforming Whig party. This is especially helpful when moving from local support to state and then federal level support, since you can put the apparatus of the old party to work for the new ideas (this obviously doesn’t mean absorb all the old party, just the ones that are already aligned with your mission).
The final piece is a central tenant of your platform that is both easy to understand and easy to justify simply based on morals and feels. The GOP had antislavery. We could have anti-oligarchy.
Edit: There is also another way, though: just take over the already existing party, like what the Tea Party did to the GOP. There are some pros to this, the biggest being the ability to utilize the first past the post voting system to greater advantage and ride on name recognition with the underinformed parts of the base. But there are also some big cons, mainly that the “new” party is still saddled with all the corruption and bullshit within the old party from the get-go and now have to convince voters that they are different and will change things from within. With how the top brass of the Democrats have been processing their loss in November, I’m of a mind that starting from scratch could be more beneficial. Especially since there were a lot of voters that just wanted “change”. I also don’t think that simply having a D next to your name on the ballot will work as well for progressives as having an R next to their names worked for the Tea Party.
Winner take all didn’t save the whigs.
Some form of Ranked Choice Voting could save what democracy we have. The fact that the leadership of both parties oppose it so vociferously should be enough evidence for anyone to realize it.
Well, why wouldn’t they oppose it? They stopped representing the people a while ago.
“But I don’t want to believe we’re losing horribly, I’d rather believe we’re nearly winning!”
— Liberals
