Going by the recent bullshit in today’s senate, they are right-lite
Charles Schumer makes policy decisions based on an imaginary Republican family.
Democrats have been basically Republicans since the Clinton administration.
Democrats are controlled opposition, which the belief is solidified by the recent senate vote. I’ll still vote blue, but if the politician option of it being a coward/establishment then I might as well vote for a rat. Absolute disgusted our elected leaders have no spine as Republicans continue on their quest to achieve fascism and white supremacy.
Fuck those 6 and fuck Schumer.
I’ll still vote blue, but if the politician option of it being a coward/establishment then I might as well vote for a rat.
why not vote for 3rd party instead of wasting your vote like this?
The republicans have a strong enough, brainwashed base that will vote for them come hell or high water. Around 35% of people who will vote are seriously engaged on their side and will do whatever they need to vote for them. That’s a pretty strong hurdle to overcome
The democrats also have a contingent of Better Blue than Red and will vote for them no matter what.
The largest party next in line would be the Green party, and honestly, they’re barely trying. I mean the head of the party has investments in Fossil Fuel companies supporting fracking. AOC rightfully critisized them for a lack of organiztional development. It’s just this mess of funding going in and our for visibility and the dilution of the “not republican” vote.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes.
If you want us to vote for 3rd party, you need to deliver us a 3rd party with enough leadership to campaign and win it.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes
the democrats and republicans are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
s are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
I don’t disagree, but voting for a 3rd in a tw- party race will also be a useless non-starter.
history has given us several examples of this happening; with mexico being the most recent one and in our lifetimes.
those examples prove over and over again that it’s the self-reinforcing propaganda that keeps us back, not two-party; spoiler-vote; fptp; electoral-college; etc. nonsense.
For nationwide elections I agree there isn’t much of a choice, but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states is still good to express dissatisfaction, and third parties and independents can still win in local elections.
but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states
absolutely, and i’m a fan of this, let’s get congress full of third, as long as it’s not libretarian third :)
When did America decide to remove first past the post? Oh they didn’t …so how is 3rd party not a wasted vote?
not only is it possible, but it has happened and is currently happening in our lifetimes: either read a non-western history book to see several historical examples of political duopolies being overturned by 3rd parties (until the americans reversed it) or look for modern sources showing a 3rd party named morena overthrow its american backed duopoloy in mexico less than 10 years ago.
You mean the two Dems and the independent that acted as scabs and went against the rest of the democratic party?
US Senate advances bill to end federal shutdown
Sunday’s deal was brokered by Democratic Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both from New Hampshire, and Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said a person familiar with the talks. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the chamber’s top Democrat, voted against the measure. Many Democrats on the Hill watched the deal unfold with displeasure.
I meant the 5 fuckwads that gave in to repugs demands
I agree this should be the career ending vote for 8 scabs, but I also think refusing to replace them with better candidates if they also run as dems, won’t do anything other than guarantee the re-election of 8 scabs.
It doesnt matter if they’re democrat or independent - what matters is that they aren’t a class traitor.
Do whatever you want but I sure as fuck wouldnt vote for a democrat who is going to sell me out as soon as acting in my interest is politically inconvenient.
it’s always just one or 2 democrats.
Oh, yeah this is defo controlled opposition. When people asked for spine, they got jello.
No, the dems are going at their enemies pretty hard.
Agreed. And are simultaneously displaying that the Republicans are their friends.
Not even that distant. They’re the same wealthy pedophile christofascists.
I’m going to take this opportunity to link this video by Richard Medhurst
This is not infighting, this is the great Un-Masking
I will also take this oppotunity to link this video about Why Leftist Purity Tests are good.
Never stop Purity Testing, Comrades, Never.
I wouldn’t even call it purity testing, they’re just testing. I’ve seen obsession over purity taken to a counterproductive extent, and I maintain that it can be a problem when dealing with a complex unideal reality, but what BadEmpanada is talking about here is fine. That’s a healthy level of testing, and important in preventing recuperation or sanewashing. Democrats are a bourgeois-controlled party and don’t share our class interests.
To give an example of the kind that is counterproductive, I know of a (small) socialist organisation in my country which has been banned from worker strikes after counterprotesting one, insisting that since industrial unions are bureaucratic, the workers should all just boycott the strike and make their own union. This group claims all other socialist organisations are impure and pseudo-leftist whenever they compromise with material reality and present conditions.
And, obviously, that’s a whole other world of purity testing to what you’re talking about. The problems are when it reaches no-true-Scotsman levels.
I get what you’re saying, regardless; never stop the tests.
Agreed
hmm, so the US citizens trying to get the Democrats to stop aligning with the Republicans should just stop because they’re indistinguishable. Got it.
Look if the Democrats were interested in shifting to the left they would have done it by now. They know progressive policies are popular. They know progressive policies get people excited. They’re not interested in being progressive. They’re only interested in maintaining the status quo and if stepping on you is necessary to do that, they’ll happily do it. Some of them will make a somber face on the news about it before gleefully stepping on you again.
Redditors have no concept of what the democrats are: a controlled opposition party in a one-party capitalist empire.
know progressive policies get people excited. They’re not interested in being progressive. They’re only interested in maintaining the status quo and if stepping on you is necessary to do that, they’ll happily do it. Some of them will make a somber face on
All fine and dandy, but voting 3rd without the 3rd being actually viable is just voting 1st for the other side.
That’s an idiotic hot take that gives the Democrats in power a lot of undeserved confidence in their seats and is exactly why Kamala failed to excite voters.
In a very small handful of very vulnerable seats, sure, that might be true. For literally every other race in the country, that’s not only bullshit it’s problematic.
“I don’t have to try, x number of people will vote for me no matter what.” That’s not conjecture, it’s literally part of the calculation campaign managers do for every single election. X voters will always vote for D/R candidate, and Y voters never will. If X is greater than half of the number of votes in the last election, campaign to your donors.
Democrats will not change their tune until they start seeing some risk. Safe and leans D seats need to start shifting away from them. They need to lose votes they once thought were guaranteed and a sizable portion of those votes need to be for non viable progressives.
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You are just desperate not to get it aren’t you?
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It’s about as productive as trying to turn a lion vegetarian.
Democrats? Left? Lmao XD
Fr how do these people think its “left”?!
Shillmer can go fuck himself
The only divide on the left right now is the the traitorous assholes - none of whom are up for reelection - who voted to end of the shutdown. Fuck you Dick Durbin. If I had you in a room for 5 minutes with a megaphone I would definitely so hard that your ancestors would be able to hear it.
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Imagine a beach of infinite length with one lemonade stand on it.
Where do you open a second lemonade stand to maximize sales if people will buy from the closet stand?
The answer: next to the first stand. Everyone to the left of your stand will find you are the best option and everyone to the right will choose the other.
This model explains why two political parties along a spectrum can end up not too different from each other in an attempt to capture the most votes.
Weird how the republicans never use this logic to add dem policy, but democrats always use this logic to duplicate republican policy and messaging, and then eat shit in elections because betraying your base to do what the opposition wants is the best way to decrease turnout.
On the one hand, a totally unified party is clearly a problem. I don’t particularly want the Democrats to be united on everything, we can see from the Republicans that is a recipe for authoritarianism.
On the other hand, it would be nice if they could fucking unite against authoritarianism.
Politics today:
-Far Left pretending they are normal Left wing, and everyone else are dumb fascists.
-Far Right pretending they are normal Right wing, and everyone else are woke communists.
The “left” in the United States is much further right on the global median. The Democrats are barely a center-left party on the global political spectrum.
Traditionally, at least since the Reagan Coalition was formed, the Democrats have functioned as a Republican-regulation party, the safety valve of rightwing ideas. The Republicans have put all of their chips on the Reagan Coalition, which they know is a tent with limited accommodations for the non-white non-rightwing. Both of these strategies have weaknesses that we can see cracking open in real time.
The Democrats, by comparison, are a much bigger tent of a party, and regional pressures and interests make it much harder for them to break the mold. There are still Democrats that identify as “conservative,” if you can believe that, and a substantial amount of them, too. There used to be “liberal Republicans,” but that number has dwindled into near-zero %.
I’m not in any way forgiving these dissenting senators for destroying what little health care Americans have. If there were any time in history where any one senator could choose to go rogue and still get re-elected, it’s now.
Democrats are like half the left tho, so we can either fight prog vs dem, or we can unite to actually take on an external foe
Democrats are right wing.
Sure. I’m a Communist, surely we can meet halfway under a socialist platform. A politician should earn their votes, so it’s their choice really.
So unite with progressives. Or keep attacking them instead of the republicans your wing of the party just capitulated to.
I can’t think of a way to gwt them to stop fighting us except winning and putting their asses down. They are rhe fucking enemy.
I’d rather they stand back and sit it out, but they cannot risk us getting any win.
When you make generalized claims like “Democrats are not the left,” you’re literally claiming that AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani are not the left.
As democrats are so fond of pointing out every time someone complains about his treatment by the democratic party, Sanders is not a democrat.
He is like Canada’s NDP.
If you voted for Sanders in a primary election or a local election what party did you vote for?
I see how it is. He’s a democrat when democrats want to falsely claim that they’re worth supporting and an independent when they want to block him.
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I guess it depends on the Democrat just like it depends on the leftist or the independent voting or refusing to vote for him.
It depends on how convenient to centrists it is.
Do you hope for at least some progress for society
Yes. Unfortunately, that’s never on the ballot, thanks to the two party hegemony. Congratulations.
Ah, so Mamdani and Cuomo were the same candidate. Darn. Thanks for opening my eyes. 🙈
I’m not sorry that the machinations of both parties failed to give us the sex pest you preferred in office.
That would be 100% accurate
Yes, they are not, they are socialdemocrats which are rightwing because they support capitalism.
So they don’t pass your purity test, and “nobody should support them.”
But according to right wing and right of center propaganda they’re radical leftist, and “nobody should support them.”
It’s pretty neat that you and the right have the exact same messaging.
I mean, its not really a purity test. It’s just kind of definitions. The political terms “right” and “left” have meant the same thing since the French Revolution. Democrats are not left wing. We can have a whole bunch of ancillary discussions about whether that means people should or shouldn’t vote for them, which I’m not interested in having, but i struggle to see how one could argue in good faith that the Democrats are left wing. Its really not even clear that Ocasio-Cortez or Sanders are “left wing” since neither seems to oppose private property rights, nor do they advocate for the weakening or abolishment of capitalism - the traditional dividing line of left and right.
The political terms “right” and “left” have meant the same thing since the French Revolution.
the weakening or abolishment of capitalism - the traditional dividing line of left and right
Wasn’t the French revolution just abolishing feudalism and the monarchy?
I’m being less than 100% precise here. The line I’m drawing is that abolition of private property rights is co-terminus with abolition of capitalism.
“Ask them ‘what’s more important, human rights or property rights’. If they reply 'property rights are human rights, they’re on the right”.
e: I’m just going to add explicitly, since there’s clearly some confusion looking at the other sister comments. It’s not about monarchism or any of that. Its two things: Property rights and social hierarchies. If you want em gone, you’re on the left. from that perspective you need not change the definition of left and right in 1799 and 1848, and all the same from Maréchal to Mélenchon.
Ok, this is making things more clear, although I get the impression I’d have to know way more about the Fr. Revolution, and maybe the following period in France to actually understand it. Was it really politically commonplace already in early 19th c. to demand abolishment of property?
Who’s Maréchal?
Under feudalism: Left is about abolishing feudalism and the monarchy. Right is about preserving them.
Under capitalism: Left is about abolishing capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Right is about preserving them.
leftism is defined by opposition to the status quo. the french monarchy was capitalist as well as the status quo at the time; we still have monarchies and capitalism is unquestionably the status quo.
leftism is defined by opposition to the status quo
You’ve just introduced a whole other definition of leftism. Also it seems to mean that no leftist society could exist in practice.
the french monarchy was capitalist
From what I can figure out, it was still in principle feudal but moving towards capitalism due to the growth of the bourgeois class. Is that correct?
opposition to the status quo is the definition of leftism, but anyone can be forgiven for not understanding this since westerners define it in the same terms as classical liberalism due to monarchies still (barely) being the status quo back then (and still existing to this day); back then, liberalism was “left” of that.
now-a-days neo-liberalism is the dominant hegemony and it’s pro-capitalist; anything to the left of that is modern day leftism.
Purity testing is good, you’re just mad because you don’t pass
I swear that even full trumpists are less obnoxious on the internet than you blue magas because while they try to choke me with the same capitalist nonesense, they are at least more honest and don’t pretend to be on the left.
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Yes, you certainly do seems to think that, thx for confirmation.
Sick burn.
since when are red lines genocide & ethnic cleansing just simple purity tests?
Since when did AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani give the greenlight for genocide & ethnic cleansing?
i have to assume that this is genuine since i don’t see anything funny about it.
bernie insists the isreali main talking point: isreal has a right to exist and co-opts leftward fervor by lending his support to the party he doesn’t belong to.
aoc voted against marjorie taylor green’s attempts to block the iron dome’s re-inforcements several times as well a voted for the resolution for redefining antisemitism to isreali benefit; include speaking out against the genocide.
mamdani is not at the national level and cannot do anything about it.
Not to mention that MTG wanted that funding redirected to the fascist bullshit she supports at the U.S. border. It’s interesting that Thomas Massie also voted in favor of this bill given he and MTG are part of the Thiel dark money “progressive” team along with hypocrites like Ro Kahnna, who pretend to support Palestine, yet hold investments in fucking Palantir.
that tweet from aoc makes it clear that she values the lives of isrealis over gazans since she ignores the facts that 1) these weapons are going to the idf who doesn’t make a distinction between defensive and offensive where gazans are concerned and 2) the idf had re-appropriated weaponry from one use to the other.
also: nice deflection in ignoring her vote on the definition of antisemitism w a tweet showing a half truth.
as much as I prefer AOC, or Bernie to the average dem, they are at best cautionary tales about fixing a corrupt system from the inside.
and at best, I would classify them as centrists.
Yeah, they’re mostly centrist, somewhat left of center, but they’re far from socialist, let alone communist.
Anything that is not their exact flavor of policy is not the left. And anything more is extremism.
True, but is the A for anarchists? Anarchists are not left.
Edit: oh, I’m on .ml. I didn’t know yous had a thing going for anarchism as well, now I know.
Anarchists are left. Anything to the left of capitalism is left. Anarchists want to get rid of capitalism.
Could you elaborate? My understanding of anarchism is the goal of eliminating government. That won’t eliminate an economic system that originated organically.
My understanding of anarchism is the goal of eliminating government
The finer details will always change depending who you ask, but yes, it’s generally either the elimination of government, or of all ‘unjust hierarchies’ (which includes state government).
As someone else mentioned, ideological anarchists tend to be socialists, and in this context ‘anarchism’ is assumed to be that socialist strain, but not everyone calling themselves an anarchist is also a socialist. It’s a broad school of thought.
That won’t eliminate an economic system that originated organically.
Capitalism isn’t organic. I can’t think of a case where it has developed outside of a revolution (like the anti-monarchist revolutions) and/or imperial suppression. It requires the enclosure of the commons and development of private property security forces like a police, neither of those are an organic phenomenon.
If anything, I would assume anarchism is more organic, since it could be found in many hunter-gatherer gift economies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism#Example_societies
Now, I’m personally not convinced that this makes anarchism appropriate for our industrial/post-industrial societies, but it’s not inorganic.
No its the idea that authority/power is bad and we shouldn’t have it.
Including cops, oligarchs, presidents, kings, popes, and sometimes even bed times.
Anarchy is more of a fundamental method of ruling/source of power/social policy. It’s neither left or right; and so different types of anarchy exist such as capitalist anarchy.
Anarchist communism is what you’re technically referring to. Economic ideologies seem like the mixup here.
They most certainly are?
Maybe you are thinking of anarcho-capitalism which is not a serious ideology
Isn’t anarcho capitalism just extremely radical liberalism? In which case people do take it very seriously. I know someone who is flying to some island in the pacific soon to get away from taxes and the government.
Sorta, its the belief that capitalism can (and should) exist without the state, which is what makes me call it an unserious ideology. Seeing as the state arises from class contradiction and capitalism cannot exist without class. There are people who seriously believe this but that doesn’t make it coherent.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining (:
