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Every Democrat I know irl is a kind, considerate person with empathetic views.
So it's amazing to me that the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election, especially really fucking important elections
Because the parties don't represent the people. The parties represent the interests of those with most influence in the party. In the modern system it is those who make the most impactfull and sustained donation efforts. The rest is just marketing used to secure enough votes in the election show according to arbitrary rules they set and change as they see fit.
So it’s amazing to me that the party seems to go out of its way to find the most horrific ghouls and status quo warriors to set forth in a federal election, especially really fucking important elections
I think its useful to distinguish between Democrats and democrats. I try to use Democrats for party officials, elected officials, talking heads within the party etc. I try to use democrats for democratic voters.
Democrats do not have the priorities of their voters in mind, and have, since the 90's, wished that they actually had republicans for voters. Democrats don't want to be managing a leftwing party (the votership they largely have), they want to be managing a rightwing party. The Democratic party reconfigured its self to be diet Republican after Carter and have been failing forwards ever since.
I lived through all of that and you put it just right: They kept failing forward. If they weren't the only alternative to the Republicans the party would have died after 1984.
It's probably obvious we need more choices but how?
It’s the system, honestly.
The U.S. government was always designed so that it would be ruled by ‘the top’. Through failures of imagination, inability to build in flexibility, and the entrenched powers doing what they can to grow their power, we’ve wound up with a system where money is power and people are merely numbers that can be shuffled to produce desired end results.
I’m quickly approaching a point of throwing up my hands, but if there is a needle that can be threaded by ‘the people’ to stitch back together our fraying democracy, it’s this —
A state-by-state ballot initiative effort to remove political drawing of electoral maps.
Changing voting (likely also ballot initiative) to remove the first past the poll system, so that we use instant run-off (aka ranked choice) to give people the opportunity to vote for who they want without throwing their vote away.
Removing barriers to voting and establishing a national holiday during election days.
Overturn Citizens United. Overhaul campaign finance. Eliminate unknown funding sources from politics. Eliminate business contributions and PAC’s entirely. Narrowly define acceptable lobbying, and broadly define what lobbying can’t be.
Strong consumer privacy laws that have teeth, so that micro targeted campaigns can’t be used to manipulate people into swinging elections. Case in point - Trump only won the swing states by 11,000 votes (total) in 2016.
And using ballot initiatives to have enough states join the national popular vote interstate compact to render the electoral college moot.
Primaries. The people have to show up and actually vote for what they want into the primary (rather than trying to vote according to political strategies). With enough sustained effort and time a coalition of like-minded representatives could be built up to slowly change the system to a more representational one.
I've been doing this for 24 years and have the "Kucinich for President" bumper sticker to prove it.
When should I expect it to start working?
Same. Tons of Bernie merch.
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
"Genocide Joe" is a little crass, but he absolutely deserves to be taken to task for his blind support of the IDF/IOF. That's more important to me as a voter than hearing circle jerk promises about known positions. We know he's pro abortion rights, he's shown that. Now it's time to address the elephant in the room.
Well it's simple, what are the Democrat voters going to do, vote 3rd party?
They're held hostage to the party, so the party has no need to reflect them, it just has to be less bad than the Republicans.
If you don't like it, vote in the primary!
(Unless you live in NH, then you don't get a primary. Also the DNC reserves all rights to ignore any primary election)
Either we get rid of the two party system, or it's gonna be the death of democracy.
There can't just be two options picked by private organizations... That's just the illusion of choice when billionaires and corporations donate to both parties.
We're held hostage by one party and get literal death threats from the other. It sucks, man.
This is why their only political message is “vote for us or you’ll be sorry.”
Yeah, and it feels that way all over the world.
For example, the recent election in Argentina was between a Libertarian nutjob and a corrupt center-left party. Unfortunately the corrupt center-left party lost, and now the maniac is wrecking their economy.
Then you've got the Labor party in Britain, who despite all of Brexit couldn't manage to form a government.
It's like the entire world is trapped between the options of idiotic populism and neoliberalism.
Things would improve if we ate the rich.
Saying that Milei is wrecking the economy is like saying a bulldozer is wrecking a house when it already got hit by a JDAM
Abortion rights and a free Palestine!
Then the audience — made up of many young people & women — immediately started chanting things like "Four more years" & "Let's go Joe." Be careful of these stories.
Well, obviously. The audience was there to see Biden because they presumably like him. You think the protestors were going to suddenly win over his strongest supporters after yelling for accountability from their hero? Biden, the audience, and the press covering the event weren't getting what they wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it.
It was a pro-abortion rally. Probably not the best moment for a pro-Palestine protest.
Edit: Whoops, replied to the post, not the comment.
Oh, I wasn't ignoring the intent to eliminate an ethnic group; I know that it's necessary for for proving a genocide, and will be the most difficult part of South Africa's case. Maybe they'll find something that can clarify Israel's intent, like an official calling for Gaza to be completely reduced to rubble, or a member of the Iraeli parliament calling on for nuclear strikes to, “crush Gaza,”, or a cabinet official calling what's happening in Gaza an ethnic cleansing, or an Israeli minister calling for settlers to illegally take control of the territory. (Of course, this is just a few recent examples from this war. You could go from the Nakba all the way to the illegal West Bank settlements if you wanted to give the intent in a historical context.)
Anyway, you've really illustrated why the American centrist is so ridiculous. You honestly want to argue that a nuclear-powered (yes, Israel has nukes, even if they don't admit it) military with a $20 billion budget that is systematically destroying a civilian population couldn't possibly be committing genocide because none of their founding documents say, “genocide.” Meanwhile, you also want me to accept that a terrorist organization with homemade rockets, that controls an area the smaller than Detroit, with a military budget of $350 million, is just as capable of committing genocide. Not only that, any deaths they cause are a genocide, because their charter calls for genocide (which is obviously ridiculous; by this logic, Dylan Roof committed genocide). You are a deeply unserious person and I'm done with this absurd exercise.