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
The DNC doesn't give a fuck about the Democratic voters as long as they keep voting for their selected candidates
Even if we don't they pick their candidate anyway.
they made it clear what they think of us when clinton elevated trump in 2016
They care about you less if you don't vote.
If we want better candidates we should be prepping for 2028 and 2032 now. Not 2024. We have a big chance coming up. So many of the boomers that have been in control of all levels of government for the last several decades. Neocons and neoliberals are all dying out. And being forced to retire. Change is coming one way or another.
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.
The parties represent liberals and fascists, when leftists are gaining in grassroots popularity. This grassroots movement must continue to build momentum and make real change.
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.
You won't make it alone
You shouldn't. Your thinking is linear and deterministic, but elections and society structures are not. Voting for X over Y period is not a guarantee of X. It's a chance at X, assuming an entire host of other people vote with you and a number of other factors fall into place, but not a guarantee.
In other words: I am too weird to ever be satisfied with the results of an election.
Be the change you want to see friend. Organize, distribute literature, engage others in honest and open dialogue (like you're doing), and encourage those around you to vote in every election and primary, or to run if able.
Really though, we just gotta last another 15 years or so and then the climate change feedback cycle will take care of everything
I think learning how to survive the collapse is a better use of my time at this point.
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
Vote for third parties?
Doesn't work in our system. To do that we'd need to use the same broken system we have to implement some other kind of voting system. But for it to work in time we would've had to have started in the 80s.
I suspect the DNC is gonna try another Bill Clinton style southern strategy and appeal to disenfranchised conservatives by shifting further to the right. And current democrat voters will shift to the right with them, defending their right wing actions tooth and nail.
Yeah, it seems with every candidate, we veer further to the right
Feelings aside, Biden is objectively one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.
[Bernie] Sanders said that some of the early goals that the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress were able to accomplish in the first two years of Biden’s presidency were progressive victories, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
“I think the American Rescue Plan that we passed early in his agenda, in the midst of the terrible pandemic, the economic collapse, was, in fact, one of the most significant pieces of legislation for the working class in this country, in the modern history of America,” Sanders said.
I mean, being to the left of Obama and Clinton isn't exactly hard.
Reread the comment that I was responding to.
No, I know who you're responding to, but pointing out that Biden is marginally more left-leaning than the guy who repealed Glass-Steagall and the guy who created the assassination-robot squad doesn't really undermine his point. FDR's party gutted the New Deal, Biden being slightly more pro-union doesn't really mean much to the overall trend.
The point being that I don't expect inhuman levels of perfection for my political leaders, and I don't think you should either. There was much more to FDR's administration than the New Deal, and when it comes the historical comparison Biden may have fallen short on matching the New Deal (although objectively he passed the biggest infrastructure and progressive economics bill since the New Deal), he has an undeniably better track record than FDR in terms of human rights, civil rights and environmental protection. There's really no comparison.
(FWIW, it's also worth noting that FDR had a significantly stronger Democratic backing in congress, with IIRC, a large supermajority in the Senate for multiple years. Historical political context is also important.)
Like it or not, It's just a point of fact that Biden is the most progressive president we've had in at least 50 years, if not a century, when looking at the entirety of his record so far.
he has an undeniably better track record than FDR in terms of human rights, civil rights and environmental protection. There's really no comparison.
Biden is currently supporting the Palestinian genocide as we speak.
The world's first two-way genocide 🙄
The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews
A) Glad you were eventually able to edit your post to more than a single emoji. B) You know that Palestinians aren't Hamas, right? C) You understand that it's not a, "two-way genocide," if only side can actually commit genocide, right? Hamas may want to kill evey Jew, but they've only managed to kill 1,200 people in their initial attack and 210 soldiers since then. Meanwhile, Israel has killed a minimum of 25,000 people, and by there own estimates only 9,000 of them were militants. (Also, 9,000 is a number the IDF gave without any evidence, so it's probably a gross overestimate.)
There's a reason that, of the two groups, only the Israeli government is being accused of genocide in the ICJ, and it's not because the international community likes Hamas. Genocide isn't just a declaration in a charter, it is a specific series of actions against an ethnic group, and it sure seems like Israel is committing those actions.
A) Glad you were eventually able to edit your post to more than a single emoji
It's only fair, I was just short on time.
B) You know that Palestinians aren’t Hamas, right?
Not all Palestinians are Hamas or even sympathetic to Hamas. Not all Israelis are IDF or supporters of Netenyahu.
Every single innocent person on either side of this war is a victim.
C) You understand that it’s not a, “two-way genocide,” if only side can actually commit genocide, right?
This is a stunningly bizarre point.
We've already established that the founding mission of Hamas was a jihad in the name eliminating Israeli Jews. To take it a step further, nations like Iran, who back Hamas, have openly called for "wiping Israel of the map" on multiple occasions. So not only is the intent real and well documented, but the actions of Hamas, including the war crimes of taking civilian hostages, are consistent with those original goals. Hamas leaders are still openly talking about a one state solution today, as are most of their supporters, even in the west.
But to your point, that intent doesn't matter and only capability matters.
I find that quite ironic considering the thousands of missiles fired from Gaza into Israel by Hamas as part of their coordinated terror attack. The IDF estimates (grain of salt, best number I can find right now) there were 2000 Hamas missile attacks on October 7th alone. There have been continuous attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah since then.
The only thing stopping those missiles from hitting Israeli civilians was the American Iron Dome missile defense system. Had it not been for American support of Israel, it's very possible that the combined forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, with the backing of Iran and Russia, could have very well been capable of waging an all out genocidal attack on Israel, as they have repeatedly stated is their shared intention.
In that regard, are Israel guilty of simply being able to defend themselves better than Hamas could defend Gaza? Would it have been better if Israel hadn't had Iron Dome and been hit with some thousand missiles from multiple different Islamic militant groups on multiple fronts?
Of course not, which is also why the "accusation" of genocide against Israel has been rejected by every key member of the UN as baseless and without merit or evidence.
We don't get to simply refine words until they mean what we want them to mean. Hamas and Netenyahu both wanted war, played off each other for political power, and have both openly called for a unacceptable single-state solution "from river to sea". Which, as a worst and most cynical interpretation, can be seen as a call for genocide from both parties. Neither should have ever been given political power, and neither should be allowed to hold power in the future. But it does take two to tango, and Hamas' intent and actions do matter here as well, especially when they are not helpless and have used plenty of potentially lethal force towards Israel. (And again, there is the war crime of taking civilian hostages.)
This is on them, not the United States, who have (thanks to Iron Dome) protected the lives of countless innocent Israelis and who have called for the IDF to show restraint and to work towards a two-state solution with an autonomous Palestine that Hamas are unfit to rule over.
Doesn't matter if it's Biden, Bernie or FDR's ghost in the Oval Office, America will continue to support its most important ally in the middle east, especially as they take heavy fire from all directions by groups whose state intent has always been their annihilation.
the "accusation" of genocide against Israel has been rejected by every key member of the UN as baseless and without merit or evidence.
Well, Israel's allies (France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, U.S., and U.K., by my count) have objected, and most of the other Western nations have declined to take a stance. Meanwhile, more than 25 nations in the Middle East, Africa, and South America support the case. So, if you think that this case is meritless because, “key,” U.N. members don't support it, your ignoring massive international outcry and showing off your Eurocentric bias.
The only thing stopping those missiles from hitting Israeli civilians was the American Iron Dome missile defense system
the United States, who have, thanks to Iron Dome, protected the lives of countless innocent Israelis
Yeah, this is just wrong. It's not American, it's Israeli. We've contributed money and missiles to it, but it was designed and built by an Israeli defense firm and the IDF. Americans want to believe that Israel would be helpless without them, but Israel has a first-world economy and a very well-funded military. This isn't Ukraine; there would economic and political consequences for Netanyahu if Israel lost our support, but they don't need our support to survive. Biden could withdraw support to Israel due to human rights violations without creating an existential threat to Isreal.
We don't get to simply refine words until they mean what we want them to mean.
You're right, so let's look at the U.N.’s legal definition of genocide:
Killing members of the group (check); Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (check); Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (check); Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (check); Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (...nope, not that one).
Any of these constitute genocide, and Israel is at 4 out of 5.
Finally, you seem very concerned with what could happen while ignoring what is happening. Yes, Hezbollah and Hamas could commit genocide against Israelis with enough support and resources. Yes, Israel could have much higher civilians casualties without the Iron Dome (which, again, is an Israeli creation). If these things happened, there should be international outcry and U.S. intervention. But Hezbollah and Hamas can't win a war against Israel, much less commit genocide, and Israel does have the Iron Dome.
But what is happening is that Israel is waging a campaign of destruction that has killed at least 1% of the population of Gaza. At a bare minimum, 64% of those casualties, 16,000 people, were civilians, and most of them were women and children. Their actions have been described as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing by human rights groups, and there is a genocide case against them before the ICJ.
These are not hypotheticals; this is what is happening right now. And they are happening with the support of the U.S. and, “one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.”
Ranked Choice Voting: "It smell like bitch in here"
Of everyone who claims no third party could win would actually coalesce around and vote for a third party candidate, the third party would win. Their children apparently aren’t suffering and starving enough, yet.
That's not true for the president. They are not picked by popular vote but the electoral college, and it's "first to get half the Electoral College votes", not who ever gets the most. It takes a literal majority, otherwise Congress or some other suits just get to pick.
The US is absolutely not a democracy when it comes to 2/3rds of its branches of government.
Considering the Senate is just two assholes per state and the House would have over a 1,000 members if we had the same ratio as 1789 I'd expand that to all three branches.
It's not a legitimate government, but we all pretend it is. Especially the people with guns.
Well, a "legitimate" government just needs to retain control, and they definitely have control. Though yes, the US is definitely not a legitimate democracy.
Idk about that. Maybe, but if we keep doing the same thing expecting different results, we’re definitely not getting them.
The problem is you're only focusing on one branch.
Congress has an amazing amount of power... the problem is a majority of them are really only concerned with their own piece of the United States of Pie. Their first, second, and only concern is being re-electable. Start focusing on electing more people who actually have the people's (all the people, not just their specific constituents, mind) best interest at heart and you can have effective change.
Constantly focusing on the Presidential election, and only the Presidential election and you lose out on most of the power in this country.
Start focusing on electing more people who actually have the people's (all the people, not just their specific constituents, mind) best interest at heart and you can have effective change.
The problem is that the person you want to elect will lose to someone who selfishly serves their constituents, because their constituents vote for them.
What about of those candidates are never on my ballots?
Everyone wants a third party, but not everyone wants the same third party.
That’s true but many actual leftists will coalesce behind a better option.
No they wouldn't, it would, at most, be a deadlock between the three parties that the House would decide on. One would hope they would go with the one with the most votes, but in reality they can pick anyone. Including someone who wasn't even one of the top three candidates.
Not to mention all the people who want a "third party" aren't necessarily going to vote for the same third party. They all want their own person. Most likely none of them would get anywhere near the majority popular vote, much less any electoral votes.
what are the Democrat voters going to do, vote 3rd party?
Sit on their hands like they did in 2016.
You mean the election that had record voter turnout all over the country? Is that what sitting on your hands means?
And yet still barely two-thirds of people eligible to vote.
They could vote for any of the other DNC candidates.
Unless you’re in Nee Hampshire right?
Or like we saw with Bernie, they’ll sabotage your campaign and rig the DNC.
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.
Vote in all primaries. Vote in state and local. Vote on your local dog-catcher.
The President isn't the only office that matters, and really it doesn't even make up a majority of the importance. It's just easier to get people to focus on it, and ignore all the other just as important elections.
I get what you're saying, and I'm very involved locally, have even considered running myself, but then what? We've still got immigrants and refugees in concentration camps, still can't get anyone, especially women or trans youth, access to healthcare, can't redistribute wealth, can't give land back to the tribes. I still feel powerless. Now what? Just be content with that?
"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.
This is why their only political message is “vote for us or you’ll be sorry.”
"A vote for our candidate is slightly better than chopping off your nuts with a rusty cleaver and pouring salt on the gaping wound. Vote Blue!"
Yeah, but the other guy is actively campaigning on chopping your balls off for laughs and keeps showing up to rallies with a cleaver and a salt shaker...so y'know...you pick your fucking battles.
I'm a trans guy, please vote for the guy who isn't literally threatening to chop my balls off. :/
That's a lot of words just to say you've got nothing except "the alternative is worse"
That's pretty bad
If the alternative is worse, the current option is still better. And I'll take the better choice.
Which choice frees the refugees? Which choice provides universal healthcare? Which choice gives land back? Seems to me both choices are unfathomably bad. Do we have to pick who gets human rights?
Seems less like a democracy and more like a system inspired by the Saw franchise. Fuck this so much.
Fuck this country.
I understand your sentiment, I really do. We also need economic reparations for black people, to redesign the police system, and to ensure LGBT people are represented in society and education.
It's ironic to me how much I hated the country back when I was a senior in high school, 2012 -- and now how it's in many ways worse today in 2024. There have been advancements, and those need to be celebrated, but there have been significant setbacks and reversion. I never thought I'd live to see an era even more hostile to LGBT people, in many ways.
I'm not going to tell you that I've learned to love the country in spite of its many faults -- but I have learned to recognize that we are a country that owned slaves, and also freed slaves. We enacted Jim Crow, and we passed the Voting Rights Act. We didn't let gays serve in the military, then we enacted Don't Ask Don't Tell, and then we stopped caring if soldiers were openly gay.
America is a story of oppressors and liberators. Those who only let rich white men vote, and those who protested until women and black people could vote. America is all of them. We can pick though who we extol as model Americans, and who we condemn as our worst.
To tie things back to what you're saying, we need to preserve the human rights we have right now above all else, before we can expand them to everyone who deserves them. In 2016 people were unhappy that we weren't expanding more, and it led to us losing abortion rights we already had.
We protect those we can, and we wait for our moment. We do our damnedest to make sure we don't regress, and when the time comes, we honor the woman's suffragists and civil rights marchers and secure expansions.
Before we can expand, we have to bury these Trump fascists six feet under. Only then can we get around to fixing our many problems.
We've been regressing though. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, Obama took no action to lift it. Same with Guantanamo and the use of torture, Obama took no action to rescind these things that I'm aware of. Trump put refugees and immigrants in cocentration camps, Biden built even more of these camps.
The problem is the Democrats are not preserving the rights we have. They're willing to compromise on basic human rights.
I've been around since Reagan, and I've been watchin this happen in real time. The few "wins" in human rights have been bittersweet since they are always won by throwing other groups of people under the bus -- for instance, Obama's healthcare plan that successfully helped more middle-income people gain access to healthcare while causing actual harm to our lowest income earners.
I've never seen this protection you're talking about. I've seen both parties drift further to the right and become more and more defensive of the capitalist status quo.
Correct. The system is fucked. But like it or not, you'll be stuck with one of them
We're held hostage by one party and get literal death threats from the other. It sucks, man.
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
Can you elaborate on what you mean 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"? Are you unaware of the fact that Biden is the incumbent President?
He was nominated by a wide margin against a dozen other candidates (including over my preferred candidate), and elected with solid EC majority and a record number of individual votes.
To suggest that he was somehow appointed by the party establishment, when he's simply running for reelection like almost every incumbent President in American history has done after their first term seems like a very disingenuous statement. It's interesting that nobody leveled that argument against Trump when he ran for reelection in 2020, not to mention every other time it's happened, considering it's been the norm for decades.
I know plenty of Dems who voted trump because abortion. I think a lot is the demographics’ religion. I’ve heard too many say they will vote for trump because at least he gave them $1200. And a friend told me in conversation he visited a (all black) church where the pastor said he doesn’t care if trump is elected, because “God has a plan.”
Biden leaves much to be desired, and waited until election year to mention price-gouging, even try to contend with border red states and abortion. Facts are, both establishment parties are on the same Team Gazillionaire, which isn’t us, and they don’t want it to ever be us. It’s time we wake up that one party is just more sneaky about it, and they’re really not that sneaky. And the EC is still in place.
Biden leaves much to be desired, and waited until election year to mention price-gouging, even try to contend with border red states and abortion. Facts are, both establishment parties are on the same Team Gazillionaire, which isn’t us, and they don’t want it to ever be us. It’s time we wake up that one party is just more sneaky about it, and they’re really not that sneaky. And the EC is still in place.
You can't convince me that a native English-speaker wrote this.
Is there some reason you think people who aren’t native English speakers shouldn’t be involved in American politics? 🤨
No. I do expect coherent and factual arguments from those who do, however. I've had my fill of word salad for 2024 already. Am I asking too much?
Is that why you didn’t mention any of that in your comment and instead focused on whether or not they spoke English as a first language?
That's fair. You're right.
I just thought it was funnier than going point by point through that incoherent nonsense to try to correct it, because sometimes I feel like it's better to laugh than it is to try to engage with political talking points that are so mired in bullshit that they are hard to take in good faith. It's also flawed to assume that everybody who is engaging in conversations around American politics are American citizens acting in good-faith, based on what we know about the history of foreign meddling in global elections, but I digress.
It's possible that you've taken it more seriously than I meant it to be, but ultimately I said something that may have been offensive and exclusionary to ESL speaking people, and for that I'll just say sorry.
I appreciate that you were willing to hear what I was saying. FWIW I recognize there was a legitimate problem with troll campaigns in at least the past 2 presidential elections and I’m sure already is a problem in the upcoming one, but defaulting to ‘someone isn’t using perfect English, they’re a shill!’ (in addition to being exclusionary to ESL speakers) casts too wide a net and includes a lot of people who legitimately do speak English as a first language (ask any English teacher, lol).
It’s my first language and after four decades of voting, this is what it’s been.
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
The DNC doesn't give a fuck about the Democratic voters as long as they keep voting for their selected candidates
Even if we don't they pick their candidate anyway.
they made it clear what they think of us when clinton elevated trump in 2016
They care about you less if you don't vote.
If we want better candidates we should be prepping for 2028 and 2032 now. Not 2024. We have a big chance coming up. So many of the boomers that have been in control of all levels of government for the last several decades. Neocons and neoliberals are all dying out. And being forced to retire. Change is coming one way or another.
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.
The parties represent liberals and fascists, when leftists are gaining in grassroots popularity. This grassroots movement must continue to build momentum and make real change.
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.
You won't make it alone
You shouldn't. Your thinking is linear and deterministic, but elections and society structures are not. Voting for X over Y period is not a guarantee of X. It's a chance at X, assuming an entire host of other people vote with you and a number of other factors fall into place, but not a guarantee.
In other words: I am too weird to ever be satisfied with the results of an election.
Be the change you want to see friend. Organize, distribute literature, engage others in honest and open dialogue (like you're doing), and encourage those around you to vote in every election and primary, or to run if able.
Really though, we just gotta last another 15 years or so and then the climate change feedback cycle will take care of everything
I think learning how to survive the collapse is a better use of my time at this point.
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
Vote for third parties?
Doesn't work in our system. To do that we'd need to use the same broken system we have to implement some other kind of voting system. But for it to work in time we would've had to have started in the 80s.
Not necessarily:
https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
Alaska implemented ranked choice voting after voters approved the measure in 2020
I suspect the DNC is gonna try another Bill Clinton style southern strategy and appeal to disenfranchised conservatives by shifting further to the right. And current democrat voters will shift to the right with them, defending their right wing actions tooth and nail.
Yeah, it seems with every candidate, we veer further to the right
Feelings aside, Biden is objectively one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.
I mean, being to the left of Obama and Clinton isn't exactly hard.
Reread the comment that I was responding to.
No, I know who you're responding to, but pointing out that Biden is marginally more left-leaning than the guy who repealed Glass-Steagall and the guy who created the assassination-robot squad doesn't really undermine his point. FDR's party gutted the New Deal, Biden being slightly more pro-union doesn't really mean much to the overall trend.
For all of his progressive economic accomplishments, FDR also interned in the Japanese and allowed for the creation of one of the world's worst toxic waste sites.
The point being that I don't expect inhuman levels of perfection for my political leaders, and I don't think you should either. There was much more to FDR's administration than the New Deal, and when it comes the historical comparison Biden may have fallen short on matching the New Deal (although objectively he passed the biggest infrastructure and progressive economics bill since the New Deal), he has an undeniably better track record than FDR in terms of human rights, civil rights and environmental protection. There's really no comparison.
(FWIW, it's also worth noting that FDR had a significantly stronger Democratic backing in congress, with IIRC, a large supermajority in the Senate for multiple years. Historical political context is also important.)
Like it or not, It's just a point of fact that Biden is the most progressive president we've had in at least 50 years, if not a century, when looking at the entirety of his record so far.
Biden is currently supporting the Palestinian genocide as we speak.
The world's first two-way genocide 🙄
A) Glad you were eventually able to edit your post to more than a single emoji. B) You know that Palestinians aren't Hamas, right? C) You understand that it's not a, "two-way genocide," if only side can actually commit genocide, right? Hamas may want to kill evey Jew, but they've only managed to kill 1,200 people in their initial attack and 210 soldiers since then. Meanwhile, Israel has killed a minimum of 25,000 people, and by there own estimates only 9,000 of them were militants. (Also, 9,000 is a number the IDF gave without any evidence, so it's probably a gross overestimate.)
There's a reason that, of the two groups, only the Israeli government is being accused of genocide in the ICJ, and it's not because the international community likes Hamas. Genocide isn't just a declaration in a charter, it is a specific series of actions against an ethnic group, and it sure seems like Israel is committing those actions.
It's only fair, I was just short on time.
Not all Palestinians are Hamas or even sympathetic to Hamas. Not all Israelis are IDF or supporters of Netenyahu.
Every single innocent person on either side of this war is a victim.
This is a stunningly bizarre point.
We've already established that the founding mission of Hamas was a jihad in the name eliminating Israeli Jews. To take it a step further, nations like Iran, who back Hamas, have openly called for "wiping Israel of the map" on multiple occasions. So not only is the intent real and well documented, but the actions of Hamas, including the war crimes of taking civilian hostages, are consistent with those original goals. Hamas leaders are still openly talking about a one state solution today, as are most of their supporters, even in the west.
But to your point, that intent doesn't matter and only capability matters.
I find that quite ironic considering the thousands of missiles fired from Gaza into Israel by Hamas as part of their coordinated terror attack. The IDF estimates (grain of salt, best number I can find right now) there were 2000 Hamas missile attacks on October 7th alone. There have been continuous attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah since then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-rockets.html
The only thing stopping those missiles from hitting Israeli civilians was the American Iron Dome missile defense system. Had it not been for American support of Israel, it's very possible that the combined forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, with the backing of Iran and Russia, could have very well been capable of waging an all out genocidal attack on Israel, as they have repeatedly stated is their shared intention.
In that regard, are Israel guilty of simply being able to defend themselves better than Hamas could defend Gaza? Would it have been better if Israel hadn't had Iron Dome and been hit with some thousand missiles from multiple different Islamic militant groups on multiple fronts?
Of course not, which is also why the "accusation" of genocide against Israel has been rejected by every key member of the UN as baseless and without merit or evidence.
We don't get to simply refine words until they mean what we want them to mean. Hamas and Netenyahu both wanted war, played off each other for political power, and have both openly called for a unacceptable single-state solution "from river to sea". Which, as a worst and most cynical interpretation, can be seen as a call for genocide from both parties. Neither should have ever been given political power, and neither should be allowed to hold power in the future. But it does take two to tango, and Hamas' intent and actions do matter here as well, especially when they are not helpless and have used plenty of potentially lethal force towards Israel. (And again, there is the war crime of taking civilian hostages.)
This is on them, not the United States, who have (thanks to Iron Dome) protected the lives of countless innocent Israelis and who have called for the IDF to show restraint and to work towards a two-state solution with an autonomous Palestine that Hamas are unfit to rule over.
Doesn't matter if it's Biden, Bernie or FDR's ghost in the Oval Office, America will continue to support its most important ally in the middle east, especially as they take heavy fire from all directions by groups whose state intent has always been their annihilation.
Well, Israel's allies (France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, U.S., and U.K., by my count) have objected, and most of the other Western nations have declined to take a stance. Meanwhile, more than 25 nations in the Middle East, Africa, and South America support the case. So, if you think that this case is meritless because, “key,” U.N. members don't support it, your ignoring massive international outcry and showing off your Eurocentric bias.
Yeah, this is just wrong. It's not American, it's Israeli. We've contributed money and missiles to it, but it was designed and built by an Israeli defense firm and the IDF. Americans want to believe that Israel would be helpless without them, but Israel has a first-world economy and a very well-funded military. This isn't Ukraine; there would economic and political consequences for Netanyahu if Israel lost our support, but they don't need our support to survive. Biden could withdraw support to Israel due to human rights violations without creating an existential threat to Isreal.
You're right, so let's look at the U.N.’s legal definition of genocide:
Killing members of the group (check); Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (check); Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (check); Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (check); Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (...nope, not that one).
Any of these constitute genocide, and Israel is at 4 out of 5.
Finally, you seem very concerned with what could happen while ignoring what is happening. Yes, Hezbollah and Hamas could commit genocide against Israelis with enough support and resources. Yes, Israel could have much higher civilians casualties without the Iron Dome (which, again, is an Israeli creation). If these things happened, there should be international outcry and U.S. intervention. But Hezbollah and Hamas can't win a war against Israel, much less commit genocide, and Israel does have the Iron Dome.
But what is happening is that Israel is waging a campaign of destruction that has killed at least 1% of the population of Gaza. At a bare minimum, 64% of those casualties, 16,000 people, were civilians, and most of them were women and children. Their actions have been described as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing by human rights groups, and there is a genocide case against them before the ICJ.
These are not hypotheticals; this is what is happening right now. And they are happening with the support of the U.S. and, “one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.”
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.
https://youtu.be/WS2Bsq5PDmU?si=MC0DCuKP0hzWDMyF
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Ranked Choice Voting: "It smell like bitch in here"
Of everyone who claims no third party could win would actually coalesce around and vote for a third party candidate, the third party would win. Their children apparently aren’t suffering and starving enough, yet.
That's not true for the president. They are not picked by popular vote but the electoral college, and it's "first to get half the Electoral College votes", not who ever gets the most. It takes a literal majority, otherwise Congress or some other suits just get to pick.
The US is absolutely not a democracy when it comes to 2/3rds of its branches of government.
Considering the Senate is just two assholes per state and the House would have over a 1,000 members if we had the same ratio as 1789 I'd expand that to all three branches.
It's not a legitimate government, but we all pretend it is. Especially the people with guns.
Well, a "legitimate" government just needs to retain control, and they definitely have control. Though yes, the US is definitely not a legitimate democracy.
Idk about that. Maybe, but if we keep doing the same thing expecting different results, we’re definitely not getting them.
The problem is you're only focusing on one branch.
Congress has an amazing amount of power... the problem is a majority of them are really only concerned with their own piece of the United States of Pie. Their first, second, and only concern is being re-electable. Start focusing on electing more people who actually have the people's (all the people, not just their specific constituents, mind) best interest at heart and you can have effective change.
Constantly focusing on the Presidential election, and only the Presidential election and you lose out on most of the power in this country.
The problem is that the person you want to elect will lose to someone who selfishly serves their constituents, because their constituents vote for them.
What about of those candidates are never on my ballots?
Everyone wants a third party, but not everyone wants the same third party.
That’s true but many actual leftists will coalesce behind a better option.
No they wouldn't, it would, at most, be a deadlock between the three parties that the House would decide on. One would hope they would go with the one with the most votes, but in reality they can pick anyone. Including someone who wasn't even one of the top three candidates.
Not to mention all the people who want a "third party" aren't necessarily going to vote for the same third party. They all want their own person. Most likely none of them would get anywhere near the majority popular vote, much less any electoral votes.
Sit on their hands like they did in 2016.
You mean the election that had record voter turnout all over the country? Is that what sitting on your hands means?
And yet still barely two-thirds of people eligible to vote.
They could vote for any of the other DNC candidates.
Unless you’re in Nee Hampshire right?
Or like we saw with Bernie, they’ll sabotage your campaign and rig the DNC.
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.
Vote in all primaries. Vote in state and local. Vote on your local dog-catcher.
The President isn't the only office that matters, and really it doesn't even make up a majority of the importance. It's just easier to get people to focus on it, and ignore all the other just as important elections.
I get what you're saying, and I'm very involved locally, have even considered running myself, but then what? We've still got immigrants and refugees in concentration camps, still can't get anyone, especially women or trans youth, access to healthcare, can't redistribute wealth, can't give land back to the tribes. I still feel powerless. Now what? Just be content with that?
"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.
I prefer The Butcher of Palestine
This is why their only political message is “vote for us or you’ll be sorry.”
"A vote for our candidate is slightly better than chopping off your nuts with a rusty cleaver and pouring salt on the gaping wound. Vote Blue!"
Yeah, but the other guy is actively campaigning on chopping your balls off for laughs and keeps showing up to rallies with a cleaver and a salt shaker...so y'know...you pick your fucking battles.
I'm a trans guy, please vote for the guy who isn't literally threatening to chop my balls off. :/
That's a lot of words just to say you've got nothing except "the alternative is worse"
That's pretty bad
If the alternative is worse, the current option is still better. And I'll take the better choice.
Which choice frees the refugees? Which choice provides universal healthcare? Which choice gives land back? Seems to me both choices are unfathomably bad. Do we have to pick who gets human rights?
Seems less like a democracy and more like a system inspired by the Saw franchise. Fuck this so much.
Fuck this country.
I understand your sentiment, I really do. We also need economic reparations for black people, to redesign the police system, and to ensure LGBT people are represented in society and education.
It's ironic to me how much I hated the country back when I was a senior in high school, 2012 -- and now how it's in many ways worse today in 2024. There have been advancements, and those need to be celebrated, but there have been significant setbacks and reversion. I never thought I'd live to see an era even more hostile to LGBT people, in many ways.
I'm not going to tell you that I've learned to love the country in spite of its many faults -- but I have learned to recognize that we are a country that owned slaves, and also freed slaves. We enacted Jim Crow, and we passed the Voting Rights Act. We didn't let gays serve in the military, then we enacted Don't Ask Don't Tell, and then we stopped caring if soldiers were openly gay.
America is a story of oppressors and liberators. Those who only let rich white men vote, and those who protested until women and black people could vote. America is all of them. We can pick though who we extol as model Americans, and who we condemn as our worst.
To tie things back to what you're saying, we need to preserve the human rights we have right now above all else, before we can expand them to everyone who deserves them. In 2016 people were unhappy that we weren't expanding more, and it led to us losing abortion rights we already had.
We protect those we can, and we wait for our moment. We do our damnedest to make sure we don't regress, and when the time comes, we honor the woman's suffragists and civil rights marchers and secure expansions.
Before we can expand, we have to bury these Trump fascists six feet under. Only then can we get around to fixing our many problems.
We've been regressing though. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, Obama took no action to lift it. Same with Guantanamo and the use of torture, Obama took no action to rescind these things that I'm aware of. Trump put refugees and immigrants in cocentration camps, Biden built even more of these camps.
The problem is the Democrats are not preserving the rights we have. They're willing to compromise on basic human rights.
I've been around since Reagan, and I've been watchin this happen in real time. The few "wins" in human rights have been bittersweet since they are always won by throwing other groups of people under the bus -- for instance, Obama's healthcare plan that successfully helped more middle-income people gain access to healthcare while causing actual harm to our lowest income earners.
I've never seen this protection you're talking about. I've seen both parties drift further to the right and become more and more defensive of the capitalist status quo.
Correct. The system is fucked. But like it or not, you'll be stuck with one of them
We're held hostage by one party and get literal death threats from the other. It sucks, man.
Can you elaborate on what you mean 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"? Are you unaware of the fact that Biden is the incumbent President?
He was nominated by a wide margin against a dozen other candidates (including over my preferred candidate), and elected with solid EC majority and a record number of individual votes.
To suggest that he was somehow appointed by the party establishment, when he's simply running for reelection like almost every incumbent President in American history has done after their first term seems like a very disingenuous statement. It's interesting that nobody leveled that argument against Trump when he ran for reelection in 2020, not to mention every other time it's happened, considering it's been the norm for decades.
I know plenty of Dems who voted trump because abortion. I think a lot is the demographics’ religion. I’ve heard too many say they will vote for trump because at least he gave them $1200. And a friend told me in conversation he visited a (all black) church where the pastor said he doesn’t care if trump is elected, because “God has a plan.”
Biden leaves much to be desired, and waited until election year to mention price-gouging, even try to contend with border red states and abortion. Facts are, both establishment parties are on the same Team Gazillionaire, which isn’t us, and they don’t want it to ever be us. It’s time we wake up that one party is just more sneaky about it, and they’re really not that sneaky. And the EC is still in place.
You can't convince me that a native English-speaker wrote this.
Is there some reason you think people who aren’t native English speakers shouldn’t be involved in American politics? 🤨
No. I do expect coherent and factual arguments from those who do, however. I've had my fill of word salad for 2024 already. Am I asking too much?
Is that why you didn’t mention any of that in your comment and instead focused on whether or not they spoke English as a first language?
That's fair. You're right.
I just thought it was funnier than going point by point through that incoherent nonsense to try to correct it, because sometimes I feel like it's better to laugh than it is to try to engage with political talking points that are so mired in bullshit that they are hard to take in good faith. It's also flawed to assume that everybody who is engaging in conversations around American politics are American citizens acting in good-faith, based on what we know about the history of foreign meddling in global elections, but I digress.
It's possible that you've taken it more seriously than I meant it to be, but ultimately I said something that may have been offensive and exclusionary to ESL speaking people, and for that I'll just say sorry.
I appreciate that you were willing to hear what I was saying. FWIW I recognize there was a legitimate problem with troll campaigns in at least the past 2 presidential elections and I’m sure already is a problem in the upcoming one, but defaulting to ‘someone isn’t using perfect English, they’re a shill!’ (in addition to being exclusionary to ESL speakers) casts too wide a net and includes a lot of people who legitimately do speak English as a first language (ask any English teacher, lol).
It’s my first language and after four decades of voting, this is what it’s been.