I’m so close to blocking this community. Its Rule #5 states:

Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.

Instead, it’s basically a leftist version of a right-wing echo chamber where if you don’t support your candidate hard enough then you get downvoted into oblivion. Which is meh personally, but on the wider scale also shuts down interesting conversations that could result, if people felt more free to actually articulate their positions, using coherent logical formulations mind you. And even that is fine I suppose, if that’s what this community wants to be, then it is on me to seek out what I want elsewhere.

I may not agree with someone, but I will defend to the death their right to speak.

Anyway, sorry OP that your The Atlantic article - a liberal media source if I ever heard of one - is getting downvoted to oblivion in spite of the rules of this community specifically asking for the opposite behavior. Fwiw I cross posted it to another news community in case that helps.

Dont confuse shitlibs with leftists we are not the same thing.

By that token though, are there any true leftists alive or dead that ever existed on planet earth? The issue with such an ideological purity test is that it keeps shifting around, forever trying to distinguish the pure and correct ones from those on the periphery who are somehow worse than those entirely outside bc these at least should have known better. I’m not even saying that you are wrong - obviously there’s a spectrum and obviously some people are more along it than others, but I’m saying that that entire mode of thinking is problematic in the practical sense. Example: isn’t my very own message hypocritically doing exactly this, and I would have done far better to have been more accepting of your words? 😜 So it’s like the trolly problem: not meant to find a practical solution, just something to consider in case it’s fun to do so.:-)

There is nothing purity about it. Liberals are more aligned with Republicans than they are leftists.

Sigh… fair point:-|. I hate that it’s true, but…

(in my head, I like to think that “real liberals” simply have no representation in politics right now, or ever, but then the opposing argument to that is that the purpose of a system is what it manages to accomplish so… I cannot in good conscience continue to do that)

None of the working class has representation in government. Our government represents capital, bankers, and corporations. All of which have convinced voters there are only 2 options for which right wing corporate owned party they want to select.