‘Try actually fighting’: Democrats face voters’ fury at town halls.
> Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
Lately my emotions have tended toward anger at the apathetic middle, not the cartoon villains of the Penguin Administration.
I know it’s a minority view but I blame all this on the nice normal people that thought they had better things to do than pay attention to politics.
If you do not see the need for aggressive responses to lawlessness, you let this happen and I find you boring.
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can’t pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your “meaning” is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
“my centrism isn’t a problem, it’s DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered”
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren’t wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that’s just me.
I would say the last time they existed was the 1970s when Nixon agreed to create an EPA he really didn’t want to that had fewer powers than its supporters really wanted. The 90s only seemed smooth because scumbag Clinton gave Republicans everything they wanted on welfare reform, criminal justice, telecom deregulation, intellectual property laws, and international trade.
And we still got Gingrich and the contract with America and Ken Starr and Sore Loserman for being so conciliatory
And erased the deficit. Plus the first real attempt at national healthcare.
I mean, there’s good and bad. We could have that or we could have all bad.
Until some of you start running and finding out what it means to win an election we default to whoever they’ve got queued up.
Dude, no. The 90s were better than now because the ball was closer to the top of the hill and hadn’t been rolling back down as long. The strong worker protections, economic regulations, and tax policy that built the middle class during the 50s and 60s started to be dismantled in the 70s because of compromising with economic extremists. They started blaming everything that made a strong middle class possible for high inflation and have been doing it for every economic woe since.
On the other end, the only reason many of those laws were able to be passed in the first place is because FDR and company dragged us there over the objections of the same group.
The best times this country has had economically were never because the neoliberals and their predecessors back through the robber barons were less extreme and more reasonable, but because we had politicians who were up to the task of kicking the shit out of them and overcoming their influence.
A parliamentary system may be more resilient against fascist takeovers but this discussion is about the inherent foolishness of the centrist fallacy.
It’s a fallacy under any circumstances: do not compromise with people who are operating in bad faith.
On an article talking about how Dems failed voters…
There’s always going to be someone blaming voters and saying asking for representation is undemocratic…
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”
They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Democrats hit 27% approval this week…
That’s ironically the level Schumer said Dems would start doing stuff when Trump hit.
No one likes neoliberals, or their policies
It’s just not an effective political strategy, regardless of how you try to look at it. Even ignoring popularity with voters, even when neoliberals get elected, they refuse to do anything.
The entire purpose of it is doing nothing, it’s political nihilism.
No one likes neoliberals
51% of voters consistently vote for Democrats.
Barack fucking OBAMA was a neoliberal.
If you think neolibs are unpopular, you’re in quite a bubble.
Agreed.
The democrat dinosaurs will panic, telling us the large donations will dry up, without which a campaign cannot be won.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We're now 0/3 on that front, so... yeah. It's not impossible, but they'll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
Yeah people forget that the Democrat party doesn’t need to even hold primaries, let alone respect the outcome. The DNC admitted to pushing Hillary to the forefront and were the ones that dragged Biden out of retirement because it seemed like Bernie might win the second time. The good politicians seem like exceptions.
Need to start promoting working families type party.
I’m not talking about Presidential primaries. I’m talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I’d be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it’s not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of… I don’t know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.
You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn’t going to happen. Presidential primary isn’t the place to start.
This is way. Democrat voters want change, but they’re not speaking to the system in a language it understands. The party changes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That only happens when people with different views stand for, and win, lower level positions. Every voice changed lower down on the totem pole changes the presure on the people making decisions further up. Ultimately enough movement lower down means the top eschalons are pushed out and replaced too.
Whether it’s possible to find enough candidates to start filling the party, I don’t know, but just focusing on the primaries (or lack thereof) for the top job is missing the wood for the trees.
I volunteered this election with our state house district committee of the Democratic party. The grassroots is effectively neutered and you can believe that they are carefully managed to be sure nothing rises up that the national party cannot control.
The Democrats are managed opposition.
Thank you for putting the effort in. The party apparatus isn’t going to want to change, but I’m not sure that it’s managed opposition as such, so much as those who are ‘in’ being happy with their lot and doing what they feel they need to to stop that being taken away.
There’s two ways to use that to change the situation, either demonstrate that their comfortable position will be taken away if they don’t change their politics, or take it away by finding a candidate you can rally enough support behind. Neither is easy, and both require getting people involved en-mass at the lowest levels of politics, which is going to be hard work with the party pulling against you. It’s not impossible though, AOC and Sanders are both candidates of a different stripe and have, so far, held their places. Imagine how different things would be if they were replicated even a few times?
Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is.
The problem is that they'll, again, fight you every step of the way. An ideological takeover will have to happen over their dead bodies, and meanwhile they'll keep demanding concessions so they don't expel you from the party and disallow you from running for primaries. The crux of the issue with the ideological takeover route is that this contradiction will lose you legitimacy in the eyes of your supporters as you're forced into compromise after compromise in order not to alienate the neoliberals, and they'll give you fucking nothing in return.
Ross Perot couldn't pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment.
Uh... obviously you can't win an election with only 19% of the vote?
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
That’s exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.
No third party that isn’t self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.
A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united.
If you start local and strategically spread (or create a mass movement and go for the jugular) you can remove the neoliberals from the equation and make socialists and fascists the only two choices.
And. And work to implement ranked choice voting. The FPTP system is the root of all this. The reason you can’t realistically consider voting for a third party, and why those who did (or sat home since they had nothing realistic to vote for) handed power to Trump.
But all that will take time and is not going to help in the next couple of elections. So there also needs to be a short to medium term plan.
However they aren't in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can't stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between
Okay I could be wrong, but can they not make up excuses bar whoever they don't like from primaries? Or make up other excuses and run their own neoliberal candidate and split the vote anyway? They just... nominated Harris in 2024 so clearly they're not obligated to even hold primaries.
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