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Your party, and why its The Worst
Styrofoam Sammich
WANT.normal (not weird)Registered User regular
WANT.normal (not weird)Registered User regular
A general thread to discuss political parties, the ways they suck, let us down, and effect our future plans or the plans of others. Including but not limited to: The Democrats, The Republicans, a theoretical British opposition party, baby showers and whatever it is they do in Canada, something involving black face.
Obviously not always a happy topic, but let's try to be civil, keep in mind rules about advocating violence etc
Obviously not always a happy topic, but let's try to be civil, keep in mind rules about advocating violence etc
ElJeffe wrote:go wild
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Video is describing this as bait.
For example, the state parties are typically feckless, and the DNC does very little to help win statehouses (the occasional governor's race aside.)
Man, the local unelected political committees and boards for WA Dems are truly atrocious sometimes.
Also too many of them would just like to get rich with skin-deep social diversity while attending cocktail parties at swank digs. Hollywood for ugly nerds.
There is some good news implicit in this bad news, which is that the DNC does not have the capacity to police local elections outside of their urban machine strongholds, so lefty candidates can out-organize them.
The honest answer here is ruthless purging of dissidents both domestically and abroad.
This is a challenge for people not even that far left who have serious concerns about dem leadership and corporate influence, too
Jill Stein definitely had dirty Russian ties, but that seems to be as much just standard grifter / useful idiot spoiler stuff as any sort of active involvement. She had a lot less direct ties to Russia than the Trump Campaign and GOP at large.
Now the GOP edit - Green Party has absolutely been buoyed and received funding by the GOP and their supporters as a direct spoiler for decades now.
There isn't one of course. One thing that's very valuable to learn is the difference between someone conversing with you and someone exerting power over you. The difference can be subtle and people doing the latter often disguise what they are doing as the former. It's an effective trick but the first step to seeing through it is to let go of any idea that you need someone's approval before criticizing them.
The Dem Party leadership have shown who they are time and time again. Some folks who are liberal/left-of-center apparently still think they are worth defending. I say don't even bother engaging and just push forward with you want to do, focusing on local elections and -- maybe even more important -- doing politics outside of elections.
This isn’t specific to Greens, Dems will also backchannel (sometimes front channel!) money to 3rd parties on the right to divide their opponents’ votes
also let it never be forgotten that obama birtherism originated with clinton's 2008 campaign and then got picked up as useful by the republicans
hitting hot metal with hammers
[the following will be a hard and fast overview of just over thirty years of Democratic Parry internal politics]
For those unversed in Party history, the DLC was a coalition of conservative, “business-friendly” Democrats (primarily, at its founding, Democratic donors) that formed in the wake of the Reagan victories against the dems. Both Clintons, Al From, Joe Lieberman are among a few noteworthy members, but not anywhere limited to just them of course. Indeed it was From who served as founder of the organization and was its longtime CEO; but it was perhaps Bill Clinton who gave the DLC its major win.
It’s widely regarded that his 1992 election victory is what set the stage for the post-Reagan restructuring of the party, a restructuring that saw the party abandon decades old constituencies such as labor in exchange for the aforementioned “business-friendlier” approach to corporations*, a harsher approach to crime, slashing welfare programs** and the like; a political philosophy known as “the third way,” trying to seek a middle ground between the old Democratic policies and those of the Right wing. Even following the end of his second term, Bill and Hillary had essentially amassed for themselves a level of power within the party apparatus that served to end the old era of the Democratic Party and entrench the DLC’s hold.
There was some argument at the time that the rise of Obama and his victory over Hillary Clinton signaled the end for the grip the DLC faction held over the party (particularly with the dissolution of its constituent organizations as formal, discrete entities), but in retrospect it seems more that what happened was the DLC effectively became the Democratic Party’s leadership and organizing structure (and thus, the need for discrete organizations had ended; the job to remake the party in the wake of Reagan vs Carter and Mondale had been complete).
But, as strong as the DLC’s grip became, and as much as the party was restructured in its founders’ image, there were still left wing Democrats and organizations out there and some still getting elected. And, while these fights were fairly in the background for much of that time, time continued to March on and the fallout of the DLC’s right wing policies began to take hold, supercharged by the efforts of the Right Wing’s pushes in the aughts: economic instability for the working class, the consolidation and monopolization of corporations, etc.
And, in turn, a lot of old folks started retiring and passing on, making room for a new generation of progressives to start getting elected. Which brings us here, with the modern Congressional Progressive Caucus. For the first time in a while, there is a left wing faction of the Democratic Party that has enough seats to make trouble for those formed by decades of the DLC’s preferences, and fights that were once the shit you only heard about in fairly niche reporting, or inside the beltway political books, are now finally big enough you can see them play out in the mainstream.
*indeed, Clinton would follow through on this quite well with a marathon of deregulatory bills signed into law, including the 1996 Telecommunications Act that paved the way for mass monopolization in the space, or the repeal of Glss-Steagall, argued by many to be a lynchpin in the general economic crises that would follow over the course of the following decade
**arguably, another of the DLC’s turnabouts was its abandonment of the Black Community; it was never particularly shy about joining in with the right in cutting programs or outright attacking those that just so coincidentally happened to primarily benefit black Americans. Jesse Jackson once referred to the DLC as "Democrats for the Leisure Class,” and you could potentially make the argument that the DLC could be seen as a resurgence of the southern democrat, given its foundational members and their racial priorities
Interesting. Especially interesting since it was the strategy of the conservative Democrats to call Bernie Sanders racist (either directly or through layers of abstractions and innuendo). This never passed the smell test but it was very effective at putting well-intentioned but naive left-wingers on their back foot.
Yeah the whole party was on board, which IMO to me kind of demonstrates that trying to do electoral politics without a social movement behind it is like putting the cart before the horse. The labor movement didn't collapse because the Dems went corporate -- the Dems went corporate because the labor movement collapsed. The individual politicians were just following the money and the power and the unions lost both.
It's because the democrats were putting forward and passing republican legislation.
It feels like you can trace a thirty year line of Democratic policy making, candidate choices and practices from the present back to 1988 to “twenty donors decide to remake the party in their image”
This is true of the GOP, true of the Democrats, true of the UK Labor Party and the Tories. We see it in unions too; ask some Teamsters how they feel about Hoffa's leadership and you'll probably hear a description of something similar. National governments and corporations fall prey to this as well.
Without a doubt.
One thing that's very encouraging about the current strike wave is that a lot of it is being driven by rank-and-file union members who are demanding more of leadership. I hope the militancy continues!
To be clear, both the Telecommunications Act of 96 and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Stegal were originated by Republicans, and G-L-B got out of the Senate with a single D vote (though many more views for it after conference.)
Like, not trying to whitewash the Democrats' ultimate complicity, just making sure we have the objective facts straight.
Even knowing its coming its astounding watching an entire apparatus dedicated to white washing class interests for the wealthy turn identity politics on the left.
Who would ever believe Sanders is racist? Isn’t there a pic of him being arrested at a civil rights rally?
The reason why the Democrats suck is inherent in a big tent party: they address a lot of interest groups, and they aren't always focusing on yours. Meanwhile the Republicans are fairly united in white Christian nationalism, so their cultural appeals work a lot better for their core audience. Because they have less groups to focus on, they can address their feelings a lot more effectively.
why should laying out the reasons a political party sucks and is hopeless turn people off politics altogether? there are a lot of ways to be engaged politically that don't involve the democrats, and there's a bunch more besides that don't involve engaging with electoral politics at all. this is part of the problem, people in the democrat machine making like they're the only game in town and if you don't do it their way it's your fault personally when trump 2 gets in. that's a dogshit way of engaging people, they suck the life out of any alternative. that's a self-fulfilling prophecy
hitting hot metal with hammers
I've never seen anyone with actual influence call Sanders racist, or even imply it. What they did say is exactly the sort of thing Lanz is talking about. 2016 Sanders in particular (and large swathes of the Dem party in general, including both progressives and moderates) have been focusing away from race issues. He was significantly better about it in 2020.
And it is a real problem. 538 had a pair of relevant articles about this recently. A lot of pro-POC policies scare white people. Those policies might even lose us elections here and there. But if the Dem party is seen as abandoning Black and Latino voters, it's going to cause a long term collapse in the party. That's before even getting to the fact that pro-POC policies are, you know, a great thing to have regardless of the politics.
Democrats sucking encourages it more than people calling it like it is.
Democratic leadership doesn’t have a “we can’t focus, there’s just too many people to serve problem;” they have a “we serve our wealthy donors” problem
Which makes sense when, again, the post-Reagan reformation of the party was a project headed up by a group of party donors tired of losing
He also responded "all lives matter" when asked to say "black lives matter" at a rally and handled a couple of protestors demanding justice for Sandra Bland pretty poorly. In a general sense he did a decidedly mediocre job tying his labor-populist message to institutional racism in his first go-round. It didn't come completely out of nowhere.
Full disclosure, I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary.
I think this is a bit simplistic, the president and leader of his party being against something tends to steal votes for an intiative like that on his side of the aisle. Overriding Clinton's filibuster when he's more popular than you as a democratic politician would have been a gamble if you planned to run again
Yeah the Green Party is a Russian and GOP asset rather than a front because it can be so easily manipulated.