Fuck off with that bullshit. Because what I’m seeing in this very thread is that the “centrist” Dems are just complaining that their failures are everybody else’s fault, and NEVER their own.
ETA: In fact, it seems to me that the Progressives are being decried here for doing the exact opposite of just “complaining about how it [isn’t] fair]”; some number of them may have actually put their collective foot down and said “Enough with the bullshit, I’m done supporting the slightly-less-right-wing party!”
Did I say we got nothing? Right in the part you quoted it says “incrementally better”. That’s not nothing, or worse than before. I’m not a moderate.
What we don’t get with the current conservative Democratic party is a push back against the corporate abuses of government. We continue to have mergers, monopolies, and monopsonies as standard practice, with regulatory capture and politicians on both sides beholden to corporate interests.
A large part of the dissatisfaction with the way things are is due to stagnant wage growth over the last few decades, as both productivity and profits increased. Americans (rightly) felt like they were getting screwed. Trump and the Republicans give them easy (and wrong) answers to their problems to sooth their feelings. The Democrats don’t do much of anything.
Trump and Republicans before him (with the help of Fox News) have had great success lying about what they’ll do to fight for the working man, and then give even more to the big corporations than the Democrats do.
Those in the Democratic party who want to fight the rampant corporatism, are smeared as progressives, told they’re full of impossible dreams, and are chasing unicorns. No wonder they’re upset. Most of them vote for Sanders or Warren in primaries, and then Clinton in the election. Others, after being yelled at and called babies went home with hurt feelings.
If the Democrats want to keep the progressives, maybe when they have a choice between doing the progressive plan or what HCA and UnitedHealth want, they’ll pick the progressive option.
You know why we’re doing that? Because it’s not our fault.
In the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we voted for Hillary Clinton. It’s not our fault Trump got elected.
If you voted for Trump, it’s your fault Trump got elected.
If you were eligible to vote but didn’t, it’s your fault Trump got elected.
If you threw away your vote on some hopeless third party candidate, it’s your fault Trump got elected.
I mean, you just said that you voted for them, so you are enabling them just as much as I am. So, go fuck yourself.
You really think that pushing extremist views is a winning strategy? Good for the people or not, the people don’t want what you are selling.
You obviously don’t know shit about anything, much less me, what I’ve done and what I am working towards. You are just too busy wallowing in your own tantrum to even understand that you are pushing away any allies you may have with your childish whining.
And yet, your every effort is in their best interest. Maybe look into that.
I think it’s the hateful rhetoric. We like to think that liberals are more reasonable and capable of basic self reflection, rather than just vomiting hatred at any target they can find. He may be for liberal policies, but he sounds just like a raging alt-right proud boy.
Right, because you were complaining about how the rules of our country work. I obviously literally didn’t mean to perform a seance, but it seems I overestimated your intelligence by an order of magnitude or so.
Sorry about that, I will try to use small words and avoid common idioms that are beyond someone of your capabilities.
Well yes, there is nothing that I can do about it right now. Do you think I can just march into the National Archives with some whiteout and a sharpie and make whatever changes I want to make?
You are starting to sound like one of the Jan 6th insurrectionists. The process of democracy doesn’t go your way, so you abandon democracy.
That’s exaclty what you are demanding.
Okay, so now you admit that that is what you are demanding, that we abandoned the basic foundation of our country. At least you have a brief moment of honesty here.
I guess it means what you mean by attack. If you mean people dared to disagree with you, then sure.
Apparently you are unable to follow context as well. By “you” I mean anyone who makes those choices.
No, the approach I am taking with you is as to an adult trying to reason with a screaming toddler who isn’t getting their way.
Yes, because you are attacking me for not getting you that fucking pony.
It’s not just Republicans destroying our country. Sure, they are the ones that are our enemy, but when our “allies” do their best to undermine our efforts, they are actually more dangerous.
I will as soon as you stop telling me to unilaterally tear up the constitution because it’s not getting the results that you want. I think you need to fuck right off, to be honest.
No, you just whine and complain that perfection has not been achieved, and yell at anyone who is doing their best to make things better that they aren’t doing a good enough job.
What I posted is absolutely correct. When people can’t tell the difference between the rhetoric of the proud boys from that of a progressive, then that progressive is working against the interests of a liberal democracy, and handing the far right victory on a platter.
Now, to be fair, you said, “merely complaining about the leadership”, which is fine to do. But what is happening is not “merely complaining about the leadership”, you are demanding that we completely change the way our country is run. Minimizing it to “merely complaining about the leadership” is incredibly dishonest of you to do.
This is a load of bullshit. Do you understand that when you say stupid bullshit like this, it does in fact make people get tired of it? You are attacking us, right here, right now, and then you play coy as though you can’t possibly understand why anyone could be upset with your rhetoric?
Yeah, so? They wrote a document that we follow. I’d love to make some changes to it, but I don’t have that power. I am trying to work within the system to change it to make a better country, but that takes time, effort, and cooperation, something that those who demand these changes aren’t willing to do.
Or do you recommend we try violence to change it? That’s the only other option, and it seems you aren’t happy with the first.
So, what do you recommend?
I voted for Bernie in the primary, I voted for Hillary in the general. I donated to and volunteered in several local races, and my personal efforts probably swayed at least one race, and I can take partial credit for a couple others.
From the outside looking in, you just see all Americans as the same, and all equally complicit in the problems that our country has. You ignore that some of us are working our asses off to address and mitigate those problems, and just whine that they are not already fixed.
I was disabused of any sort of that notion at a very early age. But I also was disabused of the notion that just hoping and whining gets anything done. It takes real work, work that does not make splashes, it’s not flashy, it’s slow, grueling, and mostly thankless. This is exactly the work that some of the progressive wing of the party refuses to put in, they’d rather demand change than actually work for it.
I’m a bit torn on it. I actually preferred Hillary in many ways, but I voted for Bernie, as I wanted to steer the party a bit to the left. I thought doing so would lend some support to the progressive agenda.
I would have accepted either as president, but I do think that Hillary would have gotten more done, if nothing else, she’d be more realistic. Bernie promised a whole lot that he had no chance of delivering. Hillary promised less, but I believed she could deliver most of it.
I wouldn’t have had to hold my nose to vote for Bernie, but I would have had more trepidations about both his chances of winning, as well as his ability to follow through.
Nah, they mostly didn’t like his supporters. I’m starting to see why.
That’s how democracy works. People need to vote in order for people to win office.
Right, and the people who didn’t vote, or voted third party are at fault here. But so are the people in “safe” states who encouraged them not to vote for her.
I agreed with you on that (the horrors) which is why calling her a uniquely terrible candidate as many progressives are want to do is not just harmful, but wrong.
I’d either feel defensive about it, and scream and yell about what a terrible candidate Hillary was, and how she didn’t deserve my vote, or I’d not act like a child, and realize the impact that my mistake has made on our country, and do everything I could to make up for it.
Things like that are incremental. We can go in the direction that ends up with a public option, or we can demand a public option right now.
The first is harder, but actually is possible. The latter is easy because it’s just a dream.
Fair, there are a lot of low information voters who make choices not based on policy. I should say that everyone had access to the information to know what was on the line. Republican voters certainly did. They knew that there was at least one SCOTUS seat up for grabs, and understood that Kennedy and RBG were old enough to likely not make it through an administration. They knew the stakes and turned out. How many times have we heard, “I don’t like Trump, but I do like his SCOTUS picks.”
No, just progressives who either didn’t vote for Hillary, or encouraged others to not vote for Hillary. Taking a broad brush to yourself for martyrdom purposes does no one any good.
Look at the OP. It’s not “How are progressives feeling now?” it’s specifically about those who hated Clinton.
When Clinton called homophobes and bigots and the like deplorables, many Republicans chose to take up the mantle in order to take insult. I feel as though this is exactly what progressives who are looking to take insult are doing here.
This is reductive. You actively supported a candidate that somehow could not beat a joke candidate. You supported a party that was determined to run that candidate and all the strategic mistakes that entails. Hillary actually losing the election was only the last step in a long chain that constituted a loss to Donald Trump, and you happily went along with every other link in that chain.
So in back to back posts to me, I’m the asshole because you assumed I didn’t vote for Clinton, but I’m also the asshole because I did vote for Clinton.
No, I am not enabling them as much as you, because you are supporting the incompetent, corrupt party as-is, and I’m doing what little I can to change them to something better.
Extremist views like “the American government should serve the people as a whole, not a very small fraction of the richest of them”? Only when you allow yourself to be boxed in by the Overton window they’re selling you is anything I’ve advocated for “extremist”
It’s funny, you guys are making up this narrative about how whiny progressives are empowering republicans and alienating everything, but it’s really the opposite. Mainstream democrats are so incompetent at fighting against the republicans but so good at suppressing progressives that you could reasonably conclude that they view progressives as the greater enemy.
This is beyond the pale. You assert that I’m the one being alienating, but you are calling me equivalent of a fucking proud boy. I normally think of you as a reasonable person in a debate, whose posts are worth reading, but this is disgusting. I expect an apology for this. It was ill-considered and hateful. Far more hateful than anything I’ve said in this thread to any other poster.
You know what’s funny? Maybe the other guy remembers my posts from 20 years ago when I was actually fairly anti-progressive and more libertarian. My policy positions were vastly different than they are now. You know what happened? I’ve done a lot of that reason and self reflection you say I’m incapable of and dramatically changed my mind about issues.
Your attacks on me are personal and disgusting, and they’re made in the same post where you talk about how it’s actually progressives who are alienating everyone else with their toxicity making them ironic too.
Are you seriously advocating, in a first past the post system, that progressives should all split from the democratic party and form their own party? Who do you think that would benefit?
Well, no, you called anyone who supported Clinton an asshole. You called yourself an asshole.
We did exactly the same things. We voted for Bernie in the primary, and voted for Clinton in the general. But you think that we are different somehow?
Anyway, I probably did do far more than you did to get liberals and progressives elected in 2016, as well as 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and I’m working on 2022. I donated, I campaigned, I spent countless hours working with the campaigns to improve their image, I spent hours going door to door knocking and asking for their vote.
What did you do?
I mean, most of the American people do have it pretty good right now. Most people live fulfilling and happy lives. We need to work on those America is failing, but we can’t do that so long as we can’t even acknowledge where we really are.
So, yes, claiming that only a very small fraction of the richest Americans are the only ones who aren’t living in a dystopia is an extremist view.
When you yell and scream, and even call for violence, as you are doing in another thread, yes, you are alienating the majority of voters. They don’t want to be associated with the sort of hate that you are spewing.
Progressives are so good at shooting themselves in the foot in the hopes of hitting their allies that the quote, “what one should really fear is not a competent enemy, but an incompetent ally.” comes to mind.
How are progressives “suppressed”? You get every right to speak and to campaign and redress your grievances. Just because you are not given everything you demand isn’t oppression, it’s just life. This martyrdom complex is just another page from the playbook of the alt-right that you seem to have heartily adopted.
I mean, you are refusing to accept the results of an election and demand your way. In the other thread, you are as close to explicitly calling for violence as you can get away with on this board.
Yes, take away what it is that you are advocating for, and the way that you are advocating for it makes you sound just like them. Annoying thing is, I agree with most of what you are advocating for, I just find the way you are doing so to be, let’s just say counterproductive.
And you’ve had quality posts on this board that I’ve read with interest, and that doubles my disappointment with the direction you’ve chosen here. Lots of people work really fucking hard to try to keep this country working for all of us, and you just throw them under the bus because they weren’t able to do a good enough job with the limited resources they were given.
I can’t apologize for describing the impression that you are giving off here. Maybe some self reflection is in order, to see just how hostile you are, not just to those of us on this board that disagree with you, but to the entire notion of democracy when it doesn’t go your way.
Are you with @Banquet_Bear as he says that we should just rip up the constitution unilaterally because it was made by old dead people?
Your attacks on the Democratic party and anyone who supports it are pretty disgusting.
Yes, they are. Because I am pointing out to you what you sound like, what impression anyone would take of your rhetoric. If you are insulted by an accurate description, change the description, don’t complain about being described. I am responding to your toxicity with disgust.
What benefit are you getting from the current system, where you claim that the Democrats are no better than Republicans and they are corrupt and terrible and all?
And what benefit do the Democrats get from having a wing that doesn’t support them in elections?
Seems all you want to do is to try to subvert the party. You saw how Trump subverted the Republicans and took over that party with his extremists, and it seems you want to try to do the same thing.
Who knows? I think a lot of recent events have placed several previous presidents in a better light. It is scary that the two most prominent candidates are Trump and Biden. There is a remarkably scathing article about the former in The Atlantic, surprisingly so. On the whole I think Clinton was well liked and a little too smooth. Were there really a lot of Democrats who disliked him? Certainly some Republicans did…
…its entirely possible to learn from what happened in 2016 without having to re-litigate what happened in 2016.
This is what actually happened:
It sure looks like Bernie did what he could and made things better than they were. So he got something. Because progressives in general, especially the ones with platforms in the US, understand the power of negotiation and incremental change.
The stakes were not obvious.
Even today, where the stakes are even higher than they were in 2016, where SCOTUS has gone rogue, where States are banning abortion, where books are being burned, trans rights are being threatened, where white nationalists are proudly marching down the streets, where mass shootings happen so frequently I’ve lost track of how many there have been this year, millions of people aren’t going to vote in the mid-terms or the next presidential elections.
Because for many, the stakes are not obvious.
For many, they are so disenfranchised with the process that they don’t see how their vote will make a difference.
For others, they might just not care.
And for many others, its almost impossible to vote at all. They may be a felon living in a state that doesn’t allow them to vote. Or maybe those voter suppression tactics paid off.
The only people who really understood the stakes at the last election were people who are invested enough in the process to care.
And the thing about stakes is that it goes both ways.
Right now, there are millions of people who for the last 50 years have worked on a strategy of taking over the judiciary and over-turning Roe vs Wade. And they did it.
So they are poised for the “push over the top.” Win the Senate and the President and they can ban abortion nationwide.
The stakes have never been clearer for them.
But for the Democrats: the stakes are not being made clear.
That isn’t a “voter” problem. Its a problem with the Democrat leadership.
I don’t honestly know what I did to piss you off and for you to take a bad faith interpretation of absolutely everything I’ve said. So after this post I’m going to simply make sure I don’t see any of your posts every again.
But to set the record straight:
I am not now, and have never ever worked alongside Fox news with the goal of disillusion voters.
I am not affiliated with Pravda, I am not a Russian agent, I never worked for the former Soviet Union, I am not trying to get American voters to not come out to vote.
My complaints are pretty much limited to this message board. I make the occasional tweet. Nobody reads them. I tend to post here because I’ve been posting here for nearly half-of-my-life.
I stand by everything I have said about your constitution. The “bedrock of your society” was written by owners of slaves. It is a racist, misogynist document created by a bunch of racist, misogynist long-dead-white-dudes.
America isn’t exceptional. The sentence “You are indoctrinated to pledge allegiance to the flag and the republic as kids” isn’t an attack on the American people. It’s simply a fact. Did that upset you? Sometimes the truth hurts.
I do not support violence. I have not called for an insurrection. I am not trying to “undermine your efforts.”
Nothing I have said here: and I mean absolutely nothing, matches the rhetoric of a proud boy. And nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, that anything a progressive has said matches the rhetoric of what the proud boys have said.
I can’t emphasize this enough: I am not actually more dangerous than the Republicans that are destroying your country. Really. I’m not.
I’m not demanding that you completely change the way your country is run. That is a complete disingenuous reading of everything I’ve said. The constitution is a fundamentally racist and out-dated document. And part of why America is the way that it is right now is because of a slavish devotion to that document. It underpins everything that you do. But I am under zero illusions that any of that will change. Not in the short term. Not even in the long term. Things aren’t going to get better. I only see them getting worse. My posts aren’t a call to action. (and the posts that you interpreted as a call to action were obviously, to varying degrees, intentionally hyperbolic)
Let’s not kid ourselves. The kind-of-America that the Republican leadership are fighting for is a reflection of the kind-of-America that millions of Americans actually want, and a reflection of what millions of other Americans don’t want, but can live with. It’s the people at the margins who will suffer.
I agree with this. Getting a public healthcare system was identified as a major progressive goal. I fully support that goal.
But the reality is that Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to get a public healthcare system in 1993. Obama tried to get a public healthcare system in 2008. Both had to settle for less. There’s no reason to think Bernie Sanders would have been able to get a public healthcare system if he had been elected president in 2016.
No, I didn’t. I don’t think I did anything like that. Could you point to where you believe I said that? You think that my position in this thread is that anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (as you are now saying that, by my own standards, I am an asshole for doing) is an asshole? It’s hard to take you as a good faith actor in this discussion when you mischaracterize me so dramatically.
I think you made a wrong assumption that I did not vote for Clinton and now you’re trying to cover it up, rather than admit your mistake, by instead making up bullshit about me.
It’s interesting that you say “I yell and scream.” Where are you getting that? This is a message board, this is all text based. I’m not even doing the text-equivalent of yelling and screaming. I’m not going off on emotional tirades or failing to stay on topic or make sense. I’m not typing in all caps all the time. My posts stand up as being perfectly valid and thought out.
When I was young, I would hear from people in the media or in real life talk about Richard Dawkins as this ultra-militant, angry, screaming atheist all the time before I’d ever seen him. I had this image of my head of him as this flaming ball of rage, aggressively attacking everyone in sight with his extremist views. And then I actually saw him, and he was this quiet little British guy who was very polite and very careful with his words. Why do you think religious people constantly mischaracterize Dawkins in that way? Why do you think you’re saying that I’m “yelling and screaming”?
You’re referring to a thread about what we can do after the fascist coup removes the ability to change politics by voting, and then acting as though my posts about the nature of violence in that context is a general call for violence in normal circumstances; that is really dishonest and you must know that.
And then you are taking this thread - in which I have generally stuck to the issues and not attacked people personally (although, to be fair, I did throw out a “fuck you”), even though this is a call out thread about how progressives are at fault for Trumpism - as another supposed example of my extremism. And you act as though that proves that I go rampaging through every political topic alienating people. What’s the proper response to people calling out progressives, again, for the Republicans being evil and the democrats being feeble?
No, I certainly didn’t do that. I have listed reasons why a primary is not the same as a general election, why right wing democrats have advantages in their own primary systems, and tried to attack the merits of continuing to vote for right wing democrats in the primary, but I haven’t done anything like “refusing to accept the results of an election”
You are so desperate to try to make this terrible proud boy analogy that you’re really stretching with that one, to the point again, of dishonesty.
I actually did do this. I gave it a lot of thought today, and I think you’re doing a combination of 1) just making shit up, see above, and 2) ignoring the context and venue of where I’m posting this stuff. I’m posting in a thread where I am being called out for being the reason for Trumpism and everything falling apart. Democrats aren’t even fighting as our democracy goes down in flame, and of course, as usual, they blame progressives for being too passionate or too “extreme” for wanting things that, as @Banquet_Bear points out, would be considered basic human rights in the rest of the rich and democratic world. Given that, I think my behavior in this thread has been pretty mild.
In addition, you’re trying to imply that I advocate for violence easily but failing to point out that you’re taking that out of context from a thread that’s specifically about a future scenario after we have lost the ability to change the country through voting because of a successful fascist coup. And even then, my posts weren’t calling for violence, but rather pointing out that we’ve whitewashed our history and programmed people to think that violence is never the answer, that it can never be a useful tool in enacting change for the better.
I’m sure you’re well aware, as it is important to the spirit of this board, that there’s a big difference between attacking a political institution or a viewpoint versus attacking someone personally. I’m not perfect in this regard, but I usually try to keep my attacks aimed at ideas and institutions.
I didn’t say they were the same, but I said they were both right wing parties that were making things worse, one much slower and less gleefully than the other. I also said that having a two party system, in which one entity is pure evil, and the other entity is the softer, milder version of that evil is a tool that keeps our politics under the full control of the people who stand to benefit from that arrangement.
I think the opposite question is more relevant. Why should everyone feel like they owe their votes to the democratic party even though the democratic party doesn’t do anything for them? If you will vote for a party no matter what, no matter how little they do for you or even if they are actively hostile towards you, then they have no incentive to represent your interest. Insisting that everyone left of batshit republican territory has a moral duty to vote democratic no matter what is one of the reasons that the democrats don’t give a shit about actually enacting any progressive policies. If they can take the progressive vote for granted, they don’t need to actually do anything the progressives want. This is part of the incentives we have given them where they do nothing but chase republicans to the right, because people like you insist that anyone to the left of them owes them their allegiance and their votes.
I mean, sure, I guess so. Since you have already established that you regard things that other rich and free countries consider to be basic human rights as extreme, then I am indeed trying to subvert the democratic party with “extremism”: I want them to do things that benefit the average American rather than the ownership class.
This, again, is a really desperate reach to try to equate me with the alt right and with Trump. Oh, Trump subverted Republicans, and you want to change the democrats, there’s another point that proves you’re just like Trump and the alt-right! But, of course, the difference is that I want the democrats to move in a direction that’s actually good for the country, that increases the well being of the average American, that puts us first before their owners.
You asked what you and I are doing differently. The democrats are losing, and have probably already lost, democracy in this country. We supported them as much as could reasonably be expected in 2020, and gave them control of the government, and they are doing jack shit with it. We are actively in a fascist coup with a country that has doubled down on subverting a democracy as a strategy. You want to, what, just sit quietly and watch it happen so that we don’t risk offending right wing democrats? Just let this one play out, roll over, let the fascists take over?
And I’m not talking about Manchin and Sinema and all of that bullshit. I’m talking about having an opposition party that shows every indication of having no respect for democracy, no respect for institutional norms, attempting to game the system, attempting to control election boards to try to set up election shenanigans that we already know they’ve tried and are planning to try harder, not using any instrument of justice in the United States to punish the perpetrators, making no effort to strengthen our institution, and no real effort to appeal to the American people to shake them out of their complacency. And people like you, who constantly ask the “extremists” who aren’t happy with this to be quiet because we’re ruining everything played a pivotal role in making this happen. We are losing our country and no one is even putting up a fight. A fitting end to your “shut up and vote democrat and don’t rock the boat” strategy.
Now - I know you probably don’t care about this, and fair enough, but I respect you as a poster. I don’t give a shit if most of the other dumb dumbs in this thread are dicks to me. I would still appreciate an apology for you for your desperate attempt to say that I am the equivalent of Trump and the alt right, that I have no introspection, that all I do is “yell and scream”, and other such unfounded accusations you’ve thrown around. I think you’re better than that.
The last few years have made me really weary of continuing dialogues with people choosing to act in bad faith.