The wing doesn’t matter if the eagle is a nazi tbf.
Liberalism has always been right from center. You can put neo in front of it all you’d like.
It was left in the context of a world dominated by feudalism, but we no longer live in that age.
Neo-it.
All I want is the freedom to vote how I want and still count my vote if my first choice didn’t win. Democrats should be free to run their political party how they want. Just like how everyone else should be free to participate in our elections. Free of a spoiler effect.
There should be no monopoly on the future of our nation. Republican, or Democrat.
Surely the freedom to vote how people want is not to high a bar for the democrats to clear right? Self proclaimed democracy advocates surely want the people to be represented fully… right?
I would never force a liberal to vote for my preference in a election, why is it okay for them to do that to me?
And it is a conscious decision to force me to vote a certain way. Every election democrats mercilessly rage at 3rd party voters. The Democratic party and their voters understand that First-past-the-post voting is flawed. Yet in blue states, fully in control of the Democratic party, FPTP voting shackles the people.
Democrats understand FPTP voting does a bad job of representing the nation. They ignore this festering gaping mortal wound… all for safe states and easy elections against a complete clown show. One that has defeated them in every way possible.
The monopoly is over democrats. You never deserved it, and you most certainly do not deserve it now in our darkest hours. Get out of the way, we have to move forward as a nation.
The Democratic party is not more important then the United States of America.
Electoral Reform Videos
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems
The system can’t be reformed to favor the working class because it was created by & for the owner class, the “donor” class. If necessary they will unleash fascism to maintain control.
The Democratic party is not more important then the United States of America.
They both have to go. There’s never going to be a socialist USA. That can only happen after a revolution leading to an different state with a different name.
I think actually a party guilty of genocide should not be free to run in elections, or even free to remain outside of prison
I don’t think chsnging the voting system will fix this. There is still a 2 party system in australia despite a democracy with preferential voting for over 100 years.
Bingo. Class dynamics take priority over voting mechanisms.
“I am angry the overton window has moved so far to the right, I’m going to blame the folks trying to move it leftward”
What hasn’t happened is an IRL movement around a new party or leader. What has happened is lots of “divide the left” memes and posts. I do wonder who that sentiment serves the most.
Moving it leftward is when you support two separate groups of genocidal fascists in Israel and Ukraine and whine at leftists for not tactically supporting the fascists enough
Divide the left
You are not on the left. But I do keep seeing a bunch of “How do you do, fellow leftists? We sure do love voting for the 𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓮𝓻 𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓵, amirite? By the way fuck communists” memes and posts. I wonder who that sentiment serves the most?
Left wing starts are anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. The democrats are complicit in genocide and take money from AIPAC and only care about pleasing their business owners. Also the DNC is a private corporation
The Democratic National Committee is many things but democratic
https://www.drmikekatz.com/the_dnc_and_rnc_are_private_corporations
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/WildingDNC.pdf
Liberals call this “purity testing,” but fundamentally the democrats stand for perpetuating capitalism and imperialism. These two points of contention are irreconcilable with any leftist.
“Waaaah how dare you purity test me, yeah I have right wing economic views but have you considered my social views are also right wing” - average Liberal
Yep, lol
“purity testing” more like them gaslighting people into believing that they are left wing and getting defensive when they are proved not to be
Bingo.
If I’m trying to create anything worth anything you’re goddamn right I’m gonna test my ingredients for purity
I agree, though I’d say there’s a difference between criticism and self-criticism with what we think of as “purity testing,” ie demonizing AES or other movements for their imperfections.
And still miles better than the GOP, your point?
Which is their entire platform, which is why the whole thing keeps going further right.
Except the Democratic party doesn’t just block leftward movement. It turns the crank in the same direction, just slower.
Dems as a whole are more left wing today than they were 20 years ago, but cool graphic
This is about the party, not the party’s constituency.
Yeah, that’s what im talking about
That’s your standard?
Election time already?
Leftists are always anti-DNC and focus on organizing over electoralism, so I don’t see why you think this is related to any election coming up.
The following can all be true:
- The Democrats are a right wing neoliberal party.
- The Democrats are the most left-wing option that is realistically available to American voters.
- The Democrats can be pushed further left if American progressives work to do so.
- The Democrats - at the party level - will resist such a change, but that resistance can still be overcome.
- In the long term, massive structural overhauls and the downfall of capitalism are the only things that will save America and the world
- In the near term, voting consistly and enthusiastically for the least bad option can still protect vulnerable groups from harm and create changes that lay the groundwork for those structural overhauls.
The funny thing about this is that if it were possible to reform the democratic party, it would only be through demanding change, and credibly threatening defection if those demands are not met. By setting conditions and giving those conditions teeth. What you’re suggesting is just asking nicely for people to act directly contrary to their material interests and hoping for the best. It’s complete nonsense.
Also lol at “enthusiastically voting.” Yes, it’s very important that you not only bend the knee to your corporate masters completely unconditionally, but that you do so with a smile on your face. You can trust me, I’m a leftist just like you, see how I say all the language about needing the downfall of capitalism?
That is their entire point. Two party system means that they can take up all space for opposition to Republicans while making their policies bipartisan.
The Democratic party is entirely built to fight any leftward movement, it isn’t just that the progressives didn’t try. They have been trying for 80 years. It is that the entire party is structured and designed to fight that. That is the actual reason Trump could come from the outside and completely reshape the Republicans, but the Dems can form rank and resist Bernie and the progressives.
The Democrats have shown overwhelmingly and repeatedly that they would rather lose to Republicans than move at all to the left.
Then primary the bad actors and reform the Democrat party.
This is your option. There is no other option than violent revolution and I can assure you from spending my entire life in this country that modern Americans don’t have it in them.
If conservatives can morph the Republican party into the traitorous entity it is now, then liberals can reform the Democrat party to move more to the left.
History proves party reformation is possible, and inevitable.
Liberals will never move left cause they’re pro-capitalism.
It’s not for liberals to move the democratic party left, it’s for everybody that wants the democratic party to change to do so.
The DNC will never change to the point of siding with the working classes, because their base is in their donors and the ones who hold the means of production, wealthy imperialists.
Their base is whoever votes in the primaries.
It took about 7 years for the Republican party to change from the Bush/Cheney era to full on fascism. The democratic party is not immune to a drastic change (hopefully towards the opposite end of the spectrum), but it won’t happen overnight and people that want this change must get involved. Money allows to promote an agenda, helps with organizing a campaign, but ultimately it’s the people who vote.
The GOP moved rightward, because that’s entirely compatible with what the capitalist class is okay with and even wants at times. The DNC, on the other hand, keeps moving rightward despite their voterbase moving leftward, because their base is that very same capitalist class. That’s why politicians lie, it would be very easy to not lie if you were actually basing your support on voters.
I only used that word cause of the person I replied to. I personally don’t view the Democrats as capable of moving left, at least not on the major stage. The only way to get a leftist party is to destroy the major parties through violence.
Then explain why the entire planet is capitalist and yet other countries have FAR more left leaning parties.
The Democrat party can be moved left if liberal voters make it happen.
EDIT: Yo downvoters, start a violent revolution or keep your fucking downvotes to yourself. Or, better yet, submit an idea, if you can, for what you think can be done. Because in reality, your options are start a violent revolution or reform the Democrat party. There are no viable 3rd parties in America and none are even trying to be viable. Use your fucking brains instead of your fingers to downvote. You are part of the problem.
EDIT 2: Honestly, my bad guys. I didn’t notice I was in .ml. The lack of common sense makes a lot more sense now.
Depends on what you’re talking about, but usually it either means they are in the global south, or have otherwise had a longer history of working class organization or proximity to socialist countries. Not by voting.
Not by voting.
Lol.
Can you provide examples of countries with viable left leaning parties that didn’t get there by voting?
You think working class organization is successful without voting in candidates that champion their cause?
🫡
USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc. were all won through revolution and working class organization. Even then, my point was clearly about the necessity of organizing. It is through working class organizing that politicians and the capitalist class are threatened into giving concessions, not through passively voting for sloganeers and other charlatans.
Crazy how some people have very strong opinions on politics but no basic understanding of how democracy works
Point 3 is wrong. The working classes in the States are already increasingly left, while the DNC is increasingly rightward. The DNC doesn’t care about what voters want, but what their donors need. That’s why it’s critical to engage with parties like PSL.
I think we’re showing mixed results on your third bullet. It did seem that way, for a while, as we pushed on social issues. And when it came time to get on with the economic issues, the core management team of the party rallied, and rather than adopt the left flank to win, steps right to hand control to Republicans.
And it’s happened more than once now, to obvious and clear effect: the goal of the Democratic party isn’t to win elections, it’s to keep the country idealogically aligned with a neoliberal ruling class. And if that means handing control of government to Republicans, they’ll do so, then blame the left (even though it’s them moving to the right losing elections).
To the fourth bullet, no, it’s not clear that within the machinations of the party infrastructure it can be overcome. Because if not now, when? Party leadership has never been weaker or more vulnerable nor the times more desperate. Democrats as a party poll worse than Trump, yet progressives can win elections with both the entire Republican and Democratic apparatus gunning to take them down. yet somehow we can’t replace Schumer’s or Jefferies.
Skipping to the 6th point, again, that isn’t actually borne out by the evidence. It’s not something well know in advance and only as an artifact of history. What’s been extremely clearly is that so far, voting has been wildly insufficient to make the kinds of structural changes necessary. Obama is the classic example of this. He runs on healthcare, holding wallstreet accountable, and ending the wars; he delivers corporate “access”, bails out the banks, and continues the wars. The voters did their job and the system didn’t work.
So a relentless optimism that the system will just work as intended doesn’t seem warranted, and it’s clearly not going in a good direction.
Until we recognize that the Democratic party, it at least it’s current and historical structure is at the core of the problem with why we can’t advance political change, its pretty clear that this decent into autocracy, fascism, and a degraded quality of life is inevitable. The Democratic party isn’t just part of the problem: it’s the core element of the problem.
Nothing new, in a profoundly capitalist structure like the US, there are no other options than to choose between conservatism and fascism, substituting reason for “in God we trust” and “Stars and Stripes”, to keep citizens ignorant and obedient to continue functioning.
You could’ve made this image using paint in under 5 minutes, did you really need to waste half a liter of water to have AI generate it?
OpenAI, and others, lose money on every prompt even with paid subscriptions. The resources will still be wasted by them but to cost them money is priceless.
This message brought to you by the wig party
The Whig party died because it failed to address the whig voters’ concerns over slave states. The Whigs in charge were too busy trying to find a moderate choice between traditional whig and democratic policies since the Whigs consisted of both northern and southern slave states and were too spineless to pick a side. Zachary Taylor (W), who had never voted or voiced his political opinion prior to running, won the nomination because whig voters in the convention thought being a middle ground candidate was enough to win. And he did win, but…
After Zachary Taylor was president, Winfield Scott (W), who was running a diet-democratic campaign seeing how it worked with Taylor, was running against Franklin Pierce (D), a dark horse candidate who wasn’t even in the running until the 35th ballot at a stalled democratic convention. Scott, having lost the anti-slavery voters of the northern states, had an enthusiasm issue so big that people of the time regard this is one of the least exciting campaigns in presidential history. After Pierce won the election 254 electoral votes to 42, Free Soil and ex-Whig voters coalesced into the republican party. The whig party had been killed.
If your party isn’t giving what people are pleading for or isn’t a real opposition party, it’s easier killing the party and starting fresh with something better than trying to lure the lost party back to your own values. And if we’re already putting forth all that effort to build up a new party when one dies, why not be cool and make a revolutionary vanguard party instead of filling the vacuum in bourgeois elections?
Their strategy is to give into Trump’s demands in the hopes that it prevents him from destroying their precious institutions. They hope to be able to take over from an unpopular Republican party after Trump dies without really undoing the damage he’s done. The problem with this approach is that it will prevent the system from needing to be properly rebuilt, effectively legalizing most of his abuses of power and prolonging the instability of our country. A big part of this will be institutionalizing the blatant corruption and oligarchy while further rigging elections to make it impossible for popular movements to ever legally gain power.
A Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg presidency will see them ruling as a weaker feudal king than Trump, but only to promote business activity and interests. Relying on the honeymoon period following Trump’s removal, they will position themselves as the saviors of “democracy,” yet they will do little to actually undo a lot of the election rigging that Republicans are installing right now. They will suppress workers rights and throw the most disposable minorities under the bus, deregulating and burning through all the goodwill they have. They’ll parade the corpse of liberalism around as long as fools will believe it, but it will be a cynical gesture.
In order for actual liberal democracy to exist again in this country, the liberals would need to have shown a backbone and resist Trump no matter how much he destroys institutions. They would need to risk temporary jail time and potential assassination to invigorate long term support for a rebuilt American dream. Instead they’re showing that they never cared about liberal ideals, only the goodwill liberalism afforded their power.
Yeh. The strategy seems to be to wait for their “turn” and make it look like the care while they watch everything they claim to stand for be destroyed.
Never forget that the right-left spectrum is a myth
Kinda? The spectrum aspect is a bit iffy and I don’t use it, but there are absolutely socialists on the left and capitalists on the right, and that’s useful for understanding. Trying to argue over which is more or less left or right doesn’t usually matter as much as the left/right distinction outright.
I agree, but I also wonder if the Democratic party can be converted from the inside to change it’s focus.
Probably not. I just winder what the best way forward is. It’s not really clear.
The DNC is designed against entryism, and drives its power not from popular support, but wealthy private donors. What’s important is directly organizing on the ground to form a large, working class party, like PSL. Reading theory and organizing are the best things you can do. If you want somewhere to start with theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out.
Wow, that’s quite a lot of content to go through. Thanks!
No worries! Honestly it’s designed to turn anyone from not knowing anything at all about Marxism into a capable cadre that can figure out where to go next (like Capital, Anti-Dühring, etc), but just reading section 0a is great if you just want to dip your toes in.
📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.
people have been trying that for 60+ years its a no go, the party is fundamentally anti-working-class
60 years ago, Democrats were creating Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and the Job Corps, passing civil rights, voting rights, and labor protection acts, and massively expanding investment in public housing and education. It’s only in the past 45 years things have really gone sideways
The DNC has always been a capitalist and imperialist party, passing social welfare programs doesn’t counter that basic fact, and as such doesn’t counter that leftists have been trying to change them into a leftist party for far longer.
It can’t be reformed. It needs to be burn down and new party started.
The two party system exists to prevent this.
Sure, but there is no other option. We must build up a working class party, if running them electorally doesn’t work, then it will still work when conditions falter and revolution happens.
I mean a conservative project to do exactly this is what transformed the Cheney era neocons into the modern day fascist party we see. So at least in principle that’s possible. but clearly the neocons were more than happy to go along with fascism. Fascism and conservativism have effectively the same goals.
The neoliberals who faced the same kind of insurrection from within their party at the same time were unwilling to adopt progressivism and are still unwilling to adopt progressivism. The right was able to change their party into a fascist one, the left has failed to move the demo party into being a progressive party
AI Slop
