The vast majority of Democrats are center-right. That’s not moderate.
Get disgruntled voters to vote again, drive up turnout, maybe the Dems will win.
Try to convert brainwashed fascists to fasc-lite: absolute recipe for continued failure.
The DNC wants the Dems to be the Washington Generals.
Well, democracts mostly act like the other side of the coin of republican. And it’s not hard to understand why when you see PACs and millionaires funding both.
Every potential convert you were ever going to turn happened election day 2020.
That’s why it isn’t working.
We don’t want moderates. Moderates aren’t the ones that will get Civil Rights, campaign reform, rein in monopolies, get rid of Citizens United, health care for all, etc. Moderates just half-ass “solutions” that keep stuffing more money in the already wealthy’s pockets while ineffectively trying to get bakeries to make wedding cakes for gay couples. We need actual liberals and progressives, not Republican-lite.
Fuck, so many signs, so many failures for so many years…
Say what you want for Republicans but they plan and play long term and they play it well. So many small losses, but every hundred losses, another quiet, hidden step forward to eroding democracy… Fox news, the Republican state TV channel, winning a lawsuit enabling them to call themselves a news organization while lying, hell, since Reagan…
The US has been sliding in this direction for 4-5 decades now, look where you’ve gotten yourself, it’s embarrassing…
I think this is simplifying and twisting narratives. Republicans didn’t plan for Trump, but the evangelicals and extremists rolled with it (just like progressives and antifa would’ve rolled with someone like Bernie). Besides an authoritarian take over of elections, the republicans don’t seem to be putting anyone electable up on a podium lately.
I doubt any of us are privy to what the Democrats plan and play long term, if anything they’ve been more effective at controlling their party if we’re looking at them through the lens of being moderates. If you think they’re “failing”… it’s in the eyes of a citizen and not what their donor’s interests are which is the priority of the party.
I am interested to learn about how the rest of the world is handling the “news” issue though, I see a lot of media coming from other countries (like UK and Australia) which follow the same format of fox so figured we were all fucked when it comes to actually vetting what can be labeled as a news source.
Democrats now are where Republicans were in the 80s
TBF the parties swapped in the 1960s and finished polarizing in the 90s so in the 1980s some rebublicans were pro immigrant and pro union.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed by the 99th United States Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986. The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982.
This is correct. They’ve “moderated” their views so many times over the years that they are only distinguishable from Reagan Republicans because of their stance on abortion.
And people are even calling for Dems to be more “pro-life” in order to further appeal to “moderates.” It’s absurd.
Democrats Are Already “Moderate.”
I’d say quite a few of them are conservative bordering on reactionary. You just can’t see it for all the MSNBC talking heads that insist Henry Cuellar is the far left of the political spectrum and anyone beyond that is a Tankie posting from a North Korean IP address.
There’s no such thing as meeting Nazis in the middle. That’s called “becoming a Nazi”.
…
whelp, time to shave your head.
The whole moderate thing was an attempt to appeal to Republican voters. They live in a personality cult echo chamber now, it would serve no purpose except catering to ghost. The fact that they are still thinking within a system that has been fundamentally corrupted is why they are doomed to failure.
In the UK, our politics are currently similar. Our centre-left party is Labour, who are in government, but they’re losing popularity. Keir Starmer, the leader of Labour, has made Labour more moderate. They’ve lost some voters to the Reform party (populist right) but they’ve lost even more voters to parties that are left of Labour (Lib Dems and Greens).
There’s a left-wing Labour politician called Andy Burnham who has criticised Labour’s direction, and he said something which I think can apply to the US too:
Our centre-left party is Labour
I’ll spot you that Corbyn was centre-left back in 2015. The current Starmer government is indistinguishable from the Tories (in no small part because a bunch of the New Labour Starmerites are literally just Tory transplants) who occasionally stake out positions to the right of Farage’s fascist Reform platform.
But hey, at least you’ve got “Your Party” now. As soon as they stop suing each other, anyway.
never pandering to them, but put big ideas on the table.
Part of the problem with modern politics is that its so tied up in the News/Social Media cycle that running on “the same old idea that was as good then as it is now” is seen as bad politics. You can’t just come out and day “We should hire more doctors for the NHS and pay their lowest level staff better wages” or “We need strong labor unions in the country again in order to claw back surplus value from the employer class” because that’s old boring socialist slop. You can’t even have a Mamdani-esque “We’re going to have government run grocery stores that trade basic staples at cost of production to fight inflation” without being heckled as a radical marxist who flunked economics.
None of that gets the national media jazzed up. The only way to get people (in national media) excited is to talk about the latest Tech-Thingy and insist New Tech is going to be the panacea for all your problems. And then, every time a New Tech thing comes out, you pivot to that and insist its going to bring about the cost cutting (ie, lower wages and higher capital costs) reform everyone secretly desires.
That’s the only thing that qualifies as a “Big Idea” in the eyes of national media reporters. So that’s the tail our political dogs are told to chase. Forever. Nevermind that it never seems to fucking work, save to enrich a few special interests in the tech industry.
Yeah I get depressed when I see the news or politicians mention AI, as if it will solve every problem. I think LLMs can genuinely be useful but we should be realistic about them.
You mentioned Mamdani. I think what’s interesting about him is that he is polling well - he could win the election, even with his big ideas. So maybe there is an appetite for big ideas from the left. Which I guess is why there have been quite a few people interested in Your Party (but yes, whether they can stop bickering and function together is yet to be seen).
I think what’s interesting about him is that he is polling well - he could win the election, even with his big ideas.
He’s captured a moment within the city when every single other person running sucks enormous amounts of ass. I suspect he’d get flattened by a '00s era Bloomberg or a '90s era Giuliani. But the political scene in NYC has been hollowed out. Running for office is a thankless task. Governing is an even more thankless task. Getting a job selling bitcoins to public pensions and high frequency trading tickets to the next Taylor Swift concert via some weird wholesaler app is significantly more lucrative.
Guys like Adams, Sliwa, Cuomo, and Mamdani are what’s left after you’ve stripped state and local politics of anything except the cheapest form of bribery and the most naive form of ideological optimism.
I think I’ll take naive optimism these days. It seems better than doom, gloom, and billionaires trying to own everything, while charging you more and more for essential goods and services.
Bill Clinton tried triangulation (read: being more right wing) and the republicans tried to impeach him. Obama was right of Reagan and the republicans…tried to impeach him. If the GOP is going to fuck with democrats no matter what, let’s just elect some truly revolutionary people. I mean people who make Bernie Sanders look like Mitt Romney. People who make Cornel West look like Paul Ryan. We should be running people who start at “if your net worth is over $100 million you get to line up against the wall” and need to be negotiated down from there.
Exactly. The next president should be very progressive - free health care for all, expand public services, get the 800 billionaires, millionaires and corporations to start paying taxes, increase teachers salary and minimum wage, make associate degrees free, no more bailing out industries/companies, get rid of monopolies, make paid pto mandatory of minimal 3 weeks. Call it project 2029 and create the manual for it now so that it’s actualized on day 1. I can dream can’t I? Maybe in 40 years this will be possible….
I voted for Obama in 2008 for exactly this reason, that was his platform. Then I watched from my hospital bed in 2010 (partial colonectomy due to diverticulitis) while they (the House and Senate) voted it down. I don’t know if he/they was/were corrupted by pharma money after the fact, or if he/they ever intended to follow through to begin with.
In the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, he quotes Obama where he makes the excuse that having Medicare for All would leave 3 million insurance workers out of a job. That would be like stifling the proliferation of electric lighting because of the impact it would have on the whaling industry.
The d’s have been actively disallowing progressive agenda to come into fruition. Someone(s) in the party was not allowing Obama to move forward with the plan.
The public option was killed, specifically, by Joe Lieberman. Not the Democratic party as a whole, or Obama.
The dems could have taken him off all committee assignments and had the AG go after he and his family’s financial misdeeds unless he played ball. They could have included it in budget reconciliation. They could have simply changed the rules to allow them to break filibuster with 50+vp. They chose to let Lieberman stop them.
The public option was there to be bargained away. They never intended to enact it. Joe Lieberman had to play the part of the opposition since the republicans are too racist to ever bargain with a black president.
Lieberman was reviled by the party after that. Trying to act like he was some kind of avatar of the Democrats is revisionist history. The party literally primaried him out and he had to run as an independent. He spent the rest of his life whining about how mean Democrats were to him.
He was primaried before that happened. That’s why he played that part.
Amen! I want Democrats to do all the things that Republicans accuse them of doing. I want them to do this because being reasonable is not winning brownie points with these people. The next president should tell America to get ready for a new national flag; we’re adding 3 more stars for Puerto Rico, Guam, and Washington DC!
We can dream
We can do more than that.
They aren’t moderate they are where the far right was in 2000
Tell that to older gay people
I grew up in a gay family so I know all about this subject. I can argue that the democrats continuously moved farther right while using a few social justice issues as a smokescreen.
This is true, but that does not mean that they haven’t made life materially better for LGBTQ+ people, even if it was a cynical calculation for many of them.
It’s starting to look like those rights and the rights of women are just going to be taken away and then surprise the parties combine into one faction of facism
Why would that not have happened by now if it was the plan? What are they waiting for, some guy to proclaim himself Jesus and endorse children in private prison cages?
Look at the money both parties are receiving from aipac. 95 democrats voted to give Charlie Kirk a holiday. Two wings of the same bird.
Meaning more than half voted against it while every single Republican got in line. I see a clear solution, here, remove every Republican and Charlie Kirk doesn’t get a day.
But to be honest, making a statement against political violence is not a problematic stance. I care about taxing the rich, healthcare, reversing Citizens United, etc.
No fucking shit, everyone knows this, even the democrats know this, most of them are just bought and paid for
I remember having mad respect for Biden for announcing his intention before 2020 of being a one term president.
It sickens me how much the Democrats dropped the ball.
Biden doesn’t get enough hate. If he had allowed real primaries, the Democratic candidate would have won easily. Trump won again because right wing Democrats fight harder against progressive Democrats than they do against Republicans.
That’s assuming the Democrats would even allow fair primaries. That shit has been rigged since forever.
My best “famous people” story is that I once had a private dinner with Joe Biden and his entire family, Jill and Beau and Hunter and their kids when they were small.
Now, instead of a great story, I had dinner with one of the worst presidents of our time.
Dammit Joe. You fucked up our country, and my story.
one of the worst presidents of our time
Given the competition, he’s actually one of the best of our time.
That’s not a good thing.
No. He’s the modern Buchanan, but worse since the civil war we’re careening towards wouldn’t have happened if he’d not decided to run again.
True story
Exactly.
US Democrats are very conservative under their thin coat of identity politics. They would be considered way to the right of most European conservative parties.
They’re even shedding that after loosing in 2024. Slowly was doing it during the election but then once lost immediately threw trans people and minorities under the bus for the dems incompetence
I don’t think this is actually true. Perhaps on some very specific issues but as a whole I’d say no. They are certainly to the right of left wing parties but many conservatives in Europe have also shifted right in recent years.
I’ve seen leftist Americans say that Bernie Sanders would be considered a right wing conservative in Europe. These people have no idea what the political landscape actually looks like in Europe. Some still believe Europe is a soc-dem Valhalla, because we have healthcare here. But many centrist parties have shifted right in Europe even in the Nordics. For example the center left Danish Social Democrats have implemented hardline asylum policies.
They’re just trolling. Bernie is at least left of center. He is also the most left of any national politicians here. Democratic party leadership are roughly around where the Tories are in the UK.
Correct. Most people who say this are focused on healthcare and other social safety net issues. When you look at LGBTQ+ rights, or racial discrimination, or even abortion, Democrats are further to the left of lots of European parties. It can be a slog to get a European to admit they even have racial issues at all.
So obviously I can’t speak for all European countries, but I find it hard to see in what way the Dems would not be at least center-right here
yeah but center right isn’t more right wing than European conservatives. Parties like AfD, PVV, RN, Vlaams Belang are more to the right of European conservatives. Those are straight up fascists. Dems would still be considered liberals in Europe and I mean the old classic liberalism not the weird definition Americans use who think liberalism is a left leaning ideology like progressivism. And liberals are mostly center right to right wing in Europe.
Name a country in Europe where abortion, being gay are illegal or racial discrimination is so bad they have to overcorrect it with laws?
Russia
Ah ya got me. Now name a country in the European Union (which is what I meant)or that is only part of Europe and no other continent.
I disagree look at actual laws and policies, the rural and less educated areas might be loud but they don’t hold any power. Stares at Roe v Wade in the US.
Democrats generally support roe v wade so this is a poor example.
The difference is in the US the rural and uneducated people do hold the power.
Yeah they “supported” it so much it was overturned great clown logic.
That also was my point about the dumb dumbs having actual power in the US, so swing and two misses.
I never said they were competent. But I don’t think there’s much question that they genuinely support abortion rights. If you believe otherwise, the ruling of a court with a supermajority controlled by the opposing party is very poor evidence. The Democratic appointees all voted to preserve it.
It’s worse than that, in my opinion. The Dems feign incompetence to keep the game of distraction going. It’s like WWE to keep us all blaming our neighbors while they take away more of our rights a little at a time. They let Rowe v. Wade get overturned on purpose so they have something to harp about in the future.
Obama suspended habeus corpus which goes back to the frigging Magna Carta: all they need to do is call you a terrorist or a traitor and they can just disappear your ass. Rhetorical side note: how can Julian Assange have committed treason if he wasn’t an American to begin with?
Maybe in a few specific issues this happens but I think it’s more that dems face a lot of pressure from powerful people and they tend to buckle.
I don’t see any evidence of that with roe vs wade. They just didn’t think it would be overturned.
Are you talking about Guantanamo Bay with the Habeus Corpus stuff?
