• 219 Posts
  • 312 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • “Because people are, by and large, spectacularly awful” is a terrible message for getting people to vote for you, and you can tell a lot of actually awful people in the Democratic party believe it based on the stupid shit they campaign on (for example - nobody is going to buy it when you say you want a lethal military, your party likes treaties and peace and UN hearings, you’re just pretending to be a Republican because you think we’re all stupid).

    Maybe if we run on what we actually believe and stopped trying to bullshit people they’d stop being so spectacularly cynical about their country.



  • Idiocy caused the “no show” problem. If you couldn’t see that the Biden and Harris campaign were creating the exact conditions to make this happen by fighting with their own supporters over Israel (who turned out to vote against Trump anyway but made the Democratic party look like the chaotic shitshow it is with their protests) and telling everyone else that the economy was great actually and they were just too stupid to see that, you’re a fool (who was probably being paid six figures for campaign consulting).







  • Yeah, age isn’t so much the issue when we have decent older people like Bernie Sanders and younger douchebags like Josh Gottheimer running around, the problem is that newly elected Democratic party members have all been told that they need to vote for the people who have been in DC the longest and one day eventually it will be their turn

    That would be bad enough on its own, but coupled with the destruction of any kind of campaign finance regulations making it a lot easier for moderate Democratic party members to secretly work work with rich donors and Republicans to make sure progressives don’t stay in DC for long, we’ve ended up with a senior group of Democratic lawmakers who have shitty policies their voters hate and only know how to solve their problems through hippie punching









  • Huh, I haven’t had time to watch that Conover video, but it sounds a bit like arguments I heard on this “Know Your Enemy” podcast episode where they interviewed a couple of political scientists who wrote a book called “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics” that sounded interesting enough to at least get on to my reading list, so that might be something you’d dig.

    At any rate, I completely agree the national Democratic party is awful and tone deaf and out of touch, and I do think the centralization doesn’t help (like, if I have to hear one more liberal from California or New York tell me that Medicare for All lose us votes in the rust belt and then immediately start pushing gun control policies I’m going to scream (I scream a lot)). And I do like the idea of a political leadership who organizes around local issues and makes things like mutual aid and bail funds part of their political work (which is something the old school hyper local parties would do, though a lot of people called it corruption.

    That all said, I’m not sure if it’s centralization or if it’s just oligarch money in a world without campaign finance laws steamrolling us, and I’m just as worried about, like, the Democratic party of Louisiana or Montana or New Hampshire or somewhere doing horrible bigoted shit that gets a local majority because redneck shitholes drive out almost everybody who disagrees eventually. Like, this is pretty much exactly how Jim Crow went for the first half of the 20th century and we do not want to go back to that.

    Also, I wonder to what degree the decentralization was just a thing induced by the availability of technology when power structures came into being (like, for example I think we would have had more New York politicians running around Chicago when they were setting up if it didn’t take 2 or 3 days to go back and forth at the time) and if it isn’t kind of inevitable.

    Either way, I definitely agree whatever the national Democratic party is doing isn’t working. Also, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a good spokesperson for anarchism because I’ve got a few state-ish sympathies in my brain (that one time the feds sent the national guard into Little Rock to fuck up some segregationist assholes was tight), but I will say that most hierarchies of authority are bullshit (maybe necessary bullshit, but they are still total bullshit that end up empowering the dumbest assholes), and anybody who says stuff like “we need to respect the office” make me want to light a bong with a burning flag and blow the smoke in their face (yes, that would be a lot of things to juggle and I would probably end up lighting myself on fire, but I guess that sends the right message too).