‘Try actually fighting’: Democrats face voters’ fury at town halls.
‘Try actually fighting’: Democrats face voters’ fury at town halls.
Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
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Lately my emotions have tended toward anger at the apathetic middle, not the cartoon villains of the Penguin Administration.
I know it’s a minority view but I blame all this on the nice normal people that thought they had better things to do than pay attention to politics.
If you do not see the need for aggressive responses to lawlessness, you let this happen and I find you boring.
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. "We ignored Hitler," he said. "We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all."
They thought of the government as "They." The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can't pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your "meaning" is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
To be fair to some of those people, they're not all being unintentionally malicious. I used to call myself a centrist but that was in the transition phase between "conservative because everyone I know is" and "I have formed my own beliefs". For most people that's what the process of developing their opinions looks like. You don't swing right from one extreme to the other. You take baby steps along the way. You start to see the cracks in what people around you are saying but you still mostly hear exaggerated caricatures of what the alternatives are so you're sort of stuck in the middle because you don't know where else it's even possible to go.
Centrists are scum, but the truly disengaged "oh I don't care about politics" people are much worse imo.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
Current events are proof that your preconditions needed for compromise to work do not exist in the real world.
That’s because the democrats refuse to move left and don’t have a backbone.
"my centrism isn't a problem, it's DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered"
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren't wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that's just me.
You missed the part about ethics. The compromise between murdering and not murdering minorities is to not murder minorities.
That is the dictionary definition of ‘not a compromise’.
If they provide anything resembling reasonable, we find middle ground.
The Democrats can't have a backbone. They are owned by oligarch interests. Asking the Democrats to save you is asking a shark to stop another shark from eating you. They are rotten to the core.
If the democrats won’t do it, then a leftist party is required
Exactly. The Democrats are incapable of being the change we need.
Replace "the real world" with "America" and you're right. There is plenty of real world out here where there is no need to be tied to one party. In my parliamentary elections I've had 3 parties that I'll choose from depending on what they've been doing recently. It all comes back to that stopid FPTP system forcing two parties on you.
A parliamentary system may be more resilient against fascist takeovers but this discussion is about the inherent foolishness of the centrist fallacy.
It’s a fallacy under any circumstances: do not compromise with people who are operating in bad faith.
To be fair, they kind of did exist for like... at least ~60 years. Many of us are old enough to remember what life in the 90s was like.
I would say the last time they existed was the 1970s when Nixon agreed to create an EPA he really didn't want to that had fewer powers than its supporters really wanted. The 90s only seemed smooth because scumbag Clinton gave Republicans everything they wanted on welfare reform, criminal justice, telecom deregulation, intellectual property laws, and international trade.
And we still got Gingrich and the contract with America and Ken Starr and Sore Loserman for being so conciliatory
It's never been perfect, and far from ideal, but it worked. Compare that to whatever the fuck it is we're experiencing now, and it looks like a goddamn utopia.
And erased the deficit. Plus the first real attempt at national healthcare.
I mean, there's good and bad. We could have that or we could have all bad.
Until some of you start running and finding out what it means to win an election we default to whoever they've got queued up.
Dude, no. The 90s were better than now because the ball was closer to the top of the hill and hadn't been rolling back down as long. The strong worker protections, economic regulations, and tax policy that built the middle class during the 50s and 60s started to be dismantled in the 70s because of compromising with economic extremists. They started blaming everything that made a strong middle class possible for high inflation and have been doing it for every economic woe since.
On the other end, the only reason many of those laws were able to be passed in the first place is because FDR and company dragged us there over the objections of the same group.
The best times this country has had economically were never because the neoliberals and their predecessors back through the robber barons were less extreme and more reasonable, but because we had politicians who were up to the task of kicking the shit out of them and overcoming their influence.
I mean, what is the compromise here exactly? Don’t deport all the children with cancer? Only shut down half of the department of education?
Did you not read the ethics part? The ethical compromise between fuck over DoE and not fuck over DoE is not fuck over DoE. Democrats should be moving left
Sorry, I misread your comment.
This is what Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is about. A book about the rise of fascism in the US written in 1935.
If "did not vote" was a candidate, it would have won every presidential election in modern history.
I have plenty of anger for both groups.
All that is needed for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing.
On an article talking about how Dems failed voters...
There's always going to be someone blaming voters and saying asking for representation is undemocratic...
i was saying where were "you before and during the election protesting, when the REPUBLICANS were up in arms in rallies all year long defending trump" this all the people that are complaining now that they dint do when was elected or before. oh wait, just after the election; the responses were i couldnt be bothered, or did not vote because im not even benefiting from this now, ro forgot.
If it's minority, then I'm right next to you and will gladly stay mad at the 40% that gave fuck all about this election. I fucking hate each one of them. I've never hated abstract people before, but in my 54 years, I've never been utterly ashamed and sad to be an American.