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From an outsider perspective, the Dems may be hopeless neoliberals, but isn't it more:
R: hehe sure we will hehehe
D: here's a set of policies that should improve things
Voters: too complicated, just say yes.
The Dems proposals are crumbs on what we should have. Universal health and education for example, never make it out of the primaries. Very few Democrats, really the ones that are Democrats so they don't have to start a Social Democrat party, espouse that stuff. The rest of the party thinks a minimum wage increase will be enough and they can't even get that done.
In reality we need real cost of living counterweights. Government run grocery stores and basic retail. Private businesses literally told everyone that abnormal inflation after the pandemic was just them price gouging. And we're supposed to take a single policy that would have been good in 2005 as proof Democrats "get it"?
Fuck no.
Well said. I think they get that things have gone too far, but just don’t care / don’t know how to make it better at this point. And Dems definitely aren’t interested in listening to good ideas from the left, so…here we are.
Here's what happens. Dems make a law proposal, but know that in order to get bipartisan support from the Rs, they'll need to make some concessions, so they already soften the language from the start. Rs still find flaws in it, so the Dems add more and more water to the wine. But then when it comes to voting the Rs will still vote "No", because their whole platform is based on no progress for regular people. They also need people to think that democrats are useless for them. So they flood the airwaves right after their no-vote shouting "why has nothing been done yet?" Dems can then say: "but you just voted no", and the Rs will just say "because the proposal was bad" knowing that their base will not do any more investigation, nor will most of the media. The Rs have mastered the "never play defense" strategy.
Doesn't it make you think though? How is it that internet comments can directly and easily point out the situation, politicians spend millions-billions and they have no clue? The only conclusions I can come to is the system is currently working as the political class wants it to.
The Democratic Party is about getting donations, not winning elections. 2024 was the Dems' most successful Presidential campaign in history.
I hate this defeatist shit. They aren't that tough. We need to play politics like LBJ did.
I agree with you. But for that we need less spineless politicians on the left. We need people who stand for something.
That's true but Democrats also haven't put their entire party weight behind anything that would meaningfully change the situation for Americans below the median income
Well fucking said. The Democrats need to BE fucking Democrats.
Free public housing. Rent is crushing us. The for profit home/apartment building corporations have failed at their job. Even if you are most gracious and say they are held back by red tape, guess who can cut through it?
This is a housing crisis. At least in the judge dredd universe they had the mega cities....
Free isn't really realistic at the scale we need it. We can make it free for people who are that destitute, but most of us just need housing at a reasonable rate.
Luckily, if I spend 30 million dollars to build 60 bachelor or couples units I can easily reserve a few for that. And the other 50 units will easily cover the cost of the building, maintenance, and remodels, over the next 50 years. Just charging them purely "at cost" would amount to about 1,500 dollars a month. And that's in the places where it's expensive to build. So other rentals are going for 3,000 for bachelor's and couples in that area and the net effect is to drop an anchor in the housing market there.
Half a million per unit? Average apartment construction cost in Shanghai is ~$52.3/sqft, that's a bit under $50K/900sqft 2bd apartment. Elsewhere in China is cheaper.
When you centrally plan what resources will be needed at what price and what the completed apartments will sell for, you get much cheaper and higher quality apartments than the paper thin walled engineered lumber 5-over-1s we pay half a million for.
US cities have literally paid organizations more than that per year per person for tent camps.
I'm quoting from some of the most expensive real estate in the US. While we might get some savings from economies of scale, it's important realize that doing this purely on the market could save Americans 50 percent on their rent.
It's low hanging fruit at this point.
It's more like the Republicans promise the moon even if they intend to shove the sun up your ass, while the Dems only promise what they think that they can accomplish, and often even that gets trampled by Republicans willing to break the government just to keep the Dems from doing anything.
The last time we had a Democrat who made big promises and ran on a campaign of hope and progress, we had the largest voter turnout ever recorded in the history of the country at that time. And then an even larger turnout for his second election. Cut to 2020, and we elected the VP of that guy largely on his relation to that former President and because he wasn't the other guy, and in this past election we saw several million less voters than 2020 with notable drops in support in swing states amongst Democrats and unaffiliated voters after right wing politicians voiced their support for Kamala.
There's also the issue to be had with the bias of media in the country and how that affects public perception. I still remember in 2016 when the news channels aired video of Trump's empty podium for an hour instead of Bernie Sanders' speech.
The time before that when we had a Democrat who made big promises and ran on a campaign of hope and progress he got re-elected three times and they had to make an amendment to stop it from happening again.
We can't DOOOOOO anything because they're meaner and stronger than we are! Even when they're in the minority!
and in this past election we saw several million less voters than 2020 with notable drops in support in swing states amongst Democrats and unaffiliated voters after right wing politicians voiced their support for Kamala.
to be clear, this was most likely a fluke of the post covid times, this was a global phenomenon. Had covid not happened, there is a very high likelihood that kamala would've won.
It might have been the largest turnout at the time, but the largest so far currently is 2020 with 158,427,986 votes, which is almost 30 million more than 2012.
Biden had the biggest turnout and lead of all time.
Did you mean 2020 or 2024? I think you're right that 2020 was the largest turnout ever, and we can only assume why, but the jump from 2004 to 2008 and then 2012 was massive, and the drop from 2020 to 2024 was massive as well. They were all in the figures of tens of millions of voters shifting one way or the other in almost every election from 2008 to 2024 except for Hillary vs. Trump, if I remember correctly.
My point is that Republicans campaign on change and appeal to emotion, and the last time we saw a Democrat campaign on a similar message, we saw some of the largest turnouts in US history. The facts are that the country consistently does better under Democrats than Republicans, but Republicans appeal to emotion in a way that Democrats don't. Biden added, what, 500 million jobs to the economy in the past 4 years? But the majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - even some of those making six-figure salaries - and so the lack of an appeal to their daily struggles disincentivizes them from supporting Democrats. The Republicans promise change, and even if it's a bold-faced lie, people eat it up because the issues they face every day seem to fall upon deaf ears.
yeah sorry typo, the biden statement was the biggest indicator
No worries, I figured from the context that that's what you meant.
I think COVID would be a pretty damn good guess why we had the biggest turnout ever.
Not really, it’s more like Dems give 5-10% of what they promise, and everything else is robbing from the working class to further cement the established power structure. That 5-10% is normally supposed to keep a lid on open revolt, but at a time when housing prices have doubled and food costs have tripled, that’s just not enough anymore.
Yea pretty much, Rs will line their pockets in the cruelest way possible through hate and fear and won't even bother with breadcrumbs
Ds will line their pockets, but try to make sound policies and make gradual improvements that balances corporate interests with the peoples interest.
The sound policies are "too complicated" for the average voter and the whole "gradual improvements balanced against corporations interests" piss off those on the further left (Hence the whole bLuEmAGa bullshit)
There's no balancing. It's the people's interests if a corporation isn't inconvenienced.
That's correct. This is a rather old post when Dems had power but kept getting cock blocked in Senate Trump mostly won because he said yes and stupid people ate it up, so you version is much more apt for today.
I've noticed this a couple of times: Any time the top handful of comments under some given post doesn't create the consensus reality "Dems are doing everything bad on purpose, don't vote, Democrats are your enemy," there's a notable little flood of comments to try to create that consensus reality. You can see quite a lot of them in these comments. I predict that there will be a continued push of vigorous participation until that reality is created in the comments, maybe by a newer comment with fewer upvotes but with the desired anti-Democrat messaging taking over the top spot as this one ages out, and then a bunch of blander replies to that top-spot comment to push everything else lower down. And then, once that's established, the little flood of activity that created 10 comments with the "right" message in the last hour will subside, and the comments will become a trickle again, with that persistent reality created in the top few comments, and this one buried down below.
The OP comment has a point. That's why it got a bunch of upvotes.
This comment also has a point. That's why it also got a bunch of upvotes.
That's an exchange of views. It is healthy. The little floods of comments with the "right" messaging which tend to continue until they take over the consensus reality are less healthy, in my opinion.
No. My point is you should vote. You should be primarying every corporate Democrat. You should also be working on a third party for the next few years.
Corporate Democrats don't want people to vote. Pelosi doesn't care about you or me, she gets richer off her insider trading and the GOP policies or Dem policies. All they want is to get re-elected. Until that is threatened all we're ever going to get from them is fake concern on talk shows.
Did you think I was disagreeing with you in some way? My reply was to a different comment. I agree with pretty much everything you just said. Well, maybe reforming the voting system before trying a doomed effort to switch “the left” to a progressive third party for the next few years, under a FPTP system… but other than that, yes.
Sorry I'm just so used to people trying to characterize my views on the Democrats as "Both Sides" or "Stay Home".
In fairness, there are quite a lot of people saying that, who have poisoned the well.
I get your frustration. I don't even like the Democrats, and I am constantly accused of all kinds of sins against leftism, just because I keep pointing out that not voting for them, in the current political climate, will make things 10 times worse.
I'm interested to note that the top-level narrative of the first few comments has coalesced exactly as I predicted it would. If you go back and sort by "top," you'll see what the actual consensus is... and yet, somehow there's an opposite consensus that things reliably coalesce into after a while, when the comments settle down.