Apparently (according to some random comment on Reddit where this was posted) this was written by an organization called "Third Way", that doesn't actually have influence in the government or either political party
"So it turns out veering gradually to the right just isn't working for us, it's probably the 'far left's' fault"
I knew as a European that the US only had two right wing parties, with the democratic party sitting firmly to the right of most of our centrist parties here, but this is just fucking stupid.
Dominance from... People giving you money because they like you? People who can't call you up to make or break your next election based on how you vote today?
Like even if you take it at face value and pretend it's all above board... What the fuck could you possibly mean by that?
This is the Ratchet effect in action. Democrats did not heed the warnings about extremist right-wing propaganda spreading like wildfire. They now assume the voter basis is inherently fascist, and race to appease them.
Democrats are equally to blame for things, like the modern racist slave trade that is the "corrections" system. This puts them with the camp of critical-race-theory enemies. Many of them are transphobic as-fuck, which also puts them (partly) in the anti-gender camp.
I did not cite genocide and war-crimes in the above paragraph, because so many of you have made clear you are fine with it.
Centrists have made it clear, time and again, that they value middle-of-the-road fallacy above human lives, and they are willing to put those lives on the line to reifytheir trolley problem fetish. The centrist is someone who will literally say to Hitler "I will defend to the death your right to express your hate" and at the same time say to the trans woman "I will have to reduce your freedom of expression, because it is unpopular with my voter base, and we risk devolving into fascism".
This is how we got here. These mfers come every 4 years begging for leftist and anarchist votes, because the alternative is fascism. But they were themselves fascist the whole time, only with a broader social support. Now they lose that broader social support because 10 years of relentless, ludicrously funded propaganda have shifted the discussion 100 years back, they now bend over backwards to earn that social support again. This in unscrupulous.
In turn, it lends legitimacy to neofascism and shifts the institutional landscape even further. We should not concede one inch to anyone trying to water down human rights for political gain. Human rights are to be taken as a whole, especially at the times that the most illiterate and unnuanced fragile white masculinity reclaims racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism with renewed confidence, this is not the time to let them score popularity points.
In fact, we need to escalate. The more we trigger the fascist voter base the better. Destroy the common sense, of the equal-opportunity capitalism apologist social democrat.
How influential are these moderates at this point? If the DNC leadership is still paying attention to them, they are pants on head retarded.
Leftwing people don't fucking vote in primaries. People don't vote third party enough for it to act as anything but a spoiler benefiting fascists. Realistically the US military would turn people into a bloody paste if we attempted to rebel.
And now we might not even get elections in the future because we have authoritarians in charge ripping the functions and institutions of the government itself to shreds. Like... we are so fucking screwed.
They're influential because the big donors like this stuff, it's the kind of changes that don't impact them and push away more left leaning policies that would hurt them. One of the points is literally ignoring small donors which is what average people are.
Calling Bernie Sanders fart left.. first thing the American people should do is reframe your left right references. The guy is centre-left. Democrat party is solid right and Republicans are radical far right.
Our Overton Window has been pushed clear out of the building, shoved into the drainage culvert around back, and it's slowly drifting downriver and out to sea.
I don't at all think you were saying this, but just put it out there, he himself isn't compromised. He's been a solid dude all along
He's just pushing the bare minimum to make the hurt stop. He's pushing in the correct direction, he just pushes for the most watered down, easy to sell version of things that would still address the core problems
But ultimately, he is indeed the compromise... It's the best they're going to get
Trying to shift further right won't work. You can't do "what the other party does" because they already do it and they do it better.
Find original messaging, take back the narrative. Then you get to tell the story you're good at.
Trump does this exceptionally well. By spouting all kinds of shocking horseshit, the media doesn't stop talking about him. This lets him dominate the narrative. You could see them panic when Kamala was nominated, because suddenly the DNC controlled the narrative for a bit, and polling showed Kamala taking the lead. That advantage evaporated as Trump seized control of the front pages again.
This doesn't just happen in the US. Here in the Netherlands, the campaign was not initially but later on dominated by talk on migration from the PVV. Of course other parties tried to respond by talking about migration, which only helped to legitimise the PVVs talking points.
That advantage evaporated as Trump seized control of the front pages again.
And don't forget the Dems panicking at the sudden signs of success and muzzling their best talking points, tying up Tim Walz and trying to appeal to moderates by parading Liz Cheney around instead of sticking to a really strong narrative, like how republicans are weird and what's in Project 2025.
Dems do NOT understand populism, or if they do they have a twisted perception of what drives common people and how to engage with people burned out with voting. Seeing the tone of the "rallies" being led by Schumer and Pelosi after the election to try to restore some amount of moral and drive told me clearly that the dem party is utterly cooked. They are out-of-touch, elitist, naive and stuck in some era of civility that never existed.
Trump does [shocking, rude, unprecedented] thing and OWNS the [punching bag]
Whoever has been in the punching bag category thus far has got a steep hill to climb. I think the opposition needs to come from within the republican party, and will need to pursue headlines with a similar format in response to Trump actions that genuinely piss everyone off.
EDIT: if anyone wants inspiration/brain rot for a grass roots campaign, the gateway pundit is good template. I think that's more of a strategy to use on old people on Facebook.
Trying to shift further right won’t work
I think we're at a point where most people in the US are right leaning (maybe even arbitrarily so). The democrats have pissed off and alienated enough people where that's the situation. The important thing now is to reinforce the idea that right wing beliefs and American freedom, civil liberties, democracy, etc are not mutually exclusive. That's the issue with Trump's strategy right now, as people are willing to follow him into an authoritarian future because they're focused on the "own the libs" aspect of it.
As someone else noted, the right said that, because yeah, they're going to say that. Here in about two years, they're going to be saying Hitler and the Confederacy lost their wars because they were too woke. BUT WAIT there's more! As I understand it, when they gutted the Biden campaign to make it the Kamalampaign, they foisted a bunch of the high-level HRC campaign staff on her, which, if you look at it, explains why so much of the Kamalampaign looks and smells exactly like the Hillary campaign. Of course, when these doofuses lost again, rather than showing a smidge of self-awareness, they promptly gave interviews saying that it's clearly because they were too far left (socially, specifically, though I wouldn't be at all shocked to hear that they meant it economically too).
She lost because the US is mostly misogynistic and racist. 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 mostly gave as their reason something that could be summarized “That’s too much power to give to a woman”. Harris being a woman was a greater impediment to her win than her being a person of color.
When google searches for "is Biden still running" spike on election day, it's kinda hard to swallow "racist and misogynist" as the reason.
Maybe the electorate really is, but I think we should wait for an election where they don't run a shambling corpse for the first half, belatedly realize that mistake only when it's completely undeniable to anyone vaguely paying attention, and forcefully swap him out for the VP that tells union reps to fuck off and goes on television to say "I won't do anything different from the shambling corpse"
Big cities have problems, but they are still far better off than small town rural America. There isn't some specific failure happening in large cities, you're seeing the broad inevitable enshittification of Capitalism as a system.
Democrats must be some serious masochists, they would actually rather take the blame thenselves than admit capitalism is wrong.
DNC: we tried bootlicking billionaires and it didn't work, what if we double down on bootlicking billionaires even harder.
It's also reported here. This fits with the reports of complaining that Democratic Congresspeople have been doing about the progressive wing of the party wanting them to fight back against DOGE. They and party leadership may well be aiming to not just talk like it, but fully become the new Republican party, in hopes of having a stampede of "moderate" Republicans who aren't happy with Trump come their way.
The top of the Democratic party basically wants to become the party of big money and try and steal this mantle from the Republicans.
Obviously, this isn't going to work because the donors will just go for the party that will give them more, and they will always be the Republicans party.
This is basically just the campaign advisors trying to get as much money into the campaigns as possible, because they get a cut of every ad buy. They're not interested in making things better for the people, just looking at their bottom line.
I've been saying this for a number of months now you got to kill this party. Abandon it completely. We got to start a new party. We got to start a labor party. A worker party. A party of the people. Whatever we want to call it, but whatever it's called it's a party that's not for the big corporate donors that control the Democratic Party. The Democratic party basically since the late '70s but certainly since the '80s abandoned the people the peoples issues. They're not coming back.
I kind of agree, but it needs to be a serious party that proves itself. I wont vote for some joke party that only runs in presidental elections. They need to put in the work and run (and win) in smaller more local elections before i would consider giving my vote.
Ideally, this party would fill in the gap the republicans left behind after dying.
For the foreseeable future though, i dont have a choice other than to vote dem
That's not entirely true. We've had change-ups in which two parties are THE two parties before. Noteably, the GOP. But it MUST start at the local level. We can't just wait until the presidential election and then complain about the voting system when all that's left to be done is act as a spoiler candidate. We have to start now, in our own communities.
It's also helpful when there is infighting among factions within one of the big parties. That's one reason behind the success in getting the GOP off the ground so quickly: they made common cause with like-minded members and currently-sitting politicians of the older, underperforming Whig party. This is especially helpful when moving from local support to state and then federal level support, since you can put the apparatus of the old party to work for the new ideas (this obviously doesn't mean absorb all the old party, just the ones that are already aligned with your mission).
The final piece is a central tenant of your platform that is both easy to understand and easy to justify simply based on morals and feels. The GOP had antislavery. We could have anti-oligarchy.
Edit: There is also another way, though: just take over the already existing party, like what the Tea Party did to the GOP. There are some pros to this, the biggest being the ability to utilize the first past the post voting system to greater advantage and ride on name recognition with the underinformed parts of the base. But there are also some big cons, mainly that the "new" party is still saddled with all the corruption and bullshit within the old party from the get-go and now have to convince voters that they are different and will change things from within. With how the top brass of the Democrats have been processing their loss in November, I'm of a mind that starting from scratch could be more beneficial. Especially since there were a lot of voters that just wanted "change". I also don't think that simply having a D next to your name on the ballot will work as well for progressives as having an R next to their names worked for the Tea Party.
Some form of Ranked Choice Voting could save what democracy we have. The fact that the leadership of both parties oppose it so vociferously should be enough evidence for anyone to realize it.
Love America, stop letting extremists speak for us, get involved with regular people, foster community, and govern better. The democrats might have a chance after all.
Because they’re not giving the bribes that the big donors give. Politicians expect a high paying effortless lobbying job as reward for selling out their country.
The "far left" has a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging?
What a joke.
They're going to use this defeat to blame progressives and Walz (who consistently had the highest favorability of anyone on either side of the race) instead of their conservative cop Kamala.
They selected Walz because he was polling the best (because he talks like a normal person), and then they basically hid him because they didn't like what he said. Not sure if he did any interviews after the Jon Stewart one where he was slightly too honest about Liz Cheney.
What's not mentioned in this excerpt is that this was sponsored by Third Way, a think tank that is singlemindedly devoted to convincing Democrats to cut the left out of the party. God knows the DNC has its problems, but it's misleading to frame this as a mainstream Democratic conference.
The blue MAGA are here on Lemmy and I ran into couple of them. They keep shouting to the rooftops that the Democratic party did nothing wrong and berate Trump voters as stupid and ignorant. But they are tone deaf when you point out that the Democratic party is not willing to run on the platform on Medicare-for-all, build more social housing and increase federal minimum wage (and ditch Israel), which made the party unappealing and lose consistently. Basically, blue MAGA don't want to go left, because even if they are socially progressive on issues, they benefit from wealth inequality because they themselves are affluent in spite of being socially progressive.
Edit: yep, the blue MAGA came out of the woodwork. They think Medicare for all, affordable housing, and increasing minimum wage are red fascism.
But they are tone deaf when you point out that the Democratic party is not willing to run on the platform on Medicare-for-all, build more social housing and increase federal minimum wage (and ditch Israel), which made the party unappealing and lose consistently.
Oh cool, those are winning issues in the Dem primaries, right?
It is as if Bernie, a more popular candidate, wasn't deliberately sidelined. It is as if Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, another popular politician, wasn't selected to head the Oversight committee and chose instead a geriatric, monied politician. It is
And finally, ask yourself, is not running on those popular platforms gave Democrats the win in elections? Or are you going to call people dumb? Who is really the dumb one for losing against annoying orange?
There are plenty of them if you lurk long enough. They will harp "vote blue, no matter who" and repeating the meme "leopards ate your face". The litmus test is to mention that Democrats did not go left enough which is why people voted for Trump (who promised the always appealing tax cuts amidst the growing inequality and radical reshoring of companies), and blue MAGA will bury their heads in the sand and keep calling Latinos, black folks and white working class and others who are working three jobs, living pay check to paycheck, and can't afford to pay for medical insurance as ignorant, racist, misogynists, Uncle Toms, etc.
Sure it was stupid to vote Trump, but it was more stupid of Democrats to lose to an orange man by not appealing and refusing to acknowledge those who have economic anxieties brought by mismanaged globalisation. It would have been an easy victory, but blue MAGA and DNC do not want to alienate the same donors that fund the Republicans (I mean, look at the screenshot where it says to court big donors instead).
Moderates have done nothing but sell their America out for a seat at an empty table. How could anything good come from people who are currently in charge of the shit show called the DNC?
We should really be discussing ways to take over the party, like the tea party did. I've been wondering why I'm so reluctant to register as a Democrat yet wanting to feel like a part of it I want to bend to my will
I'd like a list of those who subscribe to this theory to ensure not a single one of them ever gets a vote from me again. I'm an overseas voter and my "home" state is so gerrymandered to shit it doesn't really matter what I do anyway.
Thing is, though, if you elect even these guys, who supposedly exist because trust them bro, they'll still vote for your policy stances the majority of the time as they always have.
If you vote for a Republican, or if you vote fringe group candidate or don't vote at all, the Republican might show up at your house at night and break in through the tiny bathroom window before tangling all of your appliance cords together and whacking you with the bundle of appliances while you lay in bed before pulling out a razor an assailing you while you're confusedly trying to fight your way out of a bundle of appliances, carving their names into your stomach while they yell out strange cow-wrangling sounds and various slurs which may or may not apply to your ethnicity. Then they'll call you a slut who was begging for it with the way you dress and the method you use to pay utilities, before taking money out of your wallet to buy cocaine with and leaving as the police enter to coerce you into silence.
And also 79 Million people will lose medical coverage and all of the elderly become homeless, but mostly just that first thing I said.
The district I vote in is heavily gerrymandered and it really does not matter who I vote for at all for some positions. Many local positions have had only various flavors of republican and independents even run and, in spite of living overseas, I dutifully combed the internet to find out which of them was least extreme for local positions (surprisingly difficult, made more annoying by many of the state's sites blocking overseas IPs and some candidates having basically no web presence).
I have no idea when the last time a non-republican filled any of the roles at all. I have, for many elections, voted blue no matter who. I still mostly plan to do that, but anyone subscribing to the philosophy of cutting off the "extreme" left and dragging things more right can fuck right off. Not, as I said, that it will matter since the republicans will win the area by double-digit percentages every time.
I smell bullshit here, but yeah this is definitely a laundry list of exactly the stuff not to do. A moderate democrat is a Krysten Sinema and a Joe Manchin that exactly did a lot of damage to Democrats.
Also, owning up to democratic governance issues of large cities? Republicans run <20% of America's top 50 cities, and 10% of the top 30. Republicans are not in the business of running large cities, so WTF would give credence to them on a topic they literally have no expertise or relevant track record in doing.
agree, but these are supposed "democrats" who give in to the total horseshit GOP messaging. This is why I don't think the original post's content is real:
Image going to the tailgaiting party or to a southern baptist church and tell them about urban democrats' failures. They won't switch DEM. They'll say that Faux News was right all along and will confirm all of their beliefs in the radical right wing propaganda.
The rightwing coup within the DNC. Those staffers and consultants need to be blacklisted from politics. They have done nothing but drive the country into fascism.
the Democratic Party must reconnect with the working class to preserve liberal institutions
Doing that means
"creating new and strengthening existing local organizational structures, especially labor unions".
Do not focus "on issues important to the active base only" such as "media freedom or democracy": this leads to "failures of mass mobilizations".
"[E]ngage with [ordinary people] outside elections, focusing on issues that matter to them".
"[T]o push through popular reforms that elites oppose", free "the party from elite capture" by shifting financing "from the corporate elite to small and micro-donations".
"[C]ommit to left-populist economic policies".
"[L]earn symbolic class politics", "embrace the mundane and be down to earth".
you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people
I'm seeing the playbook overlap a bit with points 1 & 4, diverge from point 2, and not treat point 3.
Another article reviews research observing a decades-long trend of class dealignment: workers abandoning the left-wing party & joining the right.
As unions have weakened and Democrats abandoned them, the party has increasingly relied on & shifted appeal to urban middle class professionals & minorities.
The review names 4 paths researched or discussed to reverse dealignment.
inclusive populism: "appeal to working-class voters’ sense of resentment at economic elites and stress how elites use racial resentment to divide segments of the working class that share a common interest in economic justice"
anti-woke social democracy: make "a clean break with factions of the party that embrace unpopular social and cultural messaging that alienates working-class voters"
deliverism: "pass and implement large-scale economic reforms that benefit working Americans"
institutionalism: reinvigorate a "labor movement capable of advancing working-class interest in politics and [re-embed] Democratic and progressive politics into the lived experiences of working-class communities"
It looks like the playbook is going with anti-woke social democracy & institutionalism, rejecting inclusive populism, not mentioning deliverism.
They seem to think the way to win the working class is to go more MAGA-like (anti-woke social democracy) instead of trying a competing strategy like inclusive populism.
It also looks like they're choosing not to break free of elite capture, which seems like a huge mistake.
Thats going to be a hard sell, let us know when they figure out that being intolerant (beyond the paradox of tolerance) is going to spoil their ballot against the cult of the GOP.
loudoun county is wealthier, better educated, more diverse, and more 'blue' these days than most 'suburban' counties. local democrats could shift left of ocasio-cortez and sanders (et al) and still win.
Progressives absolutely can execute a takeover of the party, just like the far right did with the Tea Party movement. Primary out every blue MAGA Dem, get real progressives in their place.
The one thing that intrigues me is why nobody filled the actual left and far-left political vacuum in the US? The political axis is so skewed that people like AOC and Samders are considered far-left, even though in Europe they'd qualify as left-of-centre. There seems to be a huge empty space left of them, but I don't see anyone taking advantage of it and dominate a good third of the political spectrum.
Because the FBI was created with the explicit purpose of assassinating left wing politicians and activists in the US, and the CIA was founded for the same reason but abroad.
First past the post, basically. Especially in modern times where geography really shouldn't have as much weight as it does.
In most European countries a Green party gets somewhere between 5 and 20% of the vote, and at that stage they get representation in Parliament and possibly even get to participate in government. In the US they need to get 50% of the vote in a given area to get any type of office, no matter how minor (Mayor, school board, whatever).
So they can't really build a grassroots to grow politicians for a national stage, and voters know that voting for them is basically the same as staying home.
Also, they need to get rid of Jill Stein, that picture of her sitting at the table with Putin and Mike Flynn isn't going to go away and shows terrible judgement. You can be critical of US imperialism without hanging out with a different kind of imperialist.
Geography matters because people form identity groups within their geographic areas. People in rural areas have very different wants and needs than city folk. So it’s only natural for them to vote for different representatives.
No organization. No trust. I used the words "we" in one post then got accused of being a narcissist. If a stoner can't get stoned and speak for other stoners, how would we ever be anything other than stoners?
It's not exactly "real" in the sense that lawmakers are doing this, it's more "real" in the sense that a lobby group were lobbying at their lobbying office where they work as lobbyists.
Jesus does this country need to get off of the two party system. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is to get someone elected via the current system who’s willing buck the system that put them into power.
Not quite true. The two party system is an organic result of First Past The Post voting. Since voting is determined on the local level (as opposed to the federal level) it'll be easier to change to Rank Choice and get somebody new elected that way.
Not "easy" mind you, but "easier"
This is the key component that the "vote third party" people keep missing.
We need to disband the United States. It is no longer salvageable. We need to disband the federal government entirely, grant every state full independence, and let the states form whatever new country or countries they want. By the time you get to a political system this dysfunctional, there is no saving it.
Personally, I think the power vacuum created by the US Federal Government will be immediately filled by megacorporations and it's going to be a long, hard, bloody fight to disentangle our entire continent from these gargantuan corporate parasites.
I do agree with the first point. Leftists need to take back the American flag. America used to stand for inclusion. Now it seems like American flags plastered means Maga.
Lol, America has never stood for inclusion. Every new demographic has faced extreme bigotry. People had to fight tooth and nail to be included. They literally had to amend our founding document several times because of it.
We should definitely try to be better, but let's not pretend that the US wasn't built on the bodies of people who wanted to be included.
Yeah, basically the only times the US flag was used by the 'correct' side of a conflict are the civil war, WWI and WWII. Everything else is basically genocides and imperialism.
Listen, you seem to be confused. The Democratic party isn't there to protect your rights and pioneer progress. They're aim is to win elections. If appealing to the right is what wins them elections then that's what they'll do. It worked for the Republicans so there's no reason to believe it won't help the Democrats win too. They're not there for your benefit. They're there for their benefit.
Have you considered they just need to go further right?
But seriously, I've been saying this for years now - the GOP is disintegrsting and Democrats are going to become the new right wing party after it dissolves, and something new will reform on the left
But they're just sprinting right at this point. How long will it take for a new party to form? We have the will, at least I think we do, but we're not ready yet.
We need a leftist party, I don't want to pick between fascism and fascism-light for 2 election cycles as we get our shit together. We need to be ready
OP is right though: the Democrats and the Republicans are not like parties in every other democracy, i.e. expressions of specific political ideologies. They are institutional electoral machines, of an institutionally two-party state. They have their altered their ideological core before: prior to FDR the Democrats were basically just populist racists. They can easily alter their ideological core in the future as well. It just so happens that in the latest party system the Democrats have been the machine used by the American centre and centre left.
Edit: by OP I am referring to the comment I'm responding to, that is heavily downvoted.
That was definitely what I meant, perhaps I didn't phrase it particularly well lol. My point was ultimately that Democrats arent much different from the Republicans in so much as they will front whatever they have to to gain and hold power. That's not to say there aren't democrats who truly believe in equality, equity and the rule of law, or insert any specific belief you like, just that you shouldn't expect the party to support those values no matter what. If going maga is what gets democratic politicians into Congress and other positions of power then many of them will toe the line.
You shouldn't hitch your cart to either political party and expect them to always follow your values. Vote into power the people who you believe will stand up for the values you believe in (unless those values are naziistic, racist, homophobic or fascistic, in which case please find the nearest ocean and work out how far you can swim)
Their idea to win elections is to try to beat Republicans in a constituency that is already entrenched for Republicans. This plan is dumb as shit without even talking about ideological reasons to oppose it.
This could tactically work for them, given that the Republican Party has been hollowed out by a transnational crime syndicate, leaving conservatives who aren’t fascists and don’t want to see America burn without a party. Still sucks to be the progressives they’d kick to the kerb, though if this craters the Republican Party, it’ll leave a vacuum to be filled by a second party, the most obvious candidate being the Democrats’ marginalised left wing. So America would end up with a centre-right Democratic Party, which would be somewhere between Eisenhower Republicans and the German CDU or similar, and a new left-of-centre party, which would basically be the Dems minus all the Manchins and Blue Dogs and other spoilers. (Unless there is significant electoral reform, both would be the only viable parties, and each would be a broad church.)
It's asinine. Hand over the DNC to the people who made the RNC what it is today. OK, but what do you actually win? 100 more people get to clutch power until death wrenches it from their hands?
I've lived and worked around enough republicans to know that if given the choice between voting for a Republican and a slightly watered down yesteryear Republican, the Republican voter will always just choose the Republican. Especially because their media sphere is screaming at them about how the democrat is a secret Muslim Marxist who wants to give everyone's babies to the Clinton's antarctic adrenochrome base. You know who did at least better with Republicans? Bernie. And I think that scares the fuck out of the big doner class.
Let me restate that: There is, no shit, a better chance of a full-throttle communist revolution than of capturing Republican voters by chasing them.
Lol, it absolutely will not. Republicans are republicans, first and foremost. They are voting republican because republicans are their sports team. It does not matter what the policies espoused by democrats are, they are democrats, and thus verboten for republicans.
Do you not remember the hilarious interviews where democratic (maybe obama specifically, depends on the video) policies were pitched to republicans, and they agreed with them up until the reveal that the policy was from the 'wrong side' of the political aisle?