‘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.
As an Aussie watching what's happening over there, all I've got to say is that the days of honourable dueling are gone - your leaders need to understand that you're in a dirty street fight now!
My brother taught me there is no such thing as a fair fight.
Your brother is wise.
Your brother is correct
Ah yes, the tru endgame of "the highroad strategy". Simply doing nothing as the fascists pillage the Government. At least the Dems are holding their noses high as everything burns around them!
I'm sure they're excellent patrons of the arts, such as the fiddle
Whats the best wine pairing with fascist takeover?
We are alone in this. The dems are better, but they are at fault here too because their entire strategy is being better then the republican which allows Republicans to be as awful as they please
Honestly instead of pushing me to the democrats, this has just gotten me to hate both sides, just hate one a little less.
You need to do more than finger waggle, treat Republicans the way they treat us
It’s remarkable that so many are blaming Democrats for what’s happening, instead of the Republicans doing the things, people who voted for the Republicans doing the things, and non-voters who decided they don’t care about Republicans doing the things.
No wonder your country is fucked.
I don't blame democrats for the Republicans actions, but I do blame democrats for democrats not even trying to slow Republicans down. This has been American Legislation all my life, Republican gains office, immediately lowers taxes on the richest Americans while shifting the tax burden onto the middle class and poor, while cutting service and protection for average Americans, rides out 4-8 years destroying education, veteran services, and regulations stopping full on breakdown of the US as is. A Democrat gets elected, they get nothing at all done due to republican obstruction at every turn, rides out 4 years of the problems Republicans put in place having the bad outcomes everyone knew would come, Republicans presidential nom runs off ''This democrats ruined everything! I'll clean up the mess! And I hate immigrants!!'' Republican is elected and immediately gives huge tax cuts to the wealthiest- rinse and repeat.
Obviously, the Republicans are the party that's pushing and doing all this stupid shit, but the Democrats are not using the power they have to impede them. The CR that the Democrats helped pass removes the power from Congress to remove Trump's tariffs, for example. And the Democratic party keeps following the losing strategy of moving further right. I don't think they actually care about winning the presidency or congress again; they just want to keep the corporate donors.
Republicans arent showing up to hear the message, so let's shit talk the dems.
You aren't crazy. This shit is fucked up.
Be mad about it. Be frustrated. Figure out what you can do about it in your circle of influence.
It's not just about shit talking to Dems because they show up to hear us shit talk to them. It's about the fact that 10 Democratic senators just voted with the goddamn Republicans to strip Americans of basic needs in order to give a massive tax break to billionaires.
Those Democrats don't represent me. And since one of them is from my own state I'm going to make damn sure he doesn't get another chance.
Chickens can at least peck a bit. These dems aren't even that tough
A rooster can fuck you up.
Another constituent, Donya Williams, complained Ivey didn’t know the people in his district well enough — because he admitted earlier that he didn’t know who popular podcaster Joe Rogan was until the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
This explains so much. They are as ignorant of the current state of things as the "apolitical" voters who thought Trump would be fine this time.
French aristocracy? Who ordered French aristocracy?
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."- The Democratic Party
“But please donate to my campaign to STOP this. We will soon, I promise”
Here's a 100 texts from candidates running for city commissioner in TN and you live on the west coast.
My god I am so sick of the emails.
I used to get emails like "Contribute to X because I will fight for our schools to provide school lunches to everyone!" And I'd donate.
Now, the emails are just "Donald wants to kill education. GIVE ME MONEY."
So you can use that money to buy another sign that says "Pweeze stop"?
Pretty much exactly the answer I've gotten from all my reps.
I think we may may finally be getting our message across. Here's why:
Last night, Adam Schiff, one of the Democratic lawmakers I respect the most, was on Kimmel, and was very rough not just on the HitlerPig Crime Family, but also Chuck Schumer.
But what really struck me, was that the very honorable, polite, and respectful Adam Schiff took the opportunity to basically say "Fuck You" directly to the president - TWICE!
Kimmel asked him if he had said thank you to HitlerPig, and Schiff said he used a different two-word phrase, but one of the words was "You," and everyone got it and laughed. At the end of his interview, he made another joke that was another very obvious disguised "Fuck You."
They were obviously baiting HitlerPig into a tirade, but seeing Schiff go on national TV and saying Fuck You to HitlerPig twice marks a very new direction in messaging for the Democratic party. I hope this is the beginning of pivoting from appeasement to Hard Ball.
Schumer and Pelosi don't have street fighting skills, they are from the era where Republicans weren't all violent dixiecrat trash.
Schiff and the newer ones don't bring harsh words to gunfights.
That's awesome. I've started to get some social media feeds on YouTube from Adam Schiff and they've been pretty provocative and direct, which is desperately needed.
Time for the neoliberal world order to end. Want Republicans to actually be scared of Democrats? Fill the party with socialists.
This is correct. Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries. Not town halls or performative third party voting, but filling the party up with people who think differently.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We're now 0/3 on that front, so... yeah. It's not impossible, but they'll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
No, it changes by having a chair that cares more about beating Republicans than beating progressives...
And we have that now
The fight over the party was over more than a month ago when the Chair election happened.
Neoliberals lost, the party of today is not the same party as 2 months ago, the chair is basically a dictatorship with all the power and zero accountability
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said it won't be fixed through primaries and was genuinely flummoxed as to what you thought primaries were for.
Having read what you actually wrote – now –, the world is much more coherent.
If I stay home, that'll show those Democrats
Agreed.
The democrat dinosaurs will panic, telling us the large donations will dry up, without which a campaign cannot be won.
Sounds great. But maybe you should get out of your bubble every now and then to realize that a party full of open socialists would 100% fail in the US.
I am aware of how popular Bernie's policy goals are. It does not matter.
You might be right, but I also submit that, when talking to Trump voters (older family members of me and my friends mostly), instead of "proving them wrong" about Trump, I've been redirecting the conversation toward "isn't all that bad stuff the fault of rich people?", and it has had a 100% success rate so far. They fucking hate the wealthy too. They ain't waving the red flag, but I bet a lot more of them would vote for someone just to screw over the rich than most people think.
I don’t see people screaming at Bernie, AOC or Tim Walz. Wonder why that is…. Oh maybe it’s because they’re actually willing to notice the frustrations of their base.
"Wait you want us to fight for your rights, like you elected us to do? I dunno, that sounds like effort. It's much easier to agree to what Republicans want and it theoretically looks good on paper that we wanna work with Fascists. Maybe we'll get some of their voters this time!"
Ocasio-Cortez/Sanders 2028
Democrats: No we need to do this
This is why we lose. Fucking unite for something, geez
I feel that Sanders is probably too old and that he can pass the torch on at the next election. It's sad, but I still don't think we need an 80 year old running for office.
My money is that we'll say the same thing about him in 10 years
nah fuck that. Bernie will go out in a blaze of glory, double middle fingers to the sky, falling straight from the oval office into a coffin after guaranteeing All Americans get equal access to universal healthcare and a secondary four year/vocational school education. He'll take money out of politics and raise taxes on the 1% so hard they'll revert back into normal fuckin people. He'll invest in High speed rail, green energy, while simultaneously legalizing weed.
The man has been working his whole life towards these goals, I say we help him get there.
I think Walz/Ocasio-Cortez would be a much more popular and palatable suggestion for the electorate, even though I personally prefer your proposal
Nah, we tried appealing to the center shit and that got us nowhere. Go hard on restoring working class America. Fuck racism, sexism, and ignorance - that shit got us a slow slide down to where we are now .
Kick the fucking oligarchs out and tax the fuck out of them. Rich should mean enough money to be very comfortable and never worry again, but not enough to buy elections.
if Americans are going to just sit and wait, the US won't be recognizable in 4 years, and there sure as hell won't be a free and fair election
I think after Biden and then Trump, people will be completely fed up with old white guys. I seriously doubt even Santa Claus could get elected. I'm in my 60s and a huge Bernie fan but we need some younger people on the ticket.
They'll get disappeared long before they get a chance to be on the bill
They need to understand that they are fighting for the country. And when they don't treat the Republicans and billionaires as the enemy they deprive us of the power to fight at the ballot box.
So we have to go to the soapbox. Like lemmy.
And when that fails, many of us (not me) will find they have nothing else to lose and go to the ammo box, like mangione is accused of.
And the rest of us will go to the jury box and vote not guilty.
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.
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.
Democrats hit 27% approval this week...
That's ironically the level Schumer said Dems would start doing stuff when Trump hit.
No one likes neoliberals, or their policies
It's just not an effective political strategy, regardless of how you try to look at it. Even ignoring popularity with voters, even when neoliberals get elected, they refuse to do anything.
The entire purpose of it is doing nothing, it's political nihilism.
No one likes neoliberals
51% of voters consistently vote for Democrats.
Barack fucking OBAMA was a neoliberal.
If you think neolibs are unpopular, you're in quite a bubble.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way - not that a pressure campaign to reform the Democratic Party will be easy, but it'd be sure a hell of a lot easier than trying to primary them out or form a new party. We should try to change them but we need to prepare for every eventuality.
The fact is that nothing is going to change if we can't change or replace the Democrats first.
We're working on it.
In SF for example I've started working my ass off for Saikat Chakrabarti (former AOC Chief-of-Staff) to unseat Nancy Pelosi in 2 years.
Truly, for all the people I talk to who say, "but what can I do? I live in liberal stronghold X". NOW is your chance to do something important.
Hold your Democratic leaders accountable, contact them, threaten to throw all of your time and energy into supporting their primary opposition, make them sweat. If they don't step it up, follow through on your threat and start getting involved with alternative leaders who are ready and eager to fight.
Ocasio-Cortez, at an event in Las Vegas, Nevada, said Trump has “handed the keys to Elon Musk and is selling this country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback.” But she also had sharp words for her own party.
“We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us too,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But what that means is that we as a community must choose and vote for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class.”
Leftists:
So they'll support the working class now, right?
...Right?
Voters have had enough.
I was thinking the other day, wondering, "What % of legal - born and raised - Americans seeth with hatred for the United States, and would actively hurt America, anyway they can. What % and what political stance they have, and of course, it's the democratic party.
Lemme rephrase... Simply, if you're American, but you also hate America and are politically active. 98%, you're a democrat.
What one focus on in life will become a bigger part of one's life. The left needs to ditch the hate. I'll come back when "democrat" isn't synonymous with hate.
Being critical of the government vs oppressing criticism by calling it hate
Yeah I think I know what side I'm on
No, it's not oppression, it's calling an apple an apple. Democrats don't usually mind expressing their hateful views about America. They are quite vocal about how they hate America.
Hey champ, here's a tip; instead of writing, "lemme rephrase," halfway through your comment, you can just delete the portion that's poorly phrased! That way, instead of having to read (what I'll generously call) a paragraph of word salad, people can start at the part that's (again, generously) coherent! Also, you might want to look up, "what does a hyphen do," or, "when to use commas vs. periods," because you write like an AI that was trained exclusively by ESL students and stroke victims.
The GOP cosplay as patriots to confuse small minded fools that striving for a better life is un-American. As if our founding fathers weren't looking for a better life.
You're looking at the map upside down.
You should try and figure out why you believe this. Clearly people here don't agree, and it doesn't ring true to me either. How many people do you actually know who seethe with hatred for the US?
What would constitute fighting?
People keep complaining about Democrats not doing anything, but under current constraints there isn't much they can do.
People seem to spend more time complaining about Democrats not opposing Republicans than they do complaining about Republicans destroying America.
The damage Trump and Musk can do is directly proportional to how fast they can speedrun fascism before they lose the House and maybe the Senate in the midterms. So the main lever that our elected Democratic reprentatives actually have is slowing down that effort in any way they can. That means filibustering, delaying votes, interrupting, shaking canes, getting escorted out, etc etc. Generally throwing sand in the gears of the administration. It's not just performative, although that's part of it. It's to slow-roll the fascism so we have a better chance to fight it.
For one, let the goverment shut down. The majority of people will blame the president no matter the circumstances.
The majority of Congressional Democrats tried to let the government shut down.
I hear you - I see plenty of outrage about Republican action though. What can Democrats really do but try to rely on Judges to do their jobs and campaign until midterms. Maybe they can rally enough people to march on Washington, but that may just speed up authoritarian gains.
Both sides seem to always act like the other side is tyrannical because the other side is doing things they don't like. And unless they cheated, they are doing what they were voted in to do. (Unless they lied about what they were going to do.)
people should just admit thier really right wing voters deep inside, there are plenty of people that votes as A D, but profess ideas and beliefs that of a republican, not necessarily a magat. there is a reason why we have so many DINOs in the DNC