Doesn’t fucking matter, I’m voting D because it’s a fucking binary system and the other choice is a dystopian totalitarian shithole and abstaining from voting is voting for said shithole.
it’s a fucking binary system
That can change but it requires people to get involved at ground level politics like school boards, city councils, county supervisors and township offices. It takes about ten years for these officials to reach congressional levels. The teabaggers did this successfully but they had a lot of financial support from wealthy conservatives.
This is something that people constantly miss. It’s why you can write off third parties. Plenty of people want to see change, but they think just winning the presidency is enough. It isn’t. You need Congress too. And getting Congress means winning individual races on the state level. And winning those often means you need to win elections for state and local positions. You can sometimes skip local and go straight to state, but very rarely can you skip state and go federal.
If we want a better system, it needs to start local with a well organized ground game across every state. You need to build up a reputation and strongholds. Greens and libertarians aren’t interested in doing this, which is I write them off as opportunistic grifters.
Yeah, the greens are especially a joke. The LP is essentially an outlet for Republicans to pretend to be “independent” every once in a while.
The Tea Party, at least in this one regard, has been inspirational. Imagine if a hard left wing group managed to get support and glomp onto the Democrats and force their will on the larger party like the Tea Party turned MAGA Party has. We could see some serious progress instead of having token voices to ignore come voting time, because they have no choice but to stick with the main Party line.
“We won’t vote for a budget that doesn’t include Universal Healthcare. Good luck getting support from the Republicans, they hate you.”
Both parties openly backing and arming the genocide in Palestine, the most well-documented genocide in world history, despite overwhelming public opposition, is not a binary system, it’s a one-party system. We are living in dystopia already, the Democrats shave 3% off of whatever the fascist Republican platform is and say “we’re the best option.” Stop being a fool and see the system for what it is.
We see the system for what it is, so I’ll vote for the slightly less terrible party in the short term and also do the things necessary to change it in the long term.
Good luck with your attempts at incremental change, that’ve been going on for a century while our society has completely devolved into fascism, a bipartisan police state and a genocidal global empire. You are clearly the brilliant visionary we need to guide us into the uncharted future.
How about both of you go the fuck home and let an actual progressive do some actual good for once?
That would require getting elected, which would require them being broadly popular.
Barack Obama pulled off a surprise victory over the established Democratic candidates by campaigning on a message of hope and change. Of course his administration ended up only slightly more progressive than a standard Democrat’s, but the fact remains that a non-mainstream candidate can run and win on the promise of progressive reform.
I think Biden has been more progressive then Obama. Yeah, Obama was a minority and he was a damn good orator and importantly he wasn’t Hillary. He represented progress. But his actual policies? Nah. There is something aspirational about having someone who isn’t another old white man, and I think Obama was a decent President, just not particularly progressive.
And the established dem party learned from their mistakes. It will be much tougher to slide a progressive by again.
More specifically, progressives would have to actually turn the fuck out for those progressives at the primaries.
Bernie can tell you counting on that is counting on pigs flying.
Bernie’s strategy to victory was turning out a huge number of young people and disaffected non voters. He lamented in the last months of his campaign that he wasn’t getting the numbers he needed.
It’s so much easier to blame the corrupt DNC than to recognize we need to work on turnout and a broadened message. It should be obvious after 2016 that the virtue of a righteous message is not enough on its own to get a following.
A platform of legal weed, free college, free healthcare, and student loan forgiveness couldn’t even achieve a 75% turnout of young voters – and I say that as someone who was mid 20s in 2020. You could hardly imagine a better platform for young people. There needs to be a much, much better ground game for progressives to win.
He sure as hell was at my (very close to national average demographics district’s) caucus in 2020. Damn near the whole room lined up for Biden nearly instantly. It was the same for Hillary in 2016, btw. These lies people like to repeat on the internet about how one progressive or another has overwhelming support and only loses out due to manipulation by the democratic party are not borne or by reality, and I think are often spread by those trying to either disenfranchise left voters, or are the voters that fell for it and are now doing the dirty work of repeating the lies.
The issue is they’d rather have another republican than an actual progressive
See: Al Gore vs Bush
Also, still miffed about Bernie not being a “good candidate” for the DNC in 2016.
Gore won. He just fucked up by playing by the rules back when people thought that mattered. The brooks brother rioters knew better, and the right wing court put the fix in.
Also, not to be a pill, but nader took a small percentage of the votes in Florida in that election as a progressive. Most of those probally would have gone to Gore, making the bullshit soft coup the GOP pulled off impossible if he wasn’t in the race.
First past the post means vote for the lesser evil and pressure the fuck out of them to get the system changed. Thats it. The system doesn’t let anything else work.
Fucking Gore couldnt even win his own home state, a state that overwhelmingly vote Clinton both times. Had he been able to do that he wouldnt have needed Florida.
And what is it with liberals always blaming the 3% that vote 3rd party, and never the 15+% of Democrats that flipped party?
Because Harris would then become the default nominee and Biden knows she can’t win. It’s either that or a punishing primary resulting in some other nominee, but who would that be? Could they beat Trump? It would be a big gamble. Biden running for a 2nd term is a gamble too, but it probably is the safer bet. His real mistake was having someone as unpopular as Harris as a VP.
I think he would be happy to hand it off to her if he thought she could win.
I also think that it didn’t occur to Biden that Trump would still be viable after being defeated in 2020, but of course, like many of us, he underestimated both the cowardice of most Republican leaders and the depravity of Trump’s base.
Do you think people actually want a progressive candidate?
The term “you get the politicians you deserve” is often correct, regardless of country and culture.
EDIT: Downvotes? I thought this place was better than Reddit… If you disagree, please highlight how the demand for progressive policies has been shown by the electorate…
How about no President over the age of 60? I want young politicians. I also want term limits.
Please no. An age cap is fine. But term limits will just add gas to the fire of corruption.
Term limits in Congress mean we lose experience. So we’re forced, right away, to rely on outside experts for everything from technical knowledge on fracking to getting a bill passed correctly. This is the first axis on which lobbyists and parties gain more control over representatives.
The second axis is campaigns themselves. A lot of time in office is actually spent campaigning and fundraising. Especially in the house where you’re up every two years. This means your name and reputation is your brand. However, with term limits people will not have time to build those brands. So anyone looking to move up to the Senate, Governorship, Presidency, or wherever else will likely have to depend on “outside” money far more. They simply will not have had time to build up their own funds. This money, of course, comes with strings.
Even staying in place would require abiding by those strings in the long run. Once fundraising is no longer expected of the representatives they become vulnerable to a primary by their party. The party simply shifts funds to another candidate and that’s the end of a problem for them.
The third axis is the predetermined length of a politician’s public political career. Only senators and representatives that toed the line get cushy jobs provided by the party or lobbyists. While that’s already true to some extent, many politicians end their career when they don’t have the popularity to get elected anymore. This also means they don’t have much political capital to spend getting cushy jobs unless a personal connection grabs them. With politicians being forced into retirement at young ages, with plenty of popularity and capital, they’re going to get offers they can’t refuse. As long as they’re a “team player.”
Another way to think about term limits is making the politicians employees of their party. And while that’s not a bad thing in systems with a lot of parties (like ranked choice voting and proportional representation); it’s catastrophic in a two party system. Because the oligarchs will waste no time literally buying the legislature.
Age Caps are great. Age Caps simply require you to retire at retirement age. And for that side step much of the tomfoolery I’ve described above. Long serving politicians are more accountable to their constituents and it’s harder for lobbyists and party die hards to influence Congress.
What exactly would term limits accomplish? Bernie Sanders would be prevented from running, but people like Kyrsten Sinema would be fine.
The solution to bad candidates is to vote them out in the primary or work towards ranked choice voting so that people have a legitimate 3rd option in the general.
If you want to know what term limits actually do check out Missouri. Basically by eliminating “blood sucking bureaucrats” you eliminate anyone who can actually write effective legislation.
So… Most legislation ends up being insane and unenforceable or written by special interest groups and handed to dummies who don’t seem to be able to even read it.
I used to be a big term limits fan, now that I’ve seen what actually happens… It’s a fucking mess, we need professional legislators.
Not surprising, this is pretty much why he ran 4 years ago. He never wanted to be president, but his party had literally nobody (whom they would allow) that could step up and be a real contender.
That “allow” part being a rather substantial issue for those not really paying attention back in 2016.
I’m not sure you can say he never wanted to be president. He ran in 1988 and 2008 before running in 2020. It sounds more like he always wanted to be president, but I could believe he’d prefer to not feel like he has to run for another term.
Well yes, you are correct in that at points in the past he wanted to. But I honestly felt that in 2020, he either thought his time for it had passed, or he wasn’t confident he was the best candidate to win. He mulled running for quite a while, and only really entered definitely when it was obvious there was really no other choice left for the DNC. But for a long time (too long really) nobody was even sure that he would run.
That’s because it’s bullshit. The lemmy consensus on this kind of thing is badly skewed to the left and is basically pure amateur hour. Without doubt there are many intelligent and well-informed users who have a better grasp of the realities of US electoral politics, they just aren’t the majority, and so we find objectively ridiculous comments receiving tons of up votes while anyone who dares to mention an unpopular truth is downvoted to Hades
Getting 2016 vibes this time around…
Or it is just the vocal few that are more openly speaking out…
Polling and all, it will be in the history books come 2024.
Books were being banned and censored way before this decade.
Not sure what you are trying to point out that is not new…
Old problems are still problems. Pointing out their age does nothing to solve them.
Trump’s gonna burn the history books and replace them with McDonalds menus.
Honestly, this reminds me of 1968. Old president supports war unpopular with youth, people protest, the GOP choose a failed candidate from the previous election, y’know?
Reminds me of 1933: A right wing guy briefly in jail for a coup attempt got out early and became German chancellor.
Thanks for the info!
The 1968 United States presidential election was the 46th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1968. The Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, defeated both the Democratic nominee, incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey, and the American Independent Party nominee, former Alabama governor George Wallace. This was the last election until 1988 in which the incumbent president was not on the ballot. Incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson had been the early front-runner for the Democratic Party’s nomination, but he withdrew from the race after only narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary. Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy and Humphrey emerged as the three major candidates in the Democratic primaries until Kennedy was assassinated. His death after midnight on June 6, 1968, continued a streak of high-profile assassinations in the 1960s.
