Well, costs keep rising while my pay stays the same. I’m in mental health care, so in general not enough is being done to help with the mental health crisis we’re facing, and what is being done is clearly to increase pharmaceutical company’s profits more than to help people, so that makes my job harder. The fact that at no point have the Dems ever actually tried to unfuck our election system so I have to go through this nonsense every few years. More than 100k in Student loans that I can’t scrub with bankruptcy, thanks Biden. Medical bills that should be covered by single payer. And believe it or not, some people care about what happens to other people too… So there’s the genocide which isn’t actually a new thing, Dems have been supporting it for decades. The bullshit at the border. The drone wars killing innocent people everywhere. Education is fucked. Abortion rights are fucked. Dems never saw an increased military budget they didn’t like, while they continue to allow social services to be cut. Billionaires haven’t been taxed out of existence. On and on.
People tend to extrapolate that since some things are broadly fucked everything is fucked for them personally, forgetting that on a personal level for most people who would be posting on Lemmy, there are many things to be thankful for and many things that have gone right. The clear and obvious wealth disparity (for example) may be sickening and outrageous but that ends up usually being a question of degree, which is why I joke that that people are really complaining that their TV isn’t big enough.
And then we shoot ourselves in the feet by assuming that because of this generalized feeling of “bad” and “unjust” that there is no path forward and that no progress has been made. This is factually incorrect and easy to disprove, but people get mired in the “this sucks” phase, leading to angry fist waving without action. tl;dr people love to complain but are too lazy and myopic to do anything about their complaints.
Eh… I’ll agree to some extent… Though I think people are also deliberately restricted from taking meaningful action. And after 40 years of the center teaming up with the right instead of the left, when teaming up left would mean almost certain victory, I think many people are disillusioned and burnt out. They don’t see a way of ever being represented, given the current system, so they’ve given up on the system. The only way for someone to get them off the couch is to come with a plan to change the system completely.
when teaming up left would mean almost certain victory
Except it demonstrably doesn’t. If that were so Bernie would have won overwhelmingly in the primary. Pretty much all the polling and research suggests that the majority of US voters are pretty center or center-left, with dems being pretty evenly split between center/moderate and progressive. (Eg https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/)
Saying “if we were just more left wing” completely ignores this reality. It’s frankly nonsense.
