āBoth sides badā is why we have Trump.
Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage. Environmental laws have been all Democrats. If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldnāt have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.
No, the DNC is why we have trump. Itās on them.
Obama wasnāt perfect at all, but his platform was at least change and progress. While he was originally against gay marriage he did listen to the public and change for re-election. If the DNC listened to the public instead of fighting against progress that would be great. But likeā¦ Biden was the throw away to conservatives for Obamaās VP to ābalance outā Obama being progressiveā¦.And now he was their best idea on what to do for a better future? Itās pathetic, and demonstrates the above.
No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump. Theyāre saying the DNC is what even allowed trump to exist, by being greedy fucks who care more about their handlers than the American people and running the worst candidates they can. āNothing will fundamentally changeā is the dumbest, most āfuck you donāt bother to vote for meā fucking campaign Iāve ever heard.
No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump.
The meme isnāt that Biden was worse but that he did nothing. Itās proveably false. Trump himself proved it by criticizing Biden at inauguration and immediately undoing Bidenās orders.
If it was that easy to undo what biden did, then practically he did nothing.
Its fine let them keep losing. I honestly donāt care anymore. At some point progressives like Bernie, AOC, etc. will finally wake up & realize they donāt need Democrats to win. You want to see people passionate about voting again then it is time to leave the establishment behind. Anyone remember Bernieās crowds in 2016? It was obvious he was may more popular than Clinton having to pay Beyonce & Jay Z for people to show up at her events.
They absolutely, 1000% need Democrats to win. Maybe not their respective districts, but if they want to get anything done on a national level, they need about half the country on their side, and that includes Democrats.
Now, they can certainly eat the party whole, the way the tea party and MAGA ate the GOP. That involves being more specific than āDemocrats badā. In fact, how did they do it? Did you ever see them telling people to abandon the Republican party?
Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.
Gay marriage was legalized at the federal level by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The only time a Democrat acted on same-sex marriage nationally was when Bill Clinton banned it by signing DOMA in 1996.
Environmental laws have been all Democrats.
Nixon created the EPA.
If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldnāt have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.
If Democrats passed legislation, Bidenās achievements couldnāt be undone through executive order.
The parties are not the same, especially now that one of them is openly fascist, but youāre giving Democrats credit for things they did not do. Also, the meme doesnāt say theyāre the same, it describes the rachet effect, which is an accurate representation of how Democrats behaved on multiple issues. Look at how their economic policies have changed over the last 30 years, or how their views on immigration policies have changed since Trump was elected.
Is there a political community you found on lemmy that understands how this works, like you do. I see way too many Democrat apologists on these popular communities.
Not on .world. Iāve noticed .world is more of a neoliberal, mostly pro-capitalism instance in general.
Note, Iām talking more about the moderation rather than members.
Well, .world has a lot of users who understand this, but the loudest voices (who are often times moderators) are definitely Democrat apologists. Then again, some of the other instances, like .ml, have the opposite problem, and are full-blown tankie/authoritarian apologists, so itās kind of a, āpick your poison, damned if you do, damned if you donāt,ā situation.
Your list supporting Republicans means you must support Trump. right?
I mean you canāt have it both ways. Nixon created the EPA, Nixon was Republican, therefore Republican policy is to put the environment first. Thatās what you are arguing.
That is absolutely not what Iām saying. Iām correcting objectively false claims youāre making; environmental laws were not all Democrats, the Democrats did not do anything at the federal level to pass, āfull gay rights with marriage,ā and the meme and OP did not say, āboth sides bad.ā Those points are a statement of fact, not an argument.
Why canāt stating facts just be that: stating facts.
Instead, people have to insert imaginations of their interlocutorās position so they can try to dish an āownā before asking them for clarification first.
And we wonder why discourse is broken in todayās age
LOL no it isnāt, Trump or someone like him was an inevitability because US elections are fixed and the people who have actual power in your society, Corporate board members, want fascism.
Truth there. Iām from a dark blue area yet city government here couldnāt act any different than if I lived in a dark red state. In some ways I actually think they are worse. All they have to do is put D next to their name & the voters will support them regardless of their actions.
Of course there was some good legislation along the way. Nobody is denying that. But the crisis we face now is there because the Democrats decided to ignore the danger. It really is that simpleā¦
You can start with Citizens United. You can talk about the Dems after 9/11, the illegal drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, how the Dems celebrated the human rights violations then, which leads us to El Salvador today. You can talk about stacking the courts, which was a plan publicly announced in the 90s, that the Dems never seriously tried to stop, leading to the current Supreme Courtā¦
If you want to say, āWell, the Dems are less evil,ā then great, many people partly agree. But thatās not good enough. They fucked us all over by not stopping the Republicans from doing really horrible shit, even though we all knew what was coming. Maybe in a few years we can write on Bidenās tombstone āNot quite as evil as Trump.ā Would that make anyone happy? Is that something to be proud of?
No āvote blue no matter whoā and not demanding actual representation is how we got Trump. People got duped by a con becuase they have never seen the real thing, so anything different can look appealing to the uncritical.
Democrats didnāt flip on gay rights until Obama, and the Supreme Court did marriage equality. (Yes better than Republicans) Democratic leadership is already trying to send trans people under the bus to try to save face with the Republicans. Both sides are bad! We need to demand more from the democrats and force them to support the working class and to never back down when talking about human rights. Right now. The Democratic party is nothing more than an enabler of our abusive and coercive government/economic systems that allows lessor evils to even exist.
Democrats didnāt flip on gay rights until Obama
And Obama didnāt flip on gay marriage until the end of his first term. Biden came out in favor of it, which forced Obamaās hand, but it wound up being the right move; it energized the base when enthusiasm was starting to wane. Then, under Obamaās leadership, they continued to do nothing to establish gay marriage at the federal level.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/democrat-republican-elect-primary-1.6497911
Itās apparently all part of a Democratic strategy aiming to help those seen as extremist Republican candidates to secure their Republican partyās nomination. (Which Mastriano did win.)
The hope for Democrats is that those extreme Republican candidates would be much easier for Democrats to beat in the November general election. But the strategy has raised some concerns about effectiveness and whether it could have unintended consequences.
https://observer.com/2016/10/wikileaks-reveals-dnc-elevated-trump-to-help-clinton/
The memo named Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson as wanted candidates. āWe need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,ā the memo noted.
that was a very different party than current dnc. todayās dnc is controlled by two faced lobbyists pimps like schumer and pelosi, who will have trump win again and again than see aoc being a possibility.
in todayās dnc someone like al gore or obama will be suffocated out of primaries like bernie. heck schumer would probably have obama killed to keep dnc pro-israel
i will be surprised if aoc is not pushed out of the party by 28.
Things have been getting worse my entire life regardless of who has been in charge. It gets worse more slowly under the dems, but it still gets worse.
Why is it too much to ask for things to get even a little better?
It gets worse more slowly under the dems, but it still gets worse.
Gay marriage? DEI? Pacific Protected waters? Arctic protected from drilling? It was getting better until Republicans were elected to undo it all. The Rachet Meme is a version āboth sides badā which is what helped Republicans win.
Correct. Not to mention the midterm congressional elections that only see ~20% turnout, and even less in the congressional primaries. The overwhelming majority are retirees, who will almost always pick the most conservative option in their party. People love to complain about term limits and appeasement centrists, but they donāt show up when they actually have a say in who represents them.
Before you reply to me directly please understand:
- The US overthrew democracy in the country I am from
- The US installed a fascist king with secret police that terrorized my family
- Once kicked out the US supported a dictator in the neighboring country where the other half of my family lived
- The US funded both sides of a war between my country and the neighboring one that led to mass civilian deaths, one side directly by giving a dictator weapons and cash and the other side clandestinely thru laundering money by selling drugs in Latin America
- Once they lost that war turned on the dictator in the neighboring country and invented reasons to illegally invade. Twice
- Toppled the regime and left a power vacuum that consumed all my family that lived there for literally hundreds of years.
- Created material conditions in the country my family is from that forced them to leave or die
You Americans are not the good guys, your country and government is evil to its core.
Point 1 definitely has some 50+ countries in it, but point 2 almost immediately leads to Iran, who suffered a coup in the 1950s because the then president wanted to nationalize the oil reserves.
Point 3 is the rise of Saddam. Point 4 is the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the Iran-Contra kerfuffle. Point 5 is the two invasions of Iraq by the USA, 1991 and 2003, the latter leading directly to point 6.
Have you considered being born to a wealthy white family in the West? I hear itās much easier
worse, theyāll say that heās privileged for not being a gay in trumpās america, since thatās perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a human being.
My best guess is that you are from Iran? If memory serves, this got kicked off via the Anglo-Persian oil company, 51% owned by the Brits. (They go by BP now.) The company was a private entity that was treating the Iranian workforce poorly in terms of qualify of life and profit sharing with workers. The ruler in Iran was tired of their country and land being used to generate profits for foreign entities. The profit sharing with the company was renegotiated in the somewhere in the 1930s. (my memory is a bit spotty on the exact date.) In Narrator voice: The company did not abide by that agreement. During world war 2, the allied forces basically occupied Iran to secure the oil fields to keep supply chains intact during the war; so this would have been happening in the 1940s. This created a push for nationalizing the company and supply of oil, leading up to the 1950s and in 1951 is when Iran nationalized it under prime minister Mossadegh. There was lots of back and forth between the Brits and Iran, and threats of going to international court. The Shah was a bit more friendly to how business was being done between Iran and the Birts. This led to an attempt by the Shah to replace Mossadegh in 1952, and led to riots against the Shah and perceived foreign intervention. This failed. Mossadegh was pissed and eventually Mossadegh expelled the British embassy in October 1952. The brits cried to the USA, which led to the CIA to depose Mossadegh via the Shah, using underhanded bribery and corruption type shenanigans. This led to another 2 decades of Iran getting fucked by the brits and the USA, which eventually was a factor in the hostage crisis in 1979. Yeah, America was pissed about that. I was born in 1979 and have very early memories of Reagan saying shit like we wonāt negotiate with terrorists. When Iraq went to war with Iran, the US was on the books as supporting Iraq. There was an embargo preventing the US from selling weapons to Iran. That didnāt stop the USA. They funneled weapons and training to contras in Nicaragua who would then supply Iran, simply because the USA didnāt want Iran to be influenced by the Russia and communism. This is not taught in American public schools at all. American history curriculum usually ends with the civil rights movement. This was all stuff I had to learn on my own after hearing about it first hand from my best friend who lived through the Iraq/Iran war in the 80s. Yes, we are the baddies.
Here is the education that you need to take over the Democratic Party:
David Hogg, the new Vice Chair of the DNC, has allocated $20M to primary out the old appeasers, and replace them with youthful progressives to create a true opposition party.
Democratic primaries only see ~20% turnout in congressional elections. 30/50 states have partisan primaries, meaning you must be registered as a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary. This was a contributing factor in Bernieās 2016 loss.
Rather than progressives and leftists fracturing over third-parties, we need to all block vote progressives into the Democratic Party through primaries and replace the deadwood centrists that have been content with the status quo.
Check your stateās primary type here: https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_election_types_by_state
This was a contributing factor in Bernieās 2016 loss.
I am from the Bronx. I was a registered democrat my entire life. Somehow when my wife and I went to vote in 2016, after making sure we were registered, we were turned away from the polls because āwe werenāt registeredā
2 years later I started receiving the letters and was suddenly registered again.
The reason Bernie lost in 2016 is your fucking party threw us off the rolls because of who we are and where we lived. Your fucking party stole that election. You are full of shit and it is you that is a fascist enabler by making an excuse for corruption.
Itās not my party. Iāve been left of the Democrats since the 90s. Itās the party that more closely aligns with my values between the only two that can win a US Presidential Election.
I believe you, and Iām sure youāre not the only one with that problem. I didnāt say it was the reason Bernie lost, because Iām fully aware of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Hillaryās collusion, but it was a contributing factor.
I volunteered to direct foot traffic for the general election, and chatted up several other volunteers about the disappointing results of the primary. They told me that they couldnāt believe how many registered independents and no party affiliation voters they had to turn away. Apparently partisan primary requirements arenāt common knowledge, so Iām sharing this information to prevent other people from having the same experience.
As someone that voted Bernie in 2016, we didnāt have the votes in 2016 for Bernie to make it through the primary. The country itself was not as progressive in 2016 as it is now imo, especially so for the Democratic base.
For Bernie to have even had a chance to win the primary, the election format would have needed to not be First Past the Post. He was a victim of vote splitting found in First Past the Post and then establishment Dems allocated their voters votes to go towards Hillary. I donāt think it was fair what happened to Bernie especially with the DNC, but I realize now it was a flaw of the system itself that makes it extremely difficult for a progressive to win a Democratic presidential primary. I think it makes zero sense why people canāt pick their favorite candidate(s) first and then pick backup āsafeā candidates for elections. Also there is the issue of some states excluding people not registered with a party from voting in the primary. I feel it is a bad move to prevent these voters at the primary level since non-affiliated voters are usually the ones that ultimately decide the elections and they can give input ahead of time if they would vote for that candidate in the general election.
Having ranked robin voting, STAR voting, or score voting would help prevent a popular candidate like Bernie from losing by default to a āsafeā establishment pick.
Edit: Trust me, I would like to be wrong about 2016 and just how progressive country as a whole was at the time. But weāre really backwards in a lot of ways, especially so back then. The bulk of older voters were at most were economically voting for Democrats, not on social or economic policy by and large.
Lol, and this was the establishment Democrat response:
Hilarious that Carville claimed progressives have purity tests in the same breath
David Hogg
Be unarmed if you wish, but donāt choose for other people how they defend themselves.
The Democrats will not defend us, the justice system will not defend us. We are on our own.
You had a choice OP
- Vote to maintain a bad status quo
- Vote to make things a billion times worse via fascism
- Start a revolution
Instead you chose secret option d. Make āboth sides equally badā memes to justify the acceptance of fascism.
Always vote against the fascist. Or revolt.
The economic system in the US guarantees fascism, the rules are made up and votes are donāt matter.
I didnāt vote because Iām not American. They should revolt that is the only answer.
Votes do matterā¦ Wouldāve voted just a few more against Trump, we wouldnāt be in this (I think at this point global) messā¦
Should they matter more or should the ādemocraticā process be quite different (more deliberate), yeahā¦
At this point though, we need big protests, I agree. Also just to wake up all those (not entirely lost) MAGA idiotsā¦
Hubris is thinking a few liberal voters in america could abate a global trend toward fascism without fundamentally changing anything about our broken capitalist system.
we wouldnāt be in this (I think at this point global) messā¦
We were in this mess before the election
I agree totally. All the upper-middle class socialists in this thread have no doubt been setting this in action.
Or theyāve been doing nothing but navel gazing on Lemmy.
Who took away our option to vote to make things better?
The first past the post election system did.
If you want things to get better in elections, you need to get rid of primaries. Instead implement a voting scheme where you arenāt punished for ranking your desires honestly.
In the current system, the only votes that matter are the ones for the two leading candidates. Any other vote is equivalent to not voting.
Start a revolution
Why do people keep smugly citing this as the third option when there are a million better options before outright rebellion?
As if any rights or liberties weāve won as a working class have ever come from anything other than violent opposition and disruption.
Revolution is the only option for long-term gains, rather than short-term concessions. As long as the bourgeoisie controls the state, they will use it to wind back any concessions they give out temporarily.
Sure, but you donāt get to revolution without many smaller escalations
Libs harp on that word because it sounds rightly ridiculous to an american, but say āarmed protestā and suddenly it sounds a lot more realistic.
I think the Democratic Party is more to blame for running a Status Quo candidate when thereās so much dissatisfaction with the state of things. When people are angry, the guy who blows up the system is more appealing than the person trying to maintain it. You gotta actually promise to overhaul things, thatās how Obama won.
Vote to make things a billion times worse
Your daily reminder that blueMAGA liberals donāt consider Palestinians human
(Iām also curious how they determined op is an American eligible voter in a swing state)
I didnāt, but I realise āno, U!ā Is all you have, so youāre going to cram it in regardless.
Which Ukrainians?
- The oligarchs?
- The Banderites?
- The eastern & southern Ukrainians, who, after the Maidan coup, declared independence from an unelected government, and were subsequently terrorized by the Banderites for nearly a decade, with tacit and overt support from the Ukrainian and US governments?
- The men being pulled off the streets and pushed to the front lines against their will?
.
Previously. Previously.
This fact doesnāt really invalidate the initial statement though.
We would not be experiencing what we are currently experiencing presently if the Dems won. This isnāt an endorsement of the Dems, just reality
I view voting as a means to steer us to possibilities. Revolution and change wonāt come through the ballot box but who gets voted in can influence that one way or another.
The thing about a party that does nothing but maintain the status quo is they will never make things better.
I donāt think itās healthy to feel morally superior for preventing progress.
