JollyPieFedThe US Isn’t Moving Right — the Democrats Are
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The Democrats have been a solidly center-right party for decades. JFK wasn't a leftist! Today, the party has a small left wing, the DSA, represented by people like AOC; but the mainstream of the party remains solidly right-of-center. Democrats support big business, private land ownership, free trade, wage labor, and the rest of the center-right consensus.
The Republicans, however, drifted from "a little bit right of the Democrats" to "for-real fascist" over the course of the Reagan, Bush, Cheney¹, and Trump administrations. Today, the leader of the Republicans is a Hitler fan.
So, as usual, the first-past-the-post voting system sucks utter ass ... but Americans today have a choice between a center-right president and a Nazi president.
¹ Yes, the Cheney administration. Nobody believes Bush Jr. was actually calling the shots.
I'm banking all my hope on Harris winning, and then Dems either take the House and hold onto the Senate, or more likely Dems retake the Senate in 2026 and also keep the House then.
Once that happens, they can drop the filibuster, and then pass the 127 DC States plan, which would allow them to pass constitutional amendments to fix this once and for all, https://www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21063591/modest-proposal-to-save-american-democracy-pack-the-union-harvard-law-review
Edit: Worth nothing that the reason for the Dems shift to the right is due to the how the Electoral College works, and which would require a constitutional amendment to abolish.
EmpireInDecayDSA are nothing but sheepdogs.
They are no longer right of center, they filled the void left by Reagan Republicans shifting further to the right.
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The left is pro 2A.
As are the Republicans. In a country with only two ruling parties, that means the country is. It's quite simple.
The distinction being drawn is that popular sentiments aren't going rightwards like the parties are.
If that was the case wouldn't dems win every election? How can the people stay center or move left and it not cause a landslide for the more left leaning party?
Well, I would argue that that is like 95% where their votes are coming from, basically "This is still the 'left' option, I guess," rather than believing in any sort of positive vision on the part of the Democratic Party (it doesn't have one).
However, politics isn't just a 1-dimensional spectrum where things neatly slot into whatever is closest. The fact that they are lurching rightward, the apparent contempt they have for the left, the lack of any meaningful similarity between what a left-wing person wants and what the Democrats will even acknowledge is real (like action on the genocide in Palestine), means that what you are taking as similarity is in many cases difference. Just saying "Fuck you, vote for me because the other guy is worse" is really not a good strategy for getting votes unless you are holding getting votes as secondary to pandering to donors.
Like, do you think a new Republican candidate could just be blatantly pro-choice and not lose one or two dedicated blocs of the Republican voting base, just because "he's still the farthest right"? Of course not, democracy doesn't work that way. If you don't support people on the issues they care about most, a good number of them will tell you to go to hell while the others roll over as always.
تحريرها كلها ممكن10 years ago I used to bring up how Biden was one of the biggest proponents of the murderous drug war and the police militarization that came with it, and how he should never be president because of all the blood on his hands. I used to get called extreme for it
DessalinesJust a few months ago it was impossible to criticize this old segregationist rapist. The two US political parties are worse than cults.
The Dems have moved so far to the right that what used to be the far-right (Bush/Cheney) now supports them
Fredselfish
This is all you need to know about the Democratic Party. How many years before they make Trump look sane?
The dems have already rehabilitated GWB, McCain, and Cheney. It's a trueism that the democrats of today are the republicans of 20 years ago.
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
- Julius Nyerere
Fidel_Cashflowcurrent day libs will have rehabilitated trump sometime in the next 20 years. I am willing to bet every dollar I own on that. it will happen, just like bush and cheney have been rehabilitated.
It may well turn out that humanity chases itself towards more and more hate and scapegoating as they make the world they live in less liveable.
Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ rights, marijuana reform...not to mention a Black man was president, and a Black woman is the party nominee.
Yeah, it sucks that progress is so slow, and yeah, it sucks that some things have gone backwards. But there *has* been a huge amount of progress in the past however-many years. We went from "don't ask, don't tell" to having a *Catholic* president openly support gay marriage in a relatively short time.
Using Harris' Glock anecdote as evidence the party is moving to the right is just lazy editorializing IMHO. Almost as lazy as just asserting that the party is moving to the left because of the issues that you decided illustrate the left-right difference...
Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ rights, marijuana reform...not to mention a Black man was president, and a Black woman is the party nominee.
You forgot that the black woman is also the sitting vice president.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ rights, marijuana reform…not to mention a Black man was president, and a Black woman is the party nominee.
Oh do lgbt people have more rights now? Oh fuck, I'll let my trans refugee friends know.
The fact that your trans refugee friends continue to suffer is deplorable, but does not mean lgbt don't have more rights now. You're employing the same fallacy that anti-vaxxers use when they say it's pointless to get a vaccine when it doesn't 100% guarantee protection from the illness. Things are better for some people and still desperately need to improve for many others.
The fact that your trans refugee friends continue to suffer is deplorable, but does not mean lgbt don’t have more rights now.
Trans people are experiencing low key genocide but we also have more rights now?
Things are better for some people and still desperately need to improve for many others.
Things are desperately worse for some people and have improved slightly for others.
Genocide of trans people > gay marriage on the impact on the queer community
the only thing lazy here is parroting democrats who took credit for things they didn't do
Affordable Care Act
democrats walked back on medicare for all reforms ensuring that the aca will cease to function.
LGBTQ rights,
the democrats gave us don't ask, don't tell; doma; and 10450. the gays became accepted through portrayals in tv and movies; not because of democrats. the closest thing that could be misconstrued as lgbt right is the defense of marriage act which did nothing but give gay marriage bigots legal protections since the supreme court invalidated doma 8 years before.
marijuana reform…
nothing but lip service for the last 20 years
not to mention a Black man was president
a member of the ruling class
Black woman is the party nominee.
acab and a prosecutor who put many innocent people behind bars and then fought to keep them there once it became clear that they were innocent to just to save face.
I respectfully disagree. Half of independents and a quarter of Democrats said they'd support militarized camps for undocumented people.
The corporate/conservative propaganda is working.
That polling was mentioned immediately in the article, but it then points to the wealth of issues where the headline is true.
None of that matters to me. You can be conservative and give renters a break. As long as they're the *right* renters. This idea of in groups and out groups that is the core of conservative ideology is gaining ground.
Edit to add - It's struck me that the article and I are actually talking about two different things. Their real complaint is that the Democrats are moving towards servicing the donor class more than their constituents. My complaint is that the constituents are getting too cozy with the idea of in groups, as long as they believe they're on the inside.
The donors -- the domestic owning class -- were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it's been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they've always had, it's just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.
It's not a matter of what the owning class "believes" as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are *interest* groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -Lyndon B. Johnson
This is kind of a shit take. Yes, the Democrats are, but we are approaching a whole new part of the spectrum on the other side.
Sure, the bad guys are getting worse, but does that excuse the good guys getting less good? The article wasn't particularly original, and certainly didn't serve enlightenment, but it did make me ever so slightly less cheerful about Harris. Now might not be the time to complain about details like this, but — if those concerns are founded — the details are still worth remembering.
The "good guys" were never good. This is the party of slavers, Dixiecrats, Jim Crow, colonialism, settler-colonial genocide, multiple coups and wars, and material supporters of basically every racist cop there has ever been. Oh, and right now, they are doing a genocide. They also were under Obama but nobody cared because Yemen gets little press in chauvinist media. They've been making rightward shifts in most policies since Clinton.
GraphoThis is what the democrats have always been, just now they stopped pretending to care about people abroad or the issues that matter to the voters (and not the donors) and surprisingly that's still good enough for the blue no matter who crowd.
Take heart from her announcing a more than doubled federal minimum wage at $15. It's not going to make anyone rich, but that'll make a big difference to a lot of very poorly paid workers.
Uh, that's been happening since Carter lost. Because of this Democrats thought they had to cater more to the center to get votes back. They've been doing ever since.
"Did Carter lose because neoliberalism itself alienates our base, or because we didn't neoliberal hard enough???"
Yeah no shit. Bernie was set to be president, and fucking Debbie Wasserman Schultz was like: "absolutely not".
This is all you need to know, to understand the two party system and why we will never get any meaningful changes as long as it exists.
So how do you explain things like marriage equality and civil rights. I'm not going to claim it counters all the negative things economic liberals do. But it certainly makes the claim muddy and specious.
There is no 2 party system either. Implying the system relies on parties. Outlaw both Republicans and Democrats tomorrow and 2 other groups will fill the void. It's a first passed the post voting system, weighted for bigots with the electoral college. The wealthy will buyout interest in whatever parties arise. Hell many of them fund 3rd party campaigns now to keep opposition divided. And they will keep doing it as long as we stay divided. Because that's why there has been little to no change. Nothing to do with parties, everything to do with lack of solidarity.
The Civil Rights Act was pre-neoliberalism and more than fifty years ago so it just straight up does not matter to the discussion. That neoliberalism entered the national stage *through Jimmy Carter* is in fact proof that the Democratic Party immediately started sabotaging its own gains to appeal to the softly bigoted center.
Unless you're speaking of gay (and disability) rights as a whole as that civil rights issue that is. It's fair enough, but it's also not the economic issues most leftists are concerned with, I think largely because they take support on those social issues for granted. As it should be, going by what ideological liberalism claims to stand for.
Neoliberalism for all of its faults does tend to promote human rights if only by stripping the power to oppress away with the power to regulate, while neoconservatives just wanted to get rid of the regulations, thus the divide on Obgerfell when the liberal Justices correctly pointed out that the 14th Amendment forgot to say "No Homos."
That is also part of the problem though, right? The Democratic Party gets these narrow wins and never looks to solidify them. They trade away economic protections for narrow victories on civil rights, based mostly on judicial oversight instead of actual law, and then act surprised when economic uncertainty erodes their support further and further.
Or, after they lost the SC, have the nerve to act surprised that the Court will just undo gains by controversial decisions.
Correct. And we can complain about that after Kamala wins in a couple weeks, meanwhile let's just make sure she DOES win.