Locking this thread to clean up the mess. Come on, ya’ll, we can do better than this.
Edit: I’ve unlocked the comments in here. We’ve removed some comments in this thread for being inflammatory or for not adhering to Beehaw’s one (and only) sitewide rule: Be(e) Nice.
To elaborate a bit on what that means in !politics:
Be(e) Nice doesn’t mean you have to always be positive or happy. It doesn’t mean you always have to agree. It does, however, that at all times we have to remember the human on the other side of the screen. We can disagree and still be kind to each other and try to assume that others are operating in good faith. I get it - politics are messy and complicated and the issues are big and for many existential. But we can talk to each other and disagree with one another without resorting to personal attacks or escalating the discussion into an all out flame war.
And to reiterate - that doesn’t mean that we will tolerate hate speech, JAQing off, sealioning, or other ways of engaging in bad faith. If you see these things, please report them to the mods.
Not a big fan of this, but I can’t really blame her when the only other options are “unserious protest candidate who’s a bit of a crank” and “unserious protest candidate who’s completely nuts and possibly a crypto-Republican”.
Wow, a lot of vitriol on this topic! Okay, so, for my first post on Lemmy I am going to make a positive leftist case for Biden.
Biden is not the problem! He wants to do big things; he wants be a great president. If congress sent him voting rights, reproductive rights, major climate action, and many other leftist priorities, he would sign them. He could definitely be better, but he is mostly not standing in our way. How many decades would you have to go back to find another president you could say that about?
Biden is not the problem. Congress is the problem. State and local governments are the problem. Nimbys are the problem. We have a lot of problems to solve but the presidency is not one of them. What we need to do with the presidency is simply reelect Biden and then get on with the work of solving the actual problems.
I don’t think Biden wants to do big things.
Yep. He is absolutely invested in the status quo. Which is why the DNC sabotaged the 2020 primary to make sure he’d win.
Biden won the most states, nothing was sabotaged.
Going into super Tuesday, it was clear that Bernie had the lead. Most of the other candidates absolutely tanked, and afterward dropped out and all of them endorsed Biden. Then fucking Bloomberg joins the race out of nowhere, spends a bunch of money, muddies the waters, then drops out after hardly any time and endorses Biden. And when the DNC super delegates decided they’d go for Biden no matter what, it was clear what was going to happen.
Tell me with a straight face that people at the DNC didn’t contact the other candidates and make it clear that they wouldn’t have a future in the Democratic party unless they dropped and endorsed Biden.
The DNC did not want anyone but Biden to win the nomination, and they made sure it happened. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-110083
He was endorsed by the dropouts because any political operative could see that Biden was the best candidate to beat trump. Sanders core support is from white liberals and there aren’t enough of them to win a presidential election. Minorites and moderates have no interest in him and that was shown in the primary results.
Sanders would have been stomped by trump on 2016 or 2020
Would have been nice to see if that is true. Sanders had much stronger support across the aisle in 2016. We’ll never know though.
Welp, there you have it.
AOC has absolutely, 100% betrayed the principles that got her elected in the first place. It’s not surprising. Most people who stay in Washington long-term end up falling in line, but still, kind of disappointing to see.
My thought exactly. The Democratic Party is more fragmented than they want to admit. She was on the progressive side (I thought). Or maybe there actually is no progressive side.
Had high hopes that she wouldn’t fall in line.
People like AOC are why I’m generally convinced my vote really doesn’t matter. We elected a Democratic president with a congressional majority last time, and in return most of the country is working multiple jobs to survive AND you no longer have the right to abortion.
When we get conservative outcomes regardless, what does my Democratic vote really matter for?
fuck man. you gotta be in a pretty good spot not being able to tell the difference. there are people who live and die on the outcomes of these politics. if you really think it isn’t enough, get involved in a political project, join a mutual aid program, whatever you think is important, but genuinely even if it barely matters at all (and to be clear, it actually does matter a whole fucking lot, or republicans wouldn’t be pouring billions of oil dollars into mobilizing their base) its literally just a single day at most of effort. if you can’t do that, you genuinely don’t have any right to complain about conservative outcomes.
Your Democratic vote is the only thing preventing this country becoming a theocracy. We had one term of Trump and look at the damage he caused. Imagine what a second term would look like.
It would be nice to have a strong challenger, but the DNC protects its elders. I can’t imagine any Dem not endorsing Biden as it’s the only choice, and not endorsing him is a strange waste of political capital.
It amazes me how much and how quick people are to blame Biden or AOC when the political landscape isn’t this richly progressive utopia in a rank choice voting system. We have real problems in this country and the ONLY way we get closer to solving them is by not electing fascists
The ONLY way we get closer to solving them was by educating our populace about the dangers of authoritarianism in the wake of the world wars. And coming to terms as a nation how much the Nazi regime learned from America and our concentration camps that we don’t teach nearly enough about.
But that ship kind of sailed and we now live in a country where some obscenely high percent of Americans don’t even believe the holocaust happened at all.
In my opinion we are way past the solution being democrats, they hardly even stop the bleeding anymore. They are just there to show the masses that there are two parties and they didn’t really want to pass all of this pro business, anti people legislation, but we had to because of the debt ceiling that we didn’t even stop for long and the Republicans can beat us with it again in a few years.
The system is designed to be fucked.
we can whine about how we didn’t do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn’t gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn’t matter businesses wouldn’t be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn’t be trying their best to stop people from turning up.
While I agree that “being all doomer” isn’t exactly helpful, I want to point out that voting democrats in hasn’t been exactly helpful either. Child labor has been happening in America this ENTIRE time, it has just only been legal in the agricultural space. But I had a job before it was legal using a family members social security number, and we were almost middle class.
There are a LOT of problems with our current system. I just feel like continuing to elect the only two parties that got us here is a bad plan.
I want to point out that voting democrats in hasn’t been exactly helpful either. […] There are a LOT of problems with our current system. I just feel like continuing to elect the only two parties that got us here is a bad plan.
as always, if you want this to be different in a way that isn’t going to throw everything to the hardest right politicians (who incidentally are making a full-court press to make child labor legal again) you’ll need to start with voting reform. i would encourage you to formally get involved with an organization like Fairvote to this end.
