• Screwthehole@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m left of centre, and here’s my take - the “left” is fucking up so badly that the right is going to win.

    Ever play a sport and you just trounce your opponent, but the coach says “you weren’t that good! They were just that bad tonight.”

    This is the same thing. Trump and the GOP aren’t doing some amazing job of campaigning and manipulating, they’re just up against the weakest opponent who can’t stop scoring on their own fucking net.

    • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      First let me preface this by saying that I vote against Republicans as often as I get the chance to. Which on the rare occasion someone runs against them where I live. It is usually a democrat. So I am a staunch Ally of the Democrats. That being said.

      I am left of center of what is generally considered left in the united states. The left isn’t fucking anything up. The Left has been cut off from having a voice for nearly the last 100 years in the united States. Since at least McCarthy. What we’ve seen is a populous that has been beholden to an incestuous right wing relationship. Between two solidly right wing pro oligarch parties. Though to Liberal Democrats credit. They give lots of lip service to the concept of social democracy. And do eventually, once it no longer takes courage or bravery, do the right thing. Once they get tired of everyone shouting at them enough.

      We need the economic tools we’ve spent the last hundred years vilifying. And we need a Resurgence of Education especially economic and political. People in the United States who think they are the left, and the way we are miseducated to define left are a joke. One that is crippling us and turning us against ourselves.

      We need to rip and tear the largest corporations apart. We need to nationalize basic necessities. We need to abolish private or unaccountable funding of all elections that every level. And most of all we need to empower workers. It’s only a start. But those are the things we have to do. And unfortunately my generation the Xers. All approaching 50 and 60 years old have largely abdicated and lost their chance to really impact or make a change. We need younger representatives in touch with what’s going on now to write the laws that will lead us into the future. Instead of the regulations that will hold us in some nostalgically idealized past that never existed.

      • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah the idea Dems are left is hilarious to me, social democrats in the streets, neoliberal conservatives in the sheets. The last cry of the left as a concentrated political voice was contained in aspects of the civil rights movement, but those aspects, like MLK’s socialist insistence on economic redistribution through class projects, and his identity as a labor organizer, is completely whitewashed. It’s condensed to Rosa Parks sat on a bus, MLK had a dream, LBJ passed the law.

        The Dems stop at disparity frameworks because that doesn’t threaten the political economy in any meaningful way, as long as people are fucked over proportionately it’s okay. Rising income inequality, lowered standards of living, eventually something has to give to keep this speculative real estate project of a country going.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      One thing the political center lacks in America - and I say center because we don’t have a truly leftist political party - is a vision for the future. They don’t want a fundamental change in how the economy and government work, they just want to keep things steady and work around the edges.

      The problem is the economy and government aren’t working for most people and most people want them replaced.

      Republicans have a vision. Yeah, it’s a racist, sexist vision that will drag us back to the 1950s, but it’s a vision they can communicate.

      What’s the Democrats’ vision? I don’t think it’s mine, of worker cooperatives and high speed rail and free education and universal health care, paid for by shaking Bezos and Musk upside down until no more money comes out. As far as I can tell they just want to keep things going like they have since the 90s.

      And then they wonder why they can’t seem to get people to get excited to vote for them.

    • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is certainly a part of it. In a time when Democrats should be uniting and putting forward their strongest faces to protect democracy from the GOP, they keep engaging in political gamesmanship because ‘c’mon look at this clown, there’s no way anyone will vote for him!’

      Only problem is that people have, and people could once more, put this guy in the White House. And if it happens…well, everything’s fucked.

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s no representation of the left in American politics, there’s leftist but no political power of a left movement. The closest thing is the recent wave of workers unionization efforts which is at least encouraging.

      • Screwthehole@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I do. Where is the good Dem candidate with the platform attacking high cost of living, corporate takeover of housing, backing unions, and looking at funding education, ubi, etc?

        It’s be pretty easy to break this wide open and runaway with the election. If they wanted to.