Anyway. How we get there isn’t by reinforcing the bad views of our electorate. We need politicians who will lead, who will explain to their voters why ICE is bad, why creating new agencies with such limited immoral scopes leads to bad outcomes, and who will shape their constituents’ opinions.
Instead we have a bunch of people who concede ridiculous points to republicans out of fear of alienating their donors and imaginary moderate republicans who are secretly just itching to vote dem. And as a result we have a bunch of democrats who have internalized the idea that GOOD policy is policy that makes a bunch of concessions to republicans.
I don’t know, mostly we just keep trying and don’t give up? I think there’s been at least some tiny non-failures since the 60s, but maybe ask a black or a gay person to be sure.
I mean, both sides can play the “how’s that been working out?” card. Remember when a huge chunk of the electorate sat out the election because politics is bullshit and we let W Bush/Trump run the country? How’d that work out?
In AZ we are about to have two moderate Dem Senators that will vote to confirm Merrick Garland types instead of Kavanaugh types, support good health care as a right, and support comprehensive but humane immigration reform.
They’re not perfect. But they’re not Martha McSally. I don’t think they’d win here if they were perfect.
I’m actually a little afraid they might both clap at Trump speeches, but I really don’t think the vulnerable Arizonans they will vote to protect and help give a fuck about that as much as people on the Internet.
It will be harder to ask black people since so many of them are currently in prison with coronavirus. But hey, we’re on track to lower our incarceration rate back to where it was in the mid-80’s! Incrementalism ftw!
The prison situation really fucking sucks for sure, on many fronts. However, it is undoubtable that criminal justice reform has been steadily sweeping back into national discourse, largely as a result of leftist pressure.
It’s just very ironic that in a conversation that started off as “it’s pretty terrible how our dem politicians convince their voters that GOP compromise policies are the GOOD policies” you come in here spouting off about how your state is about to have two senators who support healthcare as a HUMAN RIGHT, and neither of them are in favor of actually, you know, providing healthcare as a human right to their constituents.
This is a really good post and shows how the Dems are the same as Republicans being the party of capital.
If the Dems actually cared about winning they would adopt some leftist policies and they would reel in a good chunk of the electorate and crush the Republicans. But they rather lose and profit off the working class than to spend some money and make people’s lives better.
Something that’s been knocking around in my head the last few days. Do you guys think it was a conscious effort on the part of capital to decouple social justice from economic justice, or was it just an unhappy accident?
Kind of neither, kind of both. There was certainly not one singular decision, but that doesn’t mean it was an accident or that it’s even universally true. It’s a generalization of something that is the result of a lot of actions by people with similar interests.
There’s no smoke-filled room where all this stuff gets Decided, even if it can sometimes look that way from a distance. It works more like: Capital will fund politicians favourable to its interests. Politicians vie among each other for that funding. The politician that discovers a way to appeal to (for example) the ‘pink vote’ in a way that still favours capital’s interests and doesn’t alienate the base vote will probably beat out a politician only pitching to the base vote (even if capital will fund both).
A toy model, everything is always much more complicated, of course.
Holy shit the WaPo article on this is amazing. Biden is going with Hillary’s super PAC from 2016, and Clyburn’s daughter along with a bunch of edems from Obama’s team and elsewhere are angry he’s not spreading the cash around to THEIR super PACS.
Ya’ll still think Bernie was wrong to not reach out to Clyburn for his endorsement? He’s an absolute scumbag who represents everything wrong with the party and it is the absolute height of insult that both a.) liberal pundits pretend like he speaks for the black community and their interests and b.) he behaves this way when he’s got millions of South Carolina Democrats who trust in him. He knowingly swung his state’s election to a man who would be much worse for his constituents who need fucking healthcare and money, because he thought he could grift some additional money for his no doubt millionaire daughter.