Pelosi needs to go
- Americans repeatedly respond to authenticity, even if that authenticity is built on lies (Trump)
- An old white self-avowed Democratic Socialist independent from Vermont overtook a decades-old Third Way household name in under a year, outperforming her in head-to-head polling against Trump.
- Democrats repeatedly water down their rhetoric to appeal to ignorance in the middle-ground
- Said middle-ground is defined by right-wing extremist rhetoric and a shifting of the Overton Window
- Said policies then fail because they watered-down the rocket-fuel too much and it never broke orbit.
- Democrats shocked when grassroots coalition that is the backbone of the party and GOTV movement unenthused.
- Democratic establishment shocked when they lose.
The day Democrats grow a backbone and double-down on progressive policy because it actually works instead of appealing to ignorance is the day Democrats never lose again.
There are some good signs in the party they’re moving away from this; notably ignoring a lot of the advice from Hillary Clinton strategists (thank fuck), while also promoting progressive voices on the national stage such as at the convention — AOC, Bernie, Warren speeches. Still, there are remnants of the old that need to go.
Also:
Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.
- Tim Walz
IDK if they are shocked at the results. There’s a calculation that needs to be made between convincing voters you have their back, while convincing donors that you have theirs, when those groups have irreconcilable differences of material interest. A cynic would say that a politicians job is to convince the voter base and the donor base that you’ll protect each from the other.
ignoring a lot of the advice from Hillary Clinton strategists (thank fuck)
idk. They seem to be running on the “if you don’t vote dems you hate black people” shtick that didn’t work in 2016. Lemmy users are eating it up though.
Where are they doing that?
The response Harris made to the protestors at the DNC is the best example I can think of. I’m probably exaggerating how much the Harris campaign is relying on this strategy because lemmy is inundated with “DO YOU WANT TRUMP TO WIN???” commenters,
She responded to the protesters and said if you don’t vote you hate blacks? Can you link me to that quote!?
That is a well spoken summery of the current issue with our political system. Thank you for taking the time to write that up and share it.
It is sometimes hard to have faith in the future when we are so inundated with our current issues. To cultivate hope in the future it is key to remember that time marches on and the older generations will always be replaced by a younger generation. I believe if we keep our democracy alive for long enough we do have the potential as a society to right many wrongs that the younger generations have lived under for the past 50 years and if we stay on target with our wants and needs and can put empathy and compassion for our neighbors as a core belief then it is only a matter of time before we get elected representatives in power to start affecting change.
I believe we, as a people, can do better for our future generations and that is why we all must do our civic duty and vote, not just for president but in our local elections, no matter how small, and every election above that. We have the power to change all this and I believe we will in time. It won’t be overnight but it can be within our lifetimes. Small steps matter because right now we aren’t capable of making huge steps but when the big steps forward become attainable we are prepared as a society to take those steps.
Thank you again for your post, stay strong and motivated and we can do this. Remember this isn’t just about you and me but us as a country, as a species and our responsibility to the future generations that will come after us. We can right our past mistakes and keep hope for that future alive. We have a greater voice now than we realize and are already electing people into positions of power to affect this change. We are not in this alone but in this together; not me, Us!
Aw thanks — and wonderfully said, yourself! Indeed despite everything along with much work to do, I feel quite optimistic. It feels as though we’re beginning to rip band-aids off that were placed there decades ago and I’m all for it. I should also note that I come from a rural Republican blue-collar family who flipped under Bush’s first term… So people can certainly change and I know I can get quite feisty with my rhetoric toward conservatives these days but sometimes it pays to extend an olive branch for some of those still reachable.
VP candidates can appear as progressive as they want because at the end of the day they don’t really have that much power. I won’t believe any real shift is happening towards progressives till we get a presidential candidate talking about more progressive policies. Until then it’s mostly them trying to pay lip service to progressive policies while chasing the moderate as the Republicans continue to drag the country to the right. If the Democrats really wanted to get more votes they would stop chasing moderates and try to activate disaffected voters who don’t care about voting because from their perspective both parties don’t really care about helping them. But then that would get in the way of the donors wants or stop politicians from being able to make lots of money from trading stocks and they would rather lose than give up that.
This can be shortened to:
Democrats have learned to talk like arguing traders on a ME bazaar, with that “munnat” tone, but haven’t yet learned to actually bargain like people do in such situations.
The issue is, I’m not sure this is correct. You are presenting Democrats as acting in your interest, just dumb.
I seriously doubt there are people dumber than you and me anywhere close to their leadership. But assuming that they are acting in your interest is unsubstantiated.
Also I hope this
is the day Democrats never lose again.
doesn’t mean you want a single-party system.
Soviet newspaper quotes of the kind “our single-party democracy is showing itself to be more efficient than their useless oscillations between Democrats and Republicans” are supposed to be a joke.
I think of it more like Republicans disintegrate. Democrats become the conservative party, ranked choice passes and we get coalitions with numerous third parties.
Why would Democrats pass ranked choice when they don’t have competition under existing system?
Has anyone ever yielded power voluntarily?
OK, sometimes very illuminated and virtuous souls do that. Just in case, these are not on the ballot.
In my hypothetical a progressive party would surely arise to contest the conservative democrats. Hopefully they would bring ranked choice mainstream.
Its absolutely malice not incompetence
Pelosi is STILL against stock buying bans for Congress because the “free market is for everyone”, meanwhile they get to decide who participates in said free market with advanced warning on news
healthcare pls
We don’t want the center. Her main selling point is that she is not 80+years old. The bar is that low. Nobody gives a shit about policy at this point, it’s gotten that bad. Anything but a geriatric convict.
Some progressive ideals are what the average American wants. Many are still very hard sells. What the Dems need to realize is that the political-junkie conceptions of ‘centrist’ and ‘progressive’ mean very little to the ‘swing voters’ they’re trying to appeal to. They don’t want a coherent ideological approach. Not that that seems to stop ‘centrist’ Dem reps from constantly trying to chase policy rightwards.
What are the hard sells? List them
Broadly speaking, higher taxes required to responsibly fund progressive programs.
You have to convince folks they’ll get their money’s worth.
Particularly rural areas are skeptical, they think they get money taken from them to solve city problems, and even if they might be able to benefit, the program might not be able to reach them.
So you might have decent luck with medicare for all (though there’s a huge special interest influencing them against that too), but if you wanted big infrastructure and transit plans, they’ll think the government is going to toss money at the cities and do nothing for them. Or worse, they’ll be one of the folks that get eminent domained to bulldoze their home to make way for rail connecting two big cities.
Why the fuck is Pelosi still a voice that anyone in the goddamn party listens to? She’s been doing nothing but fucking up since she entered Congress. She’s literally almost single-handedly responsible for the absolute deterioration of the Democratic party in our government. The only one who outstrips her in that department is Harry Reid.
Pelosi is now irrelevant since she retired and just wants people to listen to her like the rest of the boomers.
Moving to the right and calling it the center is why the “good” party is supporting genocide.
Israel has the equivalent of Donald Trump at the helm right now. And Hamas staged the equivalent of ten 9/11s, handing a deeply unpopular conservative PM an extension on his political power for the foreseeable future.
Netanyahu and Hamas both want this conflict to go on as long as possible. Netanyahu because it lets him keep power, Hamas because they want to use the 2 million people in Gaza as a pawn to shift the world against Israel. Their end goal is to wipe out the 20 million people living in Israel, and their own founders have stated that that’s not where it ends. They’re not going to stop until the whole world is under an Islamic Caliphate.
Hamas absolutely does not give a damn about anyone living in Gaza. And they’ll continue to brainwash and sacrifice the children, either as meat shields when they’re young, or as soldiers when they get older. Israel grants asylum to gay Palestinians that escape from Gaza or the West Bank. Sometimes their families will kidnap them, bring them back and behead them.
I don’t think it’s pure coincidence they go looking for Pride Parades.
Terrorists do terrorist things. If we want this to ever end, realistically the only way to do it would be to kill the Hamas leadership in any way possible and somehow undo 20 years of brainwashing they inflicted on the Gaza population. As for Israel, think how racist the average American living in a border state is. How much worse do you think they’d be if Mexico was shooting rockets at our border towns every few days? Even without the rockets, we’ve been messing with South America for a hundred years, making sure we’d never have competition on this side of the pond.
Are they racist? Absolutely. We’d be way worse under similar circumstances. Can you imagine what we’d do if Mexico invaded Texas and killed 20,000 people and kidnapped another 4000 and took them as hostages?
The US claimed everything from California to Texas after a war with Mexico. Technically they were here before we were. Should we all pack up and leave too? Why are we expecting folks to do things we’d never do ourselves?
I think Israel not running n apartheid state would do a hell of a lot more to change the minds of Palestinians than anything Hamas says
We put them there to draw aggro for all the messed up things we do in the region so we can steal their oil.
They’ve been doing that for 60 years. Every rocket, every terrorist attack they took in that timeframe should have been ours to take. We engineered the whole thing.
We got all the benefit, while they took all the losses. You want to blame them for being racist to the people trying to kill them every day? When we, as Americans are pretty much the entire reason it’s happening?
Have you seen pictures of Iran in the 70s?
We did this. All of it. We don’t get to wash our hands and pretend this isn’t all on us.
What did Mexico do to us? Guatamala? We overthrow governments for fruit companies on this side of the pond. The idea of US taking the moral high ground on a situation we created is insane.
If you actually want the moral high ground, know what we should be doing? Campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn’t immediately accept an offer to come live in America? And they’d acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living in Gaza which has been blown to bits already.
Sure, we’d have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We’ll get bombed, people will die, and we’ll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we’d actually deserve it. Last I checked, OPEC isn’t selling oil in Euros.
Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It’s the LEAST we could do after using them as cannon fodder for the past 60 years. And these performative leftists will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It’s called assassinations and coup attempts)
You’re just making complete straw man arguments right now because I never defended the US once in my statement. I said Israel is running an apartheid state and maybe Hamas wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t.
Yes the US is distinctly involved in Israel and the repression and genocide of the Palestinian people, and has been since 1948. However, that does not take away any blame from the Israelis being a violent apartheid state committing a genocide. And yes, I absolutely do blame them for being racist because Israel was the one who has created the conditions for this and every previous war in the region.
It is absolutely not unreasonable for people who were living in that land and were dispossessed of their land through no fault of their own, who are currently still being dispossessed of their land, and who are living in an apartheid, as they have been since Israels formation, to fight back against their oppressors.
By that logic the native Americans should never have fought against the colonialists and the Indians should never have fought back and killed any British. More recently by your logic Ukraine should not have fought back against Russia.
You have a right and an obligation to fight an invading power.
And we committed genocide against the Native Americans and put the few that were left in barren strips of land no one wanted to fend for themselves.
Fine, let’s give them back everything first. Then demand others do the same. To this day we impose more rules on the Native Americans than Israel does to Palestine.
We should pray that Israel doesn’t do to Palestine what we did to the Native Americans because there would be about 500 of them left, and they’d be stuffed into a piece of land the size of a Walmart parking lot.
And yet… despite the absolutely horrific shit we inflicted on the Native Americans… if your local tribe started kidnapping Americans and beheading them do you think anyone will care why?
You don’t see the irony in this?
I’m not saying the Palestinians aren’t justified in trying to take back their lands. I’m saying the Israelis are there because WE carved out that piece of land and told them they could go there. I’m saying WE decided to destabilize the entire region and sowed division so we could steal their oil afterwards. And WE directed the resulting (entirely justified) resentment towards Israel, using them as a convenient scapegoat to take the target off of our own backs.
We do not have the moral high ground here, and pearl clutching about the Israelis being racist towards people who are trying to kill them (because of us) and trying to say we should cut off all military aid and leave them to die is a morally abhorrent position to take for someone who lived their whole life steeped in the wealth that we extracted from their blood.
Because if that’s your solution for Israel, applying that same standard to us would mean we’d have to collectively commit mass suicide first. We’ve done a lot worse for a lot less.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones. Our house isn’t even glass. It’s made out of single sheets of phyllo dough.
And the scary thing is, we weren’t even the worst of the lot. Look at what world dominating empires have done historically and most of them were so, so much worse than us. Hell, look what China and Russia is doing NOW. As horrible as we were/are, just about everyone else who attained this level of power has done worse.
There is no way to atone for everything we did. But even if you wanted to start, letting 20 million people die in a death-trap we created because it’s no longer convenient for us to maintain it is certainly not the way to start things.
Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe. Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources. That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
-
10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Ending the current genocide means stopping military support for that genocide. The only way for everyone to live peacefully is a secular One State with equal rights and Right of Return for all Palestinians and Israelis
Make your own arguments instead of copy pasting things. It’s lazy, and you haven’t addressed any of my arguments.
If you care enough about the issue to have a discussion about it, at least use your own words and arguments that show you at least thought about the issues at hand.
I laid out my argument for why we can’t unilaterally cut support to Israel clearly and repeatedly. Least you can do is attempt the same if you want to convince anyone.
Israel has the equivalent of Donald Trump at the helm right now.
Which is why they have your support. The rest of your screed of genocide apologia just reinforces this.
Clearly, because reading my comments it isn’t immediately obvious what my political inclinations are.
caliphate
How do they propose to do that with North America? There’s just no way
If your argument is that we shouldn’t care because there’s no way to accomplish that in North America, why should we care when a suicidal terrorist group complains they’re being oppressed while they’re trying to kill 20 million people in Israel?
They got exactly what they wanted. Even the appeal to our humanity in an attempt to get us to stop supporting Israel was planned out from day 1. The end goal of which, is to make it easier to wipe Israel off the map.
Its not, please don’t make assumptions on that little. I’m simply poking a hole in how absurd the overall project is. Its a grift, designed to run in perpetuity because the stated endgame is a pipe dream.
You think ending Israel and killing everyone in it is just something Hamas pays lip service to?
It’s not like every country around them immediately invaded them the moment they were founded, right? Don’t get me wrong, we should never have put them there in the first place. It was the 1950s, nobody else wanted the Jews in their own countries either. But they’re there now. We put them there.
Hell, the whole reason the region is full of religious fundamentalist freaks is because we made a point of destabilizing the entire region so we could steal their oil without having to pay for it.
We did that. We put them there, screwed over the entire region and gave the locals an easy scapegoat to project their grievances onto, and after 60 years of it, you want to complain that they’re now too mean to their neighbors so we should leave em out to dry so they can all get killed? While we sit here getting fat off the riches we stole?
You want to wash our hands of it now? Well that’s convenient. It’s not like we don’t owe everything we take for granted to our ability to print money and force the entire world to buy oil using our currency.
Honestly, I think we should take a little responsibility. For once in our miserable lives.
Israel is the one that was founded on ethnic cleansing, used the peace process to expand it’s settlements, and is currently engaged in genocide. Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution
Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ
The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.
- Avi Shlaim
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
I know I wrote a lot and I wouldn’t expect you to read it all, but I addressed this as well, using the US-Mexico war as an example.
We haven’t given back Texas and California yet. If you invade a country and they take your territory, you can ask for a do-over, but it’s probably not going to happen.
As I’ve noted, WE created this whole mess. And we shouldn’t expect others to comply to standards we would never accept ourselves.
If you want to take it a step further, I posited a hypothetical situation where Mexico invaded and killed 20,000 Americans and took another 4000 hostage.
And what our response would likely be. If you aren’t lying to yourself, you know exactly what we would do, especially if we have someone like Donald Trump at the helm when it happens.
The Zionist Settler colonists were the in invaders, what are you talking about. Are you trying to paint all Arab/Muslims in the region as the same? Or do you recognize that the surrounding countries invaded the newly founded Israel after months of Israel ethnicly cleansing hundreds of Palestinian towns and also for their own interests? Transjordan colluded with Ben-Gurion to acquire the West Bank. Egypt also had their own ambitions. In 1967 Israel started the war in order to gain control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to gain control over all of historic Palestine. It’s been a permanent occupation so the ethnostate that is Israel can continue settlements while rejecting the humanity and citizenship of Palestinians to solve it’s ‘demografic problem.’
I can’t tell if you just aren’t bothering to read what I wrote or if you are just looking for the closest tangentially related thing to copy-paste.
I just said expecting them to return land when we’re keeping Texas and California is a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Yes, Israel removed Palestinian settlements. At our behest. We told them that land was now theirs. And the countries surrounding Israel telegraphed invasion plans for days before the six day war.
Revisionism aside, are you still trying to lay this at the feet of the Israelis instead of ours? We did that. It’s cowardly to try to pretend otherwise.
Israel has been the one doing the settler Colonialism and ethnic cleansing, the fact that the US and other western countries have financially and militarily supported it for decades does not mean that Israel is not the one responsible for it.
Yes, the US was founded on genocide of the natives and continues to disparage them to this day with reservations. Obviously I don’t support that, they deserve reparations and yes that includes land and financial compensation.
The Israeli plan to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip were planned for years. That’s not revisionism, 1967 war: Haaretz, Forward . Forcible ‘Transfer’ (ethnic cleansing) is fundamental to Zionism since the 1880’s long before the US had a major role in the region since the 1960s.
The whole point of the Uncommitted and other anti-genocide movements is to end US military support for the genocide. That’s what is needed to start pressuring Israel to end being an Apartheid State.
You say that and yet, we have protests about Israel/Palestine and not a peep about reparations for Native Americans. We killed 99.9% of their population. It’s easy to pay lip service after the fact, it’s done.
Guess it’s easier to pretend you care when you don’t have settlements being raided and entire families being scalped. And you killed so many of them that there aren’t enough of them left to complain about their treatment. We know what we did do when that was the reality though.
I ask again, what would we do if a tribe went rogue and started doing that now?
Do you think we’ve grown over the past 200 years? Think we’d react differently today?
Be honest.
Now if only they fucking showed up to vote.
Pelosi is an old hack who needs to take all of her stock market ill gotten gains and go away.
Why stop at one?
What center?
Between the Democrats and Republicans? The GOP that wanted to brutalize Pelosi on the steps of the capital? The GOP that laughed when a man with a hammer nearly murdered her husband with a hammer? The GOP that wants to roll back all civil rights to a time before the revolution? The GOP that wants to install a fascist dictatorship?
Or do you mean the center of where the American public stands?
The center of what Americans want is a hell of a lot more progressive than you, Nancy.
The GOP that wanted to brutalize Pelosi on the steps of the capital? The GOP that laughed when a man with a hammer nearly murdered her husband with a hammer? The GOP that wants to roll back all civil rights to a time before the revolution? The GOP that wants to install a fascist dictatorship?
You are ascribing the actions of individuals to the entire group. Not every GOP person is a MAGA person and not every MAGA person would resort to violence like some on January 6th. Please allow for some nuance.
There is no nuance anymore. If you’re actively supporting the GOP at this point, you ARE MAGA, and if you support MAGA, you’re okay with fascism.
There is no nuance if you yourself do not provide it.
The nuance was lost the minute they tried to overthrow the capital.
All of them did it? We wouldn’t still be standing without McConnell and Pence. As terrible as their policies are they still stood up for the system.
All of them are complicit, yes. It’s not that hard to understand. Go ahead and keep apologizing for them.
I’m not apologizing for anyone. I’m just saying they are not all one person and some of them do the right thing sometimes.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if McConnell hadn’t protected trump every step of the way. He made a heat of the moment call on J6 that you’re praising him for, but his behavior after the fact tells me he regrets his decision.
Any credibility McConnell gained on J6, he last 10 fold on February 13th.
McConnell stood up to that part of the system but still enabled the SC we have today.
Yes, he did, but that was within the bounds of the law. This person cannot honestly claim that the entire GOP tried to overthrow the government.
Not every GOP person is a MAGA person and not every MAGA person would resort to violence like some on January 6th.
And those that don’t are silent on the face of it (implicitly condoning the behavior) or are shouted down and pushed out of the party. Don’t pretend like the political machine and the voting base don’t support this behavior when they keep putting these people back in office.
Don’t forget, the GOP was against J6 until they saw the base was for it. Then even the people who could have been in danger said it was ok. So they absolutely support this shit even if they say they don’t.
Please allow for some nuance.
In this case, nuance is the excuse used to paper over the support these people have from within the party. Come back when the party machinery and base feel that way, because the individual’s “beliefs” are meaningless due to being a nebulous concept that isn’t supported by their actions.
Remember, if 10 people are sitting at a table and a Nazi is allowed to sit down, you’ve got 11 Nazis. And until we see evidence of these beliefs actually being held by a sizable amount of them, I’m not going to pretend it exists outside of their fringe.
He starts the both sides here…
The center that’s been pulled to the right of Reagan? Is it that center she means?
If so, she is in fact claiming Harris should govern with traditional Republican policies.
I hope America responds with a roaring NO to that.Beautifully stated. Summer Lee rocks.
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