10 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
Just a few months ago it was impossible to criticize this old segregationist rapist. The two US political parties are worse than cults.
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.
Marketing
The left is pro 2A.
Well when 30% of the country wants you dead just for being Democrat, can you blame them for wanting to defend themselves?
Democrats are not the left.
Not this shit again. Go away.
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.
Oh look, more vote-third-party slop pushed right before an election. What a coincidence!
the democrats have received endorsements from dick fucking cheney and ex-reagan staffers. they have campaigned on building the border wall more efficiently, shutting down asylum and hiring more border guards. in the debate she promised the American military will be the most lethal fighting force in the world. democrats USED to campaign on medicare for all, a path to citizenship, ending forever wars, etc. the rightward shift of the party is abundantly clear to anyone not just playing team sports. you need to come to terms with the fact that your party has been assimilated by neoconservatives and push back on it, or it’s only going to continue.
Third parties are never even mentioned in the article. Is all left criticism of Harris “vote-third-party slop”?
What a coincidence!
This is one of those things where we all know what it means but you have deniability if someone calls you out on it. Just say what you mean instead of resorting to dogwhistling.
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.
This 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.
