Well twitter’s rage bait algorithm pushes the right wing trolls to the top (I saw one guy called colarado"““researcher””" was so butthurt he made like 8 replies posting boomer memes) but if you load in more replies there is tonnes of people making positive comments and are getting a lot of likes.
It’s extremely intelligent. Using the other side’s words against them. Not only that, he never said a single word in it. Just actions. In a cinematic context it is a great way to tell a story without having to tell the audience.
It did for me, too, so I poked around a bit. If i search for just the YouTube video identifier (don’t know the technical term) it brings up the video on yewtube , so this should work:
Or what? Is that supposed to be a threat? Seems to me that if a Republican is warning you not to investigate something then it definitely needs investigating.
I think he’s implying that exposing the corruption will bring to light corrupt Democrats as well.
Which is such a fucking typical conservative concept, as though the party should defend the corruption within by ignoring corruption everywhere. Jokes on you, motherfucker, because we want to expose and eliminate corruption among Democrats and Republicans.
“Vote Blue No Matter Who” *is textbook cultish behavior and has lead to some truly awful candidacies.
The post-Obama turn from casual social liberalism to BlueAnon party jingoism has been absolutely miserable for intra-party Democratic politics. The influx of Bill Kristol / Michael Bloomberg / Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republicans is a poison pill that’s going to do the same damage to the Dems that it did to the GOP under Bush.
I’m already seeing all the toxicity and nastiness in local Dem organizing meetings that I remember my parents complaining about as liberal Republicans during the 2000-era turn.
The post-Obama turn from casual social liberalism to BlueAnon party jingoism has been absolutely miserable for intra-party Democratic politics. The influx of Bill Kristol / Michael Bloomberg / Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republicans is a poison pill that’s going to do the same damage to the Dems that it did to the GOP under Bush.
This may top Mitch’s response as the dumbest take im going to read today
There’s a big difference between “always vote for the Democrat” and “always vote for Trump”.
The only reason I voted blue last time around was because my third-party vote wasn’t anti-Trump enough in 2016. And I will continue voting blue until Republicans understand what Americans truly want from their politicians, and act accordingly. I will probably be voting blue for the rest of my life, but will be pleasantly surprised if there comes a time when I don’t have to.
There’s a big difference between “always vote for the Democrat” and “always vote for Trump”.
A big chunk of the Trump electorate has been increasingly radicalized Republicans. Folks who genuinely believe Democrats are Satanic. The Trump movement works by tapping into this cohort and feeding on their intense anxiety.
Democrats are getting a similar treatment, particularly as old GOP staffers change parties.
I will continue voting blue until Republicans understand what Americans truly want from their politicians
Doggedly putting up candidates like Kristen Sinema, Eric Adams, and Dianne Feinstein to high office won’t compel Republicans to change.
One routinely sides with her conservative friends and calls it bipartisan, another feeds off blue lives matter jingoism and fuels the hysteria, and the third is too senile to present any kind of strategic opposition even presuming her politics don’t suck.
There’s no future for progressive politics in a party that can win as Republican Lite.
And the republicans will find something minor and insignificant about a democrat and make a massive deal about it as though they are equivalent issues.
Like Biden’s classified document issue compared to Trumps. Then they say, “See? Both sides are basically the same”.
Tbf, some Democrats don’t want it exposed, nor will resign when they are exposed. Some will run to their yacht to hide from angry constituents and not face intraparty opposition.
Business leaders have nothing in common with the rest of us, so why should we trust them to have our best interests in mind? Athletes, famous musicians, business leaders, celebrities all have one thing in common - money. They have much more of it than the vast majority of people and they generally want more of it.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t want Democrats in power because they might “take his money”, so he’s promoting a fringe candidate to be a spoiler to Biden.
It doesn't, and I doubt anyone reading this would agree.
But if you believe billionaires shouldn't have so much more influence, it's not a bad idea to emphasis the frequent moronic, out of touch decisions like this. At least Andrew Yang was an honest candidate.
Conservative LGBTQ+ people make the mistake of thinking their richness or whiteness outweighs their LGBTQ±ness in the eyes of their fellow conservatives.
It does not. You are being kept around as a trophy. You are who they are referring to in “Some of my best friends are gay!”
The instant it’s no longer expedient to have a gay friend nearby, you’ll be dumped.
"The choice is between two terrible people. One is actively trying to kill me and the other doesn't care if I die." --A old post I'm unable to find but truly sums up american politics.
[…] “Nikki Haley was willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin.”
“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign,” Biden added.
The president acknowledged significant policy disagreements between his campaign and those who supported Haley, but he pointed to “fundamental issues” like support for NATO and preserving democracy where the two sides could find common ground.
“We all know this is no ordinary election. And the stakes for America couldn’t be higher,” […]
Emphasis is mine.
Her supporters are definitely to the right of Biden on numerous issues (and definitely to the right of this magazine).
But, I think Biden is correct in that his campaign should do what it can to pull them in, because Trump winning a second term will likely result in the end of NATO, a serious reduction in women’s and reproductive rights, increased danger for immigrants and minorities, the total destruction of Palestine, dooming any hope of curtailing the effects of climate change, and the complete overhaul of the US Federal Government to match the Republicans’ Project 2025 vision for the USA.
This is just a short list of all the terrible things that could happen if Trump wins another term. In short, it would just be bad.
Move? The democratic party has been centre-right for a long time.
Two quotes:
"The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight — that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policymakers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie — contained a good deal of truth."
...
”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”
The Democratic party is the incredibly wide tent of "pretty much everyone who isn't a batshit crazy far right nutjob and who wants to see government work for the people".
It doesn't have any particular identity. It only has a very loose collection of platform identities. The idea that it maps into any particular point on a political compass is nonsense.
If we want to see coherent issue parties with specific platforms... it won't happen in the political system of the US. At least not so long as conservatism has any kind of social acceptability.
Also, the fact that this post is on /m/neoliberal... hope the irony isn't lost on you.
The only reason AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Schumer, Biden, Obama, Harris, Manchin (and I could go on) are part of the Democratic party is because it is a coalition of anyone who recognizes that the Republicans have gone batshit and dangerously crazy.
If they don’t stand together, they will get steamrolled and things will get a lot worse for everyone.
Then Biden went full Zionist pro-genocide and arguably, this very moment, the Democrat party is further right than most modern republicans who just wanna wax their guns and stop abortions. So they are getting steamrolled anyway.
Biden is not presenting a better alternative. He is sidling as close as possible to Trump while saying "you voted for him, I am slightly better, come over here". He shouldnt be slightly better. The democrat candidate for President of the United States should be the polar opposite of Trump. Not the guy who is slightly better (if that) than Trump.
Trump wants Netenyahu to 'finish the job' in Gaza, wants to ban Palestinian refugees, and previously said that West Bank settlement was in accordance with international law. What's happening in Gaza is horrible, but what's been happening in the West Bank is still arguably ethnic cleansing even if it's happened slowly. Trump's a fan. The Biden administration says it's illegal and has sanctioned (violent) settlers. They're also putting a lot of pressure on Israel to stop the war.
No, they're not great, but it's absurd to think the Republicans will be any better or aren't the worse option.
Trump’s official stance is genocide. He has stated that Israel needs to “finish the problem” and would happily annihilate the Palestinian people. He has never liked Muslims, and views them as a problem.
I am not the biggest fan of how Biden is handling the situation, but like it or not, he is the only thing standing people Palestine and Trump. Biden is absolutely the better alternative.
You don't 'convert' the far right. You don't convert the cult. You defeat them. This is about to be a defining moment for American civilisation - do supporters of democracy, decency and due process on left and right work together to defeat Trump's fundamental threat to civilisation, or do they allow it to happen? Everything else is secondary.
It'll be no consolation to know that you didn't dirty your hands by cooperating with pro-democracy conservatives at the point when there's an egotistical fascist back in the White House bent on brutal revenge on the people and system that have opposed his rise. Especially if your refusal to embrace and work with them is what drove them into Trump's arms.
No, that’s what they’re counting on. That certainly wouldn’t stop them since that’s the point of the entire exercise. Although this particular example comes dangerously close to dancing over the line into incitement if it doesn’t already.
The Prison Boys leader who just got 22 years in prison admitted he knew all along that Convicted Sex Offender Treason Trump did not win the election. The media needs to point out the obvious. That the Prison Boys and Oathbreakers are Tory militia groups who were trying to destroy the Founding Father’s government and reestablish a dictatorship/monarchy.
Feels like pretty strong linkages to obstruction of justice if you’re trying to brazenly influence the outcome of a trial under the threat of violence.
The title is mainly clickbait. The bonds they're talking about were sold in 1938 by the US backed Republic of China, which at the time was fighting a civil war with the Peoples Republic of China (Maoists). The RoC lost, and retreated to Taiwan. The PRoC then assumed control of the country, and decided that it wasn't interested in paying the debts of the government it had just vanquished.
However, under international law, when the PRoC took over China, they also assumed responsibility for paying those bond holders. Nobody has gotten them to pay up except the UK when the transfer of Hong Kong was up for consideration.
So basically, this is a 70 year old debt that was taken out against China's former government, and the current government really has no urgency to address it.
As @mazelado pointed out, this is an opinion piece by the Heritage Foundation, so the motivations in writing it are suspect, especially as it's specifically pushing the Biden administration to fight this very old fight. You would have thought that if had really been a pressing matter, Trump would have handled it when he started the US / China tradewar right before COVID, as it was clear Don didn't have any qualms pushing potentially destructive diplomatic policies that were unpopular to the Chinese.
You would have thought that if had really been a pressing matter, Trump would have handled it when he started the US / China tradewar right before COVID, as it was clear Don didn’t have any qualms pushing potentially destructive diplomatic policies that were unpopular to the Chinese.
This is a fantastic point. The article sounded correct when I read it, but it felt very obviously biased as well. Your comment here helps me square everything.
What I always like to do is point out that Republicans are about "picking our bosses who will make hard decisions we might not like" vs "doing what the majority wants".
I think a good government could use a little of both. But "majority wants" should be 99% of the laws, with only 1% being "hard, unpopular decisions". Republicans prefer 100% "unpopular decisions"
Majority of white hetero Christians in the 30s through 60s wanted to outlaw gay people, cannabis and harmless psychedelic mushrooms, and imprison black people for protesting with guns.
Fuck you and majority rule. Minorities also deserve voices.
Perfect! Now it’s the old bastards that grew up from that era as a minority in power making the choice to try to keep things like they were in the 30s through 60s!
I know you’re trying to say “majority rule isn’t always a good thing”, but the alternative of “let a small group of people make decisions for everyone else” is just as bad and often times worse. It’s though the changing of minds of the majority that societal changes happen.
This is not an open question in liberal representative democracies.
You set the basic rules of the game and the minimun set of universal rights down at the constitutional level so they're not accessible to change without massive consensus, then let the rest be subject to political legislative action under majority rule. People get the ability to express themselves under equal treatment from the law protected by consitutional rights while majority consensus sets the short-term decision-making.
If you want to actually have a functional one of those you also set a proportional electoral system, which makes smaller parties have a say through the frequent need to aggregate coalitions. This mostly works.
I swear, Americans have a fantastic knack for pretending it is physically impossible to resolve basic problems. "Sensible measurement units? If only we had the technology".
Dude, you are speaking to a community of Marxist pro-anarchist retards in here. Your attempt at educating these people about how a representative democracy works is futile.
I just had an argument here with someone recently about the merits of protecting novel ideas with intellectual property rights and some of these dipshit dumbasses here think it's bad we protect innovative ideas from being stolen with legal protections.
You are yelling into the void of pure stupidity here, but I'm going to stand with you by your side.
Yeeeeeah, I'm gonna ask you to stand way over there instead, if you don't mind.
I may poke fun at Americans going straight from extreme conformism to violent revolution, but you and I are very much not in the same wavelength here. Even if you weren't being obnoxious and rude I am clearly closer to them than you, politically.
Also, modern IP and copyright systems were profoundly broken before, but are entirely nonfunctional after the Internet happened, so... yeah, thinking you're barking up the wrong socialdemocrat tree, friend.
The problem is that the US system is old and outdated, buggy as fuck, and was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change because that was what was necessary in order to get the slave states to join the union.
As for our measurements, we actually use a mix. In the military, science and engineering where it matters, we use metric. In everything else we use a kind of hybrid imperial system that in a lot of ways (not all) is much more intuitive than metric because it tends to be based on a human scale.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You're doing the thing that I'm talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President's set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it'd be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic “so fix it” switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn’t the case, but wishes aren’t worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that’s almost impossible to update because it’s full of ancient proprietary software that doesn’t play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
No, I didn't miss that part. I just happen to know what that part applies to, and there is plenty of readily available reform that only needs a normal law to enact that is not being enacted. The obviously broken major... "bug", as per your metaphor, of the Supreme Court being fundamentally broken does not need any of that legacy code, just a functional majority in the legislative. It's not the only example.
The fatalistic notion that the system is fossilized in place and has no room for reform is my point. Sure, there are some fundamental issues that require near-universal control of every state's legislature and that's become incredibly hard politically, but there are also massive issues that don't.
And for the fossilized part, you need to start with educational reform and have a century-long plan to de-lobotomize about half of your population. Because I'm not sure that if you can't hope to reach a widespread consensus you can expect to enforce that reform in any other way, either.
But now the majority want civil rights and the minority are openly saying we should get rid of democracy to prevent that, so I’m not sure how what you said is relevant at all
… and cheating, gerrymandering, and outright lying. They know they arent representing the majority and are trying to delay the inevitable demise of their power in every way possible.
They don’t even have to cheat when it comes to the Senate. It was purpose made to provide disproportionate power to lower population areas. It is an explicitly anti-democratic chamber.
Which is a good thing…to a degree. A check against pure populism is necessary for any healthy Democracy.
But the ratio is completely out of wack nowadays, and doesn’t align with how the country exists now. Democrats have to work much harder to get control of it, but Republicans have to do very little to keep it.
It’s a structural flaw that is continually getting more destructive and Republicans become more brazen. The chamber that elects our Judges doesn’t even have rules in the Constitution for how it must operate. That’s such an incredible oversight I don’t get how it took until now for it to be abused.
Cribbage players are massively underrepresented in Congress, so we need a third chamber that’s designed to give equal representation to cribbage and non-cribbage playing Americans. It’s only fair, and we all know that fair and equal are good. Maybe we should have a fourth chamber where trans people have equal representation too, to keep Republicans from continuing to try to trample their rights.
Land shouldn’t vote, people should vote. No, I don’t think rural Podunk should have equal representation to Metropolis. One person, one vote. That has absolutely nothing to do with “populism” by the way.
Reductio ad absurdum. The conversation at hand has nothing to do with classes of people or their specific interests.
I do agree that our current Senate structure was specifically designed to give more political power to states with lower populations. That may have made more sense when the country was being established. The senate isn’t exactly about land having a vote though. It’s about states themselves voting. The geographical size and the population of the state are both irrelevant.
It probably made sense in the 1700s. States needed that level of autonomy, and someone to speak on behalf of the state so that a federal policy that made sense to some states wasn’t forced upon other independent states.
In the year 2023 I’m not so sure but I think there is still an argument to be had for states to have their own votes. For example, if the federal government wanted to levy taxes based on geographic size of the state, or the amount of land owned by individuals. Such a policy probably sounds great to people living in eastern states which are smaller but more densely populated compared to western states. If it came down to a vote based on population, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, the Dakotas are now stuck with a decision that negatively impacts their citizens unfairly.
The problem has to do with the way the two houses are combined. Both houses have to agree even though they have different representation needs and goals. It was a lazy compromise to just say “both houses must agree”, but drawing a line between whether an issue is about a state or individuals on a national basis is very hard to do.
My example of cribbage players is indeed absurd, but it’s no less absurd than the reality we have learned to accept through conditioning. That’s not reductio ad absurdum, it’s legitimate use of unfamiliar absurdity to make familiar absurdity visible.
The distribution of power to the states instead of the people was a political necessity to keep some states from leaving the table, not a visionary principal of anyone’s ideal democracy. It never “made sense” at all, but was made necessary by the political realities of the time. No, it was not intended to give the vote to land, but that was it’s effect.
Your example of taxation by land mass is a far better example of reductio ad absurdum. If democracy is to be viewed as tyranny of the majority, then any alternative is, by the same exact logic, a tyranny of the minority. Any power caries with it the risk of tyranny, no matter how it’s distributed. Generally speaking, the less centralized power is, the less likely it is to be abused, but the risk is never zero.
Distributing power to the states instead of the people sounds like a step in the right direction from putting it in the hands of the federal government, but it’s actually the opposite. There are countless examples where states get trapped in a race to the bottom. For instance, a state that raises the minimum wage has to risk jobs shifting to another state, or failing to find a privately owned business could move it to another state. Much of the power states have only exists until they try to use it. Since states can’t control their borders and regulate trade with other states, the whole system just becomes an obstacle to reform.
It’s also the reason they always say “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” despite the fact that a republic is a type of democracy. They abuse language to justify the fact that they don’t want everyone to vote, only the people who vote for them. They also don’t govern for all of their constituents, only those that contribute to their power. It’s definitely not new.
A republic is simply a state without a king or other hereditary monarch. Often the leader is chosen democratically, but not always.
For example, China is a republic but not a democracy. The US is a democratic republic, which makes the claim “this is a republic not a democracy” even sillier.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
But he… wasn’t. He lost the presidency in 1932 to Paul Von Hindenburg (53% to 37%. not even particularly close) who later appointed Hitler under pressure to the channclorship (which was an appointed role) in 1933. Hindenburg died in January of 1934 and Hitler de facto merged the presidency and chancelorship into one office (Fuhrer). The story isn’t “regular people put Hitler in power”, it’s “broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists”.
Not sure entirely about that. Nazis were still a party that held up to 44% of seats in the reichstag (before they were all nazi) with like 6 different parties. Hitler wasn’t isolated. The population voted for him and his party. Hindenburg didn’t like Hitler but essentially passed away at a terrible time and Hitler outplayed Papen who was meant to keep him in check. Hindenburg felt he had to since they had the closest to a majority in the reichstag.
"In the end, the president, who had previously vowed never to let Hitler become chancellor, appointed Hitler to the post at 11:30 am on 30 January 1933, with Papen as vice-chancellor.[91] While Papen’s intrigues appeared to have brought Hitler into power, the crucial dynamic was in fact provided by the Nazi Party’s electoral support, which made military dictatorship the only alternative to Nazi rule for Hindenburg and his circle. [Sauce]
Yes, there was support in the population, but there was also a lot of violence to suppress dissent. The historical consensus, as I learned it, is to call it the “seizure of power” (“Machtergreifung” in German), because Hitler wasn’t simply voted into power by a majority.
This somewhat misleading, Hitler and the NSDAP were indeed voted into the position to seize power by democratic means which they then abused, the voter supression mainly happened in later elections when the undermining of institutions and the consitution was already well underway. “Machtergreifung” is the propaganda term the Nazis used themselves to describe the process of what happened after the fact, which in reality was much more cloak and dagger-y than the term suggests.
P.S.: Germany didn’t have a two-party system, so having a majority wasn’t that important. You would form coalitions of parties after an election which then had a majority, or even form a minority government that then has to actively hunt for their missing votes from other parties to get any legislation passed.
That is not correct. Neither according to Wikipedia, not to what I learned in school. The term “Machtergreifung” was avoided by the Nazis, they used “Machtübernahme” as to not alienate their moderate conservative supporters. But “Machtergreifung” is much more fitting, when applying it to the process that was started in January 1933.
And yes, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to appoint him as the head of a coalition government, as the NSDAP had lost votes and came in “only” at around 33%. The normal rules of how to govern in a multi-party system don’t quite apply, because it was never Hitler’s goal to rule as part of a coalition, having to compromise.
They used both terms as well as “Machtübergabe” (transfer of power) to refer to Hitler being appointed chancelor, but that was neither the beginning nor the end of the multi-step coup the Nazis enacted, which is what I wanted to highlight. The term makes it seem like a singular event, when in reality it was a longer process.
i always thought that’s mostly because german fascists dragged both of those countries into war by attacking them, which caused severe backlash by proxy, and not really antifa being particularly effective in those countries.
explains why the U.S., despite having a large fascist movement at the time, reversed course and turned on fascism as an ideology (in public); they got attacked.
same in Britain; early attacks in the war, plus some lingering resentment from WWI, combined overcoming a push towards fascism…
I’d love to hear/read more about successful antifa movements in the UK/US, but that’s what I’ve always thought/read were the major reasons for failing fascist movements in those countries: other fascists…
You really expect a politician to tell the truth, especially when it comes to history? She and the rest of the US political elite for decades now are just mouthpieces for interest groups, mostly military groups who make money with wars abroad. Together with the media, they sell you wars abroad, while waving any currently popular flag at home for votes. The US elections are so loud, you don’t hear the sounds of pain and misery those events create abroad, especially in Middle East.
After the reports of Israeli invasion in Gaza, the first smile I saw in media was that of Hillary. When the wars and killings across northern Africa and Middle East started during the Arab Spring, her smile was the most prominent one for months.
Every time this slime of a human being crawls out of a crack in the wall in Washington somewhere, a war is either being prepared or needs justifying for the american voters. All that with a smile, while the cameras are rolling.
it’s “broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists”.
She would know all about that. Bernie was killing Trump in the polls. Hilary was neck and neck with Trump.
The DNC cast their votes for who was going to General. A winner was announced. Everyone started to go to the announcement and for the only time in DNC history, the announcement was rescinded and everyone was broken up into different groups. Hilary staffers were observed scurrying around between groups. Then everyone was forced to vote again. THEN Hilary was declared the candidate going to General.
It was all live tweeted. It was all loudly publicized, but noone seemed to notice. Noone seemed to care.
Of course she is now going to make a historically inaccurate statement that casts actual democracy in a bad light.
Don't forget that there are many, many appointed superdelegates who each have around 8,000 voting power each.
There were 618 pledges from DNC superdelegates in the 2016 nomination, equaling 4,944,000 voting power (meaning votes equivalent to ~5 million regular voters in the DNC). These are not delegates assigned to states but to specific groups and people in positions in the DNC itself.
For reference, 16,917,853 of the popular vote itself went to Hilary Clinton and 13,210,550 went to Bernie Sanders according to this eye cancer of a website. If all of the DNC superdelegates voted for Bernie Sanders, he would have won the 2016 DNC primaries, even though the DNC voters regardless that the actual regular DNC voters voted for Hilary.
Anyway, I'm only making a point that system was broken.
The DNC did reform this afterwards, in that, if the first ballot doesn't have an absolute majority then superdelegates will cast votes but otherwise, cannot (as a superdelegate).
At the end of the day, I think the United States is just too damn big to run this type of system.
Red states are so entrenched in their beliefs and blue states are so entrenched in theirs, there is no way to cap them off with one cohesive federal government.
By design, every advancement is a crucial blow to the other side.
And then the real rub.
We have been at it long enough that there are not 2 parties. There is one mob of selfish egotistical asshats who struggle and toil keep federal office the best place to get richer and more powerful.
We keep calling it a government divided. IT ISNT. They are of one mind, taking a foot but making sure not to take a yard. Giving up a foot but making sure not to lose a yard. And every time the ball moves one half of The mindless masses feel validated, one half of The mindless masses feel violated, and the whole effort had an earmark on page 1672 of 3000 that assraped EVERYONE except the rich and the politician.
My betting money is on the fact that we will crumble like the USSR before I die. No grand civil war two electric Boogaloo. Just a pathetic crumbling.
The difference between US and the USSR is that we don't have a pre USA history/culture to fall back on.
DNC’s lawyers used the legal defense that they’re a private party and can run anyone they want in the general, and because of that, it doesn’t matter if they influence a primary election.
They flat out said primary elections are just a performative act, and the judge agreed with them.
Which is correct if you look at the history of how primaries came to be. Parties simply nominating someone is exactly what used to happen. The first Presidential primaries started in 1901, and they still don’t even happen in every state. Plenty still use the caucus system, where a bunch of insiders (usually local people who have volunteered for the party in some capacity) take off a day from work to decide on a candidate. The caucus system has historically been far more susceptible tampering by powerful interests. It literally was a smoke filled room, and is where that metaphor started.
Primaries aren’t some system enshrined in the Constitution or anything. It’s just how both parties have evolved over time. The general population gets its say in the election later on. The system now is far more democratic than the one that existed 200 years ago (with the caveat that we don’t have to stop with progress here).
Obama would never have gotten the nomination in 2008 if the caucus system was still the norm. The leaders of the party wanted Hillary.
That said, I think this approach would work better if there were more than two viable parties. If you don’t like who the Democrats nominated, look the Green Party or Progressives Party or Send Billionaires to Guillotines Party. If they all put a candidate out there selected by party insiders, that’s fine, just vote in the general for whomever you think is the best out of a wide range of options. It’s far harder for corrupt party insiders to game the system in this scenario–for example, it’d be harder to have a place in all parties and setup the candidates you want so you win no matter what. It’s only a problem because we have exactly two parties that matter. Treating multiple parties as private organizations who can nominate whomever they want under any system they want would be fine.
That’s not the only thing you just said that I disagree with, it’s just an objective fact and it’s pretty much what the rest of your comment is based on.
There's a handful of things I find myself having to repeat and repeat, to the point that it's starting to annoy me. I'm sure someone is going to give me shit about it real soon.
Look. Soon enough these assholes will stop beating around the bush and make their move. It will be undeniable but they will skip right past shame and whole heartily accept the fact that yes, they actually are aligned with Nazis. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. During Bush they said they weren’t racist. During Trump they said they weren’t fascist. Next they will say they won’t attempt mass genocide.
You're not wrong. Fascism isn't coming; it's here. And every time some fascist bullshit happens without consequences, they get stronger and democracy gets weaker. Fascist leaders have seen no consequences. The American Fascist Party (I said it again) has to be called that, because not only are they refusing to eject fascists from their ranks, they are promoting them to positions of real power.
Oh look who found their removable testicular implants
As Americans, his candidacy means less attention paid to Joe Biden’s disastrous economic policies afflicting millions across the United States and to the pattern of corruption with Hunter,” Pence said, referring to Trump.
Oh well, this broken clock can’t even be right once for a change.
We will restore a threshold of integrity and civility in public life so we can bring real solutions to the challenges plaguing our nation.
Real solutions such as? Burning books? Making LGBTQ lives a living hell? Guns everywhere? More tax breaks for billionaire oligarchs? Or more attacks on democracy?
I was born and raised in New York. I really love my town, but I’d never say that I was ‘proud’ to be a New Yorker; I’m from here because my parents moved here, not from anything special about me.
I was proud that 90% of the people here voted against ‘favorite son’ Donnie.
A lot of them probably did because the right openly accepted non-white and LGBTQ+ people into their ranks when they all banded together to oppose the lockdowns. They were absolutely right to do so then, but now the pendulum of oppression has swung the other way, so they’ll abandon the right and go to the left until the left does something else insane.
We desperately need an independent third party in the U.S.
They absolutely did not accept non-white and LGBTQ people during COVID, the COVID era was the Trump Administration. Lockdowns were a Trump policy and it was specifically because he didn’t do enough early enough to contain infections.
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