Why does a state like California that has supermajorities in both houses of the legislature not have a livable wage, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, and other very progressive policies?
I keep being told it’s because of the Republicans that we can’t have nice things. So what gives in California? We should be overflowing with progressive policies.
Shhh don’t realize the democrats don’t care about you either, some guy will say “both sides” and that would be lame, we just have to be quiet about the failings of the democrat party because the republicans are worse so we can’t even discuss the possibility of making things better.
California is near the top in these things, except housing which you can squarely blame on NIMBYs. It’s expanding healthcare for migrants, the minimum wage in most cities now is twice the federal minimum wage. It’s also doing well in terms of renewable energy even though energy rates are sky high. Alternative and public transportation and other public services are also getting better, albeit slowly. Can’t have everything, but CA is doing better than most.
They’re called NIMBYs, “Not In my BackYard”. Everyone wants all the social programs, affordable housing, etc, until it affects their property value/tax, or perceived safety. They want all the issues to be solved…somewhere else that doesn’t affect them.
It’s because it’s a neoliberal supermajority, not a progressive one.
Governor Newsom is much more representative of the California Democratic Party than progressives like District Attorney George Gascon. Even though the policy positions of Gascon are much more popular than those of Newsom and his fellow establishment Democrat neoliberals.
It’s the same in New York where Chuck Schumer is much more representative of the Dem politicians, especially the party leadership, even though AOC is much more representative of the policy priorities of the people in general.
As for why the mismatch, the main reasons are
Party leadership control of primaries
economical elites control of party leadership
a hell of a lot of pro-establishment gaslighting by both the party leadership and the billionaire-owned media outlets that they’re allied with
Remember that the Democratic party is NOT leftist and is NOT progressive… it is liberal, aka generally right-of-center. The few leftists we do manage to elect generally don’t wield much power, and are undermined and sabotaged at every turn by members of “their own party” as well as Republicans. The state also has a lot of very wealthy conservative extremists, and since money is power, they wield a lot without needing pesky things like votes or democracy.
Republicans and Democrats have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So now, Democrats are where the Republicans were in the 1980s: boring, middle of the road corporatists, friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum. We haven’t had a real progressive president since Jimmy Carter and that was 50 years ago.
A lot of people don’t seem to know this in the US. If you look at most Liberal Parties, they are centre or centre right. Though some are centre left as well. That’s not a full list in that link.
Right. They say a bunch of shit to hopefully get their base out, sometimes it works. But they play dead when it comes time to deliver the big stuff (like paid family leave). Still, 2nd term Biden in a coma from old age would be better than Trump 2nd Term.
It’s very fucking big, it’s wildly diverse, and even with a supermajority laws need to be written and passed. They also aren’t wanting to pass a bunch of stuff that causes them to lose in reelections.
Then there has been some talk of Newsom wanting to lay the foundation for a possible presidential campaign at some point.
How many different neighborhoods are there in just the City of LA alone? How many of them would agree on how to run the city?
How do you align the interests of the gay urban city dwellers, the film industry down south, the tech industry up north, and the farmers in the central valley?
Ranked voting should really be at the top of our priority list. Would allow more than 2 parties to be viable and give progressives a real chance to distinguish themselves from the neolibs.
Honestly, Pelosi’s voting record has become a lot more liberal since she gave up her leadership positions. I feel like lot of her work as Speaker seemed more in gear with trying to pass an imperfect deal than getting perfect nothing.
“It’s still very Republican, it’s just those the vast majority of people who live there are not.” 😬
Although maybe you’re just trying to state that Democrats are still rightists, even if they are significantly less so than the overtly fascist Republicans, which would be accurate.
Although maybe you’re just trying to state that Democrats are still rightists, even if they are significantly less so than the overtly fascist Republicans, which would be accurate.
The USA has a two faced one party system. Two sides of the same coin or “good cop/bad cop” if you will.
Both parties serve the rich, support imperialism and so on. In terms of economics they have the exact same function of serving the 10% over the 90%.
In terms of domestic affairs the good/bad cop dynamic really kicks in. The reps are ultraconservative, while the dems try to mud the waters with their slight progressiveness, in the end only coopting those things as not to endanger capitalism.
The best you will get from the dems is a
“I’ll try to not make things worse - for now. Vote for me or my buddy elephant over there will beat you up”.
(the not making things worse refers to their social policy, not their economic ones. Those will still get progressively worse for the working majority, even if it might be a bit more indirect. All the dems really are is a silken glove over the iron fist of capital).
And tbh, for everyone outside of the US it doesn’t make a difference whether the bombs the policeman of the world drops wherever they please & the bags of money they send to genociders/reactionaries/fascists/terrorists have prideflag & BLM stickers on them, or not…
Ignoring all direct political alignments, also keep in mind that such problems are never trivial.
If they were, sooner or later we would have long solved them, even with enough idiots willfully not wanting them.
But it’s not easy. For example, California by and large cannot print money. And it’s not like the things you mention are the only problems any modern society faces, especially on a multi-culture multi-urban multi-layer multi-level scale like the whole of California.
That is to say, if a bridge collapses, that’s urgent to fix. More so, to people in the immediate area, than to work towards a living wage with a 10-15y plan on how to deeply and permanently change and transform the job market and job situation. But now some money needed for the latter went towards the former. And a host of things are “on fire” every single day. Could you still put down policy changes? Sure, but if you cannot at least start on putting them into action, there’s no point. You’d just end up wording them in such a way that whoever comes after you could trivially ignore them, and you don’t want that.
And then we get into issues that do not benefit from human mass survival, and in fact would often benefit from the lack of it, like climate change, ozone depletion and species extermination. Which also cost insane amounts of money to work on, and if we’re being honest should take priority as they would automatically make all other considerations useless if we don’t first focus everything onto such basic issues.
So in short, it’s usually a combination of:
Lots of problems
All kinds of problems at the same time
Lots of needs-fixing-right-now problems
Lots of 105% prioty problems
Lack of resources to fix all of those above + then also add more to the pile.
Thr Democrats in the US are center right comppred to most European countires, the Repliblocans are … Some sort of fucking thing that’s hard to describe.
You’re going to need to Vote elsewhere in droves for that…
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