The IRA made European countries begrudgingly pass similar legislation so their green energy companies would stay and be globally competitive. We can be excited about the significance of the IRA and still acknowledge we could go a lot further. It remains that it was some of the strongest climate policy passed in the entire West.
If Europe is so much more left wing, they should’ve had legislation and policies like it much longer ago. The US shouldn’t have needed to push them.
Honestly, not really. There are times I have to remind myself. The Biden administration has a special knack for not publicizing their victories at all. As Stewart recently commented about Harris and others talking about Biden being sharp and in command. “Did anyone happen to record this?”
Noone is paying attention to that. Their strategy should be hammering this over and over and over nonstop. They have had no strategy for a year while focus was on the Republicans, and they still have no agenda other than Trump bad and Biden is not that old.
Voting first time in my life for a Republican, basically out of spite. Nothing in my personal life has changed at all after 3 presidential elections, so I’m going to vote for the one that will piss off the most people on Reddit. Watching the meltdown will be hilarious.
That’s how you got Trump in the first place though. Are you seriously saying (voting for) the president that made your life the worst of the three is your way to show them?
With exception of Bobby Kennedy, I’m not sure the latter part is true. On the other hand Republicans seem to fall in love pretty hard recently. To a shockingly worrying degree.
I don’t think that’s what the expression means. I think that expression means that the Left is quick to look for reasons why it can’t work with so and so politician, while the Right mostly just goes with what Leadership says. To borrow from Stellaris, we on the Left are Libertarian and Materialist in our ethics, favouring science and self determination far more than the Right, who is Authoritarian and Spiritualist, who believe that everyone is subjected to God’s laws, and that you have people you follow, and people you command, and all is right in the world when that paradigm is followed. Sure, there are Right-wing politicians that the constituents like more than others, but they’ll ALWAYS vote Red in the end, because the most wishy-washy Conservative is still subject to pressure from leadership and the RNC, while a Blue politician isn’t (in fact, in their worldview, the Blue pol will be subjected to the DNC machine).
Lmao. Biden would get my second vote again if he came out and actually acknowledged there was a recession. At least then I’d feel like he listened to Americans.
There was additional loan forgiveness just earlier this week. SCOTUS stopped him from taking massive sweeping action, so he’s instead taken smaller actions that are still impactful. The requirements aren’t absurdly narrow, and I suspect the people who have benefited aren’t spurning the actions.
What matters is perception and public messaging and that is currently one of a centrist president incapable of reigning in a foreign ally or continually calling out House Republicans for their shenanigans that put American lives at risk at home and abroad.
Conservatives have constant control of the conversation because they have zero qualms publicly stating how their political adversaries stand in their way. But instead it looks like Democrats trying to win Republicans support by adopting republican policies instead of bullying them into accepting the plan of the majority party of the upper legislature and presidency.
Laughably insufficient, and contained massive handouts to fossil fuel industry. Our infrastructure is still crumbling and we’re spending billions bombing innocent kids in Gaza instead of addressing major problems at home.
no recession
By the outmoded measurements, sure. But the stock market isn’t the economy. Record low home buying for individuals, record high homelessness. The working class is not ok
student debt
Should have been wiped clean. What he did was send correspondence to everyone saying as much, then yank it away last second. Too cruel to give people hope like that. What’s left is means tested to shit and while it helps some it’s only drops in the bucket for total student loan debt forgiveness. Should have done way more, and stfu about “republicans won’t let us” because that is a weak ass argument to continually do nothing.
not just sitting on his hands
This is literally the point AOC is making here. Biden is barely even registering as someone campaigning for office, much less president. It’s probably because his bedtime is 4:30 pm. Wake up Brandon, your first term is almost over and you’ve only delivered on about 10% of what you promised. Btw, those promises included being a 1 term President.
The IRA may not have been the silver bullet to fix climate change, but it was the most comprehensive climate change bill in history and allocates the highest funding ever for green energy. It actually provides so much funding that Canada and European countries were forced to pass similar legislation so their renewable energy companies would stay and be competitive.
Perhaps it’s laughably insufficient – but it also happens to be some of the furthest left wing legislation in the West with climate change.
Plus, Democrats also passed an infrastructure bill to address the issues you’ve accurately identified. I don’t think we’re naive enough to think that everything would be fixed in a few years from that. There’s significant lag time when you make any change.
What she said was “I think we can certainly do more to be advancing our vision, and I believe we have a strong vision that we can run on.” She specifically calls out:
Codifying abortion/reproductive rights [House and Senate races matter!]
Lowering Medicare age
Student loan forgiveness
Contrary to OP’s title, she actually pushes back on the false narrative that Biden is running as “not Trump”.
She does say that it will be important to demonstrate “what we are willing to do with” governing power between now and November.
Biden has to have more to offer than to be the alternative to Trump, and because even bringing up his age causes condemnation, I’m not sure there’s actually much else being considered about Biden as a candidate.
We living in a democracy in name only. Without a free press and independent media and without better rules to allow the people to make better choices, it’s always going to go the way of some weird self reinforcing and randomly mutating ideology.
Every 4 years Republicans move 6 steps towards fascism, while dems only move 4 steps towards fascism and tell us they’re our only hope to avoid fascism.
What vision? What do dems actually offer beyond “trump bad”? Don’t get me wrong, Trump definitely Bad, but how many times do they expect this sort of brinkmanship to work? Even if we beat this Trump there will be another one along, and the people who openly tell us that they want to end democracy in America only have to win once.
And if you notice Democrats have said nothing to counteract it. Their history shows they let Republicans offer up far right wing legislation, Democrats hate it. Then a Democrat takes up the reigns of that same policy and gets it passed with liberal approval.
On the other hand does it really matter? Like Obama had a plan to “fix” healthcare and in the end he couldn’t really do anything about it. The entire system you have sucks.
American politics is only about slinging as much mud at your opponent as possible and painting the grimmest doomsday picture as possible about everything.
Actually having a vision and a dream doesn’t work, unfortunately.
Actually having a vision and a dream doesn’t work, unfortunately.
MAGA has proven that isn’t true. Granted their vision and dream is horrible but it works. Establishment Democrats are losing to Trump because providing a vision and dream in the other direction would be against the interests of their corporate donors.
You completely sailed over the point where establishment Democrats are losing to this because they won’t work against their corporate donors and moderates won’t hold them accountable.
Can he though? Seems to me that a lot of the things Biden does don’t get noticed by people. Either because of laziness and apathy on their part, or due to horrible reporting from our less than a reputable media at this point. A lot of the best accomplishments don’t get talked about, some are even misremembered. You still hear people talk about the the rail worker strike and yet completely forget how it ended with Biden getting the rail workers pretty much everything they wanted. I don’t know if that’s just ignorance or purposeful misinformation what I hear it from people though. A lot of his reforms have been some of the most progressive in decades, yet people on the internet especially just pretend they don’t exist for some reason. Is it messaging or is it purposeful? Hard to say.
Biden is a liberal, and is making moves for liberals, yes. People here are leftists, and want moves made for leftists. Being slightly more progressive for a liberal is not what leftists want, it’s what progressive liberals want.
Well leftist might want to grow the fuck up and realize that the choice is between a straight-up fascist and a progressive liberal. So the time to whinge about it would have been years ago when they could build up their own candidate and start campaigning for them. Instead, cuz they’re lazy, they’d rather now subvert democracy in a huff. They’re going to end up learning the lesson of Weimar Germany, that when the fascists come to power they murder the leftists. It’s what I can’t understand at this point, is it ignorance or is it malfeasance?
This same exact line has been thrown at leftists every election cycle for the last 50 years. The fun thing? The liberals sided with the fascists in Nazi Germany, lol.
I never suggested that leftists shouldn’t vote for Biden over Trump, but get off your high horse and realize that what’s good for liberals is not necessarily good for leftists, and leftists have a right to complain and criticize. Liberals are not entitled to votes just because they aren’t as bad as fascists, at the end of the day both are bad.
Again, I’m going to vote for Biden, but I’ll absolutely clown on him for being a lukewarm liberal propping up genocide as well.
If it’s been thrown at them for 50 years, which I don’t necessarily concede, it’s because they never do anything about it. Leftists don’t organize. Leftists don’t prop up candidates at local and small levels. Leftist don’t campaign. What leftists do is complain. What leftists do is cut each other down. What leftists do is turn up their noses at 80% of success because it’s not the other 20. Meanwhile conservative will happily chip away 20% at a time for 30 straight years till they get what they want.
Being a left is an America is one of the most frustrating things you can be, because we kill ourselves.
How did how do they get entrenched? Is it just magic? Or maybe, they’re that much better at organizing which leads to entrenchment.
Why on Earth with 80% success from a liberal be socialism that makes no sense.
You people have no idea how far the Democratic party has moved in the last 20 years alone. You people have no concept of what it was like in the 90s. On so many issues today the Democratic party without question supports things that the Democratic party back then was way too conservative to do. It’s about incremental change. Short of violent revolution, which I am not ruling out, that’s the only way to get change. Only.
Because liberalism is beneficial to Capitalists, money flows towards them. Leftists have been forced to organize at grassroots levels against the powers of Capital, while liberals have had the pleasure of being bought and paid for by Capitalists.
80% success for a leftist would be Socialism. Of course Biden is a liberal, I don’t give a shit if he’s successful as a liberal, I care about genuine improvements in material conditions for the Proletariat. Biden hasn’t been 100% bad, but he’s been far from leftist.
Grassroots movement is how you get change. In the last 20 years, liberals are no closer to emancipation of the Proletariat.
Leftists do organize, do promote candidates, do campaign. The problem is that the DNC is actively hostile to true progressive movements and undercut them at every moment.
Leftists have to look outside of the democratic process because the space alloted to them within it is purposefully ineffectual, and we often have to push the Democrats around because they’re constantly holding back reform.
Then who? This is always what happens I always get told that it’s just too hard. They can’t win. Just give up. Let the fascists win. It’s all I ever hear on this damn site. You know what I don’t ever hear? The Who. Where is this leftist candidate that was built up and put in position to win this race? I don’t see him.
It isn’t just alternative candidates, but I should point out that there areother candidates running that absolutely deserve consideration (Cornell West strikes me as a particularly good option for leftist policies).
If democrats want to win with leftist support, they’re going to need to try and make concessions to the caucus. A part of direct action is withholding support in order to win ground, and the democrats are absolutely not entitled to anyone’s vote. If they really believe they need to defeat fascism, then maybe they should start listening to the people telling them why they’re loosing votes.
You still hear people talk about the the rail worker strike and yet completely forget how it ended with Biden getting the rail workers pretty much everything they wanted
Biden subverted the workers’ rights to strike, it doesn’t matter what the outcome was. Unions have the right to strike anytime for any reason and no President should have the legal authority to interfere in negotiations for any reason, point blank.
The railworkers strike set precedent that strikes could only happen if the President wanted them to, which is a really fucking awful thing to do. But I’d expect no less from a neolib.
See this is exactly what I’m talking about here. First the ignorance and thinking that set of precedent and not the hundred years that has come before it. Then the concept of no it doesn’t matter the results. Just the arrogance of saying results don’t matter when it comes to governance. This is the problem in a nutshell right here.
Okay so best case scenario is that Biden didn’t do anything to change union rights in America and followed the past 100 years and worst case is that he showed that not even the dems actually support workers right to strike? Am I following you right? The president isn’t the daddy of America. You fuckers talk all the time about how “Joe Biden doesnt control the economy” when he literally stepped into a private negotiation to force people back to work. It was illegal when Raegan did it and it was illegal when Biden did it.
It doesn’t matter the results. Biden subverted the workers’ rights to strike. He could’ve gotten them 10x more than they were petitioning for and it would’ve still been a disaster for unions in the long-term. Union rights aren’t subject to the whim of whoever is sitting in the Oval Office.
ding ding ding! this is the answer - Biden does exactly what the donors want, which is more of the same from the last 50 years. AOC is scoring some easy political points here by stating the obvious, but an 81 year old fossil isn’t suddenly going to decide to be a leader rather than a fear mongerer from the bunker.
She’s right. People are tired of the status quo which is slowly being dismantled by Republicans in the House, etc. Attacking them only further entrenches people who lean right. Hilary already made this mistake when she thought Trump was an easy win and ignored flyover states. This is how you lose swing state votes, too. Biden and his team have done a lot of good things, but it’s all for naught if nobody sees it - his messaging sucks.
When she streamed with hbomberguy and said ‘trans rights’ on the mic I genuinely hoped she would. She is young, she is based, she has charisma most democrats lack. But dems seem to prefer safe bets so they’d nominate Joe until he dies. Even at that time they can vote her in just because she’s not a geriatic pos like her opponent.
She may be able to next time. But it all depends on this election. Switching from an already sitting President to her would never happen. That’s like firing the person who made your business run somewhat normal after a complete shit show.
It reminds me of a good movie, Wag the Dog, where a slogan Don’t change horses in mid-stream was very untimely and cringe. But yeah, she’s nobody to the most and there are years of groundwork to even put her on a ballot.
Honestly, I dont feel like listing out everything. The entire point of justice democrats / progressives was to go against the establishment. Yet they are voting with these ghouls every time. Even on issues like Palestine, they continually drop the ball. I am done with them. They have no intention of improving things.
She’s pretty consistently been against genocide in Palestine It’s just that she doesn’t get to decide when the rest of the establishment goes along with it
And this is why progressives struggle so much. Idealism is great but not always compatible with reality. Compromises have to be made, and you have to redo your strategies when you see how the sausage is actually made. I suspect if you won an election to be a House representative, people you currently agree with would come to see you as a sell out too, simply for adjusting your tactics to meet the new reality you see.
Not supporting a genocide is a low fucking bar. If you can compromise on the annihilation of innocent children, you are a shit person and don’t deserve a vote. Please be fucking serious.
Nah if Trump was in office in the last four months there’d be open conflict across the Middle East with thousands of US troops bound for Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, etc
That is a fucking lie, and all it does is justify Bidens egotistical clinging to power.
Stop drinking the cool aid. It’s what led to the first trump presidency. It will lead to the second, too.
Remember: Trump being awful is an argument to not vote for Trump. Biden needs to also make the argument that we should vote for him. as it stands there a lot of other people who are Not-Trump.
And, supporting genocide is a pretty fucking massive reason to look elsewhere.
Or you could not vote, or you could vote for literally anyone else.
Sure, the consequences of such are probaby that Trump wins- but there is still possibility there and there are people dumb enough to try and make that point.
It’s crazy how people are acting like we’re the problem for not wanting to vote for either genocidal candidate. Just find someone better and I’ll vote for them, DNC. Unless you can’t.
I know right? This quote in the headline makes her out to sound so tepid like “please mr president could you maybe be more confrontational against the fascists who want to kill me and my allies? 👉👈”
I’d love to see it, but Dems are going to run neither and try to skirt another “at least he’s not trump” win. Not excited to see how it plans out, 2020 was entirely too close for comfort.
Oh yeah, if he started talking like half of his most rabid supporters do online then he’d be way more popular.
If people could quote President Biden’s personal attacks on white supremacists, book bans, etc then they’d get a lot farther with the politically disengaged.
Imagine if you had Biden (or his social media team) out here on the daily constantly mocking GOP culture war shit as inherently un-American and out of touch with normal people?
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