Well, the edit did save me some work.

You chose to keep replying (including to announce you’ll be off “doing something useful”), then come back just to tack on a personal insult and blame me for wasting your time. That is a pretty revealing model of the politics: grand plans for a new system, zero patience for the people you would need to build it with, and somehow even your own choices are someone else’s fault.

If everyone outside your circle is a zombie, a liberal, or too far gone to bother with, you won’t build a movement. You’ll build a clubhouse.

And a clubhouse is fine. It just is not going to replace a system you keep evading a real contest with.

But if this is how you practice politics, you clearly do not need my help wasting your own time.

Weird how “only us, only together” in theory becomes “anyone who disagrees with me can and wants to ‘die with this system’” in practice.

Real serious collective politics there. Stunning way to build a movement.

Yeah, you know what, you’re riiiight. What’s the point of maintaining the republic when the heat death of the universe is inevitable?

You’re certainly not just pivoting here and pretending that being able to read history/climate science somehow makes present political struggle irrelevant, while ignoring the fact that if you refuse to build power within the current system because you are busy fantasizing about your future “new system,” what you are actually doing is ceding the existing one to the right.

That would be bad faith and something a person who has read up on history could never say with a straight face.

https://youtu.be/b_29yvYpf4w?t=17

Good luck organizing, champ. Remember to stop, drop and roll once you realize you’re on fire.

DNC members do not oppose “the left” as an electorate boogeyman. It opposes leftists when they act like an internal rival power center who come in shitting on Dems in office, demanding full control of the party, and acting like that should count as coalition building when it really hurts every vulnerable DNC member from the center leftward.

That does not mean the DNC is secretly closer to the GOP than to its own left flank; that claim is political anti-fanfic. Bernie lost, both times, because party insiders lined up against him and because he failed to win a broad enough coalition. I say this as someone who campaigned for him in 2016 and 2020 and have close friends who worked on his 2020 campaign in the PNW and then across the US.

And Mamdani, like AOC before him, undercut your case. They are evidence that the party establishment will adapt and move leftward, when you win inside Democratic primaries. It’s called proving your electability. And as those progressive dems (and, hell, even democratic socialists) win races, build a durable voter base, and work with the party as a coalition, they’ll find themselves with more internal influence.

“The DNC and GOP are basically the same" is defeatist slop. The Democratic coalition is a battlefield, and the left either gets strong enough to win on that field (either winning outright or through coalition building), or it resigns itself to irrelevance, because there is no serious alternative on the table.

… Because historically when republics fail, all of the things you are complaining about typically get worse. Less accountability, less political and economic equality, and more rule by insiders with guns.

The solution to those is more democracy, not pretending nihilism is insight.

Want the problems you call out to change for the better? Convince a few nonvoters to vote.

Yes. That is representative democracy.

Organize with others who align with you politically (or with whom you can form a coalition), rally the voters around your cause, fundraise to support your message, convince other voters to align with you, and bolster sympathetic candidates, and then lobby to persuade other candidates who need support that there are voters who will champion them if they take a your position.

Nobody said it was easy. It’s a republic, if you can keep it.

The only way to get leftist policies is to tell the Democratic Party “give me leftist policies or I stay home in November” and fucking mean it.

Or, you know, like, actively organize, fundraise and lobby like every effective political group does…

Yes. The framing of this post is pure right-wing propaganda.

Democrats do not block movement left. They work under constraints that essentially require 60 Dem votes in the senate to pass milestone reforms.

The last time they had that was 2009. They had it for fewer than 100 days, and in that time they passed the ACA.

I love that even two leftists together can’t come up with the idea of fixing the car themselves. Maybe bc on a subconscious level they know they’re not capable 😂

Apparently it’s against the rules 😮

I wonder if mods see the irony of their other rule against any type of prejudice.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Biden-era Democrats: passing child cash payments, drug-price negotiation, insulin caps, the biggest climate bill in US history, and the biggest federal gun-safety law in decades. With a 50-50 Senate and an obstructionist opposition.

Obama-era Democrats: passing ACA, Fair Sentencing Act, Dodd Frank, creating CFPB, etc. With only like 70 days of having 60 votes in the senate.

Leftists: dems pass nothing.

Question for you: do you think Palestinians should thank you for rejecting imperfect Democrats and helping to hand the presidency, house and senate to the party whose members openly support fewer restrictions on Israel?

But keep rejecting them to preserve your sense of superiority, I’m SURE that’ll help the most vulnerable more than keeping Republicans out of power.

Let’s have a moment of silent gratitude for all those US leftists who preserved their personal sense of moral superiority by not voting or voting third party in the 2024 election. Where would we be without them?

spoiled rich crooked babies who refuse to do the hard work of leading… and then they repeatedly lose and try to blame everyone else

That line fits Hasan pretty well, actually.

His whole model is to deride institutions while depending on other people to do the institutional work he looks down on. He can bless the handful of candidates who pass his purity test, but that is not the same thing as building power. In U.S. politics, elected officials need a broad coalition around them, and the way Hasan operates his platform subverts that.

So even when his preferred progressives win, what then? If there are fewer Democrats overall (because people like Hasan don’t discourage voting third-party or abstaining from voting in general), then progressives have fewer coalition partners, and smaller voting blocs to work with, so those wins come with less leverage, not more, and the country slides farther to the right.

Bernie Sanders understands this, which is why when Hasan tried to draw Sanders into criticizing Newsom, Sanders did not indulge it. Same reason Sanders was so friendly with Manchin: he knows what compromises need to be made to maximize chances of enacting progressive policy.