Why are Democrats tarred as elites when the world’s richest man funds Trump?
Why are Democrats tarred as elites when the world’s richest man funds Trump?
We’re living in a second Gilded Age of extreme inequality. Kamala Harris’s campaign should strike a more populist note
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To be brief, it’s propaganda designed to keep rural voters red. Ie- "those big city folk don’t care about you."
Partly...
But also that the Dem party today is significantly more "conservative" economically than we used to be, as the article points out:
In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt thundered his warning that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy US democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was eventually enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.
In the 1912 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please”. The struggle to break up the giant trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, a “second struggle for emancipation”.
Wilson signed into law the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened antitrust laws and protected unions. He also established the Federal Trade Commission to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”, and created the first permanent national income tax.
Years later, Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth-cousin, Franklin D Roosevelt, attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and social security. FDR instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy – those making more than $5m a year were taxed up to 75% – and he regulated finance.
Plus, Teddy was the first presidential platform that used universal healthcare....
So part of it is that Republicans lie and propaganda
But if the modern Dem party didn't think the Dem party platform from a fucking century ago wasnt "too extreme" the modern Dem party would be as popular as it was with FDR.
I think that's more of a symptom than a root cause. republicans' goal since the 70's has been to pull the lower and middle classes to them with wedge identity issues like abortion. the whole "elitism" thing is a part of that too. So now the parties are competing on those wedge issues and identity more than economic progress, as they were in FDR's time.
Like, you understand that if the Dem party wanted to, they could still be that economically progressive, right?
And that in doing so it mitigate Republicans lying?
The Dem party becoming more economically conservative is solely the fault of the people choosing to do what donors want over what Dem voters want....
Both parties focusing on the "wedge issues" is by design, that way the wealthy who donate to both parties always win...
The only people who control the Dem.platform is Dem party leadership, them choosing wealthy donors over voters is literally no one's fault except the people running the party who keep repeatedly making that choice.
I get wanting to blame Republicans, but we can't on this one.
It's literally as easy as Kamala deciding to do so at this point, it's a month from election and she's the candidate. But she's not, instead she keeps moving to the right economically the closer we get to the election.
The Dem party becoming more economically conservative is solely the fault of the people choosing to do what donors want over what Dem voters want…
Do not make the mistake of thinking nerds on the Internet represent the Democratic Party rank and file. They like neoliberal economics.
They like neoliberal economics
Then why did 08 Obama carry the party and flip red states when all those neo liberals voted R due to the PUMA movement?
The neo liberals are not a majority of voters, they just still have a death grip on party leadership positions at the DNC
Then why did 08 Obama carry the party
... because Obama was a moderate neoliberal.
Fortunately both Biden and Harris support an unrealized capital gains tax, which would be an absolutely huge move. If we can acquire both houses of Congress and thus the ability to pass laws, we may actually achieve it.
Also, have dems cut taxes or regulation on the wealthy at any point that you can remember?
the point is there would be more of a political mandate for economic change if our demographics looked more like this today. that map is never going to happen today no matter how progressive dems go on the economy, because of the work republicans have done to divide us over the last 50 years.
The point is there's been a political mandate for economic change for over a century...
The reason the Dems don't have the numbers to accomplish it, is them giving up on progressive economics.
Think of it like a restaurant. One that used to serve food people wanted and was always busy. Then the restaurant got kick backs from a differemt food supplier. One whose food was worse, and thus unpopular.
The restaurant loses business because the food gets worse, it takes a while because people only go out to eat every four years, and the only other restaurant serves shit sandwiches exclusively.
People won't still go out to eat and pick the shit sandwich, they'll just stop going out to eat. The patrons of the shit sandwich restaurant will eat anything, they'll keep showing up.
In this analogy, that explains the decrease in Dem voters while Republicans stay steady.
We can bitch and moan when the shit sandwich restaurant is the most popular, but bullying people to still patronize the restaurant that's a shadow of it's former self isn't going to work as well as that restaurant just serving the food customers want.
But they won't do that, because they make more serving cheap shitty food even if they get less customers
It's really as easy as running a Dem candidate that is as progressive as Dem voters.
Hell, Pennsylvania is an important battleground state where close to 60% of voters want to ban fracking...
If Kamala gave voters what they want on just that one single issue it would likely hand her the presidency. But she's not.
For some reason we only hear "this is what voters want" from the Dem.party when it's used to rationalize being more conservative. When the voters are more liberal than the party, the voters are told their views don't matter, and that depresses turnout which is why we don't have "the mandate" we used to.
I hope that makes sense.
People won’t still go out to eat and pick the shit sandwich, they’ll just stop going out to eat. The patrons of the shit sandwich restaurant will eat anything, they’ll keep showing up.
continuing with your analogy, people have NOT stopped going out to eat. a significant portion have absolutely gone over to the shit sandwich shop.
a greater percentage of voting-age people voted in 2020 compared to 1932. In 1932 they were much more unified under FDR, today we are more evenly split between R and D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections
If the two restaurants both serve shitty food, there's not as much judgement for eating a shit sandwich. Because everyone eating at a restaurant is eating ahitry food. It becomes normalized.
The "good" restaurant becoming ahittier doesn't steal customers from Shit Sandwiches, it just makes people think that shit sandwiches isn't as crazy as it seems because both restaurants serv shit.
Which still fits.
Dems moving to the right year after year and adopting things like fracking and a border wall when a decade ago we said only a racist idiot would want those things... Makes the average American question if other "conservative" ideas are really as bad as Dems say they are, or if 5 years both parties would want them.
It only hurts the left and helps the right
I agree it absolutely hurts the left and helps the right, but we disagree on the cause. Remember in your analogy the food quality is not the only thing that diners care about. They are being lured to the shitty restaurant by stuff that has nothing to do with food at all.
Yep.
So making the "good" restaurants food shitty only hurts their business, and their the only ones with the power to set their menu.
We can protest, leave bad reviews, stop going to the restaurant, anything to communicate that we would eat there more if they had better food.
But at the end of the day it's up to the handful of people running the restaurant/party what they serve up.
So making the “good” restaurants food shitty only hurts their business
not if the customers they're losing don't care about food. I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree here.
how did McDonald's get into this conversation? 🤔
instead she keeps moving to the right economically
It's not all "Move to the right." Just this week she suggested expanding Medicare for in-home care.
Just this week she suggested expanding Medicare for in-home care
Which is like the most widely abused part of Medicare...
Not by people, by predatory providers who max out benefits while going months without even calling their "patients".
Jon Oliver just did an episode on it this season even, was just like a month ago I think.
As long as someone makes a profit on healthcare, it's going to be absurd by overcharging and undeserving.
We need a nationalized system lol kentge VA where there's no insurance middleman, Medicare gives us one middle man which just doesn't solve the root problem.
It's been 112 years since universal healthcare was part of a presidential platform, that being "too extreme" for today's candidat is making my point, not disputing it.
You need to look at the longer timeframe.
I also wish the Dems would promote more progressive policies. At the same time, the media does not celebrate the wins for Dems, such as the creation of the CFPB that Elizabeth Warren established. They don't celebrate the response to oligopoly through review of mergers and acquisitions by the FTC under Lina Kahn. They don't celebrate the reduced child poverty rate under the expanded child tax credit. Positive progress doesn't make it to mass media even when it does happen, which isn't often enough.
By the same token, they report everything trump says...
The report everything Vance says, but also Biden and Kamala too.
If Biden and Kamala talked about those things, then the media would too.
Kamala just went on an interview blitz, I watched some of it, didn't see her being up anything you mentioned. Did she in any of the recent interviews you e seen?
She was just on Colbert, he'd have let her say anything she wanted to...
Do you remember what she choose to discuss?
Edit:
Walz just talked about ending the Electoral college, and the media reported on it.
But they also reported on Kamala distancing herself from it.
That's an example from like today of what I'm talking about. All it takes for the media to report on something is a high ranking politician saying it. There's so many and so desperate for ad revenue they will cover anything that comes out of someone's mouth if they're on the presidential ticket.
Stop blaming the Dem leadership and look at the facts.
The voters heard Donald Trump say that he liked grabbing the pussy and that he didn't like soldiers who got captured.
People are choosing garbage because they'd happily eat a ton of manure if it meant they could blow stink in a Libs face.
Death had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.
Damn I miss Teddy. One of the last presidents to truly give a fuck and put the actions behind it.
He really wasn't one of the last tho...
Not by a longshot, hell, Ike was the last good Republican and he was long after Teddy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
Things were going pretty fucking great till the original "October surprise"
According to the allegation, on top of the Carter administration's agreement to unfreeze Iranian assets in U.S. banks in exchange for the release of the embassy hostages, the Reagan administration's practice of covertly supplying Iran with weapons via Israel likely originated as a further quid pro quo for having delayed the release until after Reagan's inauguration, setting a precedent for covert U.S.-Iran arms deals that would feature heavily in the subsequent Iran–Contra affair.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory
Which is why I'm so fucking nervous hearing right wingers start using that phrase lately.
They might not know where it comes from, but somewhere the person coming up with their talking points does. They just don't spontaneously come up with shit, they parrot the phrases they've heard.
But anyways, on the timeline of our country things have only been getting worse since we stopped running progressives and started Bill Clinton and the neoliberals.
We had a brief respite with Obama, but when you compare Obama and Carter and remember there was 27 years between them...
Obama wasn't anywhere near as progressive as we should have been.
"Moderate" democrats is not a successful strategy, we have all this freaking data and history to support it, but we just fucking ignore and keep letting the wealthy run shit cuz it's easy.
Sure.
But man no one taxed the rich and built stuff like Teddy did.
Plus, Teddy was the first presidential platform that used universal healthcare…
So part of it is that Republicans lie and propagandaIronic considering that Teddy was a Republican.
But also that the Dem party today is significantly more “conservative” economically than we used to be
But that's the contradiction. The GOP is even further along this scale, so how can the GOP be seen as the party of the people while the Dems are elitists?
Partly…
I think mainly.
We need to bring back the Bull Moose Party (at the local level, not the Russian-backed spoiler effect garbage like the Green Party is debasing itself at).
A better idea is to do to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party and MAGA did to the Republicans.
Primary out corporate candidates and push for progressive ones at every level. President, congressional rep, school board trustee, dog-catcher: it doesn't matter.
The problem progressive voters have is that they don't show up, and the especially don't show up during off years, in primaries and in down-ballot races. The polticial right, by comparison, has been getting people in place on small races for years.
Sanders did more for progressivism by enthusing Democratic members to vote in primaries and down-ballot races than Stein or any third party has ever done, and we're seeing results. It needs to continue.
That's a nice thought, but it won't happen because the ratcheting effect of primarying out moderates only works in one direction, rightward. This is because corporate donors are just as happy to fund fascists as they are moderates.
In contrast, progressive candidates often don't stand a chance because corporate donors fucking hate them and will spend effectively unlimited amounts of money to destroy their chances, especially if they make regulation and oversight of corporations a big part of their platform. Ditto for the police "union[sic]" and police reform, or AIPAC and opposing genocide, for that matter.
No thanks. Ranked Choice voting or bust. Yall choosing bust? Sall good with me, I had a vasectomy so I don't have kids. Rest well kids, you won't ever have to suffer these fools (me too, thanks).
I can see the reasoning that the presidency is the biggest office and gets people talking about third parties the most...
But the reason the Green Party is obviously a grift is they focus on battleground states for those presidential runs.
If they were doing what they said they're trying to do, they'd focus on states like Cali where they can get the media attention and votes while not handing the presidency to Republicans.
Like everything in American politics, it all depends on what state something is happening in
But conversely, the "spoiler" factor of even a fuly realized Green campaign is nil if the Democrats tack left. Pull the plug on Bibi and Jill Stein has very little to talk about.
It's like they know the party will never bother to win those voters, and assumes they'll capture them as good-enough/lesser-evil.
Yep, if the easiest votes to get were between the two parties, Republicans wouldnt pull the shit they do with far left parties while embracing the far right.
They'd move to the center to fight for those mythical "moderates" or at least have the Green party positioned slightly to the right of the Dem party.
But they're not. Because Dems just use those mythical moderates as an excuse to do what big money donors want. Moving to the right is effective at raising money from billionaires, but completely ineffective at increasing Dem votes.
The party and the voters don't have the same goals.
If she did this and raised taxes on corporate and individual wealthy, it would be a win of historical proportions.
Sounds like the democrats should do something about First Past The Post voting!
You wouldn't bring up the shortcomings of First Past The Post voting and then do nothing to change the voting system... would you?
So glad to hear of your public promise to work towards pass electoral reform in your state. Wishing you and your people the best of luck in this campaign you just signed up for.
Propaganda makes you believe that one of the two party is your fiend. Meanwhile for the past century both the red and blue party has served elites interests and fuck over everyone else (including the planet). The proof is that you are a peasants and it would take you a couple of minutes just to visualize how much a billion is.
The system is working as intended. A country created by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and controlled by the wealthy.
Having said that the two sides of the same coin is a bunch of bullshit when you see 60+ years of hate and fear propaganda conducted by conservatives.
Making every modern amenity a partisan issue and is also no mistake. It is very clear one side is keeping us from free education, free/cheap healthcare, equality, and a living wage. It is even clearer when they are pushing for more child labor, pollution, racism, and sexism.
You are contradicting yourself.
The system is working as intended. A country created by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and controlled by the wealthy.
It's not hard to understand, in such a system you don't make it to the top unless you belong to the wealthy
Not at all, I am just not falling for the two sides of the same coin bullshit invented by the conservatives to further denigrate our government.
There is a serious problem and it is not with the liberal/left/Democratic party. The reason we are in this situation is because the conservatives are garbage people dragging this country down.
There is a serious problem and it is not with the liberal/left/Democratic party. The reason we are in this situation is because the conservatives are garbage people dragging this country down.
The reason we are in this situation is because for centuries if not thousand of years rulers enslaved and beat up people to seize power.
There's a genocide going on right now where kids are being murdered daily, if you believe there's not a problem in the current system you are complicit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Israel_in_the_Israel–Hamas_war
This is not ancient history and the US is not unique in its genocidal actions. There is not a country that exists that has not engaged in this behavior.
There are several genocides going on right now.
https://www.genocidewatch.com/countries-at-risk
I know there is a problem. In fact, I gather I know a lot more than you about it. Not disagreeing about that aspect at all.
Having said that we are also experiencing far less genocide than any other time in history. It is weird to say it but things have gotten a lot better although I am sure the Palestinians, for example, would disagree.
It is weird to say it but things have gotten a lot better
For billionares and rulers things keep getting better yes, for everyone else they don't. Look outside your window or at your bank account then remind yourself that there's someone chilling in one of their 500f yachts. For the average person in the past decade things have gone south.
Having said that we are also experiencing far less genocide than any other time in history.
Go ahead and compare the genocides perpetrated by parties without serious problems with these of their colleagues from history.
The world is objectively more peaceful and billions of people are better off than ever before.
https://oneearthfuture.org/en/one-earth-future/news/world-getting-more-peaceful
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news
Downplaying genocides around the world makes you look pretty callous.
Downplaying genocides around the world makes you look pretty callous.
That's what you are doing
To be fair, there is a kernel of truth there.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
