The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.
…Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for speaker of the House, will not commit to holding a vote on abolishing ICE. He opposes Medicare for All. He has said he will not hold Trump accountable for the human rights violations committed, portraying it as a question of “getting even” rather than achieving justice where it was denied. Chuck Schumer, who holds similar positions, has an extraordinarily low approval rating – yet plans to run for majority leader in the Senate. Electeds are questioning whether these men should hold these roles.
But the dissent must also come from us, as it has been. We need to demand an end to the fast violence of guns on our streets trained on our neighbors, bombs dropped from the sky and the slow violence of people dying because their healthcare was denied or their food stamps were cut.
We need to organize, and mobilize, to demand the multi-racial democracy we were promised – not a playground for the rich to get richer on the time and labor and lives of the poor.
“Centrists” who would sooner vote Republican (like Haley Stevens) than support any truly progressive policy.
No more medical bankruptcies or crazy bills, and costs less than the current system. Healthcare is not lost when the owner eliminates your job in a recession and out of work for a year or more. Too many think they have theirs and won’t lose it and that’s selfish. Do better, demand better, it’s not hard to vote for that each time until it passes.
it’s not hard to vote for that each time until it passes.
It is - because unless you’re willing to primary and punish the Democratic Party for not doing this, they’ll do exactly what they’ve done since 2008. Promise it, then backpedal once in power.
Fuck Jeffries and Schumer, both of those fuckers are selfish assholes who just want to go back to the status quo so they can keep collecting their bribes in peace.
They will, the status quo is what got us Trump in the first place. Look at all the progressives who ran. They crushed it. Centrists don’t have the popularity to draw voters. All the progress gained will be lost because the DNC will squander it with infighting and will try to prop up an unpopular candidate like Hillary.
Gavin Newsome is just such a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with the DNC, I feel he will be the one foisted upon us all.
All centrism is is political cowardice. Just spend some research and pick a side.
Hopefully the people can move forward without too many politicians getting in their way.
I mean, a progressive here would be a centrist in most countries. So in a way, yes, trying to drag the center closer to the actual center.
News to nobody but “centrists” and MAGAts.
Centrists won’t stand anything that has happened under this administration, and will vote to repeal tariffs, defund the Iran war, and vote for real investigations of the corruption. If they dont, then they are with the proto fascists.
I’ve got news for you that might seem like clairvoyance.
Well then those aren’t centrists. Those are collaborators.
That’s what centrism is. The half way point between concentration camps and healthcare for all is still fascism.
Lol thinking you’ll be getting Healthcare for all. It will be socialism for the armed forces and brown shirts only.
That’s currently how it is right now, you incredibly dense mung bean.
And healthcare for all is so difficult, only 42/43 developed nations and 155/208 nations on Earth have managed to do it. The US has the same healthcare access as fucking Somalia.
Manhattan project… no problem Human genome project… easy Copying an effective Healthcare system from 42 other developed countries… sorry we can’t because profit.
Even Jon Ossof was campaigning on Universal Healthcare.
Is he Medicare for All single payer, or the stupid public option Medicare for America which lets insurers dump their expensive patients onto the government plan then point at it for being inefficient?
Edit: he’s a snake pushing a public option. Fuck incrementalists, they’re the same radical centrists that got us into this mess.
Do you have a source for that because I’ve read equally valid comments elsewhere that suggest otherwise and a brief google search suggests that he in-fact does not support M4A?
AIPAC WON
I think AIPAC and Israel are in their death throes
AIPAC probably have already rebranded and or splintered into a hundered new organizations. That’s how I would do it at least.
They already are doing, funnelling more money through UDP these days. That’s why we need sites like trackaipac.com to keep tabs on it. If they had splintered years ago, it would have worked better. I think people can generally see what’s up nowadays.
Israel isn’t going anywhere. Bibi’s regime maybe but there’s nothing indicating that the state itself is in jeopardy.
It’s beautiful to see people finally waking up to their terroristic state.
Still a long way to go, but we are on the right path and it is righteous.
Its a bitter pill to swallow when people realize the harm we’ve caused. But sometimes medicine is very bitter.
When the overton window is skewed so far to the right like it is in the USA, what passes for centerism is still way off towards the right wing.
Yup. And here’s how it got there . . . .
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
It helped having a President who pissed everyone off though. Maybe with some work we can turn some of the centric Republicans to the left a bit, if we can show having power to the left means results. It isn’t over, it hasn’t even started yet.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get “moderate” voters, when in reality, “centrist”/“moderate” voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnʻt exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism1. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart2. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donʻt match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnʻt map to the data. It canʻt predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youʻll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyʻre trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
S+ tier comment, in the words of my generation. I love it.
I realise why we’ve got so invested in certain framings of reality using different political lenses (conflict theory, my beloved) because it touches on literally every parts of our lives and our value systems.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a system used to organise us. I’ve seen similar tiffs arise at work over co-op versus owned, kanban versus sprints, matrix versus pyramid, and it’s the same kind of shit except for the scale: who benefits, who makes decisions, why do we do it. Real questions with concrete answers that we can experiment on and change our approaches—and keep changing them.
But just like with trying out workplace arrangements that would benefit the vast majority, there are people invested in the status quo for a variety of good and bad reasons.
We should be able to talk plainly and soberly about these things as long as we all agree that human flourishing is the ultimate goal of any system we build or reproduce.
Yup, it won them the Presidency.
And then lost them the Congress they’d held for a generation.
Yeah, this is it. I appreciate the uncertain language of whether or not centrism “won” the 1992 election as well. It really is just an oversimplification where everyone but the establishment loses. The results from the last decade or so should be data enough to show that the way things are measured is fundamentally broken. While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is still the pervading “default” mode of thinking in the meta of American Politics, but it’s increasingly coming under more scrutiny, especially after this last election once again failed to produce predictions that had the results within their parameters. I think a good portion of that lies in this weird idea that many dem and even academic circles are getting recently that “populism is a right-wing thing”, which is once again predicated on the paradigm of left/right liberal/conservative. Almost like people really aren’t that simple or something…
While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm …
I’m sure it is very convenient to the reigning political duopolies in the world to have people self-organise into two broad “teams.”
I’ve seen it happen in real-time, where I’ll agree with someone on 90% of the facts, but then we’re off on the last 10℅ and suddenly we consider eachother wholly on the “other side.”
Then if you’re already labeled as being on one side or the other, and you have two major politicians representing just these two broad sides with barely any room for nuance, who are you going to vote for? Some loser 3rd party isn’t on a team, and just has human opinions??
Anyway yeah
It doesn’t work but they pretend it does because that way the donors get what they want and they get to “appear” to be trying, when in fact they’re not. Covert Republicans and controlled opposition.
It feels like a safe trap to fall into. Republicans have the easier task because they just cater to where people are and use fearmongering to get there. Ends justify means. But it’s nonconstructive. Blind lead the blind. To me that’s definitionally conservatism. When lost, Democrats feel they just need to be Republican-lite (or they are themselves compromised assets – like Sinema, Fetterman, Schumer, etc.).
Democrats have to actually persuade and have a vision and lead the electorate, which can be a harder task. When they have charismatic leadership who can sell this with conviction, this is when they succeed. Especially when as you point out the other side is fresh off of being exposed for the grifters they are (gas prices, etc.)
The fear mongering works because liberal centrists always fail. Democrats has just to be a real opposition that do what rhey preach and abide with international laws
There’s a superseding point. The fearmongering works because the electorate is uninformed and misinformed by megaphones of fearmongering from conservative billionaire megaphones and erosion of education and diversification of media. Yes, we should’ve stuck with FDR’s New Deal approach and his desire for a Second Bill of Rights. But the Business Plot 2 (Reagan) and 3 (Trump) won – especially with aid from foreign interference most notably Russia and Israel but possibly China too.
This makes those who try to do the right thing less palatable to the masses because Fox News & Friends is telling them that any leftist is the literal devil.
Not an easy task to overcome, but tell me a viable path for how we put a Mamdani, AES, AOC in Arkansas and Alabama and I’ll listen.
If people did not notice their lives getting worse due to failure of liberal a lot of them will not fall into the propaganda that immigrants are the source of all problems. Instead of understanding the root causes and try to solve it people like prefer to complain about regular people ans whitewash the liberals failures leading to more people voting for fascism
The more progressives that respect their engagement wins , the more it will be easier to win in harder places
That didn’t stop conservatives whose lives continue to get worse voting for Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama, so I’m not understanding your point?
I’m 100% all for getting more progressives in office, fully embrace a Social Democratic Nordic Model — but I’m still not seeing this viable path to actually getting even a liberal let alone a progressive candidate on the ballot and to vote for in the likes of Arkansas and Alabama.
And are you American? I see you moderate Europe, so perhaps there is a disconnect in one’s understanding of our electoral system and the breadth, depth, and pulse of this nation and its particular states’ electoral makeup.
Conservatives always wins after the democrats and worldwide liberals centrists fail. Look at France, le pen has big chance of being next president after Macron centrism failed and led to civil disobedience. It took
Of course not. Centrists kept telling people to not even vote.
Not all of them. There were centrists like Haley Stevens telling people to get out and vote Republican.
on Bill Maher show last night (a hate watch for me) they were going on about how the midterm results were specifically NOT in support of the DSA and “extreme leftist” policy and i am like, bitch, the fact that you feel the need to deny it at all is the massive win here. 🙄
cost of living defeated the republicans. Democrats were barely even along for the ride.
According to voter polls only 39% of voters chose the economy as their most important issue in the election, and they broke 50/50. In second place was the state of democracy at 33%, and those people split 80/20, meaning that a plurality of Democratic voters had the state of democracy—not the economy—as their most important issue. People are more varied than you give them credit for.
I’ll say pointedly that it felt gross going through the fox website, despite the fact that they generally perform accurate polling. However, they seem to have neglected and jumbled independents, making up a third of the US. Independents came out in droves for a midterm, which was peculiar and auspicious. In a few weeks, I’ll be able to assess based on complete turnout whether I need to rethink. That was a valuable, but disgusting thing you offered me, though.
I’ll say pointedly that it felt gross going through the fox website, despite the fact that they generally perform accurate polling.
Relatable, but unfortunately their exit poll is the most detailed.
However, they seem to have neglected and jumbled independents, making up a third of the US.
My understanding is that the Democrat/Republican sorting is about who a person voted for, not their party affiliation. They have questions that separately ask about party affiliation, and there they usually say “including leaners.” See: “No matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself as a: (including leaners)”. Which is to say: It’s not that a plurality of Democrats had the state of democracy as their most important issue; it’s that a plurality of people who voted Democrat (including quite a few Republicans, both including leaners) did.
Ah, you’re right. When I get a bit more time, I’ll take a closer look! Thank you for the clarification
cruelty and grift played no part in the election huh? Interesting theory-- that someone else made up for you hoping you’d accept and consume. Cant go looking at other causes.
cruelty and grift
I genuinely perceive this as adorably optimistic. No, most people just care about their daily needs. The knitted skullcap Antichrist rapes, present tense, and independents began to care once gas rose above $5 per gallon. What in the world makes you think that ethics somehow played a part in this?
I truly wish I could be adorably optimistic. Seriously though, the economy wasnt great under Biden but it wasnt even close to as grim as it is now, and Biden/Harris AND congressional dems got thoroughly trounced in that election. Repubs took the presidency, and the house and the senate. I think there were multiple issues at play, with the economy being one of many things rather than the one reason Harris lost. No one can prove it but I bet if Harris had just called the Israeli war on gaza a genocide and signalled support for health care reform I bet she would have had the votes to win.
Actually we can prove it. Post-election polling has repeatedly shown the votes she lost by not calling for restricting weapons given to Israel (or, equivalently, the voted she’d have gained by calling for it) would’ve been enough to win her the election. Ditto for multiple issues being at play; no majority on either side agrees on the most important issue this election, and a plurality on the Dem side actually goes to the state of democracy. Apologies for the Fox News link, but that’s where the best exit polling is
Probably. Another user directed me to a poll that clarified that I was likely wrong.
This vote was against Jeffries and Schumer.
