I understand your frustration but also encourage you to pay more attention to what happens behind the scenes. Your position on the railroad strike is outdated/misinformed relative to what happened a month ago:

When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave

In other words, Biden instructed his administration to double back and force the hand of the railroad companies to get the union exactly what they wanted.

I think you're wanting him to be more like LBJ, using his political power to drag reluctant congress members along, and you're right, someone like that would have gotten more done. But LBJ wasn't perfect either, and the LBJ approach isn't the only way to get things done. Another way is more bottom up, get the support in congress and then just have a president who's willing to go along. I'm guessing that's probably AOC's intention, to bring liberals and leftists together so we can present a unified front and get majorities in congress.

But yeah, I agree about the railroad strike. Also the vaccine patents. He's not perfect.

Yep. He is absolutely invested in the status quo. Which is why the DNC sabotaged the 2020 primary to make sure he'd win.

raging hardliners

you're not wrong, politics is about compromise and in the most successful nations no one gets what they want and no one leaves the bargaining table happy. the question is, how does one work the politics of coalition and compromise when the people you're supposed to coalition-build and compromise with are raging hardliners. How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?

I live in Texas (a state that will go a certain way) and I will vote Dem. It makes no sense to me to help make a bigger gap between the Republicans and everybody else just because the Dems suck too.

The "principled stance" a protest vote makes only helps embolden the current political hellscape within my own state. If I can chip away at the Republican power structure, I will do it.

I would argue the opposite. An increasing minority vote/poll in a "safe" state would pull resources away from swing states to keep the state "safe". Not many people would have imagined Georgia going blue in federal elections but here we are.

The ONLY way we get closer to solving them was by educating our populace about the dangers of authoritarianism in the wake of the world wars. And coming to terms as a nation how much the Nazi regime learned from America and our concentration camps that we don't teach nearly enough about.

But that ship kind of sailed and we now live in a country where some obscenely high percent of Americans don't even believe the holocaust happened at all.

In my opinion we are way past the solution being democrats, they hardly even stop the bleeding anymore. They are just there to show the masses that there are two parties and they didn't really want to pass all of this pro business, anti people legislation, but we had to because of the debt ceiling that we didn't even stop for long and the Republicans can beat us with it again in a few years.

The system is designed to be fucked.