Remember when everyone that got the COVID shot would be dead in 2 years.
These are Christian nationalists, they love death cults.
immutable
joined 2 years ago
Speech and debate clause.
Someone should read that on the floor
If there’s something in particular in that original analysis you disagree with feel free to point it out.
Progressive voters can’t vote for progressive candidates that don’t exist. My analysis explains why progressive candidates / parties don’t emerge in this system.
When there are progressive candidates progressive voters vote for them, while centrist Dems say they won’t (that’s exactly what Clinton supporters said they would do if sanders won the nomination)
What exactly do you think “you know what, fuck you guys, we’re done” looks like in the absence of progressive candidates? Maybe the presidential candidate getting 20M fewer votes? That literally just happened.
I’d refer you back to my first comment that explains the structural incentives and disincentives that prevent an alternative to the Democratic Party from emerging
How? Does Massachusetts not have working class people in it? Is it a state comprised entirely of the wealthy?
We have data so that we don’t have to go with our guts
You can check out the vote totals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
I would argue the 2016 is a better reflection, in 2020 there was a sort of coordinated drop out of centrist candidates on Super Tuesday as the establishment wing of the party threw their weight behind Biden.
But in either case the answer is that the Democratic Party is basically a coalition party of centrist Dems that seem to be fine with shifting further and further to the right and more progressive voters. In 2016 it was pretty evenly split so there is appetite just not enough for a viable party.
I volunteered for Bernie Sanders. His two runs for President (along with a long career) are probably as close as you can find to what a modern progressive party would look like.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000528
He raised a lot of money, had very large rallies, and a lot of very passionate volunteers. But lost, and there’s two reasons why.
- First past the post spoiler effect - Bernie had to run as a Democrat within the Democratic Party primary system. If he had run as progressive or democratic socialist he would have split the democratic vote. In a first past the post system Duverger’s Law mathematically guarantees 2 party rule.
Any progressive alternative would split the democratic vote, and ensure that, at least for a while, the republicans would win every election. You can see on Lemmy and Reddit and all other kinds of social media the amount of anger and infighting this causes on the left. This is a strong disincentive for anyone to start an alternative party.
- The donor class - the Democratic Party is largely funded by big money donors. Big money donors have a lot of money because of how things are currently arranged. If the way the country works today has made you fabulously wealthy, even if that means a lot of people suffer, you tell yourself “they suffer because they don’t work hard like me” and want things to stay the way they are. So you donate to both parties to control them and make sure that whatever particular apple cart you’ve cornered doesn’t get overturned.
Every problem the American people face is a profit generator for some fuck face. Rent too high, some landlord is enjoying record profits. Can’t afford medicine, some pharmacy CEO is buying their third yacht. Those people have enough money to buy politicians, ads, political parties, media networks, social media companies, etc. They aren’t just going to sit back and let you fuck up their money making machine, they will deploy those assets against anyone that threatens the status quo.
Here’s a particularly egregious example coming from MSNBC during Bernie’s last run when his reforms threatened their wealth https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/chris-matthews-bernie-sanders-public-executions-949802/
So that’s what any progressive party is up against. The mathematical certainty that they would lose until they could unseat the current Democratic Party, something that would take some number of election cycles. The donor class wanting to thwart any change. And let’s say they do overcome both of those things. That party then becomes the thing the donors try to buy next. Your party starts with high minded ideals but one by one the members of your party get big paydays from the billionaires and suddenly they want to soften this reform and maybe hold off on that reform and… oh look they are holding the exact same positions as the current Democratic Party. Because those positions are the positions of the people that own the party, and they will happily buy another.
Republicans love a good scam
Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!
So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.
Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.
The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.
Exactly this. And when you try to talk about it people look at you like you’re crazy or spouting some insane conspiracy theory.
Dems believe, clearly incorrectly based on recent results, that money wins elections. They decided that if they wanted to compete they’d have to get some of that sweet, sweet donor cash. Those donors aren’t spending money out of the goodness of their hearts, they expect something in return.
So now they are caught in a trap, they can either promote very popular progressive policies and watch the donors dry up or they can do the bidding of the donors and try to convince the voters that they are still somehow promoting the policies they want.
What we are seeing now is the end result of running that latter selection over and over. The millionaires and billionaires donating to the Dems don’t want to fix the endemic problems we face, because the donors handing them checks got their money because of those endemic problems.
When healthcare takes up 1/8th of your GDP, that money goes somewhere, to the people that buy the politicians to make sure that healthcare keeps funneling 1/8th of GDP into their pockets. That’s why the ACA didn’t embrace a single payer or even a public option, it just made it so that everyone had to give the donors their money. Same with rent, those checks go to landlords who buy the politicians.
The real solutions to our problems will never come out of a party capture by the donor class, not because of some tin foil conspiracy but by asking one simple question. Would the people funding this politicians want them to fix this problem I care about? This ask explains why the only place the Dems will take hard stances are on issues that don’t threaten the wealthy. The large umbrella term of identity politics (which is often overused or misapplied, but sometimes it’s accurate) has been a great carve out for the Dems for the last few decades.
Gay marriage doesn’t threaten a landlords wealth, so it’s fine to pick a fight on that topic. But even these have limits. Capitalism is by its very nature exploitative, the only way for the person who has the capital to make profit is for them to pay labor less than the value they generate and capture the difference as profit. So if your identity politics veers too close into empowering a class that’s currently being exploited, shut it down.
It would be great if the lesson they took away was, “money won’t be enough to win, we need to actually fix these problems” but they seem dead set on going “we just weren’t far enough to the right to get those swing voters, we will shift further”
The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.
I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.
Quick note on this one
Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.
If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.
So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.
Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.
Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).
Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.
Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.
Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.
Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.
Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”
So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.