Description: A picture titled “Russian plants” in a 3 x 3 grid with one of the grid items being Jill Stein, the rest are flora.
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It's very weird having scrolled in my feed toward the world stuff. It almost seems artificial, like the redditors all collected here with all the hivemind weirdness and astroturfing.
and yeah, Democrats would rather send their dark-money and 'venture-capitalist'-funded PAC lawyers to purge 3rd parties from ballots (really democratic, Democrat party; I'm writing in PSL regardless if they can't get back on and telling everyone I know to) than make themselves appealing at all to the people abandoning their moribund and redundant party 'like rats from a sinking ship'.
They would rather fight with the Republicans over the (shrinking) voter base of rich and upper 'middle class' petty bourgeois rightwingers, and alienate all of their leftwing base, and continue abandoning the 35-50% that straight up don't vote for either of these duopoly-of-exploiters in this fascist-and-vampire show, than reorient toward positions of "not genocide" or "not nuclear-brinksmanship forever-war proxy-wars" or "not-constantly bipartisanly increasing and expanding the US military and neo-colonial racketeer system which is incidentally one of the leading contributors to climate change."
or "not continuing filling the world with CIA torture camps" or "not being just as or in some ways more right wing than trump on immigration somehow
It's telling that they refuse to do any of these things a large portion of the population wants; to the point where Muslim groups are advocating voting for 3rd parties who aren't for drinking the blood of Palestinians (apparently a tall order for US politicians), and instead would rather put so much effort into demonizing and crushing 3rd parties who do advocate against these things.
I don't even know if they're capable of not flying to the right and pandering to right wingers more and more due to their donor base. Their structure is inherently based on funding and campaigning and working for the worst billionaire imperialists and arms-dealer death-merchants in the world and AIPAC and tech monopolies etc. If we all pushed up the PSL to hold their working class margins hostage that they (unlike republicans) actually rely on and take for granted, they might break in half trying to reorient. Maybe they'd float a reformist party to prevent everyone going socialist against the open-fanged republicans who nobody ever had any illusions about and half the dems who are basically republicans will join them, and the other half will flee to the new reformist party (probably alienating their "left wing" into more radical politics because that party would become democrat-ified)
People just want to be lied to about the Democrats that they're different and 'acting resistance' at all to the republicans, when they're really not that different
and where they (barely) are different, they just capitulate and help the Republicans do whatever they were going to do, in the name of "bipartisanship" and "reaching across the aisle". Like when Obama had both houses of congress and refused to enshrine women's bodily autonomy and LGBTQ civil rights into law. And then gave away a free Supreme Court seat in capitulation. Then Biden denounces the idea of pushing to expand and pack the court because it'll "politicize the court" as if that ship isn't gone past the horizon forever, while doing nothing as women's and LGBTQ rights are torn down throughout the country, even with a Democrat president. It's almost like they don't actually care, or even like when women's rights and LGBTQ rights are under attack because they can drum up fear about the republicans and look 'better' by comparison after creating the problem in the first place, and keep the vampire-and-fascist (dog-and-pony) show going, and get all the gullible liberal votes that "they'll vote for us anyway
we're not the republicans" Which circles back to why they're so scared of and pushing demonization and repression of 3rd parties I guess. That's a pretty sweet cruise-control-deal they have hoodwinking the populace in a sort of face/heel drama for their 'audience'
If only you could put that same effort into looking at the GOP. This post is disingenuous as fuck.
There is a fundamental difference between Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans with regard to domestic policy and social issues. That's why you've got folks like Obama and Hilary and Biden bending on gay marriage, throwing kickbacks to the domestic EV market, playing ref between Big Business and Unions, and occasionally kicking some money back for student debt relief. This, while Republicans seem to prefer anti-Trans witch hunts, bailouts to failing coal companies, a court packed full of Pinkertons, and full privatization of the education sector.
I'm sympathetic to folks who see the choice between Trump and Harris as a question of whether we're going to do full scale Final Solution shit to the LGBTQ community, because looking at Florida and Texas you can see legitimacy to that fear.
But when it comes to foreign policy? The MIC has both parties by the balls. This "Trump will be worse on Gaza" is pure cope. This is a campaign of extermination that Biden has actively facilitated. There's nothing left for Trump to do. Similarly, with Ukraine, the fear is that Trump's going to step in and deprive Zelensky of our latest arms shipment. He won't. Trump loves his arms deals almost as much as he loves his trade deals.
Domestically, liberals are perfectly happy to push Women's Rights and LGBTQ Rights amendments at the state level. The biggest hurdle for Dem state reforms have been shitty governors like Hochul and Newsome. When you have a Beshear at the helm, he's happy to rubber stamp progressive reforms even from a state as red as Kentucky.
Nationally, Biden fucking sucks. Harris sucks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. But Dems do have people on their roster that don't suck. Dem populism does still exist, particularly in the smaller states.
But the Dems are trending towards a very scary nationalist reflection of the GOP. The Eric Adams style candidate is a fucking sociopath and they're as common to the party as any milquetoast Beto or SucDem AOC. The quality progressives - your Jamal Bowmans and Cori Bushs - are being drummed out of the party by big money. The Silicon Valley hucksters - your Gilibrands and Newsoms - are continuing to climb the ladder.
Its fucking crazy when you've got Dems clapping like seals over the Dick Cheney endorsement. Grim tidings for the future of the party.
Most dems are not clapping like seals from Cheney’s endorsement. Most of us want him to fuck off. But we can also look to instances like that of how far the Republican Party has fallen when a literal war criminal is like “this is too much even for me”.
The Cheneys have fallen. The GOP is doing the exact same shit its been on since the Eisenhower Administration. This revanchist "I remember when Republicans were kinda good aktuly" is playing right into Trump MAGA rhetoric.
No, they are far more extreme than they were before. I literally called Cheney a war criminal. They have never been good, but it’s absolutely true that they are worse than before (republicans). You seem to think in very binary terms which helps makes sense of your simplistic world views.
The extremist rhetoric you're hearing today was echoed during the Bush Unitary Executive era and was arguably even worse during the Reagan and Nixon eras, when the then-President was significantly more popular.
They're less popular than before, so the fascist policies Americans used to nod and smile at during the War on Drugs or the War on Terror are no longer going down so smoothly. And we've had nearly half a century of ramp up. So police brutality was more remarkable during Rodney King, when a few city cops could bludgeon a guy on camera, than in the modern day when the NYPD can merc a guy and two other civilians in the subway over bus fare.
But the policies? The rhetoric? The machismo attitude? The bigotries? Its the same shit. In many cases, its the same people. John Bolton was literally a Reagan guy who had served in every GOP administration up to Trump. Elliott Abrams was directly implicated in Iran-Contra. Rumsfeld and Cheney were cronies under Gerald Ford, ffs. They were doing all the same bloody-fisted international brutality and signing off on all the domestic immigrant hunting and domestic fear-mongering that we've seen under Trump.
Trump's judicial appoints are the same Federalist Society hacks that crawled up through the bowls of the prior administrations. His cabinet is stacked with Reagan and Bush Era state level officials. Pence was a Reagan Republican and a Rush-style reactionary talk radio host who worked at the same "Alliance Defending Freedom" right-wing legal lawsuit mills as House Speaker Mike Johnson and SCOTUS judge Amy Comey Barret and Trump AGs William Barr and Jeff Sessions and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. A 31 year old institution founded by James Dobson, an arch-conservative Christian Fundamentalist.
This is who they have always been.
Because, of course, that's exactly what did happen. Lemmy isn't quite as bad as reddit (yet), but they're working hard to make it that way.