politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
a singular politician. he's going to die on the job, in the middle of an impassioned speech on behalf of the working class. indefatigable. not even Lincoln or Kennedy had a fraction of the perseverance and consistency this man has demonstrated. a true public servant.
Three words:
A
O
C
Also signed a slightly hopeful American
The entire point behind "Kamala lost because she's a woman of color, not because she wouldn't differ from her unpopular predecessor except to move to his right" is to shut out AOC in particular. The party is willing to hold back all women in order to stifle one person, and it's gross.
The Democratic president with the largest margin of victory in recent times was a black man and you're still out here saying we need to court voters that won't vote for a person of color in order to win. Maybe your read on the inherent unelectability of women is similarly flawed.
Oh, well then let's run a black man. They not only have 100% success rate, but massively outperformed all the white men. That must mean black skin (as long as it's not on a woman) is an electoral benefit! Why take a risk with a white person? That's the heart of your argument, right?
With a sample size of 2 you claim it's because they were women. I agree with you it was faulty logic, which was their fucking point and the fact you missed that is incredible. Slow down and think.
More men have been on the ticket and failed than woman. The fact that both women failed is because of what they were running with, not because they were women. They were incredibly milquetoast candidates who ran basically on maintaining the status quo.
Obama won so handily because he ran on changing the status quo. Whether he actually did or not is a matter for historians, but that's what he ran on.
Voters want someone who will fight for them. That's what Trump, Obama, and Bernie are. They don't want someone who sits back and talks about how grateful they should be.
So long as a progressive is a possibility and not one femtosecond longer.
So we have to (and you get to) support genocide forever too!
It's neat how quickly timidity develops when the party wants to shut out a progressive. That's the only thing this has ever been about.
I guess you know the party is going to shut out progressives forever and love it.
And I get that every centrist interprets all criticism of their party as trump support, but I voted for Harris.
So you don't know much about American politics and toe the centrist line. Ok.
Let's do racism and sexism, not because we're racist and sexist, but because other people probably are. It may look like us and the bigots of unclear numbers are both having the same effect, but we're not bad people just because our actions proactively support bad things. We're just being pragmatic.
You're making the entirely unfounded assumption that sexism was the cause for those women's loss rather than them individually both being terrible candidates. And despite the Obama example showing you "racism exists, so only run white people" point is just completely bullshit. People literally made the same argument against Obama.
There were blaring warning signs that had absolutely nothing to do with sexism with both candidacies. Easy bad campaign choices and cultural movements that very easily explain the losses without diving into the dark heart of man, but somehow you just ignore those to focus on banning women and POC from running for pragmatism.
Whatever you believe about your non-racist internal beliefs, your actions are indistinguishable from racism. And I'm not sure you'll ever think there's an election so low stakes that we can select the best candidate if she's a woman, because you don't seem to have learned anything by the event that proved the whole philosophy as suspect.
My cousin told me yesterday that AOC isn’t left enough for her. That tells me that either we need a 3rd party, because clearly democrats are not even wanted by their own party. Or that women are extremely easy to make toxic. At the end of the day it’s a popularity contest and most people are not doing research. You will get put through the media spin cycle and people will choose to not like you because of your voice, or because you use too much head movement when you speak, or because their favorite comedian parroted a 10 sec tiktok clip about something you said on a social issue, or because of that one vote you made that one time. Women 100% get less leeway. Believing anything else is idealistic.
Run this exercise again like it's 2008 and you're taking about Barrack Obama's blackness. People don't want AOC to run because she's just the next woman on the conveyer belt, they want her to run because she's one of the best politicians in the Democratic party.
She was the VP, and who else did Democrats have? They didn't primary and changed horses at the last minute... They had no one built up for it and little time to do it
I didn't even hear very much about her being black or a woman - Trump took some shots, and they tried that angle on Fox and such, but most of that fell flat. They ended up calling her a communist and running on the economy - it seems extremely telling
Honestly, she did great until her advisors told her to ease up on the rhetoric and attacks, and basically crippled her already watered form political positions to the point it was "we're going to do good things in a nuanced way, but we're not going to take firm stands"
You mean the guy who dropped out?
Biden won on basically not being Trump... That strategy only works when Trump is still in office. Public memory is short, shit is fucked and people want change desperately. Billionaires control the media, and they managed to convince enough people that Trump would be good for them (whether financially, religiously, or because they're racist)
And let's not forget, Trump barely won, no matter what he says. Between voter suppression and the manipulation we know of, that margin is razor thin - districts called it long before they finished counting votes
It would have been a blow out if the Democratic party wasn't fucking around. Obama won on "change", and didn't deliver... People are so desperate for something different and the Democratic party is actively resisting the demands of their own supporters, let alone the people
I agree, but I don't think we have 4 years. It took like 2 weeks for things to start falling apart, a month to dismantle all of our global soft power, and probably like 6 months for people to start dying in the streets. Our economy is collapsing, and with it the global economy
Bird flu could make the jump at any point too... Cutting regulations and public health funding is basically breeding another pandemic. Hell, honestly we might not even know it's happening until we have a whistleblower
On the plus side, we've got constant protests, Europe is stepping up in a big way, and Trump has hurt right wing causes across the globe. We've got maga people screaming to get Musk out of the white house, Republicans and Democrats alike are booing their representatives for not doing something, and Trump looks like he's rapidly aging. Billionaires who handed Trump the presidency control the media, and you know what most people aren't seeing? The daily speeches trump is making, weirdly turning everything into something about real estate development. People hate Vance - Trump seems to be setting musk or his son up to be his successor, but they're pretty universally hated too
We're over the cliff - the pax America is over, there's no going back. Things are going to get rough, things are going to get complicated, but an end is a new beginning. Maybe we can start building something better. I think we will. To me, the only question is how many people will die along the way, how long will we have to endure this slow (but now pretty fast) decline before we get past this
Or maybe this is just the end for our species. Either way, I don't think there's a "next time" in 4 years... There's no going back. Only forward, into the unknown
Nah, we're in late stage capitalism - the economy is divorced from reality, the way we measure it ie basically based on speculation. And the effects haven't had time to ripple through yet, that'll take months
And yeah, we have people dying in the streets and people locked up... But this isn't remotely at the same scale. This is like at least one person you know will be a victim here on average... This is old people in the suburbs dying on the sidewalk. This is tons more people living in their car, this is people being pushed to crime to survive en mass
It's hard to explain how bad things are going to get... This isn't more of the same, this is going to be much less abstract for most people
History is written by the winners... Every history class we get is written through the lens of "capitalism is the only option"
The great depression is exactly where to look... Let me put together some facts you probably know in a new way
What was the new deal? It was wealth redistribution. Job creation en masse through government programs (to do basically busywork at times), sociatal safety nets, worker protections... Sound familiar?
How did it play out? The establishment fought it every step of the way. America voted in younger and bolder representatives to both parties.
FDR won the election 4 times - until very recently he was said to be "the closest America has come to a king". But he wasn't... He was performing the will of the people, and that threatened the establishment. It took 2 generations to slowly dismantle what he put in place
And on the other note... Billionaires can't build a utopia. They can't build a company, let alone a city state. They're genuinely dumber than normal people - they don't ever build things. They invest in others, the ideas never come from them. They are the manifestations of the financial empire that is a billionaire, they too are prisoners of their own wealth
Ah fair, the capitalist propaganda is definitely more intense over here, but nowhere in the anglosphere is safe from it
But to answer your question, a billionaire can build a compound, but they're literally incapable of building a town. A town requires people, it's made up of webs of interconnected people. If you plop a few thousand people somewhere, they organize themselves.
If a billionaire built a compound and set up some farms, some infrastructure, and then subsidized the cost of people moving there, they could easily form a town. But that's not enough - you can't become a billionaire without a compulsive need to stand at the top.
Let's talk company towns - basically you have a resource, and to that end a company builds the infrastructure to develop it. They set up a monopoly on trade, and basically enslave people once they're there
How do they maintain control? Control the food and travel in and out. But still, people tend to rise up when they feel injustice - you need guards for the day to day, and response teams for riots and mutiny
Here's the thing... Consultants told doomer billionaires that if you want to be a feudal lord, you have to inspire loyalty. To make your knights feel like family - you have to invite them for family dinner and make them absolutely certain that if they die in your service, you'll support their family
Instead, they asked about explosive collars and biometric locks on food storage
Billionaires can't build societies. Not city states, not even company towns - if there's not someone ready to enforce their claim of ownership, they die.
By their very nature - if they could share, they wouldn't be a billionaire. They would live in the highest possible luxury, but they wouldn't be billionaires... They are mentally unwell by definition
In case you weren't aware, Biden, a straight white man (and about the same age as Trump), was running first. His numbers were really bad. Is it because he was a straight white man? No, we only blame women and minorities for the failures of circumstances. We don't actually talk about the fact she wasn't an appealing candidate regardless of race or color.
She ran on "you should thank us for how good you have it" instead of addressing real problems people have. You don't win an election like that. It had very little, if anything, to do with her race or gender.
If Kamala Harris was white with a cock, he'd be be President right now
Wasn’t she picked to replace a white guy with a cock because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t gonna be president?
Only after lying about how bad his health was to keep him in the race, only after realizing no one else but Kamala could use the money raised for Biden, and only after he bombed in a seemingly impossible way in a debate against Trump.
Or Dems could run a serious candidate this time. That would be a refreshing change.
No... Voters need to vote left. Voting left in primaries will yield better candidates.
If only Democrats would run fair primaries. Or primaries at all.
Eh, I don't know. Lincoln was well aware that he was walking into a massively complex situation with nothing short of the future of the country 100% on the line. He knew he was doing it at great personal risk, and I am sure on some level he knew it could (and ultimately, would) cost him his life.
Lincoln's life was cut short so ultimately we never got to see what the next phase of his life would look like, but he persevered in the face of the greatest struggle this nation has ever faced.
Trump and friends may well create as dangerous of a scenario as the civil war, especially if Thiel, Vance, and the other tech authoritarians achieve their goal of radically overhauling if not outright destroying the country.