Like:
People should be allowed to exist
Social programs aren’t communism
The system isn’t working for the people
Edit:
I’ve changed my mind on this.
Let the DNC go full MAGA and when they lose, because they will lose, they get the heat and we can eject them forever. At least sit them in a corner.
Progressives, you fight if you want but I don’t believe the elections will be fair so it’s a win win for you.
Holy shit you guys are fucked.
move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors
“Only accept money from rich people.”
And at the same time “get out of elite circles”
Democrats are fucking twisted.
Why not? They’re easier to please! Agenda: change nothing.
They have a proven track record already!
How influential are these moderates at this point? If the DNC leadership is still paying attention to them, they are pants on head retarded.
Leftwing people don’t fucking vote in primaries. People don’t vote third party enough for it to act as anything but a spoiler benefiting fascists. Realistically the US military would turn people into a bloody paste if we attempted to rebel.
And now we might not even get elections in the future because we have authoritarians in charge ripping the functions and institutions of the government itself to shreds. Like… we are so fucking screwed.
They’re influential because the big donors like this stuff, it’s the kind of changes that don’t impact them and push away more left leaning policies that would hurt them. One of the points is literally ignoring small donors which is what average people are.
Far-left is the “fuck you” solution that the left would take. In other words, Bernie Sanders. They should just let that man speak.
Calling Bernie Sanders fart left… first thing the American people should do is reframe your left right references. The guy is centre-left. Democrat party is solid right and Republicans are radical far right.
Our Overton Window has been pushed clear out of the building, shoved into the drainage culvert around back, and it’s slowly drifting downriver and out to sea.
I’ve read some people on right-wing comment chains say it’s refreshing that the Overton Window is finally being pushed back to the right. In America.
This shows how deeply our media bubbles bury segments of our population.
I’m betting those same people believe that Christians are being driven into the sea and the war on christmas is a real fight that they are losing.
Bernie Sanders is already the compromise.
Trying to shift further right won’t work. You can’t do “what the other party does” because they already do it and they do it better.
Find original messaging, take back the narrative. Then you get to tell the story you’re good at.
Trump does this exceptionally well. By spouting all kinds of shocking horseshit, the media doesn’t stop talking about him. This lets him dominate the narrative. You could see them panic when Kamala was nominated, because suddenly the DNC controlled the narrative for a bit, and polling showed Kamala taking the lead. That advantage evaporated as Trump seized control of the front pages again.
This doesn’t just happen in the US. Here in the Netherlands, the campaign was not initially but later on dominated by talk on migration from the PVV. Of course other parties tried to respond by talking about migration, which only helped to legitimise the PVVs talking points.
That advantage evaporated as Trump seized control of the front pages again.
And don’t forget the Dems panicking at the sudden signs of success and muzzling their best talking points, tying up Tim Walz and trying to appeal to moderates by parading Liz Cheney around instead of sticking to a really strong narrative, like how republicans are weird and what’s in Project 2025.
Dems do NOT understand populism, or if they do they have a twisted perception of what drives common people and how to engage with people burned out with voting. Seeing the tone of the “rallies” being led by Schumer and Pelosi after the election to try to restore some amount of moral and drive told me clearly that the dem party is utterly cooked. They are out-of-touch, elitist, naive and stuck in some era of civility that never existed.
Trump does [shocking, rude, unprecedented] thing and OWNS the [punching bag]
Whoever has been in the punching bag category thus far has got a steep hill to climb. I think the opposition needs to come from within the republican party, and will need to pursue headlines with a similar format in response to Trump actions that genuinely piss everyone off.
EDIT: if anyone wants inspiration/brain rot for a grass roots campaign, the gateway pundit is good template. I think that’s more of a strategy to use on old people on Facebook.
Trying to shift further right won’t work
I think we’re at a point where most people in the US are right leaning (maybe even arbitrarily so). The democrats have pissed off and alienated enough people where that’s the situation. The important thing now is to reinforce the idea that right wing beliefs and American freedom, civil liberties, democracy, etc are not mutually exclusive. That’s the issue with Trump’s strategy right now, as people are willing to follow him into an authoritarian future because they’re focused on the “own the libs” aspect of it.
I agree with everything you said.
Then you get to tell the story you’re good at.
They forgot how. We’re going to have to make a new party, I’m afraid.
Do they think that Kamala lost because she was too far left?
As someone else noted, the right said that, because yeah, they’re going to say that. Here in about two years, they’re going to be saying Hitler and the Confederacy lost their wars because they were too woke. BUT WAIT there’s more! As I understand it, when they gutted the Biden campaign to make it the Kamalampaign, they foisted a bunch of the high-level HRC campaign staff on her, which, if you look at it, explains why so much of the Kamalampaign looks and smells exactly like the Hillary campaign. Of course, when these doofuses lost again, rather than showing a smidge of self-awareness, they promptly gave interviews saying that it’s clearly because they were too far left (socially, specifically, though I wouldn’t be at all shocked to hear that they meant it economically too).
They already say Hitler was a socialist.
Hitler had welfare and (tried) to spare a jewish friend. That makes him a commie!
She lost because the US is mostly misogynistic and racist. 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 mostly gave as their reason something that could be summarized “That’s too much power to give to a woman”. Harris being a woman was a greater impediment to her win than her being a person of color.
When google searches for “is Biden still running” spike on election day, it’s kinda hard to swallow “racist and misogynist” as the reason.
Maybe the electorate really is, but I think we should wait for an election where they don’t run a shambling corpse for the first half, belatedly realize that mistake only when it’s completely undeniable to anyone vaguely paying attention, and forcefully swap him out for the VP that tells union reps to fuck off and goes on television to say “I won’t do anything different from the shambling corpse”
2020 biden voters didn’t expect years of genocide from these wackos.
Unhinged comment is unhinged
The right had tried to paint it that way. Apparently their propaganda worked quite well…
I’ve been saying this for a number of months now you got to kill this party. Abandon it completely. We got to start a new party. We got to start a labor party. A worker party. A party of the people. Whatever we want to call it, but whatever it’s called it’s a party that’s not for the big corporate donors that control the Democratic Party. The Democratic party basically since the late '70s but certainly since the '80s abandoned the people the peoples issues. They’re not coming back.
I kind of agree, but it needs to be a serious party that proves itself. I wont vote for some joke party that only runs in presidental elections. They need to put in the work and run (and win) in smaller more local elections before i would consider giving my vote.
Ideally, this party would fill in the gap the republicans left behind after dying.
For the foreseeable future though, i dont have a choice other than to vote dem
The system of “parties” and “representation” is a complete joke that’s a root cause of this genocidal empire.
The usa needs something like ranked choice before that becomes any way viable.
Winner take all didn’t save the whigs.
That’s not entirely true. We’ve had change-ups in which two parties are THE two parties before. Noteably, the GOP. But it MUST start at the local level. We can’t just wait until the presidential election and then complain about the voting system when all that’s left to be done is act as a spoiler candidate. We have to start now, in our own communities.
It’s also helpful when there is infighting among factions within one of the big parties. That’s one reason behind the success in getting the GOP off the ground so quickly: they made common cause with like-minded members and currently-sitting politicians of the older, underperforming Whig party. This is especially helpful when moving from local support to state and then federal level support, since you can put the apparatus of the old party to work for the new ideas (this obviously doesn’t mean absorb all the old party, just the ones that are already aligned with your mission).
The final piece is a central tenant of your platform that is both easy to understand and easy to justify simply based on morals and feels. The GOP had antislavery. We could have anti-oligarchy.
Edit: There is also another way, though: just take over the already existing party, like what the Tea Party did to the GOP. There are some pros to this, the biggest being the ability to utilize the first past the post voting system to greater advantage and ride on name recognition with the underinformed parts of the base. But there are also some big cons, mainly that the “new” party is still saddled with all the corruption and bullshit within the old party from the get-go and now have to convince voters that they are different and will change things from within. With how the top brass of the Democrats have been processing their loss in November, I’m of a mind that starting from scratch could be more beneficial. Especially since there were a lot of voters that just wanted “change”. I also don’t think that simply having a D next to your name on the ballot will work as well for progressives as having an R next to their names worked for the Tea Party.
Some form of Ranked Choice Voting could save what democracy we have. The fact that the leadership of both parties oppose it so vociferously should be enough evidence for anyone to realize it.
“But I don’t want to believe we’re losing horribly, I’d rather believe we’re nearly winning!”
— Liberals
Well, why wouldn’t they oppose it? They stopped representing the people a while ago.
Dear US-Americans, it is time to form a new, progressive party.
Excuse we, what?
Jesus Christ, is this real?
Big cities have problems, but they are still far better off than small town rural America. There isn’t some specific failure happening in large cities, you’re seeing the broad inevitable enshittification of Capitalism as a system.
Democrats must be some serious masochists, they would actually rather take the blame thenselves than admit capitalism is wrong.
DNC: we tried bootlicking billionaires and it didn’t work, what if we double down on bootlicking billionaires even harder.
It’s also reported here. This fits with the reports of complaining that Democratic Congresspeople have been doing about the progressive wing of the party wanting them to fight back against DOGE. They and party leadership may well be aiming to not just talk like it, but fully become the new Republican party, in hopes of having a stampede of “moderate” Republicans who aren’t happy with Trump come their way.
Also, big donors are angry at them, so I guess they’re trying to win those donors back.
It’s always about the dollars, not about the votes
Don’t forget: dollars are votes.
The top of the Democratic party basically wants to become the party of big money and try and steal this mantle from the Republicans.
Obviously, this isn’t going to work because the donors will just go for the party that will give them more, and they will always be the Republicans party.
This is basically just the campaign advisors trying to get as much money into the campaigns as possible, because they get a cut of every ad buy. They’re not interested in making things better for the people, just looking at their bottom line.
I’d like a list of those who subscribe to this theory to ensure not a single one of them ever gets a vote from me again. I’m an overseas voter and my “home” state is so gerrymandered to shit it doesn’t really matter what I do anyway.
Thing is, though, if you elect even these guys, who supposedly exist because trust them bro, they’ll still vote for your policy stances the majority of the time as they always have.
If you vote for a Republican, or if you vote fringe group candidate or don’t vote at all, the Republican might show up at your house at night and break in through the tiny bathroom window before tangling all of your appliance cords together and whacking you with the bundle of appliances while you lay in bed before pulling out a razor an assailing you while you’re confusedly trying to fight your way out of a bundle of appliances, carving their names into your stomach while they yell out strange cow-wrangling sounds and various slurs which may or may not apply to your ethnicity. Then they’ll call you a slut who was begging for it with the way you dress and the method you use to pay utilities, before taking money out of your wallet to buy cocaine with and leaving as the police enter to coerce you into silence.
And also 79 Million people will lose medical coverage and all of the elderly become homeless, but mostly just that first thing I said.
The district I vote in is heavily gerrymandered and it really does not matter who I vote for at all for some positions. Many local positions have had only various flavors of republican and independents even run and, in spite of living overseas, I dutifully combed the internet to find out which of them was least extreme for local positions (surprisingly difficult, made more annoying by many of the state’s sites blocking overseas IPs and some candidates having basically no web presence).
I have no idea when the last time a non-republican filled any of the roles at all. I have, for many elections, voted blue no matter who. I still mostly plan to do that, but anyone subscribing to the philosophy of cutting off the “extreme” left and ragging things more right can fuck right off. Not, as I said, that it will matter since the republicans will win the area by double-digit percentages every time.
What’s not mentioned in this excerpt is that this was sponsored by Third Way, a think tank that is singlemindedly devoted to convincing Democrats to cut the left out of the party. God knows the DNC has its problems, but it’s misleading to frame this as a mainstream Democratic conference.
“Moderates say party should go moderate” shocker
Fascism is not moderate.
A convent of dems in Virginia attempting to revive Jimmy Carter.
The…dominance of small-dollar donors? I wish.
If the small donors are dominating… Why would you abandon them?
Because they’re not giving the bribes that the big donors give. Politicians expect a high paying effortless lobbying job as reward for selling out their country.
And how could small-dollar donors not represent the preferences of the broader electorate?
I suppose they count electorate in dollars, not people? Maybe they mean to say “broader capital interests”?
That’s what I keep trying to figure out
Fuck, if that were true we’d have just gotten done with 8 years of President Sanders 😥
A good bit of literature has studied the problem and arrived to recommendations that overlap in parts & depart in others with this playbook.
A former parliamentarian of the Hungarian government studied its slide into illiberalism, and suggested remedies for the current, similar trend in the US. Resist in the courts & media, and build a powerful social base at the state & city level throughout the country. The latter means
the Democratic Party must reconnect with the working class to preserve liberal institutions
Doing that means
- “creating new and strengthening existing local organizational structures, especially labor unions”. Do not focus “on issues important to the active base only” such as “media freedom or democracy”: this leads to “failures of mass mobilizations”. “[E]ngage with [ordinary people] outside elections, focusing on issues that matter to them”.
- “[T]o push through popular reforms that elites oppose”, free “the party from elite capture” by shifting financing “from the corporate elite to small and micro-donations”.
- “[C]ommit to left-populist economic policies”.
- “[L]earn symbolic class politics”, “embrace the mundane and be down to earth”.
you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people
I’m seeing the playbook overlap a bit with points 1 & 4, diverge from point 2, and not treat point 3.
Another article reviews research observing a decades-long trend of class dealignment: workers abandoning the left-wing party & joining the right. As unions have weakened and Democrats abandoned them, the party has increasingly relied on & shifted appeal to urban middle class professionals & minorities. The review names 4 paths researched or discussed to reverse dealignment.
- inclusive populism: “appeal to working-class voters’ sense of resentment at economic elites and stress how elites use racial resentment to divide segments of the working class that share a common interest in economic justice”
- anti-woke social democracy: make “a clean break with factions of the party that embrace unpopular social and cultural messaging that alienates working-class voters”
- deliverism: “pass and implement large-scale economic reforms that benefit working Americans”
- institutionalism: reinvigorate a “labor movement capable of advancing working-class interest in politics and [re-embed] Democratic and progressive politics into the lived experiences of working-class communities”
It looks like the playbook is going with anti-woke social democracy & institutionalism, rejecting inclusive populism, not mentioning deliverism.
They seem to think the way to win the working class is to go more MAGA-like (anti-woke social democracy) instead of trying a competing strategy like inclusive populism. It also looks like they’re choosing not to break free of elite capture, which seems like a huge mistake.
Thats going to be a hard sell, let us know when they figure out that being intolerant (beyond the paradox of tolerance) is going to spoil their ballot against the cult of the GOP.
