this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Good thing we didn't vote! We might have changed this!
If enough people voted, the Democrats would have given people free health care, stopped financing wars, torture and genocide, close Guantanamo, improve public transit, boost public education, and lowered the cost of groceries. If only enough people voted for the Democrats, they could be in power and bring change. Of course!
Just pointing out that the last time Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority and the Presidency, it was for 73 days in 2009 and Obamacare was passed.
Yeah, they think they're making a clever point, but Democrats literally tried to do many of those things, and were consistently blocked by Republicans.
I swear, these people have no fucking concept of how their own country functions.
Assuming you meant it sarcastically, this is brilliant.
It is. I'm not American but we are facing similar issues where I live and it's a bit insulting to be told that simply voting would change anything.
We (and the US) have alternated between two major parties for decades. They have had ample time to show us how they run things. And from what we've seen, it's difficult to assume that anything would be different the next time they are in power.
That's my perspective. The two parties take turns steering the Titanic. Democrats seek compromise with the icebergs. Republicans look for more and bigger icebergs, full speed ahead.
We humans need to be about an order of magnitude more unruly in order to survive our own banal ideologies.
Please, can we be?! 🙏
US politics has had two major parties since the beginning (Useful Charts YT channel ). They've splintered and switched around names and policies, and some third parties have popped up for causes, but the system is biased to keep two in power.
You do have to vote for the right ones in the primaries first. Someone being a part of a coalition does not mean they universally support all of a certain set of issues. Universal health care is a good example, some dems support it and some do not. Need to primary in the ones that do.
Except the Dems have no obligation to primary candidates other than the ones that they choose, legally or otherwise.
Not to say don't go out and vote, but the corporate Dems have an incentive to prevent things from changing for the better of anyone except for the oligarchy. It's the ratchet effect - Republicans drive things ever further to the right, and Dems keep it from moving one way or another, thereby turning the extreme into the status quo.
We're going to have to fight the Dems as well to get this stuff done.
I think it's less an oligarchic conspiracy to keep power and more often a misguided belief that neo-liberalism is a viable political philosophy, alongside our campaign finance laws leaving us fundamentally vulnerable in a way that cannot be fixed without an amendment or winning the Supreme Court finally. Not that there aren't oligarchs that want more power, but blaming everything on them is missing half the picture of the reality of our situation. We would still be in this mess without any oligarchs, so long as the other two problems remain, as they create more systemic weaknesses.
I basically agree with you 100%. I think the whole thing is a series of shortsighted choices that have led to a situation where we have an essentially unmoving class of politicians in control who care more about their purse strings than they do actually solving anything, and nothing the average person can do about it. The only people who could really fix the issues in the system are dependent on those issues to keep their jobs.
I also didn't mean that politicians are oligarchs, regardless of party. They're servants to the oligarchs of the US - people like Bezos and Musk.
Sure, I understand what an oligarch is. I just think their influence is overestimated, and the amount of people that think neo-liberalism is legitimately a good thing from a philosophical standpoint is underestimated.
People tend to blame that on oligarchs, which is a convenient cop-out imo. Oligarchs have become this boogey-man we can conveniently blame our problems on instead of having to take a more critical look at our problems in things like messaging and communication.
edit: Like, look at Joe Rogan. I don't think his success in communication is due to oligarchy in any of its forms. That's an example of the kind of communication and outreach that we lack, though. They've got it, we don't.
I mean, a lot of news outlets are owned by the same groups funding politicians on both sides and far right think tanks. After 9/11, somebody bought up over 500 local news channels with the express purpose of running more anti-Muslim news.
There isn't some big conspiracy going on, but the facts of US politics are that since Reagan, the laws have been made based largely on the whims of the rich. More often than the majority, at least. And what do the rich want? More money. And dumb, angry people have been great for revenue. So the rich make decisions to benefit their bottom line, and politicians are beholden to their corporate sponsors, and it all leads down the rabbit hole of grifters and tech bros and all. Not in some long con conspiracy, but in idiots chasing infinite growth and infinite profits with no thought for 2 years down the road.
I think there's a big issue with Dems in their messaging, both in style and who they platform to, but the extremists have an advantage here: people think emotionally, not rationally. So if your job is to tell people that it's not their fault their lives suck, it's the fault of (insert minority group here), that's going to be a lot more palatable to people than "Biden added 500,000 jobs to the economy during his presidency" when much of the country have to choose between food and heat this week.
I also agree with the neo-liberalism (also, both sides-ism and centrists), but I think that also can be partially blamed on the Dems, and also our culture in general. The Dems have been the party of "reaching across the aisle" since before I was born, and my entire life it has only allowed things to get worse. The Dems clearly have a losing strategy, but they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas because they refuse to let truly progressive candidates lead the party for fear of giving up their power/positions (and their corporate sponsors).
Not entirely true, laws being to the benefit of the rich requires some cherry picking. Dems have allowed tax cuts to the rich to expire, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Obama taxed private health insurance to fund the ACA, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Free school lunches are not a benefit to the wealthy, nor is increased minimum wage in many states.
People have forgotten all of this, though, which is a failure in communication imo. I do agree that the dems need to fight more fiercely overall, though.
I wish I had the studies in front of me for the stats, but studies done by schools like Harvard have shown that the US cannot be considered a democracy (technically, we've been a republic anyway) and has been an oligarchy since at least the 70s. Nobody gets their way all the time, but since the 70s, laws have been passed in favor of the wealthy twice as often as the majority. You can easily pick out examples for any side, of course. Like I said, nobody gets their way all the time.
I never meant to imply that the Dems are as bad as the Republicans, anyway. Just that they act as a stop gap in the push ever right. There are those among them who are actually actively fighting against the flow as well, but overall, they are the party of the centrist/moderate status quo, and they hamper the more progressive side of the party when they can. There are a few in office who side with Republicans more often than not. Even the ACA, as great as it has been, was cut to be more palatable to Republicans before they ever even saw it. What we got is a very neutered version of the original, which I will forever love to remind Republicans was based on Romney-care, a policy created by a Republican governor of one of the most left leaning states in the nation. A Republican who was re-elected and is still looked upon favorably to this day for his actions while in office.
Before the current MAGA party, the biggest difference between the two parties was that Dems largely believed in equal rights and strong regulations, and everything else was largely arguing over the minor details like just how strong those regulations should be, tax brackets, etc. Like you said, both parties still believe in Neo-Liberalism.
Personally, I think the Dems (the leadership, in particular) just don't really care to fight because they believe they have golden parachutes just like the CEOs when they bankrupt yet another company in the name of short-term profit. The Dems were more than happy to throw trans people under the bus this election, and then blame them and "identity politics" when they lost. They seem to think that nobody who matters will be hurt in the next 4 years and people will come crawling back to them in the next election. And if we still have free and fair elections in 4 years, they'll probably be right about the second part.
Ultimately, the Democrats have a leadership issue more than anything, and a changing of the guard is in order if we are going to solve the problems at hand. Our politicians are largely old and out of touch.
It was going this way no matter what and the only question was how soon based on the voting choices we're allowed to have.
People not voting is a symptom of the inherent contradictions of our system and we're ignoring this and other symptoms because they seem fixable; they're not but we're going to try anyways because we don't know better and we don't know better because we're told that we have the best system our entire lives.