this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
940 points (99.0% liked)
Progressive Politics
2157 readers
257 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I love how these conversations happen many times every session, but then campaign time comes and everyone calls me a Russian asset for reminding people of what the "Blue No Matter Who" mentality gets you.
This is the proper attitude for primaries, not general elections.
The time to have that conversation is before and during the primaries. After that, it's not a worthwhile conversation.
The message isn't the issue, your timing is.
How long do I have to wait for this to work? It's been 25 years of voting blue no matter who and Republicans are just getting more and more power. When do we get to say that's a failed strategy? When there's no elections anymore or when there's only one party on the ballot?
Oh, wait, that happens a ton already because Democrats are fucking useless. Three seats on my 2024 ballot had Republicans running unopposed.
It HAS worked. Do you know how bad it would've been had we had Republican after Republican?? It would've been project 2000.
Damage has been mitigated. Progress has been made. If you don't appreciate that, then I'm happy for you because it means you are well of enough to not notice.
Youy know why Schumer said he wouldnt fight and voted with the republicans?
"Harm reduction".
Sound familiar?
He's a failure.
Harm reduction isn't 100% of possible harm reduction.
I'm not saying they're good. I'm saying they're useful and sometimes not horrible.
So it works when a fascist is elected eventually rather than immediately.
Gotcha.
And exercise doesn't prevent death, only extends life. Better not bother.
Way ahead of you.
But if all we can hope for is death, I don't see a point in participating. Society is awful, people are terrible, and I can't see the stars. And there's literally nothing I can do to fix this, just bang my head against a wall.
I don't see the point in trying to make things better anymore.
I hear ya. I had the same feeling of futility for a long while.
I got rid of it by getting out of the house and meeting little who think like me in real life. Going to protests and school board meetings has helped me not think it's useless.
And showing up to those things let's you push back on those who are pushing the wrong way. If you can't gain ground, slow them down. Make it expensive for them to hurt us.
I’ve tried that. They don’t think like me. I can mask really well because I’m in sales but those people are almost as alien as MAGAs. And not just politically, but socially and culturally.
LOL
What primaries? The Democrats invented superdelegates to subvert democracy in the primary process, and then argued in court in Florida that it was their right to do so when they were sued for it.
Good point. Better to do nothing then. Give up.
Or get more involved in the only party with a chance and change them from the inside?
No, that sounds like work. Forget it.
depends on what you mean by, " get more involved in the only party"
If you mean gut the dems and start over with 100% new leadership and without being at the behest of the rich, I'm in. Otherwise its a pointless pantomime and I'm not interested in playing along in corpo-fascist games any longer.
I love the idea. What's the first step we can take to accomplish that?
tough one. Its not something that comes up often. I'd say for starters we re-register to a new party to get some momentum going. DSA maybe.
Unfortunately then we're back to the FPTP problem. We don't have ranked choice voting, so there can only be two parties.
If we create a new one, we'll need to convince the moderates to join, and the 35% of people who call themselves Democrat like it's a sports team. That's quite a task.
The tea party tried this approach and failed. Then they gave up and infiltrated the Republicans instead. Now they are in charge, rebranded maga.
It is a good point, and I'm not advocating for doing nothing, just acknowledging that change via the Democrats is impossible. Unless you've been asleep for 40 years, you're well aware that real, meaningful change is impossible in this party duopoly, and nothing underscores that more than running a publicly brain-dead man and the entire "progressive" party apparatus lining up behind him in order to suit his fragile, stupid ego.
What I advocate for is doing good with one's own two hands, because that's always possible. Be willing to pick up dog shit even if it's not yours. When someone in your building asks for a favor, be generous with your time. When ICE comes knocking, and they will, find that maybe you have difficulty remembering things. (And if you really want to underscore how shitty the Democrats are, remember that Tom Homan was also Obama's guy.)
I agree. But my point is that the Democrats are the only tool we have at the moment within the government.
We have plenty of tools outside of the government, and you're 100% right that we should use those as well.
But let's not throw out the one tool we have inside the government. Let's improve it so it's useful.
The devils in the details of that vague proposal. So, sure I guess.
That's the thing, we don't.
The Democrats in Washington do not give a fuck about you, me, our families, or anyone else. They exist to do performative things and make nice speeches, then go vote in a manner that can be charitably called conservative but more often enables fascism. For example, remember when they did their nice little stunt kneeling in Congress with their African wear? Those same Democrats linked up behind Biden when he wanted to militarize the police even more.
The only power you or I have is local unless you're willing to commit an extraordinary act of vigilantism or you're a billionaire. That's it.
So join local Democrat groups
Democrats blame progressives for their losses.
Progressives don't exactly show up to vote
Great. Really courting that progressive vote with comments like this.
Do we have Democrats as a tool inside the government? Are you sure they aren't another of the oligarchs' tools?
It's both. And they're the most likely group that we could turn to our purposes.
A broken tool is no tool at all
/c/im14andthisisdeep
I can tell you've never had to sweep or shovel with something when half the haft is gone. Or tear the lid off a garbage can because the mechanism to lift the lid stopped working.
You're either with the oligarchs or you're with the terrorists
Oof
Liberals are, for all their talk, in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of love with the DNC. BlueMAGA is some combination of a death cult and an abusive relationship.
It is very culty.
BlueMAGA sounds like weak bothsidesism, come up with some real criticism
The whole thread and all the rest of lemmy is full of real criticism. So maybe take your own advice before you attack that person.
I'm not attacking them, and I wasn't talking to the rest of Lemmy so they are irrelevant
I did.
So your criticism of liberals is... they vote for the party the most closely aligns with their views? And this is somehow analogous to death cults and MAGA extremism?
It doesn't align with their views; that's the whole problem. Liberals carry water for the DNC even though they hate the nonsense it does as much as everyone else. At least I don't think I've seen anyone around here say that Biden supporting genocide* or not going after price gouging were good things. It's always excuses, "lesser" evils and false dichotomies to make sure the Democrats are always just good enough to not throw aside. That's why I likened it to the Stockholm Syndrome.
*well Zionists think so but screw them
That's still not analogous to MAGA extremism, Democrats have much more favorable social policies, which is what most Americans care about. Voting for the party that does more about the values you care about is not a death cult unless you think basic LGBT rights are a death cult.
Now that I think about it I was using liberal to mean DNC supporter and I'm pretty sure that's a misnomer (though there likely is significant overlap) so I'll say DNC supporter from now on. Also what I personally call blue MAGA is only a subset of DNC "supporters" (since most of them are closer to willing hostages, at least around here). My personal blue MAGA line is actually thinking the DNC is a competent or honest political party despite being shown evidence to the contrary or has some kind of right to people's votes. "America didn't vote for them so they have no duty to act/America clearly wants fascism" rhetoric and thinking accepting genocide was competent electoral strategy (again despite being shown evidence to the contrary) also fall under this. They also like to claim Bernie's losses in 2016 and 2020 were "the will of the voters" rather than the result of DNC tampering. Edit: Seeing a headline about genocide in Palestine and writing something to the effect of "Gaza voters bad" is also a pretty clear tell.
The blue MAGA comparison isn't about extremism; it's about other hallmark MAGA traits like tribalism, enforcement of ideological homogeneity, vilification and mocking of critics and uncritical support for "us" over "them". For what I consider emblematic blue MAGA behavior, remember how in the lead up to the election everyone critical of Biden and later Harris or the DNC was called a Russian troll or MAGA in disguise? Yeah, it's that. So yeah, they're called blue MAGA because they're perfectly willing to imitate MAGA when it suits them. Fortunately the number of blue MAGAs (as opposed to willing hostages) shrunk since then, but you'll still see a few of them around.
Within the context of the Western, and especially American, slide into fascism, people who want to stop that must do what works and ditch what doesn't work. Well, we call argue all day about what works, but voting for the DNC and in DNC primaries doesn't. Bernie 2020 and their abandonment of Jamal Bowman are all proof needed for that. And what do you call a group of people who insist on and defend walking a path down which only their misery lies? Because I call that a death cult. Whether one realizes that (the willing hostages) or chooses not to (blue MAGA) is irrelevant.
Your definition of BlueMAGA is still intellectually dishonest then.
Intellectually dishonest? Why?
Because it would be more honest, within your definition, to call them DNC partisans. What you wish to ascribe to them is not distinctive of MAGA, so using MAGA to degrade them is not only inaccurate but dishonest because it specifically makes a comparison that is unfit, and ultimately only serves to degrade the meaning of MAGA by making it applicable to any run of the mill party hack.
Blue MAGA is naturally an opposite of red MAGA. Are democrats such nice people that their radicals are insignificant in comparison, or is it just a bad comparison?
I feel that doesn't quite capture the nuance of calling everyone they disagree with a Russian troll so they can ignore them (which is more evocative of MAGAs calling everyone to the left of Donald Trump a woke libtard agent).
I'll admit I'm not exactly an expert on MAGA, but to me the distinctive features of MAGA is their hatred of dissent, intellectual dishonesty and lack of empathy for outsiders. Those are what I see as their main characteristics outside all the far-right nationalism stuff; they characterize the vessel in which you put the far-right nationalism to get MAGA.
Now I'm just now learning the term party hack, so would a person X described only as a Democrat party hack habitually call critics Russian agents and react to news of Israel committing more genocide against Palestinians with "we did it Patrick, we saved Palestine" or "leopards ate my face"?
The comparison emerged from exchanges in which DNC hacks/proto blue MAGAs were responding to legitimate criticism or predictions with accusations of the critic being a Russian troll/MAGA in disguise, so the nuance has always been more along the lines of "uh... you're acting awfully MAGA right now yourself", with the idea being that being not MAGA the DNC hack should be better than that. It's about the vessel of MAGA, not the contents.
Honey, thats just people on the internet, you can find dumb people of every persuasion.
Right, that's being dishonest and you suggesting a false equivalence.