Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
As an Aussie watching what’s happening over there, all I’ve got to say is that the days of honourable dueling are gone - your leaders need to understand that you’re in a dirty street fight now!
My brother taught me there is no such thing as a fair fight.
Your brother is wise.
Your brother is correct
Ah yes, the tru endgame of “the highroad strategy”. Simply doing nothing as the fascists pillage the Government. At least the Dems are holding their noses high as everything burns around them!
I’m sure they’re excellent patrons of the arts, such as the fiddle
It’s remarkable that so many are blaming Democrats for what’s happening, instead of the Republicans doing the things, people who voted for the Republicans doing the things, and non-voters who decided they don’t care about Republicans doing the things.
No wonder your country is fucked.
Obviously, the Republicans are the party that’s pushing and doing all this stupid shit, but the Democrats are not using the power they have to impede them. The CR that the Democrats helped pass removes the power from Congress to remove Trump’s tariffs, for example. And the Democratic party keeps following the losing strategy of moving further right. I don’t think they actually care about winning the presidency or congress again; they just want to keep the corporate donors.
I don’t blame democrats for the Republicans actions, but I do blame democrats for democrats not even trying to slow Republicans down. This has been American Legislation all my life, Republican gains office, immediately lowers taxes on the richest Americans while shifting the tax burden onto the middle class and poor, while cutting service and protection for average Americans, rides out 4-8 years destroying education, veteran services, and regulations stopping full on breakdown of the US as is. A Democrat gets elected, they get nothing at all done due to republican obstruction at every turn, rides out 4 years of the problems Republicans put in place having the bad outcomes everyone knew would come, Republicans presidential nom runs off ‘‘This democrats ruined everything! I’ll clean up the mess! And I hate immigrants!!’’ Republican is elected and immediately gives huge tax cuts to the wealthiest- rinse and repeat.
Republicans arent showing up to hear the message, so let’s shit talk the dems.
You aren’t crazy. This shit is fucked up.
Be mad about it. Be frustrated. Figure out what you can do about it in your circle of influence.
It’s not just about shit talking to Dems because they show up to hear us shit talk to them. It’s about the fact that 10 Democratic senators just voted with the goddamn Republicans to strip Americans of basic needs in order to give a massive tax break to billionaires.
Those Democrats don’t represent me. And since one of them is from my own state I’m going to make damn sure he doesn’t get another chance.
Honestly instead of pushing me to the democrats, this has just gotten me to hate both sides, just hate one a little less.
We are alone in this. The dems are better, but they are at fault here too because their entire strategy is being better then the republican which allows Republicans to be as awful as they please
You need to do more than finger waggle, treat Republicans the way they treat us
Chickens can at least peck a bit. These dems aren’t even that tough
A rooster can fuck you up.
Another constituent, Donya Williams, complained Ivey didn’t know the people in his district well enough — because he admitted earlier that he didn’t know who popular podcaster Joe Rogan was until the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
This explains so much. They are as ignorant of the current state of things as the “apolitical” voters who thought Trump would be fine this time.
French aristocracy? Who ordered French aristocracy?
“We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”- The Democratic Party
“But please donate to my campaign to STOP this. We will soon, I promise”
Here’s a 100 texts from candidates running for city commissioner in TN and you live on the west coast.
My god I am so sick of the emails.
I used to get emails like “Contribute to X because I will fight for our schools to provide school lunches to everyone!” And I’d donate.
Now, the emails are just “Donald wants to kill education. GIVE ME MONEY.”
So you can use that money to buy another sign that says “Pweeze stop”?
yeah, they have gotten so much fucking money. I could have done more good just spending that same amount on potatoes, or paying people to dance.
Like, I think someone in the DNC should be out there, putting out answers. What did they do with the money they got? Where did it go? Time for an audit.
Most expensive concert tour ever.
I think we know they wasted it all on ridiculous useless bullshit, and even if they had won, it would have been more useful to spend it on potatoes.
The amount of “gib monies plz” messages I got infuriated me. Like you aren’t doing diddly squat why would I ?!?
I think our society is ducked up enough that economically it makes better sense to have a loyal audience of easy marks than a wide audience of fickle donors. Donald Trump figures this out years ago and has been cultivating/brainwashing that audience since.
Idk how to counter it except that maybe if we gave people cheaper/free essential goods (housing, school lunches etc) they’d be less inclined to go insane and support scammers like trump or the modern democratic party.
We got a make them actually work for their money. If they want us to donate then they should do something they said they would do.
Pretty much exactly the answer I’ve gotten from all my reps.
Well holding signs and doing nothing didn’t work?
May I suggest a major and I mean major leaflet campaign?
Red Dwarf reference in the wild eh?
Guilty as charged… Wondered whether it would just slip through on a mostly US based site. Spangler maintained the ruse I think.
Steady on. Next you’ll be saying it’s time for the slogan t-shirts.
Nah, we need to bring in the big guns for this one. Stickers with slogans.
Are we allowed to glue the leaflets to bricks?
As long as it gets the message across.
Is an M67 a Leaflet?
In this timeline, sure.
I think we may may finally be getting our message across. Here’s why:
Last night, Adam Schiff, one of the Democratic lawmakers I respect the most, was on Kimmel, and was very rough not just on the HitlerPig Crime Family, but also Chuck Schumer.
But what really struck me, was that the very honorable, polite, and respectful Adam Schiff took the opportunity to basically say “Fuck You” directly to the president - TWICE!
Kimmel asked him if he had said thank you to HitlerPig, and Schiff said he used a different two-word phrase, but one of the words was “You,” and everyone got it and laughed. At the end of his interview, he made another joke that was another very obvious disguised “Fuck You.”
They were obviously baiting HitlerPig into a tirade, but seeing Schiff go on national TV and saying Fuck You to HitlerPig twice marks a very new direction in messaging for the Democratic party. I hope this is the beginning of pivoting from appeasement to Hard Ball.
Schumer and Pelosi don’t have street fighting skills, they are from the era where Republicans weren’t all violent dixiecrat trash.
Schiff and the newer ones don’t bring harsh words to gunfights.
They’re boomers. They never had to fight dirty. Theyre part of the Democrat gameplan to compromise on everythin
They did have to and chose not to.
That’s awesome. I’ve started to get some social media feeds on YouTube from Adam Schiff and they’ve been pretty provocative and direct, which is desperately needed.
I don’t see people screaming at Bernie, AOC or Tim Walz. Wonder why that is…. Oh maybe it’s because they’re actually willing to notice the frustrations of their base.
“Wait you want us to fight for your rights, like you elected us to do? I dunno, that sounds like effort. It’s much easier to agree to what Republicans want and it theoretically looks good on paper that we wanna work with Fascists. Maybe we’ll get some of their voters this time!”
“I know we campaigned on fighting fascism but that was more of a ‘if we win’ thing”
we’re holding up ping pong paddles, there’s nothing else we can do!
"As we all know, we only do what we want when we win. Your house rep doesn’t still work when they win their seat, right? …They do? They still try to get things done?
Well, uh, you know you can’t do what you want when you’re in the minority of Congress. Wait Republicans did exactly that for 15 years? And got all their demands with the filibuster and delaying?
Well republicans would just use that as ammo for their messaging. Please ignore they’ll do anything we do as massaging, from tan suits to mustard. We have to give them what they want, there’s nothing else we could do!"
The Republican demands were to NOT do things, which can be moved towards by filibuster and delay. The Democrat demands are to DO things, and filibuster and delay would just get the Republicans what they want, while being able to blame the Democrats for all the negative effects that are surprising to their constituents. They need to find better messages and ways to get those messages out, absolutely, but it’s not a mirror image to the Republican situation four years ago.
Yeah Republicans aren’t pushing forward things in Congress to give Trump/Musk more things, totally. Trump hasn’t had any cabinet picks either.
So about that government shutdown…
Time for the neoliberal world order to end. Want Republicans to actually be scared of Democrats? Fill the party with socialists.
This is correct. Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries. Not town halls or performative third party voting, but filling the party up with people who think differently.
Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries
And that means it’s time for everyone to actually give a shit about voting in primary elections instead of just old people who keep choosing the worst candidates.
Not just voting, but running for election.
While I agree, I’m a “child of the internet” so pretty much any opposition research on me would have me murdered by probably everyone.
Maybe I should run. I could unite the left and right in their disgust of me lol
Judging by Trump, I bet your reputation matters a whole lot less than you think it does.
Maybe the real Modern Warfare was the blackmail material we created on ourselves along the way
Oh! NOW I remember why I didn’t give my real name and all my friends and activities and locations and menstrual cycles and everything to BlackmailBook when they demanded it of me to view the link my grandma sent me.
JFC Why won’t this fucking thing burn to the ground.
Because you still need it. When you stop needing it it will end. Even if the bed is only one of delusion
But the corporations that donate to the party don’t want this.
And as long as privately ran organization owned by those rich people (the DNC) controls the primaries then they can choose what ever candidates they want. Like how they chose Hillary despite Bernie having more support in 2016. This is why the DNC has stopped doing primaries.
When did they stop? If you’re talking about last time around, unfortunately Biden didn’t drop out early enough for them to have one. We will definitely have primaries coming up. Will the DNC try to put their finger on the scale? Surely. But that just means we got to show up in bigger numbers than they think.
Bernie had provably more individual donors than any canidate in US history.
There’s no amount pf voting that makes the DNCs chosen canidate lose the primary.
They are a private organization that doesn’t have to even have a primary, the primary exists to hold up the illusion of choice.
Nah, these people are plenty beatable. And donations aren’t votes.
And there absolutely will be primaries.
The DNC will not allow the party to leave Neoliberal ownership.
They will rig it in favor of their canidate just like in 2016, and then try to guilt us into supporting them.
All you have to do is raise money without corporations.
How hard could it be?
Edit: /s ffs
It’s one election, Micheal. How much can it cost? 10$?
That will never happen regardless, as long as money influences politics, both parties will never represent the people.
Then join the international boycotts and prevent Americans from having money. No money, no influence.
Well, then, just duck your head down and try to survive then, because that’s all that’s left. The system is what it is and it’s not going to change without violence, so it can either be co-opted from within as my suggestion, or we can all sharpen our knives and hope the next government is better rather than worse than this one.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We’re now 0/3 on that front, so… yeah. It’s not impossible, but they’ll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
Yeah people forget that the Democrat party doesn’t need to even hold primaries, let alone respect the outcome. The DNC admitted to pushing Hillary to the forefront and were the ones that dragged Biden out of retirement because it seemed like Bernie might win the second time. The good politicians seem like exceptions.
Need to start promoting working families type party.
I’m not talking about Presidential primaries. I’m talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I’d be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it’s not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of… I don’t know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.
You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn’t going to happen. Presidential primary isn’t the place to start.
This is way. Democrat voters want change, but they’re not speaking to the system in a language it understands. The party changes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That only happens when people with different views stand for, and win, lower level positions. Every voice changed lower down on the totem pole changes the presure on the people making decisions further up. Ultimately enough movement lower down means the top eschalons are pushed out and replaced too.
Whether it’s possible to find enough candidates to start filling the party, I don’t know, but just focusing on the primaries (or lack thereof) for the top job is missing the wood for the trees.
I volunteered this election with our state house district committee of the Democratic party. The grassroots is effectively neutered and you can believe that they are carefully managed to be sure nothing rises up that the national party cannot control.
The Democrats are managed opposition.
Thank you for putting the effort in. The party apparatus isn’t going to want to change, but I’m not sure that it’s managed opposition as such, so much as those who are ‘in’ being happy with their lot and doing what they feel they need to to stop that being taken away.
There’s two ways to use that to change the situation, either demonstrate that their comfortable position will be taken away if they don’t change their politics, or take it away by finding a candidate you can rally enough support behind. Neither is easy, and both require getting people involved en-mass at the lowest levels of politics, which is going to be hard work with the party pulling against you. It’s not impossible though, AOC and Sanders are both candidates of a different stripe and have, so far, held their places. Imagine how different things would be if they were replicated even a few times?
Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is.
The problem is that they’ll, again, fight you every step of the way. An ideological takeover will have to happen over their dead bodies, and meanwhile they’ll keep demanding concessions so they don’t expel you from the party and disallow you from running for primaries. The crux of the issue with the ideological takeover route is that this contradiction will lose you legitimacy in the eyes of your supporters as you’re forced into compromise after compromise in order not to alienate the neoliberals, and they’ll give you fucking nothing in return.
Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment.
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
That’s exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.
No third party that isn’t self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.
No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again.
Ross did that well because of disappointment with the political establishment, which… gestures broadly. He also had clear issues that held back his campaign, issues that someone running for 2028 or 2032 will be able to fix. Also while the environment of 1992 won’t exist again, the environment of 2025 didn’t exist in 1992. In the words of (maybe) Winston Churchill: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
A Socialist party would not only not have a chance in hell, the votes it would siphon off would lead to a resounding victory for the Reich Wing. A strong Socialist candidate (or several) in the Democratic Primary wouldn’t win either, but would drag the debate to the left and force/enable the more moderate candidate to support the kinds of goals and programs that used to define the Democratic Party in order to win, without being labeled and dismissed as “Socialist” by swing voters. However, we’ve already seen what happened when leftists decided to sit out the General election because nobody was good enough for them.
Not just presidential matters. Local and state are much less fucked with. A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united. Division in the American system is just a way to have the other party win. Republicans allowed the Tea party because that is what they wanted as well. Neolibs won’t allow a split progressive/socialist with the exception of Bernie (because how do you fuck with Vermont).
A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united.
If you start local and strategically spread (or create a mass movement and go for the jugular) you can remove the neoliberals from the equation and make socialists and fascists the only two choices.
Or work to implement ranked choice voting. The more localities use it, the more comfortable people get with it (the primary anti-ranked choice argument is it’s “too confusing for voters”), the more chance it has to be adopted by more states beyond the current Maine and Alaska beachhead.
And. And work to implement ranked choice voting. The FPTP system is the root of all this. The reason you can’t realistically consider voting for a third party, and why those who did (or sat home since they had nothing realistic to vote for) handed power to Trump.
But all that will take time and is not going to help in the next couple of elections. So there also needs to be a short to medium term plan.
At the presidential level, yes the DNC has been terrible with candidates. However they aren’t in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can’t stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between. They can make it harder for these people to win, but they can’t stop or control city, county, or state elections. We need a base of elected officials pushing them to change their tack.
However they aren’t in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can’t stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between
Okay I could be wrong, but can they not make up excuses bar whoever they don’t like from primaries? Or make up other excuses and run their own neoliberal candidate and split the vote anyway? They just… nominated Harris in 2024 so clearly they’re not obligated to even hold primaries.
The DNC doesn’t control state elections, the local democratic parties do. It is up to the state parties to run their primary (or caucus) as they choose. The DNC can influence primaries with spending, but they don’t make the rules for state-levrl primaries.
And are the local parties not subordinate to the DNC?
Presidential primaries are the weird ones because they’re spread over all the states. Otherwise candidates just need to do whatever to get on the ballot(usually gather signatures) and then win the election. Parties can throw their weight behind one candidate in particular but that’s not the same as declaring a winner. AOC got into Congress by beating a party backed incumbent in a primary.
No, it changes by having a chair that cares more about beating Republicans than beating progressives…
And we have that now
The fight over the party was over more than a month ago when the Chair election happened.
Neoliberals lost, the party of today is not the same party as 2 months ago, the chair is basically a dictatorship with all the power and zero accountability
Guess we’ll see. The only thing I’ve seen Dems (as a party) do in the past month is roll over and show their belly.
You’re talking about elected politicians.
That is not the DNC.
Party leadership isn’t the DNC.
For the past 30 years they’ve been intertwined, because we kept getting neoliberal chairs and the party leaders are neoliberals. And they worked together to prevent progressives from gaining ground.
Ken Martin wasn’t born yesterday, you can look at Minnesota and what they did under his leadership as state chair, and the type of politicians who got to office with his help.
He’s not perfect, but he won’t stand in the way of progress, and that’s all we need to get a non-neoliberal to the general in 2028.
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said it won’t be fixed through primaries and was genuinely flummoxed as to what you thought primaries were for.
Having read what you actually wrote – now –, the world is much more coherent.
If I stay home, that’ll show those Democrats
Time for the neoliberal world order to end
Monkey’s paw curls
We now have a fascist world order.
I mean the “neoliberal world order” was just facism abroad.
Pretty much.
…which is the true goal of these “hello there, fellow leftist” bastards who exclusively attack Democrats.
If they occupy the only space to defeat Trump and they do a bad job at it, of course they get “attacked.”
If they don’t want to be criticized, they shouldn’t be public figures. If they don’t want to have people have actual reasons to call them out, they shouldn’t have and keep unpopular policies. If they don’t want to represent their people, they shouldn’t be in office.
You act like them being politicians gives you the right to spread propaganda.
Propaganda = criticism
Got it, don’t call out your favorite team, they’re immune to critcism. Calling them out is
wokepropaganda. Sources proving them owned by corporations?DEI newsRussian media.
I think it’s the true goal of these “actually Joe Biden is great and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise” bastards who exclusively attack leftists. Thinly veiled reverse psychology designed to piss people off into not voting or voting third party.
I’ll never get how they think critizing Democrats is a personal attack on them. I’ve never considered it despite being registered Dem for 99% of my time as a voter.
If you can get pissed off enough to vote for literal fucking Nazis, you deserve the attacks.
Agreed.
The democrat dinosaurs will panic, telling us the large donations will dry up, without which a campaign cannot be won.
Then we need to remind them that they’re not doing a whole lot of winning at the moment.
If I want a paycheck I have to do my job, if I don’t do my job I won’t get paid.
If they want donations they’re going to have to earn with with actions, not plans or promises.I mean, they are doing their job. It’s just that their job is to keep the left down, not to win.
Far out
you had something ti vote for that was radically different from trump
you didn’t vote for it, you got trump
simple
Try actually voting
A lesser of two evils is not radically different.
if people can’t see the difference between harris and trump at this point i completely understand why trump accidentally got elected
oopsie
Sounds great. But maybe you should get out of your bubble every now and then to realize that a party full of open socialists would 100% fail in the US.
I am aware of how popular Bernie’s policy goals are. It does not matter.
You might be right, but I also submit that, when talking to Trump voters (older family members of me and my friends mostly), instead of “proving them wrong” about Trump, I’ve been redirecting the conversation toward “isn’t all that bad stuff the fault of rich people?”, and it has had a 100% success rate so far. They fucking hate the wealthy too. They ain’t waving the red flag, but I bet a lot more of them would vote for someone just to screw over the rich than most people think.
Ocasio-Cortez/Sanders 2028
Democrats: No we need to do this
This is why we lose. Fucking unite for something, geez
I feel that Sanders is probably too old and that he can pass the torch on at the next election. It’s sad, but I still don’t think we need an 80 year old running for office.
My money is that we’ll say the same thing about him in 10 years
nah fuck that. Bernie will go out in a blaze of glory, double middle fingers to the sky, falling straight from the oval office into a coffin after guaranteeing All Americans get equal access to universal healthcare and a secondary four year/vocational school education. He’ll take money out of politics and raise taxes on the 1% so hard they’ll revert back into normal fuckin people. He’ll invest in High speed rail, green energy, while simultaneously legalizing weed.
The man has been working his whole life towards these goals, I say we help him get there.
I think Walz/Ocasio-Cortez would be a much more popular and palatable suggestion for the electorate, even though I personally prefer your proposal
Nah, we tried appealing to the center shit and that got us nowhere. Go hard on restoring working class America. Fuck racism, sexism, and ignorance - that shit got us a slow slide down to where we are now .
Kick the fucking oligarchs out and tax the fuck out of them. Rich should mean enough money to be very comfortable and never worry again, but not enough to buy elections.
That’s naïve as fuck and it’s not worth the risk. We need to eject these fucking assholes. AOC on the VP will draw in all the same people who she would otherwise attract as president. Bernie is too old for many, many people. Walz is a leftist who can speak in safe, simple White-America terms aand appeal to people who would are wary about AOC. Yes, it sucks that America is sexist, but it also sucks that we are plummeting into fascism. This is a winning ticket.
Now thats a ticket I think a lot of Dems could get excited about. Focus on economic messaging, maybe put trans issues on the downlow (WITHOUT throwing us under the bus, not suggesting go full McBride) and youre golden
if Americans are going to just sit and wait, the US won’t be recognizable in 4 years, and there sure as hell won’t be a free and fair election
Many Americans are not. There’s protests happening everyday, across the country. It’s, not being talked about but it’s absolutely happening.
Besides bluesky, can we start seeing more of the protests here on lemmy? And see it flood the pages here? If someone just posts one a day from each location, that will kick start enough people to join
Be safe. Be discreet. The administration is violent right now and accelerating. They are violating civil and human rights. Get involved in your local offline chapters, please. These places are being watched too and pictures may be used to nab others that attend. They also may be used/posted for predatory reasons. Protect yourselves and your comrades in arms. Unless you know what you are doing (and even then think 2x), do not bring your phone to protests. Keep it charged in a place you frequent.
I get what you’re saying, but if a protest is not seen, was it really effective?
It’s working when they don’t want people to see it. The revolution will not be televised. This isn’t something for media. That is cheap and doesn’t actually change things. People need to leave the house, build community, collaborate and organise, in person. Social media won’t protect you when ICE knocks, but a neighbour will. It’s not real life.
Exactly my thoughts. We’ll get trump 3.0.
I think after Biden and then Trump, people will be completely fed up with old white guys. I seriously doubt even Santa Claus could get elected. I’m in my 60s and a huge Bernie fan but we need some younger people on the ticket.
They’ll get disappeared long before they get a chance to be on the bill
