If I understand your comment, you are framing this as republicans looking to split the dems using propoganda. I think its much more complicated than that. It's a fact that traditional Dem voters are far past focussing solely on republicans as the root of all of our problems. Dems and republicans have 26-27% of the voter registrations each and independents are 45%. You can only eff Dem voters in the rear and ignore their problems so many times (while committing a massively unpopular genocide for donations) before Dem voters stop considering their party as representing them-- and they'll sit on the couch when they do.

Its convenient for people to pretend its a dem vs republican fight, but its really dem vs republicans vs couch. Couch is doing really well lately. People are sick of Trump's idiocy and also sick of the DNC's incompetence, self interest, and outright treachery. There is no democracy here until we make it happen.

He wasn’t impeached over tariffs in 2018.

well, my info was horribly wrong. I thought I might have confused one of the failed attempts at impeachment from the first term, but it wasn't that either.

70s from within your own party, especially Republicans, is pretty freaking bad.

Bad for these hyerpartisans times, yes. But this wasn't the norm, even as far back as 15 years ago.

But it's part of why GOP congress is still spineless. A lot of their constituents still think Trump is doing a "good job". Or at least that's what they say out loud.

When there's enough people doing similar.

It's almost as if you don't count at all unless you vote. Amazing really.

If there are that many unhappy people then a difference actually could be made. Assuming they do anything.

It's starting to work now. DSA is winning primaries all over the place.

It took the French hundreds of years and multiple revolutions to overcome their nobility. 25 years is not that long in the wide view of things. Especially when you want to achieve change peacefully, which we should.

This isn't nationals. There's too many races here (every House seat and 33 Senate seats) for them to fight every progressive candidate. That's why you occasionally see them give up and endorse a few progressives here and there.

Also, most of their work is done in the primaries. They tend to just accept the D candidate once that is done and over with. That's what happened with Mamdmi. Mostly because that's honestly more important than the real election, and also because they kind of have to to keep the ruse up.

You know he ran against Bush the I and Bob Dole, right.

Then worked hand-in-glove with Phil Graham and Larry Pressler to dismantle the US regulatory state, sure.

And she ran against the demented rapist crook.

How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy

But look - on voting day a competent liberal is better than an incompetent rapist sycophant, n’est-ce pas?

First show me some of the former. A congo line of Andrew Cuomos and Gavin Newsoms and Gretchen Whitmires and Bob Menendezes and Michael Flynns have not been kind to the liberal party over the last generation.

How many Democrats spent a decade sucking up to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for a bucket of money, back in the Obama Era? How many worked hand-in-glove with Amazon and Boeing and Palantir, in the name of economic growth? How many sat on the board of Walmart and Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor Company, while pretending a liberal populism?

At some point, you have to take the blinders off.

We've seen quite a few time that Musk has ended up spoiling votes. Because he did quite a good job tanking his own rep with the DOGE BS last yeast.

Money can't trump voters when voters are paying attention.

Nah, let’s make sure the progressives and democratic socialists take over the Democratic Party

That's wrong, you need to coopt the dems until they are a progressive party. Same as how MAGA turned the reps into an absolutely insane party.

Yeah, I'm not defending the democrats. I'm just saying the reason they have support is they're perceived as not as bad as the nazis and it's really fucking tragic that America is at that point where all a party has to do to get support is be perceived as the only viable alternative to literal nazis.

Like I said, it's a tragically low bar. They're seen as the only feasible alternative to the actual nazis

I'll take a bunch of somewhat-socialist representatives over no hardcore-socialist reps.

Bothsiderism will be the death of civilization. Unfortunately, the corporate media has done a lot to build this and to continue to prop it up. There is a lot of money behind the effort to get people to check out.

Yeah, I really don't understand.

I'm pretty left from an ideological perspective - universal free healthcare, state-owned or funded basic necessities, food and safety nets, guaranteed worker protections, eliminate billionaires and restore sane worker wages through sane tax and maximum employee/ceo pay multipliers, public-funded childcare services, free or nearly-entirely state-funded tuition through at least college. That cost is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on war and pork barrel. And the way you get there is by taking steps toward it to eventually get there.

If one's position is all-or-nothing or that democrats are ineffectual so they're equally bad and therefore we must oppose both, that's basically saying to move from point A to point B, we must teleport rather than walk or drive or take the train. That ensures we never get there... because that metaphorical teleportation is fiction, and no, setting the world on fire doesn't magically create incentives or conditions that in any way help discover teleportation.

If you didn't experience Boing Boing's descent in ridiculously cartoonish hyper-partisan more-leftist-than-thou purity testing and virtual struggle sessions/Oppression Olympics before they took the comments behind a paywall (! lol. rotflmao, even), it was really quite something. I'm sure that kind of thing has been repeated elsewhere, but this was quite public.

You can still see the old comments, by the way. I would try to find some older thread that perfectly demonstrates this absurd "leftist" circle jerk/circular firing squad, but since they tended to excise anything that made them look stupid (quite easy by the way), one would have to a lot of reading between the lines about what happened after their Stalin squad got done with things.

At least here, there is not an insane cadre of mods and prominent commenters running the place like a Mean Girls spinoff...here, I tend to block the moronic people that want to play the terminally online communist armchair theorists. I went to college; I had my fill of their utopian boring bullshit back then and don't need lectures from them on how to do leftism properly now, either.