If only.

I believe there are three reasons our broken two party system stagnates and rots:

1. Our slavery founders intended for our system to be a plutocratic republic that would resist change, not a democracy

2. The purpose of every state is to maintain order which requires preserving itself

3. Fixing our system would require our politicians to vote against their own interests, to risk their own power and status... This goes against every ideal that capitalists believe in. Capitalists believe that as long as they follow the rules, they are entitled to everything they can take. The fact that the rules were written by the rich to favor the rich is of no concern to them.

That's QUITTER talk! I'm voting for Rocky Road.

You're right - it's more like one group voting to drive off a cliff and the other voting to just drive really close to the cliff in case we decide to go off on some other vote, but so long as the cliff doesn't win now, we can focus on convincing people ice cream is the better option. We don't, and instead wait 4 more years to complain about the lack of ice cream, but that's a separate problem.

Really? Because Scandinavia has really nice ice cream. Europe too, with some problems.

The bus analogy would have been better if the only two choices were 1. to run over a bunch of poor brown kids (Israel's genocide) and being pissed on by billionaires before driving off a cliff OR 2. run over slightly fewer brown kids while being given moldy bread to eat.

If liberal democrats truly believed in democracy than they would fight to give us a multiparty system where people don't have to vote for genocide just to prevent a more evil tyrant from taking power.

You're right. And the results show that the idea that the election was lost because progressives stayed home is a complete historical myth.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turnout-trum-00426544

I just knew the comments were going to be us tearing each other apart.

That'd be point of re-re-re-rehashing this. Zohran Mamdani, using the big S word, recently won a primary. So now we all gotta go back and drag through this mud some more.

Every single independent that I know guzzled down the Orange Kool-Aid.

We just saw Progressives not voting for Harris, which lost her the election. The Democrats ignored that.

The good part is that the Democrats have no plan right now. So if anything Progressives should register to primary in better candidates. Also donations, but to individual candidates. This is why New York mattered so much. If Progressives can win, then it is a huge problem for the neoliberals.

You can't play Mexican standoff because the Dems have an out: the center voter. If they left doesn't vote them in, the Dems will go to the center to find voters. And a center voter is worth double because it's a vote for you plus a vote taken away from the GOP.

I’m just thinking out loud here. What if Progressives that are registered as Democrats changed their registration to independent? Also, stop sending them your money. We could organize it to happen over one week. Then keep it that way for 30 days. See how much power we truly have. If we can show the Democratic party that they would never win another election without us, maybe they would be more likely to listen.

I mean, honestly, if you manage to coordinate action on that scale, you're probably better off either attempting to take over the Dems or start a third party entirely.

We have to be careful though, I know this President is running roughshod over the Constitution with the blessing of SCOTUS and Congress but they don’t have enough votes or State legislatures to amend the Constitution. If they get that, then that truly is the end of this experiment.

Next election isn't for a year and a half, and there's no guarantee that it'll mean anything. If you want to try anything radical in electoral terms, now's definitely the time to do so. The chances of failure substantially changing our position is... low, unlike previously.

Username checks out?

But have you ever ridden on a bus with three people who want to drive off a cliff and four who don't care? Because that's the reality here! \s

You sound like one of those dangerous shitlibs, not wanting people to be thrown into concentration camps. Don't you know that the lives of the likes of you and me are acceptable sacrifices so that the wannabe revolutionaries can (checks notes) do nothing but feel really smug about how superior they are to The Establishment?

The delusion that democrats don't also put many people in cages is a huge part of how we got here.

Time to stop thinking this will end in 4 years with an election. American democracy died on January 20th.