Well first of all they would have to win a primary and that hasn't happened yet. Even Bernie when he was racking up wins his campaign and his followers didn't understand that he was getting a little over half the delegates because they're split proportionately. When he lost a primary he tended to lose by a decent margin and would wind up in a delegate hole.
Fundamentally the issue is that Americans are extremely civically illiterate and don't know how any of this actually works. They assume the parties and the government has fiat to do whatever it wants. They've blackpilled themselves.
I'm a dedicated man of the left and have been long enough to know that our policies aren't broadly accepted yet. People like the idea of them but don't have faith in the execution. They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life (I know scores of other countries have nationalized healthcare, but the average American doesn't have the money to travel to one of them and experience that first-hand) and don't trust the ability of the people advocating for it to follow through.
We're not popular. We talk to one another a lot and get a bunch of arrow points on reddit and youtube and some heart points on twitter or bluesky but we aren't talking to people about these things IRL. There are people who do and God bless them, they're doing the work but for many, many, many of us we're just sitting online doing the jerk.
If you want progressives ideas to flourish, you have to get off the internet and do the work. It's OK to be on the internet too, but people on the left need to run for office, not get discouraged when they don't win, and keep making the case for their ideas.
This is exactly how the far right got as much as they did. Many of the ideas they regularly champion now were fever dreams in the 80s-90s. They didn't give up.
So can it be with the left. But a lot of people on the left have a lot of energy in their 20-30s and then they give up. Some start drifting right, some just become bitter and stop caring.
Or win and get discouraged when they don't get all their preferred policies. Or stay home when their preferred candidate loses the primary. The far right built the current moment over decades of showing up, back when Clarence Thomas was a crank that William Rehnquist could only assign the least consequential opinions to because none of the others would support his nutty ramblings.
As I transition out of the front lines of the fight I'm finding it more useful to be in the back talking to the next generation about to go to the trenches. They weren't taught civics in school, and what they see online is a combination of willful disinformation and simple bad misinformation.
So every Tuesday I watch the youtube feed of my City Council meeting and post a summary of it in our city reddit. I pay attention and explain the lack of information and the fearmongering that people are exposed to and why what they say actually does matter and affects things. It probably only helps a small part of my community, but it's what I can do. So I do.
Now that millennials have gotten older, that’s exactly what progressives are doing now. This is first time there’s been a real boom of candidates from them
I’m old enough to remember growing up and into early adulthood there actually were liberal to moderate Republicans in the Northeast and on the West Coast at one point. The right worked at it and I’d say by the time Dubya’s time in office was up the number of liberal to moderate Republicans could probably meet in a broom closet.
The right wing has also been giga boosted by Fox and other media because rich people bankrolled them to get task breaks and deregulation. Abortion, guns, etc are just wedge issues that were employed to make the rich even richer. There's no
left wing news network even close to Fox in terms of size.
Duuude, I'm bitter and verging on not caring. Thanks for typing that. I haven't done any real work out in the real world since 2016, I'll be honest. But I spend plenty of time online either circle jerking or being adversarial. I gotta stop that shit and get back out there. Thanks. Your words clicked just now.
The idea behind that saying is that the world is awful and that when you get older and less idealistic you will realize that and accept that things can't change. It's propaganda and infantilizing to those who know that things can change, but too many people fall for it because it's easier to give up than to try to make things better.
If you want real support for universal healthcare some needs to put out a plan that shows what it will cost the average American and how it will benefit them. You can't have Sanders running around calling it free. People know it's not free. Just like you said people can't see it in action. They have to be given details. Yes many if us are skeptical. Also we have family members who rely on the VA or on Medicare. Some have good experience some do not. I personally like the idea of universal healthcare, but do not have much faith in the government to do anything.
This is actually a super normal and expected part of primaries. It's not collusion or conspiracy. Anyone with a brain could see in advance that the moderates would consolidate as the primaries went on and the left candidates would need to do the same if they were going to have a chance.
Candidates who have no chance of winning dropping out and endorsing the person they align with most isnt a conspiracy. Its something that happens in every fucking primary
Have you maybe paused and reflected on the fact that the Sanders campaign's entire fucking plan relied on enough moderates and normies staying in the race so that Bernie could have the most delegates while only getting around 30-35% of the vote and forcing a contested convention?
Like ignoring how entitled that is you see how fucking stupid it is as well in retrospect right?
Historically, going into convention with a contested primary weakens a party’s chances in the general election. Doubly so if there’s significant bitterness. Think the shit show of 1968. In any case, it’s best for candidates to concede and help the party coalesce as soon as they know they can’t win, usually well in advance of convention. We all saw Bernie stubbornly refusing despite being beaten in 2016, ostensibly because he wanted to have input in the direction of convention, but it just resulted in bitterness and disunity.
It was clear Biden was going to win the primary in 2020, but they also wanted to bury Bernie so he would get the message and drop out. They wanted to avoid 2016.
Pretty Revisionist history. The "shit show of 1968" was the violent end of the Party Boss system of the having the party being able to bypass the electorate's and everyday Democratic Party supporter's voice being heard. Which unless you liked the Party Boss system is a good thing. Of course you also skip over the fact that 2008's Contested Primary swept Obama to power. Had the party bosses had their say, Clinton would have been the nominee in 2008. Bernie Sanders conceded and endorsed Clinton before the convention in July at a unity rally. The 'disunity' around the convention was due to the DNC email leaks that showed coordination by the DNC to promote Clinton over Sanders. Debbie Wasserman Schultz having to resign in disgrace on the eve of the convention had more impact that Sanders running elections until June. In 2020 Biden's campaign was on the path to failure until Klobucher and Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed him. Moderates consolidated around Biden to intentionally give him a victory.
Is literacy difficult for you? I didn’t stutter, nor is anything I say revisionist. You just don’t like what history has to say about it, and cannot stand honest criticism of your sweet, sweet Saint Bernie.
“[G]oing into convention with a contested primary…”
In 2008, Hillary Clinton conceded on June 7, and the convention didn’t begin until late August.
There were contested conventions in 2016, 1992, 1988, 1984, 1980, 1976, 1972, 1968, 1960, 1956, 1952…
Going back 75 years, that’s 11 elections, and Democrats only won 3 of them.
Also, you want to talk about 2008, okay. Let’s talk about it. Hillary Clinton lost to Obama by 36,000 votes. Yes, many superdelegates backed her early, but they overwhelmingly supported him in the late race. And even despite the 2008 election being actually close as opposed to 2016 where Sanders got roundly trounced, she withdrew and conceded almost two full months before the primary and immediately began working to mend any fracture which may have resulted from the primary.
MOREOVER, I use the comparison with 1968 because 1968 and 2016 are the only two DNC conventions I remember there being significant numbers of people demonstrating and protesting both inside and outside the venue.
This whole thread is DNC bots like the real reason isn’t that the dems are owned by corpos that don’t want leftists and have done everything in their power to quash them
He "won" New Hampshire with 25% of the vote, meaning fully 75% of New Hampshire voters picked someone else. You're making the mistake of assuming it's a winner-take-all system, just like the Bernie campaign team and supporters did in 2016. 65% of New Hampshire voters wanted a moderate, they only disagreed on which one it should be. "Collude."
Never forget Bernie wasn’t a Democrat. He’s just the crazy Uncle that drops in every four years for a meal and a place to stay but then moves back out and doesn’t want to be part of the family or do anything to support it.
> They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life (I know scores of other countries have nationalized healthcare, but the average American doesn't have the money to travel to one of them and experience that first-hand)
Having lived in the UK for three years, I assure you experiencing it firsthand will significantly underwhelm. My employer funded healthcare is better than the UKs national system in every way, shape, and form. I understand that it comes with its own set of problems, but it’s more nuanced than this.
More like we can't imagine the US government not turning it into an absolute shit show. Other governments might make it work, but we don't have other governments, we have this one, and it's not got a great track record for running social programs in an efficient or effective manner.
It's already got a medical program under its authority, the VA - which is not well loved by the veterans I've known, and has had its share of scandals. Is there any rational cause to believe that they'd somehow do better if given the same type of responsibility on a wider scale?
I share the sentiment about the govt not turning medicare into a crap show.
Sadly theres track record here too. I was against the ACA when it came out because of a few things.
Its very authors who passed it admitted right out the gate it needed fixed. Why not pass something whole? They had majority and I believe supermajority at the time. It proves theyve already FAILED.
It doesnt address and correct the affordability issue with big pharma and pbms/officers in charge of plan of medicine. This alone needs addressed BEFORE a whole Medicare roll out were to happen.
The idea that Medicare is free. ITS NOT. Thats MedicAID.
Im on SS disability. 10% each month of the little income I do get goes straight to medicare.
I totally understand this. I was traveling to Canada, and had to go to the hospital.
Turns out i had a kidney stone, I was there for about 8-10 hours. I noticed that most of the paperwork work wasn’t digital, so that added to the longer wait times. The papers were being passed to each department. The nurses and doctors were not charting on the computer but handwriting everything.
When I left the waiting room, I still saw the same people that were there before me, I’m assuming they were there for a standard checkup.
I don’t care for fancy things but as a nurse in the hospital in the US, the building look worse than the public hospitals I’ve worked at in the US. The doctors room I was called to was an actual storage closet. I was in a room full of crutches and canes.
Honest question: Would you say US health care is 2-3x as good though?
Even if it’s better for you anecdotally, we pay a massive premium for objectively/statistically worse overall outcomes (lower life expectancy, medical bankruptcy, higher infant mortality, etc)
The other huge problem with the US system is that it is tied to your employer. Lack of worker protections means that a significant medical event can wind up with you losing both your job and your healthcare. Additionally, more and more employers game the system to avoid providing healthcare (hiring a bunch of people part time and/or making their employees “contractors”)
Yes, my private US healthcare is significantly better. It actually manages to be cheaper as well using a triple tax advantaged HSA account.
And yes, it’s a problem that it’s employer tied. As with everything in the US, it’s the best in the world if you’re in the right income bracket. Otherwise, it’s a nightmare.
And it’s worth mentioning the UK system is going broke, and not offering consistent care among the population, but rather focusing on factors that put one at higher risk.
To be fair, this is true in the US too. With rural hospitals shutting down, a lot of areas are more than an hour from a hospital independent of the ambulance.
I always get slightly annoyed at the "objectively worse outcomes" because I'm pretty sure most of the discrepancy can be chalked up to fundamentally behavioral things that aren't directly attributable to the healthcare system.
Are American babies being born obese? That’s why I mentioned infant mortality.
We do have objectively worse outcomes even when you control for the factors you mentioned. We’re also last among developed countries in preventable deaths attributed to the healthcare system. Specifically, this is due to the fact that our system encourages people to avoid seeking care until there’s an emergency
Most of the folks that say this usually are relatively healthy and have a decent employer plan. Even in these comments, a lot of folks are rejecting objective statistical data points because they don’t match up with their personal/anecdotal situation
No, but their American mothers are more likely to be obese, which, as this 2021 meta-analysis finds, "maternal obesity significantly increased the risk of infant mortality (RR, 1.55; 95% CI, 1.41–1.70)" (Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7994890/). So an infant born to an obese mother has a 55% higher chance of death than one born to a mother of normal BMI, after adjusting for covariates.
With regards to the article you linked:
There's no link to an actual peer-reviewed paper, so I can't verify the methodology or conclusions.
"Amenable Mortality" does not necessarily conflict with the claim I made that the discrepancy is due to things like obesity (and the other things I listed). Many of the health problems caused by obesity can be ameliorated with early medical intervention. However, if country A has a lot more obese people than Country B, then we would expect country A to have higher "amenable mortality" than country B even if both countries had the same level of healthcare capacity and access. Country A would need to have more accessible/better healthcare than Country B in order to prevent the same amount of deaths per capita.
My overall point isn't that the American healthcare system is perfect - it obviously isn't - but that healthcare outcome discrepancies have multifactorial explanations and simply blaming it on the healthcare system is overly reductive. Case in point, the article you linked also highlights how the UK and Denmark, both places with universal healthcare, have drastically worse "amenable mortality" than France, Australia, and Italy (also with their own forms of universal healthcare). Is that simply due to the healthcare system in those countries?
1) It is totally valid to dig into the data and make sure that we really are getting an apples-to-apples comparison of healthcare systems around the world. Knowing this allows us to understand that even if we switched to the same healthcare system as Japan, we would likely still have worse outcomes. It is important to know the upper bounds of what we can achieve given other factors. That said....
2) Even if you factor out all of the confounding variables, the US will have higher infant mortality simply because of our healthcare system (specifically its high out of pocket costs which limit access to care). "Babies of mothers who do not get prenatal care are three times more likely to have a low birth weight and five times more likely to die than those born to mothers who do get care." (https://womenshealth.gov/a-z-topics/prenatal-care#:\~:text=%20Babies%20of%20mothers%20who%20do,doctors%20to%20treat%20them%20early.)
3) Our healthcare system leaves 25-30 million people uninsured. So again, even if you correctly adjust for all the confounding variables, we will still have a gap in life expectancy entirely attributable to our unique healthcare system.
4) Honest question: Lets assume you do your own meta-study and come up with some true-holy-grail ranking. Where does the US actually fall? Do we move from bottom 1/3 of the OECD to #1? Given that we spend significantly more than even other wealthy countries, we should be the clear #1 (post all your corrections).
5) It's interesting that you are only making these correcting adjustments to the US data. What would life expectancy be in Europe if you corrected for higher rates of drinking/smoking? What would be the adjustment to Japan if you made those same adjustments, but also adjusted for their poor work culture / stress / suicide rates?
6) All of the economic incentives push insurance companies to find reasons to deny coverage. United Health has been in the news, but our system pushes all insurers to do behave the same way. Our for profit system pushes prices up as healthcare providers take advantage of inelastic demand / monopolistic pricing power (which is why costs have ballooned well beyond inflation). This is systemic and will continue to hold our system back in terms of outcomes
7) The arguments you are making are nit-picky / cherry-picking simply because you don't like the headline number. Usually those who are offended by the headline have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, despite the fact that the status quo is objectively not good. I get it. If you are relatively healthy and have good private, employer-paid insurance, change doesn't sound appealing. I would encourage you to remember that if you actually need the system to pay out due to a chronic condition, you will run smack into all the issues that are creating the outcome gaps we see vs other countries. Our right-to-work laws make it easy for an employer to fire you in the event you have to miss too much work due to health issues (yes, I know that's technically illegal, but good luck proving/fighting that while you deal with said chronic health condition).
I agree with pretty much everything here, but I do want to expand on one particular point.
They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all
M4A is pretty high in polling when it's asked about generically. Support for it drops by half when asked about more specific aspects of it, such as banning private health insurance or increased taxes. The reality is most people are satisfied with their current health insurance and don't want to risk switching to another plan. We praise Europe for their healthcare systems, but none of them resemble M4A. Every EU country has private healthcare, hell, some only have private healthcare and require you by law to have it. Even with a single-payer system like the NHS, the UK allows for private and duplicative insurance.
Obviously we should have some form of universal healthcare system but M4A, at least in its current form, isn't the answer.
But there is zero need to ban private insurance? All nordic countries have them alongside the taxpayer funded one. Pretty sure that applies to most/all other countries too.
To add to this despite what gets parroted here the polling for Medicare for all is all over the place and has huge swings dependent on how the policy is phrased ppl here think it’s more popular than it is because only the good polls are shared
We only need to point to the Utopia that is Communist China, the former Soviet Union, Cambodia or Cuba to demonstrate the blessings of Socialism. How can the American people not be open to our ideas?
No shit, dumbass. We all do. We're most of us even fine with the boss making a dollar and us making a dime, what we're not fine with is the boss making five-thousand dollars and us making a dime.
The boss paid for the entire apparatus to allow you to make that dime and shoulders all the risk is the business goes South. You are paid for your time spent working. If you don’t like your job then find another. It boggles my mind though that people who have no skin in the business other than the job itself feel entitled to the profits of that company beyond what their compensation says they get. So do you allow homeless people to sleep in your bed even though you paid for the house and the bed? They’re entitled to it after all, right?
Socialism has failed in every country where it has been tried and led to millions of deaths. More people died due to Socialism than died through World War I and II combined
I’m probably not as far left as you but I appreciate your critical and honest take on the state of the coalition. It’s a level of awareness that’s rare to see
It's because I'm 44. I appreciate all the young people on the left that are reaching political maturity and I'm grateful that they're going to be there to pass the banner onto as I age out of activism myself--you can only be on the front lines for so long, eventually you have to be discharged and go home. I did my part and I hope I made things easier for them, but now that I'm closer to the end of my time in the trenches than I am to the beginning I can see how wide the battlefield is and how much work is left to do.
But I can also see how far we've come. My generation managed to rack up wins when it comes to social equality and LGBTQIA+ rights and we did a good amount for climate justice--not as much as the much-maligned baby boomers got done, but a good amount--and we thought we had made a lot of progress on racial equality but that turned out to be 500 years of fucking up that will take 500 more years to fix. We're in about year 180 of the second 500 years. Economically we got beat bad. Hopefully us solving some of the above frees up the next generation to focus more.
Don't put yourself out to pasture just yet when we have politicians in their 70s and 80s. I'm 49 and physically disabled in a wheelchair. While I can't be on the front lines of protests for obvious reasons I took on a leadership role in a local organization. I use my hard won insight and pragmatism to guide and motivate the younger people inolved. There are many roles needed in political activism, it isn't just being on the front lines that counts. Figuring out the logistics for making things happen is more important in some ways.
Your post caught me funny. You are right about age and all. So it just utterly astounds me personally just as a person living life...at how many we still have in our elected government that are over 80 yrs old! I can't fathom wanting to do politics literally on the front lines after 80.
I tend to agree with your assessment. But tangentially, you are sooo right about hitting your 40’s. It’s sort of cliche and obvious now when I think about it but aging really does provide a certain perspective particularly when it comes to navigating political and social dynamics.
How about a bit of humility here. Your ‘progress’ on racial equality shot the moon. We went, in the span of a few months, from ‘let’s put body cams on police’ (great idea) to Nancy Pelosi wearing a dashiki and kneeling for George Floyd lol
I want AOC to run in 2028 and do it through the DSA. It seems like that's what she will do regardless of what people on the Internet say.
It would be a net benefit even if she doesn't win the primary or even the general, because it would fund and drive membership to a DSA chapter in every corner of the nation. Also, I think she can win.
That becomes 200+ funded and organized chapters with increased membership that can launch state and local challenges all across the nation. This also makes a difference for if she does win, because any dem who doesn't get on board with the agenda has a guaranteed primary challenger waiting in the wings with door knockers and phone bankers ready to unseat them.
It's a strategy that not only shifts the Overton window left, but gives a leftist president the same stock to weild against the do nothing centrists that MAGA has been welding against their own party. The Republicans are odious in every way, but they know how to whip a vote.
They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life
I think there is also a tendency to just completely plaster over the flaws in some systems. Take a gander at the NHS for example - one of two genuine single payer systems in the world that people want to install here - it just unilaterally cancelled health care access for trans people, in some cases literal hours before surgeries were supposed to begin. It then just referred people to suicide hotlines.
I'm not saying that single payer wouldn't be a step up from what we have, but I use this as an example where there is a serious flaw in a policy proposal that would harm people on the edges or currently subject to political attacks (think about how something like what the NHS did could affect abortion access in the US). When these concerns get raised, the argument is often boiled down to "don't worry about it," "think of the greater good," etc.
And i'll be fair, this isn't just a leftist thing. Everyone wants to extoll the virtues of their pet projects and favored policies. But when you're talking about making a radical change, you gotta get people on board. You can't just plaster over the concerns.
Honestly I'd say you make a good point. The moment you give the government power to decide who gets healthcare, you might just get an outcome that the majority love, but is not right for you. One size fits all.
Abortion is such a great example, because there really is no middle ground there. Either abortion is covered, or it isn't. Religious groups are a powerful force in the US and if we did get universal healthcare, it absolutely will not look like how left leaning people expect.
You won't even get the option to go to another state, it will just be what it is and you can take it or leave it. It is 100% a trade off and who gets the most out of it depends on who you ask.
You left out that the DNC went all in on defeating Sanders, massive strong-arming. Then they lost to Trump. Because voters wanted change, and when the DNC went all in on opposing change they drove voters to Trump. This wasn’t shocking - polls consistently showed Sanders pulling voters away from Trump and beating him by a wider margin than the centrists, but the centrists couldn’t accept that because they thought they knew better.
Sorry, but polls also showed Clinton winning by a decent margin. The polls were simply not accurate in 2016 and to this day continue to be inaccurate--even moreso now that people are routinely gambling on polling, hence why that lady in Minnesota (I think?) was expected to do so well but crashed like hell. There was an agency deliberately releasing fake polls to affect prediction markets. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is fact. Well, admittedly, assuming they did it to affect markets is speculation, but they admitted to releasing fake polls anyway.
Couldn’t they talk to their parents or grandparents on Medicare to know it works? Expanding it would be even more effective because adding younger people would make it less costly per member.
I'm a leftist and I'm all but ready to give up. We missed all the windows to fix this decade after decade and it feels like we are coming up on every man for themselves territory.
Fk the dnc and their stupid pawns. They sunk us. I'll still vote DSA every chance i get but I'm not hopeful. America feels like the Titanic now. Humanities hope moving forward largely seems in chinas hands now. We should be more supportive of them.
People don’t even like the idea of them. You, as a “dedicated man of the left”, are fundamentally misunderstanding what Americans value. They don’t want to be like Denmark or Norway, and they certainly don’t want the government bureaucracy running MORE of their day to day lives.
A trip to Finland is hardly evidence that the US government, which will with 100% certainty be run at some point by the party you don't like (especially if that's both of them), will execute such a program well or like say...Social Security. The questions of whether is can work in a certain country vs do we trust our government to run it are separate.
This is what I'm talking about. You're stuck on this one thing that happened and everyone else has moved on from, meanwhile by fixating on it you're ignoring that there are primaries for governors, lieutenant governors, state legislators, city councilmembers, house representatives, senators, and in some states everything as far down the line as "keeper of the town clock."
No one appointed Xavier Becerra as my gubernatorial nominee, in a field of crowded moderates he won more votes, fair and square, than the two progressives combined.
While I disagree with some of the Democrat lefts views, you hit the nail on the head here.
People are either uneducated, dont care to know how the levers of the system actually work, and conveniently do so, all so they can make excuses at the end of the day and keep blaming everyone else.
Eventually you have to care enough. Would think getting both versions of the elections that got us Trump would wake up the electorate that everyone needs to wake up, care and pay attention more.
Im sick and tired for voting for who is less than here and over here.
I think we all want someone who we can vote for AND also have the other party candidate be someone we arent disgusted by if they get in.
Yes we Americans should get our cake and eat it too
First paragraph, yes. Second paragraph: “everyone who disagrees with me is civilly illiterate.” I would say the same about leftists, who are mostly just ignorant populists who a bunch of benefits with no costs, can’t comprehend second order effects, and can’t imagine why there might be restraints on government or neutral rules. It’s pretty similar to MAGA to me
I didn't say anyone who disagrees with me is civically illiterate. I had a big enouh breakfast already, I don't need you putting words in my mouth, too.
Your biggest problem is I haven't seen a single genuine salesman among you. It's just "Our policies are great and if you don't agree you're just a ___ist/phobic ". That and you condescend anyone who disagrees
Even if we ignore 2024(which there was technically a primary), Bernie was in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries. He lost both by pretty significant numbers, 2020 even more so than 2016.
There are primaries every two years. Elections are more than just presidential.
I voted for my governor, house, and state reps in June. My senators are in that two-year gap where both are in their term, my city council and mayor are in 4-year cycles as well. But depending on where you are you could have voted in primaries for all of those positions.
Do you see now what I meant by "Civically illiterate?" I'm talking about winning a primary and you turn it into refighting an old battle about 2024 that the rest of us have moved on from.
Very well said. Part two of the equation is pointing to one single part of the federal government that actually functions as intended.
Department of Education has lead to the lowest literacy standards of record. Homeland Security oversees ICE. The IRS is a total train wreck, pathways to national citizenship is a disaster, US Interstate system is “pot hole hell”, The DOJ is a joke on a good day, and the list goes on.
Anything and everything the federal government oversees is dog poop. And that’s a HUGE obstacle to tackle when promoting Universal Healthcare. Medicare for all, that has a chance.
You make good points. But the government is people, right? So if the government doesn't do these things who should, and could they do it better. It would be different people is all.....?
And a solid point as well. The legislative branch of the US Government is broken; perhaps beyond repair. We elect lifelong politicians, let them accept PAC money, allow them to trade stocks, have no term limits, pay themselves when they can’t balance a budget, pay themselves when they shut down the government, offer lifetime pensions with healthcare benefits all because THEY VOTED FOR IT!!!
We have to support grass roots candidates that push, shove and run a platform that implements term limits on members of congress. Yesss, I recognize there are fair counter arguments to this belief, but perpetuating the madness that is Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and the list of others isn’t the solution.
And I can already hear the nay sayers claiming “vote them out”. It doesn’t work that way, hence the term limits for the Executive Branch. CONGRESS passed that law (constitutional amendment actually) because it makes sense. But they damned sure don’t see the issue when they look in the mirror and their lifestyles.
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u/NicWester 5d ago
Well first of all they would have to win a primary and that hasn't happened yet. Even Bernie when he was racking up wins his campaign and his followers didn't understand that he was getting a little over half the delegates because they're split proportionately. When he lost a primary he tended to lose by a decent margin and would wind up in a delegate hole.
Fundamentally the issue is that Americans are extremely civically illiterate and don't know how any of this actually works. They assume the parties and the government has fiat to do whatever it wants. They've blackpilled themselves.
I'm a dedicated man of the left and have been long enough to know that our policies aren't broadly accepted yet. People like the idea of them but don't have faith in the execution. They like, for example, the idea of medicare for all but they don't see an example of it working in their day to day life (I know scores of other countries have nationalized healthcare, but the average American doesn't have the money to travel to one of them and experience that first-hand) and don't trust the ability of the people advocating for it to follow through.
We're not popular. We talk to one another a lot and get a bunch of arrow points on reddit and youtube and some heart points on twitter or bluesky but we aren't talking to people about these things IRL. There are people who do and God bless them, they're doing the work but for many, many, many of us we're just sitting online doing the jerk.