I thought this was insightful.
The reality is we keep electing shitlibs to “stop fascism” and those shitlibs take that as a mandate to pretend it’s 1994 again and go full Blairite/Clintonism/neoliberalism while purging its own left flank. And it predictably has failed with catastrophic consequences EVERYWHERE this has happened.
How about if we stop doing that?
Who is “we” exactly and what is the alternative and can that alternative actually be elected?
How exactly does it happen that we avoid “shitlibs” and get more progressive people elected especially in two party nations and systems?
I suggest reforming the system – especially in the USoA – but how can that happen without people in power making that so – and then how do you get people in power wanting and working to make such reforms?
You need some kind of proportional representation system. First past the post is just a recipe for disaster.
You won’t, though. You wield a Blue MAGA commentariat who attempts to shame anyone who actually does stop doing that.
Vile as they are the fringe extremist Trump cultists and 2025 mob had something it seems the left wing of politics is incapable of – unity.
Standing behind their candidate no matter what. No matter how much some disagreed with that candidate – even if they rightly disagreed with some aspects of that candidate.
If only we’d had that unity and complete backing of the leftwing party’s nominee when it was most needed.
I fear now it is too late.
@ The trump helping bad faith troll beholder : Shame goes where it is deserved. You deserve every bit of shame and guilt laid on you and then infinitely more.
You robbed the entire world of so much better than it would have had along with the rest of the Bothsiderists, Only-Unicornists and the Trump helping traitors Stein and West.
You have caused incalculable harm, suffering, death, grief and pain.
Metaphorically, you like the other Trump enablers, have an ocean without surface or bed full of blood upon you.
All supposedly because of your dislike for the more leftwing, more progressive of the two USoA parties.
The very least you could do is admit you, Trump enabling troll “beholder” were catastrophically wrong and apologise and do everything possible to make amends -but you refuse to do so probly because you never actually wanted anything other than the Trump tyranny you worked for in the first place.
After all, you can’t say you weren’t warned and told of the consequences of your actions beforehand.
@ The trump helping bad faith troll beholder : Shame goes where it is deserved. You deserve every bit of shame and guilt laid on you and then infinitely more.
You robbed the entire world of so much better than it would have had along with the rest of the Bothsiderists, Only-Unicornists and the Trump helping traitors Stein and West.
You have caused incalculable harm, suffering, death, grief and pain.
Metaphorically, you like the other Trump enablers, have an ocean without surface or bed full of blood upon you.
All supposedly because of your dislike for the more leftwing, more progressive of the two USoA parties.
The very least you could do is admit you, Trump enabling troll “beholder” were catastrophically wrong and apologise and do everything possible to make amends -but you refuse to do so probly because you never actually wanted anything other than the Trump tyranny you worked for in the first place.
After all, you can’t say you weren’t warned and told of the consequences of your actions beforehand.
Sounds pretty accurate to me, PZ.
2016 was educational for me.
I did what I could to get Bernie Sanders the democratic nomination but the DNC put their thumb on the scales as much as they thought they could get away with and Hillary Clinton sailed past the finish line in the lead. Maybe she didn’t need the help of the DNC but somebody over there sure as hell thought she did and maybe they were right.
Bernie stumped for Hillary throughout the general election. He was really all over the place for her. But when she lost to that absurd clown Trump despite everyone’s expectations did they talk about messaging or whether her campaign focused on what was important to voters? Of course not, they blamed people like me for not voting for her (I did vote for her as I’m sure many others like me did as well). And I’ve watched as establishment dems continue to sabotage progressive candidates wherever they can ever since.
When you think about it, the reason is kind of simple. Establishment dems don’t have policies they can appeal to voters with. Not compared to progressives. They don’t have comparatively good answers to the concerns voters have. They don’t champion teh causes voters want them to. They really only have one thing: the myth of electability. Which they fuel by sabotaging progressive candidates even to the point of knowingly letting republicans get elected over progressive democrats. Why? Because in a two party system voters will get fed up and swing back to the other party soon enough. You can depend on republicans to screw things up and piss off the voters. But if voters see progressive democrats working on issues that matter to them they aren’t going to want to go back to wishy-wash corporate apologist democrats.
Vile as they are the fringe extremist Trump cultists and 2025 mob had something it seems the left wing of politics is incapable of – unity.
They also have something else too many left-of-center folks don’t have: ability, and willingness, to talk to ordinary people in terms they can understand (or at least feel they understand).
We should be able — and should have been able back in 2000 and 2016 — to make a clear and easily-understood case that Republicans and their policies are just plain wrong and phony, if not actually evil. But instead our “establishment” simply chickened out at every turn and retreated to the purely defensive, and obviously cowardly, mindset of picking ONE count it ONE thing we thought would be a “safe” and “winning issue,” campaigning on that issue alone, and all-but-explicitly conceding every other issue the people needed to hear us speaking out on. Chuck Schumer droning on about how Democrats “going forward” would focus entirely on “affordability” is just the tip of that iceberg.
Fascists are right about one thing: people need to be led. And too many Democrats — truly liberal or not — seem absolutely petrified of trying to lead people, or even talk to them about any issue with any real emotional weight. Too many of us simply don’t want to get our hands dirty with ground-level politics and messaging; which is why we’re so easily pegged as clueless out-of-touch elitists.
@6 lanir was completely correct about Bernie and the DNC.
I reply: we supported Bernie who promised to never quit the race. However, he betrayed us by caving-in to the DNC. So, we find that a strict two party system, especially like the money owned system in the u.s., almost always gives us a choice between crap and excrement.
Money owned fossils like shithead schumer and jerkoff jeffries need to get out of the way (C.O.A.D.) so honest progressives can work to overturn the magat swamp of money, lies and corruption.
@9 Raging Bee talks about lack of unity on the left.
I reply; That is correct in the sad context that it takes money to achieve widespread unity. And, Raging Bee is correct that progressives need to take the gloves off and shove the reality of the rtwingnut lies and corruption into the forefront of everyone’s mind.
Raging Bee @9:
Republicans have been flamboyant. The case to make there is that misogyny, racism, queerphobia, jingoism, etc are bad. For far too many voters, the Access Hollywood tape wasn’t a deal-breaker, nor the Muslim ban, immigrant fearmongering, etc. A down-ballot candidate mailed me a large flyer of a menacing masculine figure in a women’s bathroom.
Steve Shives – If Republicans said the quiet parts loud (2024, 17:03)
SC:
^ And the schtick of arguing to withhold or obstruct aid to hundreds of thousands of people just to spite an imagined undeserving person.
Ah yes. The ordinary people. Like you and me.
Reminds me of the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles:
Same pattern in Australia.
It has now reached the level of existential threat: Climate change is killing us, and the neoliberals have allowed it to happen.
.
“France records hottest day ever as 40 people drown across country” (chilling themselves by swimming in unsupervised waters).
.
[France has > 40° C, Britain 30-35° C]
.https://share.google/DoLMuNoV93dtl3t2h
This is a gift from the fossil fuel lobby, which has opposed action ever since the days of Bill Clinton.
I hope Hawaii (and others) are on the right track to stem the flow of money into politics. At this point the US is functionally a corporation with infinite stocks trading at one dollar each. In reality there are two elections. First the economic elite pick their candidates, then the people get to choose.
Another challenge is the way we end up fighting with one hand behind our backs. They can create havoc because they don’t care as long as they get to win. We have to be responsible, rational and law abiding.
See, your ‘we’ is, globally-speaking, “the economic elite”.
You are a member of it.
(Hierarchies all the way down, that is, and “elite capture” ≠ “authoritarian ideology”)
—
I am not surprised that some people conflate oligarchy and fascism.
@11 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
A good chunk of Republicans look at politics are more of a weird sporting event then a matter of actual national importance. They want figures that are flashy and trash talking the opponents more then they care about the quality of their policy or how well they manage things. When they do talk about policy they want it reduced to slogans.
These are the people more concerned with beating the Democrats then who they are electing or what policy they are implementing. The ones that voted Republican in the hopes of getting rid of Obamacare even though their own medical plan is an Affordable Care Act plan.
@10. shermanj : “So, we find that a strict two party system, especially like the money owned system in the u.s., almost always gives us a choice between crap and excrement.”
That’s absolute Bothsiderist bullshit.
The Democratic party was vastly better and very different to the Repug one when you look at its policies and people nominated. Did it go as far as some wanted? No. It couldn’t for electoral reasons becoz, y’know, you need to win over people outside your base. Does that make it equally as bad as the fascist Trump party which was outright Christianist White Supremacist scumbags? Of course NOT. For fucks sake, shermanj, you should know better and think better than that.
Also false. Just factually inaccurate. Bernie lost the Democratic primary because he couldn’t win over enough Democratic party voters.
If you can’t win over your own party then how do you expect to get enough people outside of it to vote for you? You realise you can’t just win from your base and need to convince a majority of people to win an election, right?
Also what would’ve been the point in wasting money on costly campaigning once the nominee for POTUS is decided? What good vs what harm does that do – it wastes money needlessly and undermines the winning party nominee and serves no good purpose whatsoever. My opinion of you, shermanj, just keeps on declining given your denial of political reality and your outright Bothsiderist lies here.
PS. Noticed that no one has actually answered the questions I asked in #1 here.
@ nomdeplume : Same pattern in Australia.
Similar I guess but thank the Flying Sphaghetti Monster we have preferential voting and even compulsory voting here which makes such a huge difference.
Here in Oz we can put the Greens first send a message, potentially get Greens MPs and Senators elected and not get the very worst of the worst elected in doing so.
Our system isn’t perfect but it is Megaparsecs better than the USoA’s one.
StevoR @1:
Wikipedia – Ranked-choice voting in the United States
*sigh*
They are trivial and obvious.
The voters who vote.
Is it happening? No.
So asking how what does not happen happens is odd.
The system is perpetually being reformed already.
That’s what the three branches do on an ongoing basis.
—
There you go. Someone answered them, directly.
In the news: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-joins-house-voting-halt-iran-war-rebuking-trump-2026-06-23/
↓
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate backed legislation on Tuesday directing President Donald Trump to halt U.S. military action against Iran, the latest rebuke of the Republican president from an increasingly restive Congress.
The Senate voted 50-48 in favor of the war powers resolution, which passed the House of Representatives early this month, reflecting growing concern even among some of Trump’s Republicans about the unpopular conflict that began on February 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran.
It was the first time both chambers of Congress had passed a resolution directing a president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities since the War Powers Resolution, more commonly known as the War Powers Act, was enacted in 1973.
While likely to remain largely symbolic, the vote was a setback for Trump, who until recently had enjoyed near-unanimous support from Republican members of Congress.
It also comes as the administration is expected to ask Congress to authorize tens of billions of dollars to pay for the war.
[second excerpt]
The White House has insisted the War Powers Act is not constitutional and thus not binding.
On Tuesday, a White House official said the Senate vote has no significance because the resolutions do not go to the president and have no force of law and the measure passed only because two Republicans were absent.
The official also said the resolution directs Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities, which the White House says were terminated with a ceasefire on April 7.
Experts say the constitutionality of the War Powers Act likely will be settled in the courts.
“The executive branch will likely ignore it on constitutional grounds, and it’s not clear who might have standing to sue to enforce it,” said Scott Anderson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior editor of the online legal publication Lawfare.
—
That is the system reforming itself in real time right there.
If you don’t think your local Democratic candidates are progressive enough, you can join the party and help to swing their platform left. This is why MN is so very blue, despite the efforts of the other party.
It’s also false that there aren’t more progressive candidates than the blue dog Dems. Mandami won the Mayor of NYC on a straight up socialist platform, and has proceeded to do some fabulous work such as instituting a millionaire tax.
Taxing excess wealth to fund social programs is a great way to make society more equitable for the 99%.
[not at all personal, Tethys! — riffing off your comment, is all]
In the news: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-mayor-mamdani-endorsements-test-democrats-appetite-far-left-candidates-2026-06-23/
↓
New York Mayor Mamdani sends message to Democratic establishment
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani scored three major primary wins in his attempt to remake the Democratic Party into a democratic socialist force on Tuesday.
Mamdani-endorsed former city Comptroller Brad Lander defeated two-term Representative Dan Goldman, while Assemblymember Claire Valdez beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for an open congressional seat and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated five-term Representative Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Taken together, those constitute big wins for the 34-year-old mayor, who shocked the political world with his 2025 election and is now consolidating his political power. The results in New York come on the heels of democratic socialist mayoral candidates winning the primary in Washington, D.C., and making the runoff in Los Angeles.
Mamdani’s efforts to expand the democratic socialist base in the U.S. follow a decade-long effort that was spurred on by Senator Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly popular 2016 presidential campaign and his efforts to nurture a new generation of democratic socialist leaders.
Riff away John. I am weary of the idea that there is some shadowy cabal of party insiders who somehow prevented Bernie from winning the Dem nomination.
There are certainly some Blue Dog dems like Shumer still in office, but within each party there are individual variations in degree of conservatism vs progressive. I find the current head of the Senate to be a fairly reasonable individual despite being very conservative.
@19 StevoR said: ‘that’s . . Bothsiderist bullshit. The Democratic party was vastly better . . . when you look at its policies and people nominated’. and ‘factually inaccurate. Bernie lost the Democratic primary because he couldn’t win over enough Democratic party voters.’
I say: Your foolish accusations merit a succinct reply: You have no real, personal experience with politics in the u.s. Reading a few headlines leaves you naively ignorant. Members of our organization have been knowledgeable and intimately involved in socio-political issues here for many decades.
And, you talk about my ‘denial of political reality’. I don’t give a rodent’s rectum about popular, money driven political reality. I and my organization will not compromise our ‘people first’ ideals just to cave to big political money that buys their corporate owned ‘reality’ here.
1) It is a fact that BOTH the dnc and the rnc are owned by and directed by huge money. As a result, their policies are effectively nothing more than meaningless, vague, obfuscatory rhetoric.
2) better people nominated?? like slug schumer? jerkoff jeffries? corporate owned hillary? LOL
3) We were fully involved in Bernie’s campaign. He literally promised us he would not quit. It had nothing to do with your foolish, incorrect assertion about how he couldn’t ‘win over enough Democratic party voters.’ The dnc is a corrupt money driven entity. Bernie was ahead in the polls, but, because he favored people over towing the corporate dnc line, that threatened the dnc so they threatened him and their money bought and controlled the party delegates. That’s the reality of that circumstance.
4) You completely, and obliviously ignore the fact that politics in the u.s. is, with few exceptions, owned and run by vast amounts of money as established by citizens united and romney saying corporations are people.
5) Your lack of knowledge of how corporate money dominates politics here makes your questions in @1 meaninglessly inane. That is obviously why they were not answered.
Political “realism” is often just defeatism dressed up as “rational.” If Democrats want the votes, they need to make promises, not excuses.
And so the antisocial ratchet continues, where Stevo selects another who have nothing to do with a Trump victory as his chosen enemy and starts attacking them.
Well said.
[meta]
Look at the ‘nym. StevoR, Beholde.
You are mangling the nym deliberately, which is rather obviously an insult.
(‘And so the antisocial ratchet continues’)
FWIW, I took a look to verify my recollection.
Here’s the actual truth, not shermanj’s take on it (my emphasis):
cf. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/bernie-sanders-still-in-race-224050
↓Bernie Sanders early Wednesday morning pledged to “fight on” in the Democratic primary, even after Hillary Clinton secured the delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
“Next Tuesday we continue the fight in the last primary in Washington, D.C.,” Sanders said, as the crowd of supporters roared in Santa Monica.
“And then we take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia,” Sanders said, promising to continue his campaign all the way to the convention in July.
This, despite delegate math that shows Clinton has the Democratic nomination in hand after defeating Sanders in both the delegate count and popular vote.
“I am pretty good at arithmetic and I know that the fight in front of us is a very, very steep fight but we will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate that we can get,” Sanders told the enthusiastic California crowd.
As I said before (and based on the above remark, one can only conclude that person was apparently incapable of understanding my statement in its full context), I and 4 others in our organization studied, intimately participated in and lived through this situation from 2015 to 2020. It was a conflict between the corrupt, corporate funded DNC and decent, caring progressives like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, etc. As shown below and from our personal experience, Bernie did give in to the corporate corruption. Someone thousands of miles away who had no involvement in this, posting one isolated headline which is not a true timeline, nor credible and is in no way the complete story, has no business criticizing the validity of our actual experience.
As factual refutation of your false assertion I present the following:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52230979
Bernie Sanders quits: It looked so good for him. What went wrong? – BBC
For the 2020 campaign, Sanders brought in an astounding $181m in donations, more than half of which came in contributions smaller than $200.
https://time.com/5745490/bernie-sanders-ends-campaign/ Bernie Sanders Ends His 2020 Presidential Campaign
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential race on Wednesday, effectively ending a primary in which he once appeared poised to…
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/08/bernie-sanders-ends-2020-campaign-vow-continue-struggle-what-we-are-entitled-human
Bernie Sanders Ends 2020 Campaign With Vow to Continue Struggle for …
Sen. Bernie Sanders departed the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday with a forward-looking message to the diverse coalition of voters that made up his enthusiastic base of support across the United States. “While this campaign is coming to an end,” said Sanders,
In the future, I should ignore the petty, quarrelsome ad hominem games that all too frequently disrupt meaningful conversation here.
To what alleged “false assertion” do you intend to refer?
There is no such thing.
Yeah, but what about me? None of that applies.
#31 is not disputed, but it is claimed to be an element of some perceived to be “petty, quarrelsome ad hominem games that all too frequently disrupt meaningful conversation here”.
(I get it; truth is disruptive)
Please don’t posting though Sherman, I enjoy your stuff. It is just that one guy usually after all.
*don’t stop posting though
@ shermanj : I don’t always agree with you but, yeah, please don’t give up and don’t stop posting here.
Best wishes. I do think you are a good human being.
World needs all of those it can get and more.
Take a break if you need to. Recharge your batteries but please do retrun to the fight when you are able to do so..
I won’t and don’t aways agree with you.
But world does need good people fighting to make things better.
Of which I do think you are one.
@StevoR 4-6: I don’t understand why you blame the voters rather than the candidates that failed to earn those votes.
If you think that by blaming the voters you can influence them to vote as you want more than you can influence the candidates, what does that tell you about your electoral system?
If you think it’s not the job of the candidates to earn those votes… Isn’t that an indictment of the same electoral system?
@StevoR 1: the original poster, as her name implies is an anarchist, specifically anarcho-syndacalist.
She advocates for a general strike because she thinks that it gives “we the workers” stronger leverage over the people in power than voting.
I do agree with her and I suspect that a general strike would also require relatively fewer participants than what you need to significantly affect the balance of power via electoralism.
I’d also like to note, as a European, I’ve seen that playing around with different electoral systems might ameliorate the balance of power, but won’t save you from fascism.
For the record, I think those who can should vote.
I just don’t think people should put all their hopes (and energies) into electoralism.
Because the voters are the ones who actually vote them in, since a candidate themself has only 1 vote.
It could not be any more obvious why!
They saw a choice, and made a choice.
They don’t get to abrogate that responsibility.
They could have voted otherwise. Or not voted. Many did not vote.
See, in the USA there is a pool of potential voters and a subpool of actual voters.
—
It’s supposedly the job of the voters to vote for their preferred candidate, except since in the USA voting is elective, functionally it’s more like a hobby than a job. Which means mobilising the mob (heh) works, and populism is the great mobiliser for that.
(We know which side is more populist, no?)
USAnians clearly thought Trump was the better option, but you yourself blame Trump’s opponent for not earning the votes. Right?
(I find that weirdly naive)