If reelected, Donald Trump will "cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory or gender ideology" and "create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values."
Especially if you were promised ice cream the last 4 times you agreed to come to the party, and once again you’re being told “sorry, all the ice cream is for the Nazis. Best we can do for you is this cone full of dog shit. What do you mean you’re leaving? Don’t you know YOU’LL be the one letting the Nazis win?? How dare you not take this cone of shit and be happy!”
what is shit for you? Is your comfortable home not large enough? Is your TV only 65" instead of 75"? Is your car older than you’d like? Did you have to eat rice and beans more than once a month?
Shit for me is every 4 years being told “just vote for us this time and we’ll fix the election system so this doesn’t keep happening,” and then not even attempting to fix it… But yes all that other stuff too I guess
Well, costs keep rising while my pay stays the same. I’m in mental health care, so in general not enough is being done to help with the mental health crisis we’re facing, and what is being done is clearly to increase pharmaceutical company’s profits more than to help people, so that makes my job harder. The fact that at no point have the Dems ever actually tried to unfuck our election system so I have to go through this nonsense every few years. More than 100k in Student loans that I can’t scrub with bankruptcy, thanks Biden. Medical bills that should be covered by single payer. And believe it or not, some people care about what happens to other people too… So there’s the genocide which isn’t actually a new thing, Dems have been supporting it for decades. The bullshit at the border. The drone wars killing innocent people everywhere. Education is fucked. Abortion rights are fucked. Dems never saw an increased military budget they didn’t like, while they continue to allow social services to be cut. Billionaires haven’t been taxed out of existence. On and on.
People tend to extrapolate that since some things are broadly fucked everything is fucked for them personally, forgetting that on a personal level for most people who would be posting on Lemmy, there are many things to be thankful for and many things that have gone right. The clear and obvious wealth disparity (for example) may be sickening and outrageous but that ends up usually being a question of degree, which is why I joke that that people are really complaining that their TV isn’t big enough.
And then we shoot ourselves in the feet by assuming that because of this generalized feeling of “bad” and “unjust” that there is no path forward and that no progress has been made. This is factually incorrect and easy to disprove, but people get mired in the “this sucks” phase, leading to angry fist waving without action. tl;dr people love to complain but are too lazy and myopic to do anything about their complaints.
Eh… I’ll agree to some extent… Though I think people are also deliberately restricted from taking meaningful action. And after 40 years of the center teaming up with the right instead of the left, when teaming up left would mean almost certain victory, I think many people are disillusioned and burnt out. They don’t see a way of ever being represented, given the current system, so they’ve given up on the system. The only way for someone to get them off the couch is to come with a plan to change the system completely.
when teaming up left would mean almost certain victory
Except it demonstrably doesn’t. If that were so Bernie would have won overwhelmingly in the primary. Pretty much all the polling and research suggests that the majority of US voters are pretty center or center-left, with dems being pretty evenly split between center/moderate and progressive. (Eg https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/)
Saying “if we were just more left wing” completely ignores this reality. It’s frankly nonsense.
If you take a look at this chart from the article you sent, it sums things up pretty well. Bernie vs Clinton was just the blue. If all the liberals voted and all the progressives voted, Clinton wins. Obviously not all registered voters voted in the primary, but it still would have been pretty close. Also I won’t get into the fact that Clinton’s minions absolutely had their thumb on the scale.
However if you recognize that pretty much all the reds always vote, and the light blues always vote, then that leaves progressives (dark blues) left to sway. Except it’s just a matter of how many you can get to show up. IF they do show up, they vote blue. The Dems have to choose between dark blue and light red. They seem to think they can peel off more red than they could ever get dark blue. But they’ve never been able to peel off more than a percent or two… Meanwhile they basically tell the much larger group of dark blues to shut up and vote for them without ever actually courting them. In the end though… The difference between an R win and a D win comes down to how many progressives actually show up. That’s it.
Especially if you were promised ice cream the last 4 times you agreed to come to the party, and once again you’re being told “sorry, all the ice cream is for the Nazis. Best we can do for you is this cone full of dog shit. What do you mean you’re leaving? Don’t you know YOU’LL be the one letting the Nazis win?? How dare you not take this cone of shit and be happy!”
what is shit for you? Is your comfortable home not large enough? Is your TV only 65" instead of 75"? Is your car older than you’d like? Did you have to eat rice and beans more than once a month?
Shit for me is every 4 years being told “just vote for us this time and we’ll fix the election system so this doesn’t keep happening,” and then not even attempting to fix it… But yes all that other stuff too I guess
What though? What keeps happening? I’m trying to ask what specifically is so bad for you personally about Democratic Party administrations?
Well, costs keep rising while my pay stays the same. I’m in mental health care, so in general not enough is being done to help with the mental health crisis we’re facing, and what is being done is clearly to increase pharmaceutical company’s profits more than to help people, so that makes my job harder. The fact that at no point have the Dems ever actually tried to unfuck our election system so I have to go through this nonsense every few years. More than 100k in Student loans that I can’t scrub with bankruptcy, thanks Biden. Medical bills that should be covered by single payer. And believe it or not, some people care about what happens to other people too… So there’s the genocide which isn’t actually a new thing, Dems have been supporting it for decades. The bullshit at the border. The drone wars killing innocent people everywhere. Education is fucked. Abortion rights are fucked. Dems never saw an increased military budget they didn’t like, while they continue to allow social services to be cut. Billionaires haven’t been taxed out of existence. On and on.
People tend to extrapolate that since some things are broadly fucked everything is fucked for them personally, forgetting that on a personal level for most people who would be posting on Lemmy, there are many things to be thankful for and many things that have gone right. The clear and obvious wealth disparity (for example) may be sickening and outrageous but that ends up usually being a question of degree, which is why I joke that that people are really complaining that their TV isn’t big enough.
And then we shoot ourselves in the feet by assuming that because of this generalized feeling of “bad” and “unjust” that there is no path forward and that no progress has been made. This is factually incorrect and easy to disprove, but people get mired in the “this sucks” phase, leading to angry fist waving without action. tl;dr people love to complain but are too lazy and myopic to do anything about their complaints.
Eh… I’ll agree to some extent… Though I think people are also deliberately restricted from taking meaningful action. And after 40 years of the center teaming up with the right instead of the left, when teaming up left would mean almost certain victory, I think many people are disillusioned and burnt out. They don’t see a way of ever being represented, given the current system, so they’ve given up on the system. The only way for someone to get them off the couch is to come with a plan to change the system completely.
Except it demonstrably doesn’t. If that were so Bernie would have won overwhelmingly in the primary. Pretty much all the polling and research suggests that the majority of US voters are pretty center or center-left, with dems being pretty evenly split between center/moderate and progressive. (Eg https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/)
Saying “if we were just more left wing” completely ignores this reality. It’s frankly nonsense.
If you take a look at this chart from the article you sent, it sums things up pretty well. Bernie vs Clinton was just the blue. If all the liberals voted and all the progressives voted, Clinton wins. Obviously not all registered voters voted in the primary, but it still would have been pretty close. Also I won’t get into the fact that Clinton’s minions absolutely had their thumb on the scale.
However if you recognize that pretty much all the reds always vote, and the light blues always vote, then that leaves progressives (dark blues) left to sway. Except it’s just a matter of how many you can get to show up. IF they do show up, they vote blue. The Dems have to choose between dark blue and light red. They seem to think they can peel off more red than they could ever get dark blue. But they’ve never been able to peel off more than a percent or two… Meanwhile they basically tell the much larger group of dark blues to shut up and vote for them without ever actually courting them. In the end though… The difference between an R win and a D win comes down to how many progressives actually show up. That’s it.