I find “Democrats are useless” is a way to get your foot in the door without directly challenging their good-guy status. Highlighting how Democrats “fail” to accomplish anything because of the actions of other Democrats or when Democrats capitulate to Republicans and help them with their agenda is good agitation.
Chuck Shuemer voting for the Republican spending bill to prevent a government shutdown is a good example. The Democratic base is absolutely furious, it’s time to highlight that Democratic leadership will never act as the opposition that their base actually wants.
I find the problem is that liberals always take the individualistic viewpoint on this, and they’ll fixate on specific people like Schumer instead of recognizing that there’s a structural problem within the party. In my experience, discussing the fact that there are structural problems is a bridge too far for most people.
That’s true, but the fact that he’s the minority leader helps. It’s still individualism, but it’s possible to point out that the party leadership is bad. That’s not that far removed from saying “… and that’s why we need to form a labor party”
Many, sadly, will think they can just change leadership and the Party will be fixed. I think continually pointing out the contradictions and agitating with these examples still helps. We can wear them down!
Yeah, I think focusing on the fact that there is a lot of historical precedent to go off is the best approach.
Another good aspect of the “Democrats are useless” angle is that it doesn’t overstate the case. You’ll often find leftists talking about “controlled opposition” and similar arguments – whatever the merits of those, they’re not going to work on someone who’s just finally considering that Dems might not be worth rooting for.
People rarely radicalize all the way at once. It’s a step-by-step process. Our job is to lead people step by step, not sprint ahead and then get frustrated when people don’t immediately join us.
I think that a lot of people know the Democrats are shit. They have been shit for decades.
The problem is that people correctly figure out the Democrats are controlled opposition, and they don’t stick around. They just stop voting.
The problem is the Democrats know this, and they’d rather lose elections, keep their nice little controlled opposition status, rather than try to actually engage with disaffected voters.
The Bernie campaign was a direct attempt to show that if someone tried to reach out to disaffected voters, it could be successful.
The Democrats made sure to sabotage that strategy by rigging the primaries.
So at this point I think the best thing to do is keep criticizing the Democrats, highlight their intentional losing strategies, and wait until enough people catch on, and we build a mass movement to replace them with something better. Hopefully we catch enough people before they give up and just check out of politics completely
My explanation to disprove that notion: The two-party system in the US is simply two coalitions that revolves around the different division of the American oligarchy. The reshuffling of the two coalitions from 2016 in response to the increasing saliency of the socially progressive issues over economic issues means that the Democrats no longer represent the middle ground between the working class and Capitalist class. The Democratic party now is a coalition of Capitalists who are socially liberal against the Republicans who are socially conservative.
The irony is that Trump, who is framed as the bad guy by the media oligarch, is more beneficial for the working class since he disrupt the alliance of free riding Western European diaspora, force them to confess to their hypocritical protectionist policies against Trump, and remove foreign bribery in the form of foreign aid.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html
People don’t like Democrats, the problem is the lack of an alternative. There are only two electoral alternatives to Democrats that aren’t the “even worse” option of Republicans:
- Run a candidate to the left of Democrats in a Democratic primary, and
- Create a third party.
There are major issues with both. There are even bigger issues with non-electoral political action.
We had de la Cruz in solidly red states, Dems sued to keep her off ballots in swing states.
I’d take a look at this overview of how political parties are allowed to operate in the U.S. For me, it settles the question of “run as a third party or run in Democratic primaries” decisively in favor of the latter.
So why were Dems allowed to keep Claudia off the ballots?
Based on that link, I think it’s harder to keep Democratic candidates off Democratic primary ballots than it is to keep third parties off general election ballots.
Anecdotally, this tracks. Bernie was a long-time independent who Democrats would have loved to keep out of the primaries in 2016 and 2020, but they couldn’t. Meanwhile (as you point out) de la Cruz faced all sorts of ballot access challenges in 2024.
There wasn’t a Dem primary last election.
Because no one ran on the Democratic ticket opposing Biden.
Democrats have no legal requirement to run fair primaries or primaries at all. If the leadership doesn’t like the way it’s going, they could just reject the results and choose someone in a smoke-filled room, or, more likely, they could put their finger on the scale in various ways up to and including outright manipulation, and there’s zero legal recourse, even if you can prove it, it doesn’t matter.
If you wanna do democratic entryism, you gotta have an actual threat for if they screw you, you can’t just do what Bernie did and roll over. Part of the reason that the Republican leadership allowed Trump is because there was a credible threat both that the candidate would run third party, and that the voters would follow him. Contrary to the popular narrative that “Republicans fall in line,” the last major third party candidate was Ross Perot who split the Republican vote. Ultimately, it’s probably not possible because the Democratic base is much more conditioned by “reason” and will get upset if you suggest such tactics, while the Republicans are willing to throw a fit and make demands, which gives them a better bargaining position.
I’m not saying Democrats run fair primaries. That article makes the point that even if you run and win as a third party, your new party won’t be able to hold members to a party line. If it’s already near-impossible to win as a third party and doing so leaves you with such a huge problem anyway, it’s not worth it.
If you wanna do democratic entryism, you gotta have an actual threat for if they screw you
I think the appropriate threat (at least right now) for Dems jobbing a primary is for the entryist candidate to not endorse the winner or encourage their supporters to vote for the winner. A “if you screw over my candidate, I won’t vote for you” approach. People already withhold votes in the general for just not liking the primary winner enough.
Just like you need a threat to get a hostile party apparatus to take you seriously, you need to compromise some to actually win mass support. “Give me exactly what I’ll try to spike your chances in the general” is a good place to compromise, because that wins few people over and probably crystallizes some of your opposition.
Thanks, I’ll do that.
Mentioning that Democrats are just as narcissistic, evil and selfish as Rethuglicans and Lolbertarians, and describing how aside from rhetoric, all 3 of these parties have nearly the exact same political positions and viewpoints, and they all have nearly the exact same goal of plundering the entire world at the behest of white supremacist, colonialist, fascist, imperialist reich-wing anti-humane nutjobs.
Part of the problem with American liberals is that they’re consumate pushovers, allergic to effective tactics. You can get them to concede that the Democrats suck but convincing them to actually stand up to them in any way is a whole other matter.
My approach on here, (which generally doesn’t work), is to call out “lesser evilism” as an ideology rather as just “rational truth.” I’ll go into the game theory example where two people have a hundred dollars to split, the first makes an offer and the other either accepts or denies, if they deny, nobody gets anything. If both players were “rational,” then the first person would offer only $1 and the second would accept, because $1 is a “lesser evil” than $0. But in practice, most people reject offers below around $30, and as a result most offers are closer to that range. The “irrational” approach is more effective, because it’s about establishing conditions and a credible threat.
When they inevitably ignore/reject that explanation and call me a secret Trump supporter/Russian bot/red fash, I just tell them that I am irrational and unpredictable and willing to do things out of pure spite, and if they don’t want me to they’d better make sure I get what I want, or I will start executing one vote every hour on the hour. Because of they can’t be persuaded to understand basic concepts of how bargaining works, then I figure I’ll just deploy the tactics and teach by demonstration.
Though this gets back to the problem that even when they pretend to criticize the democrats to try to be more persuasive to the left, it’s generally insincere and as soon as they’re not talking to us they’ll celebrate democratic politicians full-throatedly.
Like you say, it often feels like a lost cause.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
With facts and logic lmao
Maybe start by quitting this ridiculous us vs them rethoric. People have more to them than being democrat or republican.
Whatever political side you disagree with is not a unanimous group of “bad guys” or “good guys”
Whatever political side you disagree with is not a unanimous group of “bad guys” or “good guys”
Tell that to the supporters of the Democrat and Republican parties. A lot of people in the US absolutely do believe that their side is the “good guys” and the other side are the “bad guys”. This is not something we came up with.
The OP’s question was about how to break through this notion that any of these corporate parties are the “good guys”. Your “enlightened centrism” or attempt at putting yourself “above” politics (ignoring politics), or whatever it is you think you are doing with your comment is not addressing the real issue. The reality is that there is a widespread false consciousness in the US which is propped up by the false dichotomy of political partisanship. You won’t solve the problem by pretending like it doesn’t exist.
I don’t care how many people believe bullshit, it’s still bullshit. I think we’re on the same page there
But you should care. It’s no use simply feeling good about yourself for recognizing the bullshit if most people are still trapped in that narrative. If you want things to change you need to find a way to help others to also stop believing that bullshit. Because real change is made by the masses, not singular enlightened individuals.
I agree, and I’d add that there is a material aspect to the equation as well. As the standard of living continues to decline due to neoliberal policies, people in the mainstream start having a crisis of faith and they become more open to alternative interpretations of reality. It’s important to pick your battles and focus on educating people who have already started developing doubts on their own. People who are still living in liberal wonderland will not be swayed by any argument, and you’d almost certainly will just be wasting your time.
You’re right. I do and should care. Thinking it over, I didn’t quite have a right understanding of my own opinion. Trying again:
I do care about the consequences of many people believing bullshit. And we can see this happening with American and Russian influence of disinformation around the world right now. And a lot of people are hurt because of it.
As for the validity of the bullshit, that’s where I don’t care how many people believe it.
Please, these lies about Russian “disinformation” are tired and overdone. At least come up with a new ridiculous narrative that is at least novel if you want to spread lies.
Lies? I just follow the news. But feel free to debunk a few for me. I wouldn’t really know where to start. A recent issue claimed to be Russian disinformation was that Ukraine started the war. Is that true?
Keep your mouth closed about things you admit you know nothing about
I wouldn’t really know where to start. A recent issue claimed to be Russian disinformation was that Ukraine started the war. Is that true?
a place to start: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/2022_Russo-Ukrainian_conflict
How do you define the start of the war?
How much do you know about the Minsk Agreements, for instance?
