Being on the left means people don’t have to be just like you for you to care about them

Yeah, age isn’t so much the issue when we have decent older people like Bernie Sanders and younger douchebags like Josh Gottheimer running around, the problem is that newly elected Democratic party members have all been told that they need to vote for the people who have been in DC the longest and one day eventually it will be their turn

That would be bad enough on its own, but coupled with the destruction of any kind of campaign finance regulations making it a lot easier for moderate Democratic party members to secretly work work with rich donors and Republicans to make sure progressives don’t stay in DC for long, we’ve ended up with a senior group of Democratic lawmakers who have shitty policies their voters hate and only know how to solve their problems through hippie punching

Replaced with someone over 70? You know the party’s Democratic

Another one of the dumbest things - we already paid Boeing to build a new Air Force One from scratch a few years ago, so this Qatari bribe is a totally redundant waste of money

Since when does Israel give children warning shots?

mfw the intelligence is manipulated to prop up an idiot president’s plans for violence

I don’t think the problem is as bad on all the .world communities, but it certainly is embarrassingly bad on a few of them. I could speculate as to why but I don’t know anything for certain, so I’ll just try to keep posting things I think people should be reading.

They weren’t, they’re still being paid as campaign consultants and think tank writers and pundits and etc., totally different realm of people than the non-partisan public servants Trump has been attacking

Things may have changed outside of Congress, but they haven’t changed enough inside Congress yet. This is a few weeks old but it’s the most recent quote I can find from AOC on this (also, I’m including some stuff before her quote that I think I underscores the problem)

In stepping aside, Connolly has renewed the debate among Democrats of age and experience versus youth and energy in countering President Donald Trump’s agenda. He’s tapped Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., the third-most-senior Democrat on the committee, to serve as the interim ranking member. Younger members like Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Robert Garcia of California have expressed interest in taking over the role — but so has the 70-year-old Lynch.

Tellingly, Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday that she wouldn’t be among those seeking the spot now that Connolly will be stepping down. “It’s actually clear to me that the underlying dynamics in the caucus have not shifted with respect to seniority as much as I think would be necessary,” she told reporters, saying that she’ll instead “be staying put at Energy and Commerce.”

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/aoc-house-democrats-oversight-committee-connolly-retirement-rcna205195 (arc)

I like the literal meaning of the words, but given the history of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin famously saying it and my personal experience with people who regularly use Latin phrases (outside of scientists, almost exclusively a bunch of snobby over educated dumbasses who can quote old dead white guys at length but somehow still aren’t sure if we’re in a constitutional crisis or not), I’d rather come up with something new that essentially means the same thing

I wish it was self destructive but the people at fault here don’t get destroyed at all, they’ve been happily moving from job to job in DC for thirty years or more while the Democratic party and the country has gotten destroyed

“What about”

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-ronny-jackson-drugs-dementia/

No they just choose to

I still think we should vote for them but unless they actually pursue policies that take away the ability of Republican state governments to oppress people were all just going to be some dumb sad assholes in November 2032 because President Buttigieg lost to Elon Musk after four years of getting jack shit done

Huh, I haven’t had time to watch that Conover video, but it sounds a bit like arguments I heard on this “Know Your Enemy” podcast episode where they interviewed a couple of political scientists who wrote a book called “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics” that sounded interesting enough to at least get on to my reading list, so that might be something you’d dig.

At any rate, I completely agree the national Democratic party is awful and tone deaf and out of touch, and I do think the centralization doesn’t help (like, if I have to hear one more liberal from California or New York tell me that Medicare for All lose us votes in the rust belt and then immediately start pushing gun control policies I’m going to scream (I scream a lot)). And I do like the idea of a political leadership who organizes around local issues and makes things like mutual aid and bail funds part of their political work (which is something the old school hyper local parties would do, though a lot of people called it corruption.

That all said, I’m not sure if it’s centralization or if it’s just oligarch money in a world without campaign finance laws steamrolling us, and I’m just as worried about, like, the Democratic party of Louisiana or Montana or New Hampshire or somewhere doing horrible bigoted shit that gets a local majority because redneck shitholes drive out almost everybody who disagrees eventually. Like, this is pretty much exactly how Jim Crow went for the first half of the 20th century and we do not want to go back to that.

Also, I wonder to what degree the decentralization was just a thing induced by the availability of technology when power structures came into being (like, for example I think we would have had more New York politicians running around Chicago when they were setting up if it didn’t take 2 or 3 days to go back and forth at the time) and if it isn’t kind of inevitable.

Either way, I definitely agree whatever the national Democratic party is doing isn’t working. Also, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a good spokesperson for anarchism because I’ve got a few state-ish sympathies in my brain (that one time the feds sent the national guard into Little Rock to fuck up some segregationist assholes was tight), but I will say that most hierarchies of authority are bullshit (maybe necessary bullshit, but they are still total bullshit that end up empowering the dumbest assholes), and anybody who says stuff like “we need to respect the office” make me want to light a bong with a burning flag and blow the smoke in their face (yes, that would be a lot of things to juggle and I would probably end up lighting myself on fire, but I guess that sends the right message too).

Anonymously, I wouldn’t put it above them to find some excuse to mess with you for making their Daddy Trump look bad

If it’s not Medicare for All then they’re not serious

How do you stop them from existing? “Hey, how about the [x+1] of us work together on the things we can agree on so we can outvote the people who don’t agree with us” is a winning strategy people are going to pursue if there isn’t a rule against it, but it’s hard to create effective rules against that sort of thing without blowing up the whole right to free association.

I don’t think anti-gun candidates have had much trouble winning Democratic party primaries before now or that there wouldn’t be the votes for some kind of gun control measure in any Democratic congressional majority

Also, for every incident that gets a story written about it, assume there are a half dozen or more that don’t