Quick reminder that there were other things going on in the 20s and 30s. You know, the height of socialism in the West, a strong labor movement willing to burn down factories, stuff like that. The New Deal didn’t come because leftists played nice.

No, the new deal only came to be after violent protests, and was largely a betrayal of labor groups because it gave a much watered down version of what was actually demanded, all while Roosevelt broke the strike he promised to support while campaigning. Read “Labor’s Giant Step Forward” by Art Preis if you want a more detailed accpunt

In addition to the points raised by some of the other comments I’d remind you of one uncomfortable truth. The business plot was attempted fascist takeover of America. That was thankfully put down because remarkably there was one honorable ex-marine they tried to involve the plot. That’s Smedley Butler. In the wake of that that attempted fascist coup basically nobody was punished. In large part because Roosevelt told them as long as they kept their mouth shut and didn’t block the New Deal he wouldn’t go after them. That’s basically the only reason it got through. Truncated as it was even then. Because most of the richest and most powerful people in the country we’re looking down the barrel of a gun otherwise.

Have fun wasting your time doing this. If they only fucked over Burnie once I might agree with you.

If you had to go back almost a hundred years to find any kind of example, I’m just going to gesture broadly at the next hundred years and rest my case.

Both sides are functionally the same when it comes to the world. There’s barely a difference between domestic policy between the two American parties. One uses sweet nothing’s to try assuage your fears and the other uses Force and strongman techniques.

Yeah the FDR Reformation came directly from FDR and we pushed through at his behest. According to my understanding of these politics at a time if The president hadn’t been FDR we would not have gotten those Reformations. Besides they hardly matter nowadays when they’re practically entirely Stripped Away. The last surviving one is social security and they’re pretty gung-ho about getting rid of that too.

can it be done again without another series of protests and pain the current era of capitalism?

With unintelligent comments like yours and all the discussions happening below meme threads, conflicts and violence is where we are heading to. I encourage you to learn more about the things you are talking about.

Both sides are varying degrees of the same ideology, give all the money to the economic elite so they bribe both parties into maintaining that policy above all other considerations.

One side shrugs and calls it free market forces(D) as you suffer under that policy goal, the other points and laughs at you and says you deserve it®. That is the extent of our “freedom” under American democracy.

Yep.

All the keyboard warriors talking about revolution need to either pick up and gun and do it or get off their asses and help primary bad Dems to send a message and start the reformation process.

No one who made it out of high school should be saying “both sides” because it’s a profoundly stupid and unproductive thing to say. Did we have masked squads disappearing people before January? Did our allies all hate us? Were we threatening fucking Canada? Were we paying tariff taxes?

That’s the point, I’ve noticed a lot of the loudest, most active posters on Lemmy ultimately want one thing, which is progressives not to vote. Weird how that’s what the conservatives have relied on for every presidential victory they’ve achieved in the past half century or more.

What is the point of this meme?

These memes communicate to Democrats and their supporters that we’re sick and tired of their mask-off conservative rule when they promise us the world and do nothing once elected. You want praise? You want votes? Then do something.

Since, you know, not voting for them apparently isn’t enough to inspire meaningful change. Just once in my life I want to see Democrats fight harder for the working class and poor as they do against socialists and third parties.

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Tankies. Do not engage.

You are correct. The OP has an agenda and that agenda is to fracture liberals.

The answer is not to give up. The answer is not to vote for a worthless 3rd party with zero chance of winning. The answer is to reform the Democrat party and history has shown us, repeatedly, that it is completely possible. And it literally just happened with the Republican party in the last 2 decades.

Yeah, not listening to this defeatist garbage. The Democratic party has been changed before. It will be changed again. The party is not defined by some monolithic ideology. We need massive electoral reform in the US to ensure elections are actually fair. First past the post is problematic. House and Senate functions are problematic. We need a solution to the two party problem, but until then, our vehicle is the Democratic party. Best to make it do what we want it to rather than just give up because “they’re corporatists”.

no matter who gets the nomination, vote Dem in the general election

Its never worked before, but lets just try that again.

This is a right-wing troll talking point. Don’t listen to it. This is a far left anarchist talking point

Progressives do vote for centrists. Centrists do not return the favor and vote for progressives. Harris didn’t lose because the left staying home; the left held their nose and voted for her, even though that loyalty is a one-way street. She lost because she was such a dog shit candidate that she couldn’t drive enough people who aren’t highly politically engaged to the polls. The only reason she lost the election was because of her own poor decisions. Stop blaming the left for the failures of centrist democrats.

Yeah, there are a lot of stupid fucking idiots out there, including on Lemmy, that are going to do the same stupid fucking thing they did last time and either not vote or vote for a 3rd party candidate that cannot, under any circumstance, win. And we’ll descend even further into fascism.

Lot of stupids. But as I scroll down these comments, the majority are calling this meme out for the stupid fucking bullshit that it is. So I still have a little hope. I’m sure that’ll get destroyed in the near future.

But they are a far cry better than voting Republican. And voting for a third party feels like wasting my vote.

You just answered your own question.

Democrats are FAR, FAR, FAR better than Republicans. We know this because the data shows they are better for our economy. We know this because their voting record shows that they regularly vote in favor of the middle and lower classes. We know this because they never attempted to violently overturn an election or send masked squads into our towns to abduct people off the street.

No 3rd party is viable or will be viable anytime in the near future. It will take YEARS and YEARS for a 3rd party to start winning local/state elections and getting reps in the House and Senate. And that’s IF a 3rd party actually starts putting in the work, which none are doing.

So if you want to be smart, and actually help protect our democracy, then you should vote Democrat in national elections and maybe vote 3rd party in local elections to help them gain some traction and see if they can do anything with it.

Absolutely.

Bernie is too liberal for all those big donors who pump up the Democrats via Super PACs. He might get in the way of them profiting off the American people. Bernie would have been the best choice for this country at beating back the MAGA movement before it became what we have now.

Bernie Sanders lost the primaries. This bullshit has to stop.

Imagine being so immature that you throw a decade-long temper tantrum allowing a FELON PEDOPHILE to be president because you didn’t get your way once.

Strawman? Like 3 separate strawman arguments?

Yeah, people generally want their politicians to help them.

And wealth inequality is the single biggest issue in human society.

We are at a point where if we want to help regular people, we need that to come at the expense of the rich.

You’re arguing against your own masturbatory fantasy.

The left came out and voted for Harris. They held their nose and voted for the shit pile centrist, as they always do. We’ve seen with Mamdani that this loyalty is a one way street. Progressives hold their nose and vote for centrists, but centrists do not return the favor.

Harris lost because she couldn’t drive enough politically unaligned, low-engagement voters to the polls. The average person who isn’t that involved in politics simply didn’t think it was credible that Harris would improve their lives in any way.

Aside from a few performative tankies, the message I kept reading on lemmy was “I’m going to vote for Harris, but her dog shit policies are going to cost her the election.” And those progressive voices were ignored. Their desperate warnings were drowned out by people like yourself, sticking their fingers in their ears and going, “BLAH BLAH BLAH CAN’T HEAR YOU, VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO! IT’S YOUR FAULT IF THE FASCISTS WIN, I HOLD NO RESPONSIBILITY HERE!”

Why the new account? Did your last one get banned for this same bullshit trolling?

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the dead weight is… most of it though. A lot of people just joined because it was the only alternative to republicans. And now its pretty much dead.

Thank you for putting that out there. I still cannot see making any other choice when it came time to vote. The too-close death camps you refer to were a very predictable consequence of this administration. I’m just a straight white guy but I really prefer to not add death camps to the world, or to disappear peaceful productive people from their communities, or to significantly harm the lives of millions of young, old, poor, or disabled people. That includes the ones starving overseas because of recent changes.

“But genocide!” we expect to hear in response. And if any dear readers are already thinking that, I want you to take this one fact away from my comment:

The deeply flawed US voting system — the one which forces the two party system on us — is damned near impossible to change via normal legislation and votes.

It’s THE thing. It is that mechanism that lets the red/blue capitalist american machine continue to vacuum up the vast majority of american votes. Go look up just how much agreement there has to be to amend the constitution. And we’re going to ask the people already in charge to get together and agree to kneecap their future political power. You see the issue.

Sure, the media is complicit and most voters are ignorant of the fact that there are better systems in place around the world. It’s true that a lot can be done outside of elected positions. But when it comes to the actual voting ballot, since the system self-corrects (in a bad way) for significant third parties, the expected consequences of each choice were something like:

1. Status quo, including any US resources being used for genocide and other shit.
2. Genocide Max plan, with 4 free years of Death Camp Prime
3. Flip a coin between 1 & 2 above (stay home or vote for a third party hoping it will get them recognition and funding)
4. Revolution and replace the system, like right now!

And I want to add a caveat that I’m not trying to blame the people who chose #3 above. Before the election I would disagree with that choice, but now in retrospect we know those people weren’t the reason Trump and Republicans won. I guess it remains to be seen how much of it was the genuine love for Trump the maniacs in this place have, and how much of it was election rigging and cheating BS.

Most people use “can’t” for things that are impractical, not just strictly impossible. But yes, let’s argue about phrasing rather than the issue. That ought to fix everything.

I don’t know why we keep having to have this talk about why reformism doesn’t work. Rosa Luxembourg addressed this pretty well.

We aren’t likely to get Reformations, the problems with the Democratic party are baked directly in to the institution.

Anything offered as Reformation is a token to ensure that the masses don’t revolt at least until the Reformation can be clawrd back by the powers that be.

Yup.

There are so many Americans that don’t grasp that this change can happen. Or understand the concept but outright refuse to have patience. And like you said, it’s A LOT less effort, a LOT less time, and WAY more possible to primary and change the Democrat party than to cross our fingers for a random 3rd party to start actually doing something and winning some elections and getting reps in the House and Senate.

I’ve been alive for a while. I watched conservative voters change the Republican party to the fascist traitor party it is today. You can absolutely change political parties.

Problem is this - Dems are not a political party, they’re a fundraising organization.

No, at the moment, we have to vote defensively. But we had to vote defensively in 2000 and couldn’t and it got us here.

And to be fair there’s a trillion-dollar far-right propaganda machine that sucks up the majority of viewership. So yes, in fact, a lot of influence is assuring we’ve learned nothing and will continue to do so until our own necks are in the mire.

It may be too late now. But it may have been too late in 2016. It may have been too late in 2000.

Fascist autocratic dissolution of the society is not the only great filter we are facing. An overwhelming amount of work must me done to reverse the FUBAR, and the people are not yet ready for it. Nor are they ready for the horrors of war, famine and pestilence (transmissible diseases like measles), all whose hounds have vaulted their slips.

WE JUST FOUND OUT WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS IF WE DON’T.

No, you just found out what happens when your only choices are either nazis or capitalistic corrupt “let’s debate nazis” centrists

I think progressives could easily run in Republican primaries and just start harping on labor and unions since no one else in that party does and tons of Union members vote Republican. What the worst that could happen? Collusion of the national party against the most popular left leaning or presidential candidate in the US, oh wait, the DNC already did that.

Parties can absolutely change with enough pressure.

I’ve been alive long enough to watch the Republican party almost completely change. Yeah, they were always stupid assholes. But they were not even close to THIS crazy and traitorous. Their base changed them. The liberal base can change the Democrat party.

The Democrat party is ESTABLISHED. No 3rd party is even remotely close to being established. It is not the time yet to vote for a 3rd party and won’t be until a 3rd party actually gets serious and starts winning smaller elections.

This exactly. It’s nonsense to say that the party can’t change because it has changed.

I think it can be ship of theseus’d, just replace all the key people in the party and keep the name.

At this point it’s easier to just nuke it