… we don’t have McConnell as majority leader, blocking any judicial appointments until the next time a Republican President makes the Supreme Court 8-1 and lowering taxes while boosting up fossil fuel subsidies (that’s assuming they don’t ditch the filibuster and go hog wild on repealing everything back to before the New Deal.
What gives Manchin and (spit!!) Sinema their power is that without them there is zero prospect of even the most minimal governance. Including the debt limit increase, BTW, which they unanimously oppose. Without the two most headlined DINOs there is an excellent chance of US debt default and an economic crash beyond anything since 1930.
Don’t knock buying time. It sucks, but other things suck worse (says the dude heading for an experimental cancer treatment next week.)
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And yet some absolutely did. Which I’m sure that Dr. Lipstadt is well aware of.
Which no one said. This is especially true since neither Yang nor the Greens are particularly left wing…
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No, we have him as the minority leader doing the same thing because Democrats are pathetically afraid of playing the game the way Republicans insist on playing it.
So we just have to let Democrats do nothing, then yell at the people who don’t vote for them because they didn’t do anything to address the dozens of active crises (because they’ve been ignored for so long that they’re way beyond “looming” now) so that we can elect more of them in the hopes that this time we can get enough of them together that they won’t just sit on their asses for 2 years because they won’t put a horse head in Joe Manchin’s bed.
Got it.
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I’m no fan of Manchin, who is often infuriating, but if you’ve got a more progressive candidate who you think has a realistic shot in West Virginia (where Trump won every single county and carried the state with a 40% margin) then I suggest you support that candidate. Until I see a better alternative who has a shot in hell of getting elected there, my attitude is that it’s better to have him in office than not.
Sinema, on the other hand, could easily be replaced by someone better. (She’s from Arizona, not Nevada, by the way.) Mark Kelly also got elected there and while he may not be the most progressive senator he’s been perfectly decent on a number of issues, and also has a higher favorability rating than her. She’ll be facing a serious primary challenge, as she should.
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The more I think of this, the more I think it is evident that the Democrats are in serious danger of alienating their base. As younger people who lean socialist reach their 40s and see that they have none of the benefits that their parents had, and also see that Democrats are to blame as well as Republicans, they will lean further towards socialism. The more that Democrats refuse to negotiate (an initial statement of what your values are is not ideological purity, but an unwillingness to negotiate is), the more that they will lose.
If the Democrats want to win, they NEED to talk and listen to the left, and accept them as part of the Democratic Party as who they are.
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The thing is, they will happily try and negotiate with authoritarians and fascists…
The misogyny didn’t help, but yeah.
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Has anyone actually tried running a Democrat in WV who espouses a progressive policy agenda? Even as a primary challenger? Or are Democrats so convinced of the unpopularity of their own agenda that they’d rather have an obstructionist to blame than put in any effort countering Republicans’ bullshit about being the “real” party of the (white) people?
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That would take work on the part of the Dems. Their laziness would be ok, except for the fact that they keep rewarding his bad behaviour to keep him in the party. They don’t understand that they could strip him of his assignments and power and he’d still stay because if he joined the party where he belongs he knows he’d be even more of a powerless non-entity.
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You keep coming back to voting. I’m not blaming Dem voters. I’m not even blaming Biden - as un-progressive as he is, he’s shown he can listen to progressive voices. It’s the party I’m blaming for always chasing donations over voters. And they favor big donors over large numbers of minor donors. If Sanders moved the needle in any way in the 2020 primary, it was to prove that grass roots financing can work for Dems. They just seem not to have learned that lesson.
What’s killing us right now isn’t the Presidency, it’s the Senate. And the constant backstopping of assholes like Manchin and Sinema as the only options for Dems in “Red” states. Bullshit. WV in particular is ripe for a Sanders-esque progressive populist candidate instead of chasing the GOP to the right as they go full-on fascist.
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The House too, for that matter. Remember when Pelosi and company went apeshit because AOC backed a progressive primary challenger against an established conservative Dem in a safe district because it was “inappropriate” to speak against sitting members like that, only for them to turn around and back a conservative primary challenger against a sitting progressive House member the very next election?
Yeah. But tell me again how anarcho-communists are welcome in the Democrats’ huge, gigantic, enormous tent.
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I hate this nonsense so much. Look, there are real discussions that could be had about when to vote for what’s best and when to vote against what’s worst…personally I think there are circumstances for each. But which people do you think are really responsible for the current state of US politics?
- People who enthusiastically vote for the Democrats.
- People who reluctantly vote for the Democrats because it beats the fascists.
- People who vote for other parties in hopes of giving actual leftists a voice.
- People who have given up on voting.
- People who simply don’t care to vote.
- People who enthusiastically vote for the greater evil party because screw black people, LGBTQ people, women, the poor, and so on.
Because somehow so many of these discussions treat the fascists as misguided souls who need to be gently brought to the light by careful persuasion and compromise, while directing full vitriol at leftists who would want a better world but don’t vote exactly the way you think they should, and so writing off their concerns. I think you can guess who I think benefits from that…the Republican party thanks you for your support.
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Yes, they did. Manchin won Democratic primaries in the 2010 special election, the 2012 election, and the 2018 election. In 2018 his primary opponent was Paula Jean Swearington, who was a progressive that supported Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and several other progressive causes. He beat her by a more than 2:1 margin. Unfortunate, but apparently not enough of the voters of West Virginia were ready to support a progressive candidate.
How many split-ticket voters do you personally know who voted for Trump and also voted for a nice progressive congressman or senator? I’m sure there are some out there, but I question how many.
While it would be great if we could get a progressive elected in a state that Trump carried by a 40% margin, I think we might have better luck electing progressives in states with tighter margins first. Beto O’Rourke came pretty close to beating Ted Cruz. If we can get a couple more decent Democrats in states that currently have Republican senators then we can stop worrying so much about freaking Joe Manchin.
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That’s not @alahmnat’s job, it’s the Democratic Party’s job. That’s the point - they haven’t succeeded in finding that person because they aren’t even trying!
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Not trying is different than not succeeding. As I noted above Manchin faced a progressive opponent in 2018, and the voters of the state opted not to support the progressive.
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Didn’t he just run for mayor? Was that not local enough?
The left wing dems do too…c.f. Ocasio-Cortez, India Walton…
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Well, it didn’t work so let’s give up. Hey, everybody, we tried once and it didn’t work, go home!
Swearengin received zero support from WV Dem Party or the national party in 2018. She received almost zero support from either when she ran against Capito in 2020. She’s a single mom living in a home smaller than Joe Manchin’s yacht. Self-funding is not an option. She refused PAC money.
Thank you for making my point about the Democratic Party doing nothing to support progressives in states where they have a good chance of succeeding.
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