There’s a huge difference between an article being mass downvoted by salty users who don’t want to face an unpleasant truth and an article being removed by salty moderators who won’t let their users even be passingly exposed to that truth. I’ve experienced that first one on .world but I haven’t ever had a problem with the second yet.

If they did and the article was posted to this community it would’ve been buried by downvotes

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

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

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

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).

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

Ha, the DNC thinks they’re helping Hogg out by being associated with him instead of the other way around

Soon “Our health supplements are the only ones that have been clinically proven to reduce the reported symptoms of radiation sickness, made from only the finest saw dust and snake oil etc.”

Also, it’s arbitrary and capricious - this is hitting everyone in the prison, regardless of their sentence, just because they happen to be incarcerated at the wrong place and time

The protest crowds this summer will be massive and MAGA will lose their goddamn minds over it

Daniel Tiger gon’ use his claws if he has to

Yes, because if they fuck it up we can vote them out of office, unlike Bezos and Murdoch and Zuckerberg and etc.

Most of the premium pollsters have fielded a poll to coincide with the 100 days milestone.

Links to a few,

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/abc-news-washington-post-ipsos-april-2025 (arc)

https://apnorc.org/projects/immigration-remains-one-of-trumps-strongest-issues/ (arc)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/25/us/elections/times-siena-poll-crosstabs.html (arc)

Also, I think this is all worth quoting,

The overarching argument is that public opinion doesn’t matter anymore because we’re no longer in the “normal” political space we’re used to.

This is categorically false, a basic misunderstanding of what politics even is.

… Politics doesn’t stop just because the President says it does or even when he’s in the midst of an attempted authoritarian takeover. Politics continues. Public opinion, if anything, becomes even more important. …

…

Public opinion matters a lot because public opinion is the ultimate decider, especially when it becomes lopsided against the government. It encourages more people to express their opposition and it makes the would-be autocrat’s supporters doubt he is strong enough to protect them from electoral backlash or even to remain in power.

…

… The opposers are the majority, in some polls approaching 60% of the population. When people realize this, opposers become more likely to speak out, to take stands, to have confidence that they may in fact be on the winning side.

I think the failure of a lot of elected Democratic party members to offer a contrasting vision to the Republicans has been at least as harmful

Like, when the Republicans were out there saying “immigrants are killers who will eat your dog!” and Harris responded by promising to make it even tougher to apply for asylum and create new criminal penalties for people who just crossed the border it didn’t make anyone think she was the reasonable compromise choice, it just made a lot of voters think “huh, the Republicans must have a point about these immigrants if even the bleeding heart liberals are ready to get tough on them.”