I understand the role of that the protests are playing but what is our actual plan? Are we aiming for flipping the house in 2026? Are we trying to target the non-MAGA Republicans and pushing them to impeace?
Haven't heard a clearly articulate plan from organizers or elected Dems and it is starting to really concern me. I get we're all angry and we're building coalitions but, I think we also need more action items and a plan.
Originally Posted By u/TigerLonely7218 At 2025-04-12 11:46:15 AM | Source
Also worth noting, the detailed plan is the slort of thing that tends to get talked about over signal with your local cell, not necessarily on a public forum.
At least locally our public strategic plan is to build parallel structures of support like food banks while making all the shity things the Republicans doing to our town so obvious that we might just flip the state Blue for the first time since 1964, or at least make some solid gains at the city and county level.
At the national level, I think the long term plan is to build enough voter mass to primary the shit out of non progressive-caucus dems for 2026, counting on the general anti Trump wave that we’ve seen in Florida and Winsconson’s recent elections to carry us to a progressive caucus majority in elections that have big enough margins to be exit polling evedent.
If we're talking about elections and parties, we've already lost; we need to be talking about the the line between aspirational wealth (<$10 million) and society-crippling wealth (>$100 million) and how to keep the former from becoming the latter.
The broad strokes need to be a tax structure that is overtly hostile to anyone worth more than $100 million, which is well beyond an obscene amount of ~~money~~ stolen wages as it is.
91% tax rates. Wealth taxes. Securities taxes. Antitrust actions against their businesses. Minimum wage that scales with business size: Walmart, Amazon, and other large employers significant should be forced to pay a much higher minimum wage than small businesses, to counteract their outsized influence and control of the labor market.
It's time to stop protesting, and time to start doing.
What you said sounds great, but how do you plan on getting it without “elections and parties”?
If you’re talking about revolution, what’s the plan?
What I said was:
There is currently no party that represents us. Our ideas are not on the ballot. If we are talking about elections and parties today, we are talking about the same bastards who put us where we are today. If we are talking about elections, we have already lost.
We need to be talking about ideas. The central theme is that there is no place for economic vampires in American society.
Billionaires need to be taxed out of existence or otherwise removed from society. It isn't their wealth that is the problem: if they want to purchase a billion dollars worth of mansions and yachts and private jets, they are going to pay a billion dollars to carpenters and shipbuilders and aviation workers. But they aren't doing that. Instead, they are buying stocks of homebuilders and shipyards and plane factories, and raking off profits that could be going to the workers.
Businesses should benefit society in general: a business whose workers are living below the poverty level is a business that should not exist.
Rank-and-file workers should be receiving stock along with their regular pay; they should be gaining ownership interest in the company they work for.
True, universal healthcare. Show up at any medical facility in the country, and the bill gets paid by the Department of Universal Healthcare. Medicare should not be the standard we expect. Tricare - the 100% healthcare plan provided to servicemen and their dependents - should be our model.
Things like these are the plan.
Oh, I get what you’re saying now. Step outside of parties and promote ideas and policies that everyone can get behind.
I mean the progressive caucus has been pushing for universal healthcare, an end to mass incarceration c and a wealth tax for decades now, but have lacked the votes to makeup a majority of Dems let alone congress as a whole.
Pushing for ideas however seems to assume that there is some correlation between how popular a policy is and its chances of becoming law, which is just at a factual level untrue in the US. Studies have found a proposal with 70% public approval and a proposal with 30% public approval have the same chance of actually becoming law.
There is some correlation between how the super rich feel about a piece of legislation and its odds of passing, but the primary statistical determinant is how congress criters themselves personally feel about a law.
As such, getting actual progressives on the ballot and getting the neoliberals off the ballot will lead to real, if not as significant as I personally would like, change that will benefit actual people’s lives, while congratulating ourselfs on all the great ideas that are never going to be adopted by people’s whoms job literally depends on how much their billion dollar donors like them will just lead to disillusionment when said great ideas are never put into practice.
The right congress critters will personally feel about these issues the same way we do. We can't get the right congress critters elected by talking about elections and parties and the issues they want to talk about. We need to keep the correct issues front and center. Force the candidates to either come to us, or lose to those who will.
This is how the Tea Party took over the GOP. It's how the Guillotine Party will take over the Democrats.
I mean while there are some that are actually dumb enough to believe it, most of the Tea Party republicans don’t feel the same way as their constituents, but rather that their constituents are a bunch of idots easily distracted from the ways their getting screwed over by proformitive nonsense. This is to say nothing of how most of the ideas the Far right supports are pretty damn unpopular across the board, or how tirelessly they worked to kick and pressure every candidate who wasn’t on board the Trump train out of the party.
Moreover, if we are not supporting the candidates who do agree with us and fighting to eliminate those that don’t or who actively go back on their word after being elected nothing will actually change beyond some pretty words every now and then.
Every currently serving Dem says they wholeheartedly Support the idea that the rich should be paying their fair share, just like nearly all of them support abortion or equal rights for all americans. A majority of them don’t obviously, but they sure do love to talk about supporting the abstract idea of such.
It is demonstrably trivial for canadates to say they wholeheartedly support X and then vote against it in practice without consiquence. We need to actually hold them to account, which yes, means fighting and running against them when they are chosen and not just supporting anyone who can give a platitude about how great X is.
The Idea that candidates will automatically loose if they don’t actually uphold the ideas their voters want would seem to be pretty ludicrous when places like Montana voted 58% yes to abortion and 59% to elect the man who got it taken away from them in the same election.
We are not talking about outword messaging, but rather what we actually are doing to make said ideas come to pass.