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bOtHsIdEsAmE is bs.
They are not the same, but the meme is still accurate
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I mean something happened in between The Simpsons owning their own home and raising three kids on one income, and that being like this crazy dystopia that was hailed as a good illustration of how messed up things were for American families, to now people going to work at Walmart at 65 as a greeter because they can’t do anything else but the system still wants to squeeze a little more value from them. It wasn’t all Ronald Reagan for those intervening 30 years.
It wasn’t all Ronald Reagan for those intervening 30 years.
But kinda
I mean something happened in between The Simpsons owning their own home and raising three kids on one income,
What happened is that the Dems have had control of all 3 (house of reps, senate, presidency) for 6 of the last 44 years. That's right, 6 years out of the last 44 fucking years. If you want filibuster proof control, then it's 4 months of the last 44 years. Not 4 years, 4 MONTHS out of the last 44 fucking years. When they don't have control of all 3, they have to reach across the aisle to get anything done.
Want progress? Give Dems consistent and overwhelming victories.
I actually think the level of progress Biden has been able to make domestically in the last few years is a good counter argument to this. Surely the communists will not agree with me on this, but he did a FUCK of a lot even with an explicitly rabidly hostile congress.
If Obama had ordered the forgiveness of half a trillion dollars in student loan debt, would the Supreme Court at the time have shot him down? I honestly think not.
If Obama had staffed the NLRB with actual labor people, would all these union gains have started happening 16 years ago?
Etc etc. Congress is another story, but you can even do big stuff like ACA or the climate bill even if you gotta water it down sometimes to get it through. I definitely won’t say you are wrong that the Republicans are the main danger and obstacle and voting for Democrats is a way to make things better (or, in this election, not end the world). But also, I think if you gave Clinton or Pelosi a magic fuckin wand they wouldn’t have really done anything about the neoliberal hellscape, because that’s not a priority to them or their stock portfolio or their campaign contributors or their consultants.
I get what you mean and I don’t fully disagree, but also there’s a huge (majority) corporate wing of the Democrats that I do not think should be provided with any kind of free pass.
How the hell is Biden a counter argument? He had control of all three houses for 2 years and he got great things done. When Dems get control, they get great things done. Now that he doesn't have the house of representatives, aid to Ukraine gets delayed, he has to do executive action for military alliance with Ukraine. He's hamstrung and it's limping along because he does not have the House of Representatives.
The ACA only passed when Obama had control of all three and a supermajority. After that GOP was more than happy to block everything.
Also. Check this out; I never fully realized this:
So, after the civil war it was pretty much all Republicans all the time (i.e. boo racism yay rich people), and then the whole country collapsed after a while, and they brought in FDR and started hating on the rich people and it became yay racism boo rich people Democrats all the time, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that it went to let’s do half and half, and spend all our time fighting each other.
I don’t quite know what to make of it, but I had not realized before that it was like that.
Think of it this way: progress came to a grinding halt with Reagan and the GOP since then.
Yeah pretty much. And the years that kicked off with FDR and ended with Reagan were not exactly lacking in progress being made.
Also, Democrats controlled both houses throughout the entire Vietnam War.
Hm
That's actually a really good point
One side wants to fuck the working class. The other side wants to fuck the working class and kill gays.
Right, but they do agree workers get to start with the water cannon to the face.
They both effectively want to kill gays, just one of them is overt about it and the other restricts itself to the degrades living conditions of the marginalized under capitalism while covering itself in a rainbow flag.
As another queer example, trans people face hardship like other marginalized people. They disproportionately face rejection by their support systems, homelessness, difficulties with employment, access to healthcare. I have personally interacted with many, many Democrats that claim to be pro-trans but demonize the homeless and fight against universal healthcare. They support the systems of marginalization but selectively tap into empathy and acceptance.
But materially, the primary outcome is the same. Republicans usually embrace the overtly reactionary psychology of marginalization while Democrats ensure the material consequences of marginalization remain intact.
Though we shouldn't forget that Dems are also often homophobic, racist, transphobic, islamophobic, etc etc.
It's propaganda.
everyone who doesn't like Biden is a Russian
"Everything I don't like is Russian or Chinese."
Everyone who recognizes differences between Trump and Biden must like Biden
Good-cop/bad-cop ass system.
Asking in genuine good faith: when you see politicians that abuse their power to this extent, how is your argument that they need more power through either socialism or communism? How would giving them that kind of control improve anything?
This is not an abuse of power- this is them exercising the power they are granted by the capitalist state to defend the capitalist class.
Replace "democrats and republicans" with "the worker's party" and "the working class" with "the capitalist class" and picture all the implications of that, and then understand why we'd like socialism.
Politicians serve who controls them, ie who funds them. The idea isn't to take an existing Capitalist state and add a bunch of state power, but to restructure the state and economy along proletarian democracy, ie worker councils and whatnot.
Socialism isn't giving Capitalist politicians control, but giving workers control of the state and economy.
the working class votes democrat and republican.
I mean, that's just as false as it is true. Voter turnout ranges from 40-60% depending on the year and election, meaning that roughly half of eligible voters don't vote for either party. And generally, active voters skew wealthier, so I'd bet the stat is even more pronounced.
I don't understand, sorry.
If half of people don't vote, then that's half of the population not voting Democrat or Republican.
When the working class does vote, they vote Republican or Democrat.
I don't see how that difference is relevant.
Because pretending either of these parties have wide support of the working class is disingenuous at best. You have to drastically move the goalposts to try and retain any claim to truth.
Low voter turnout suggests that some segment of potential voters don't support the given options. If voter turnout was 20% would you still think your adjusted claim is identical to your original? "When [some subsection of the working class] chooses to vote, it votes for one of the only two real options" borders on tautology.
Not to mention the extant parties have a duopoly over electoral institutions, meaning it's illogical to assume that even the people that do vote necessarily support either party, rather than voting for whichever one they find less bad.
What do you mean by this?
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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