These people are genuinely conspiracy brained morons.
āPlaces like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,ā New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.
Seconds after Torresā shot at āthe groupsā that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from ā¦ the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading āGAYS AGAINST GENOCIDEā and āGENOCIDE RITCHIE,ā attacking his support for Israelās war in Gaza.
As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simonās Youāre So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.
The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the partyās post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth āAbundanceā agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.
āAny time someone is against something like āabundance,ā it means that theyāre afraid of something. Theyāre afraid of losing power,ā said Welcome PACās Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto OāRourke adviser. āIf the left feels threatened by what weāre doing, then I say: āYouāre still welcome in our coalition.āā
[ā¦]
āIf you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,ā said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.
Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business āabundanceā ideas faring worse than anti-corporate āpopulism,ā WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.
āItās what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,ā said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. āItās such a bad poll.ā
Shadowy āāāgroupsāāā who are supposedly coordinating every protest, protestors are all on payroll or rich or unemployed so therefore they donāt count, activists and āāāgroupsāāā are never part of or representative of even a section of the public, and all polling showing their framing and ideas being unpopular are just bad polls. This is conspiratorial thinking, 1:1 with what conservatives and Republicans have been saying for decades.
And theyāre repeadedly wrong on the polling they claim to love so much.
All because people got mad at the and demanded they do their jobs, demanded they actually stand up for people who are literally being picked up and deported for no reason besides not liking Trump or having an accent when they speak.
WelcomeFestās less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conferenceās donors, arguing that itās naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.
The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a āself-serving crusadeā against popular politics.
āA billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,ā said the projectās executive director, Jeff Hauser.
Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progressā abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasnāt facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth āabundanceā ideas into a successful populist campaign.
āThat kind of conflict is unhelpful because itās just wrong,ā Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on āstrengthening a Democratic Party thatās trying to get its sh*t together again.ā
They make it sound like a āfightā will be the usual primary politics. But I fear The real fight will just be enabling GOP policies. Help ICE deport activists. Help remove trans people from public life. Crack down on all protests, etc.
Thereās nothing a liberal lives for more than stabbing a leftist in the back
Let them continue to care more about ānot rocking the boatā or whatever head in the ground shit they refuse to face. I will keep interacting with co-workers, friends, family, and the random strangers that ask me about my PLA hat or my hammer/sickle lapel pin after I have helped them (never a bad interaction even from folks wearing lots of USA flags on their shirts/hats after they see how much I really cared about their problem). It is about being okay with having those interactions, and being a real human with real concerns. Of course I will also keep getting ammo and get better with my aim. No centrist/moderate or fascist will take me, my comrades, or my arms without a fight. There are plenty of things that finding a middle ground is fine, but not genocide and not continuing the oppression of the working and the poor.
OK but, hear me out: fuck the Democrats. When are we getting behind a new party; a real, actual, authentic, left-wing, coalition party? Where is the national movement to unify and overthrow the duopoly?
Why build another party? The bourgeoisie built a new power structure under feudalism.
Prefiguration is about building new power structures within existing structures.
Organizing is the tool of the Proletariat taught by Capitalism, and vanguard parties have successfully implemented Socialism many times already. Scientific Socialism is the correct method. The bourgeoisie did not prefigure society, there was large capture of resources during primitive accumulation that led to a toppling of the aristocracy, often via revolutions, as these classes came into conflict.
Never going to happen through the current electoral system, itās carefully designed not to allow for a third party to win, and the only people who have the power to change that system through legal means have no incentive to do so. The only way itāll happen without violence would be something close to a general strike on a national level, unfortunately I donāt see that happening any time soon either.
People are already organizing for a general strike generalstrikeus.com
Sign your strike card and if youāre able, organize. It wonāt happen any time soon unless people work for it to happen.
I really hate to tell you this but 80% of the country thinks the dems are either communists or the ultimate arbiter of good.
There is very little actual criticism of the dem party from the left under current political framework.
Universal Healthcare, workers rights, and a higher minimum wage are all incred8bly popular.
Until somebody on fox or cnn says those policies are too far left and 4/5ths of the country nods in agreement.
PSL is slowly but steadily growing.
I hope itās coming, but first people need to be educated about why the Dems suck. Itās like the sunk cost fallacy.
People keep asking why the left is attacking Democrats as if itās disrupting unity, but I think the truth is that even though theyāre okay with gay and black people, unlike the Republicans, until we tear ourselves away from that billionaire focused party, we canāt build an alternative movement without it being sucked up and dissipated by the Dems. And if we canāt build a new party or movement, weāre doomed.
These people clearly donāt understand the problems or needed solutions in front of us and are willing to throw anyone under the bus, which is absolutely horrible for coalition building.
Shocking no one on the left, this fight isnāt new. Itās just dumber and dumber to keep fighting the growing left, so theyāre framing it as a new problem, not an old one thatās steadily grown and could have been avoided.
itās like deliberately not treating your HIV for years and then acting surprised when it āsuddenly, out of the blueā becomes aids. The democrats have to keep sensationalizing each new symptom of their collapse in popular legitimacy as a series of new and unrelated ills, because connecting them back to their causes would indict every choice they made along the way.
Wtf is the abundance politics? Trickle down with a new word?
Yes. Deregulation + trickle down
I can not describe how much itās going to piss people off if the democrats claim to be for abundance after 4 years of telling people āactually the economy great, I donāt give a fuck if everything in the grocery store has doubled in price in 12 months look at this graph you fucking dumbassā
I mean seriously, āfight for $15ā has floundered for so long itās not even viable anymore. I really canāt wait to see the reaction when the people who have shived anybody who says āMedicare for allā start trying this utopianism bullshit.
āWell make sure thereās abundanceā
āI canāt afford groceries and just got kicked of off snap and everybody who has ever said the word abundance supported thatā
Well you see, the problem wasnāt them, they think the problem was that Trump associated them with trans people and immigrants. Harris tried her best to say Biden enforces the border even better than Trump, but it didnāt work. So clearly, they need to be even more exclusionary with trans people and even more bloodthirsty with Palestinians and immigrants. Theyāll get reelected in no time!
Itās another way to say shrink the government and remove regulations. Because those are the issues not corporate gread
Not super surprised. I figured it was something similar to āIf we increase the GDP enough, we all end up good! A rising tide lifts all boats!ā But because GDP can go up with just rich people doing good, then it sounds a lot like trickle down to me. But I also donāt want to mischaracterize their argument if they meant something else.
If only? Nah theyāre all about silly regulations are why people arenāt building housing.
Or that climate change could be fixed if we stopped trying to regulate it.
They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing [zoning regulations] developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
Oh God. I agree some zoning laws can be changed, but everything else in that quote sounds like something a conservative would say.
I listened to an hour long interview between Ethan Klein and Sam Seder and I still have no fucking idea
Theyāre promising that everybody will have more than enough after telling all the people who correctly said they didnāt have enough they were wrong for 4 years.
How? Dem Soc welfare? Iām guessing not because centrist Americans Democrats donāt like Bernie or AOC. Increase production of everything? How? Reducing regulations, like someone else said, Iām guessing?
Vibes. People will have enough because vibes. There is no plan or intention to change anything.
Liberal would rather see the far right in power than the left.
āHow many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man!ā ~ The left.
But the old man is a masochist and part of a broader coalition and his role is to distract us with beating him while the rest of his group sacks the town.
Then when they are making their escape he jumps up and says āwe could have stopped them if we worked together ! Look what youāve done!ā And keeps intentionally getting in our way while we try to chase the ransackers.
Then when they have escaped successfully he moves in with them and shares the loot while planning the next mission.
āPeople donāt like ādefund the police,ā but voters really hate electric cars,ā said Shor.
āThey donāt hate electric vehicles,ā replied Slotkin. āThey just donāt want to be told that they have to drive an electric vehicle, particularly when the infrastructure hasnāt kept pace with need.ā
I wonder why it hasnāt kept pace with the fucking need??? HMMMMM???
If theyāre using pineapple signals they donāt want a fight
I used to think Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was a useful idiot whoād taken up space better utilized by air. I still do, but I used to as well.
