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
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?
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 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.
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.
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.