Most striking to me about Martin’s overall message is that Democrats need to stop getting into arguments with each other.
“We have to stop settling on winning arguments with each other; we have to win elections,” Martin said. The way to win, the Party leader says, is to unify behind “one single goal to stop Donald Trump … and put this country back on track.”
And how to put the country back on track? By my count, Martin uttered Trump’s name 19 times in his main address. Obviously, it makes sense that the opposition party would have some things to say about the sitting president. But he hardly mentioned major issues like housing, a word he didn’t mention at all, even though Zohran Mamdani just weeks ago campaigned to victory on it. He didn’t mention inflation either, and only said healthcare twice and inequality once.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made this point even more explicitly in his speech, saying: “We do not have the luxury to fight amongst ourselves while that thing sits in the White House.”
(The irony here is that he leads a state in which the Democratic Party just days ago took the extraordinary step of withdrawing their endorsement of the Minneapolis mayoral candidate, state Senator Omar Fateh. Then there’s Mamdani, who still can’t get the endorsement of his own party’s leaders like Hakeem Jeffries, whose district Mamdani outperformed him in!)
The 2024 presidential ballot was shaped by Biden and the Party apparatus and not by the voters. Throughout the first half of the year, the White House and the Party tolerated no acknowledgment of the president’s frailty. In the name of not having any debate, the Party squashed any primary challenges to Biden and then left no time (or way) for a viable candidate to emerge, anointing Kamala Harris instead. The Democratic Party met this past week and emerged with an exact repeat, a strict adherence to where the puck was in a losing game.
I’ve said it a hundred times. Look at the last 40 years of history where the GOP sabotages the country to increase wealth for a minority. Then later the Dems fix up enough. Then this happens repeatedly.
Look at the polling issues and taletell signs of ballot manipulation in several states. Going back to the 1990s.
Think of the games con artists play as good cop, bad cop, designed to extract wealth from their victims . It takes two actors to play .
I really do expect the Democrats will be allowed to win the midterms next year, and do nothing productive. They will not do tactics a real opposition party would do.
Then a democratic president will be allowed to win again. That president will do nothing particularly helpful other than bandages, so the next iteration will extract more wealth.
When the Dems win, it will silence, yet again, the proponents for paper ballots only.
And the next iteration of the gop in the 2030s will be worse than now.
And that is the most optimistic take on the future I have.
The DNC is pulling out all the stops against DSA members winning right now. They are really scared of actual progressives taking over the midterms.
If progressives had more power than now, it would partially make the above harder to do, but would not stop the cycles every 8 years or so.
The only way to escape the scamming of this country is for progressives to insist on paper ballots everywhere. Or else it’s just superficial wins, not important on the national level.
But progressives in the Democratic Party cannot insist on the use of counting methods used in the majority of countries like in the EU , Japan , Canada etc .
And it is here I find the psychology of the movement darkly fascinating, because it hobbles itself with taboos.