Don't worry. The Democrats are undoubtedly planning to shift even further right in the hope to scoop these guys up.
I hate that you are absolutely right.
The ratchet turns ever more to the right ... always towards the corporate money.
Exactly. Every step to right increases their pool of donors. Trading a leftist for a conservative is literally how the DNC makes money.
I mean, I'd prefer they voted progressive, but I'm fine with them not voting at all.
There would have to be a progressive that was running. In most places there simply isn't. You can't get funding for progressive candidates because the system is designed to ensure anyone who would side with workers over the rich can't win.
The ballot box won't save us, and what might, is not something you can organize on the internet.
There would have to be a progressive that was running.
Get into the party and help make it happen.
They are there, they just don't have the support they need.
Edit:
Bernie, AOC, Omar, don't tell me they are the only ones in a country of 300 million.
But if people don't engage, nothing happens, just like nothing has happened since the 70's to improve democracy in USA, but it on the contrary has gotten worse!
Not engaging leaves the power with the 1%, so blame yourself and your fellow Americans.
Like I said, you need money to run a campaign. Donations don't just appear out of the blue, and bootstrapping yourself into a legitimate candidate is a one in a million shot, so yes, progressive candidates exist, but they are exceptionally rare, and usually from a place with strong progressive organizing well below the elected representative level (unions, community orgs, progressive churches, etc.). It takes decades to build a self-sustaining movement, it's not something that happens on the scale of an election cycle, and the internet of 2025 is an overwhelming obstacle, not a useful tool.
This is what you wrote:
You can’t get funding for progressive candidates because the system is designed to ensure anyone who would side with workers over the rich can’t win.
And that is simply not true, Obama was elected by a majority of small donations.
Bernie could have run for president if he hadn't been stopped by the undemocratic elections system in the democratic party.
I refrained from answering that part of your post because it doesn't identify the real problem.
There is also a good chance ANY candidate gets money from billionaires because they often support both sides.
You are just making excuses for yourself to do nothing.
Obama failed to create lasting change because he had no choice but to bend the knee. The billionaires will not fund candidates that threaten their wealth, and the only way to even begin to fix this is by making sure there's never another billionaire. Every last one of them is an abomination.
You are changing the subject, Obama did NOT have to bend the knee, but I agree the existence of billionaires is contrary to the ideals of democracy.
I am not changing the subject, what ended up becoming the ACA, Obama's single most significant piece of legislation was dramatically watered down, and wildly less ambitious than he set out to achieve, precisely because he could not get anything more significant than he did past the lobbyists on whom their next election cycle depended, even when they had a super-majority to pass it.
You are changing the subject from that progressive candidates can't get funding. They can.
Progressive candidates can't. Moderates with no firm values at all can claim they're progressive until they are blue in the face but the proof is in the fact that they never achieve anything because if they did, they'd be run out of office.
I mean, at this point, they're not entirely wrong. We can't count on this obscenely broken system to save us by "voting harder" like we've been doing for 3 solid decades with nothing but things getting worse and corporate democrats barely fighting back against the worst excesses of the Bush and Trump administrations (and frankly being part and parcel to the worst excesses of the Clinton administration).
It's time to follow the lead of groups like the Black Panthers. They understood the assignment. We cannot count on a system designed to be anti-democratic with anti-democratic institutions like the Senate existing to actually resemble a functioning democracy. We have to turn to Mutual Aid and helping one another.
I get it, a lot of those Trump voters would be shitty candidates to bring into Mutual Aid groups, but their broken cynicism is part of being left behind politically for decades coupled with lack of education. Some of them may still be redeemable and find their skills valuable in Mutual Aid and may start to grow in positive ways that they themselves would have never dreamed.
The citizen observers watching ICE are by and large average citizens, they are not our politicians, who more likely sit in comfy warm offices while the citizens freeze their asses off trying to protect one another. That's the reality, is even though we have a handful of good politicians fighting for us, they are fighting within a broken non-functioning system. That is not their fault and that does not mean their fight is pointless, but we cannot expect them to do the fight alone, we also must protect and support each other... and that means trying to find the least shitty Trump supporters and bring them into the community fold.
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