Progressive movement leader Alexandra Rojas writes for Zeteo that those in charge of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign should have been fired a long time ago.
The Democrats are just GOP “light.” They don’t support the people, they just give lip service to the people while they accept donations from corporations and the wealthy. This will never change until the Citizen’s United decision is reversed and we get the money out of politics and stop allowing politicians’ insider trading. Their refusal to call for a cease fire in Gaza has been the very last straw for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never vote for the GOP, but I just couldn’t bring myself to vote at all this year, even to vote against Trump. This is something I’ve never done before.
Citizens United, full stop. Xcept!! Money makes the world go round. How do we straddle this divide?
By the way, dark money includes all kinds of foreign based interests, and organized crime based interests pouring money into elections and Lobbies. AIPAC somehow is just out in the open … As Though… it is an American institution.
Professional Dems aligned themselves squarely with the murder and total destruction of a people and their homeland. Shame.
All those "I am voting for my conscience" people are really the worst, aren't they? They didn't mind sending our own most vulnerable citizens here in the US and their children (now that they have no choice) straight to hell. Never mind actual Gazans in Gaza who wanted Harris to beat Trump.
I'll take you at your word you never vote GQP. But not voting in pres elections means you probably didn't vote in STATE elections either. And state elections are in a lot of ways MORE IMPORTANT than pres elections.
That's how the GQP gained power. Electing all their creepy dorks into state office first. Then those types got elected to US Congress, amplified by talk radio and other platforms..
Patriotic Millionaires: please buy some AM Stations with the progressive message. Please.
Wtf are we talking about here: first of all we've been winning elections more than losing them recently. Losing in a year where pretty much every incumbent globally lost does not portend a future where we keep losing forever. Secondly, half of Donald Trump's current cabinet picks are literally billionaires. Getting these people out of our politics is a noble goal but that is not the reason we lost this election. Stop with these post mortems asserting your particular pet peeve with the Democrats was the reason
Yes let’s compete with one hand tied behind our back, both feet in irons, and blindfolded. Because of bad decisions like Citizens United we cannot get money out of politics for the foreseeable future. So instead we should just let the right with its billionaires and multimillionaires dump millions or more into races while we try to compete with all those $5 donations. Talk about naive.
Democrats just lost to one of the worst candidates in history, who was already an awful president for one term whose incompetence led to thousands of needless deaths and whose campaign had no direction or discipline and spent the entire time talking about people eating pets and the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick. They lost to that. Give it some thought.
They lost to him the first time he ran as well, he wasn't any smarter or nicer, and they didn't go on to lose every election afterward. Maybe you should consider that there are a lot of people who don't look at an authoritarian with bad character and see all of those things as the same sort of dealbreaker that we do. Clearly, he is a bad person. He is not a bad candidate. He's turned their party into a cult.
What makes YOUR postmortem — losing... 🤷🏻♀️ everybody's doing it — more valid than the writer's assertion that corruption does not inspire DEMOCRATIC voters?
And wtf does trump's cabinet have to do with anything? Is that where you're asserting the bar should be lowered to? If Democrats can make it over a bar that you've buried at the Earth's core, then there's nothing wrong, they shouldn't clean up their act, and no one has a right to criticize their corruption?
I certainly don't consent to that standard.
Or maybe that "cabinet" comment was meant to assert that if trumpthings like bowing to overlords, then the democratic base should too?
Seriously. WTF?
Neither party has any respect for the will of the people (a.k.a. democracy). Neither party has enough decency to understand that genocide is bad. That seems to have been enough of a "pet peeve," for the democratic base, to have made a difference.
It seems you are struggling with just reading what I said, so let me clear it up: I don't have a "post-mortem," I have not given a reason why I think they lost. I said that given the current political climate and very recent history, it is unlikely this one election means they are going to just continue losing elections. That is not a post-mortem.
Trump's cabinet directly contradicts this theory that Democratic proximity to billionaires is the reason they lost this election. Republicans are primarily funded and run by billionaires at this point, and they just won the election. See the illogic there? I'm not setting a bar. I am illustrating why the writer's assertion makes no sense.
Claiming they did nothing wrong is still a postmortem. (Calling me a poopy-head doesn't change that.)
Your excuse-making — "pretty much every incumbent globally lost" — qualifies as a postmortem, even if all you're doing is denying the fact that the patient died.
Likewise, looking at a Republican trifecta and claiming, "we've been winning elections more than losing them," also qualifies as a postmortem. It's just a very, VERY delusional diagnosis.
If you took a break from trying to insult MY reading skills, and tried a little harder to improve YOUR OWN reading skills, maybe you would have noticed that I have ALREADY POINTED OUT the fact that what trumpsuckers are willing to vote for, is not a measure of what the democratic base is willing to vote for.
Please find in my comment where I said they did nothing wrong.
You are inventing things to disagree with
Noting a fact is not "excuse making". Noting that before this election, we had recently been winning more elections than losing them is not delusional, it's an observation of fact. You disliking a factual observation doesn't make me delusional, nor does it make my observation a diagnosis.
Please give me a valid excuse, as to why I should have to explain the concept of a synonymous phrase... and why I should have to point out the difference between what IS in quotation marks, and what is NOT.
As for the rest of that: It is what it is. Call it what you like.
Someone is going to have to tell me why it's Democrats' "ties to billionaires" that loses elections, but it doesn't lose them for MAGA when he campaigns with the richest man in the world and gives the highest civilian honor possible to Miriam Adelson. If people really have that deep an antipathy to billionaires, they sure have a funny way of showing it when they vote for 1) a billionaire, who 2) promised to let a centibillionaire run the federal budget, and 3) committed to a casino magnate widow decabillionaire to run foreign policy on behalf of Israel. What gives, exactly?
Because Trump at least LIES and promises to "drain the swamp" and lies some more and promises popular reforms. Plus Republicans in general aren't to keen on the whole "cognitive dissonance" thing. More people are turning left. And establishment and moderate dems are firmly right wing at this point. People on the left want actual reforms thay benefit ordinary Americans, and they see clearly how bought the dem party is (taking more dark money than Trump in 2020, prostituting itself and voters in support of genocide for the profit of the military industrial complex and AIPAC donations. Dems made it blatantly clear this election that their base is NOT the American people, but the donor class and elite capitalist interests to the point they didn't give a crap about preserving democracy from the likes of Trump, regardless of how they tried to fearmonger about exactly that.
You're twisting yourself into pretzels by saying that "more people are turning left" but that Republicans are winning the votes of people who are turning left because Dems aren't left enough, and they hate "the capitalist class" even though Trump aligned himself explicitly with the capitalist class. All you have is a hammer, and you're spending your time passionately arguing that something that doesn't even come close to resembling a nail, actually is one. It doesn't add up.
I strongly doubt that outside of some voters in Dearborn, there are very few former Dem voters going for Trump this cycle in order to "punish" the party. There are probably a lot of voters who either stayed home or abstained/voted 3rd party at the top of the ticket due to their disgust with Kamala's turn to the center and waffling on genocide.
As for billionaires, this is incredibly simple. Dems have a base that is put off by such ties, Reps do not. Many Americans did not vote in 2024, and although we cannot confirm it, how many were possible D voters who sat out due to D ties to billionaires? A R voter who is deciding between Trump or the couch is significantly less likely to have a hostile view of billionaires.
Are you surprised that voters in the democratic base, have different values than trump's followers? What trumpsuckers are willing to vote for, is not a measure of what the democratic base is willing to vote for.
I hope you're not one of those people who tries to diagnose a hundred million different people, as if "the electorate" is one collective hive-mind.
Also: What kind of an "anti-imperialist" needs to be convinced that billionaires shouldn't be allowed to buy democracy?
Rojas, and others like her, are exactly right about where the Democratic Party has wandered off since Obama and even before with Bill Clinton--both of whose administrations were more centrist than were acknowledged. Bernie's and other Progressive voices like his have been out there, crying in the wilderness but the DNC does its best to sideline them, if not shut them up completely. I never thought I'd see a Dem candidate parading around with the likes of a Cheney or a Cuban, and yet that is what Harris did in a vain effort to "court" Republican votes. I'm sure she didn't garner any with that strategy. All this "reaching across the aisle" talk has gotten the Party into so much trouble, and yes, has made it look too often like Republican Lite. Why do we fear re-installing a Newer Deal a la Roosevelt? Why cowed by claims of "socialism?" Like others, I wish we had a Labor or Progressive Party as a 3rd alternative, but it would take generations to make it happen, if at all, before the world burns up.
The reason we can't have an even slightly progressive candidate is because the dem party has been captured by the donors class/oligarchs. I agree with you, the only option is a strong 3rd party, revolutionary in nature. I disagree with you that it will take decades to build. That's just the propaganda they feed us talking. I think this movement is already happening, and doing folks, GenZ and alpha, are leading the way. If you're not following these kids on TikTok, do so! You'll be inspired!
Democrats ran the most centrist, pro American to a fault campaign I have ever seen in my life. It made the Bush campaigns look pinko by comparison.
The problem is that, even though the GOP doesn’t give a shit about Americans, they listen enough to market themselves to people, while Dems think they have it all figured out with “demographics” and advertise like it’s still 2008.
We just need to strip the Democratic Party to its core and rebuild it as a pro working class party. Everything else we believe about social issues can be addressed when Dems actually win elections, if they actually ever win
Not really any new revelation. Sell out, sell out. Puppets on strings dance for the dollar. Why do you think our elites push so much manufactured merchandise and propaganda to keep us distracted, divided, and dare I say, drugged...we are a complacent, selfish society that imagines a better world but lack the motivation or commitment to unify and make one happen.
Comedian Mort Sahl identified the problem back in the 90s when he said, "Bill Clinton is a new kind of Democrat. He's a Republican." That has been the path of the Democratic establishment ever since. As another wise person once said, "If you give the people the choice between a Republican and a Republican, they'll choose the Republican every time."
You hit the nail on the head! It has been a long time now that they have needed to cut ties with the lobbyists/big money. The Democratic Party is looking more and more like the Republican Party and both have help create an Oligarchy. It has taken me 46 years of voting to understand that our vote goes to the highest bidder and that my vote is only for show.
I have concluded that the Dems would prefer to lose with candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris than risk winning with Bernie Sanders. In 2016, 2020, and 2024 the Dems had more money, but only won one of three. Wall Street, big pharma, and the tech sector fear progressives.
As I wrote in my book, Grand Collusion, on foreign and economic policy, the Dems have lost touch with working class voters and have become the light beer version of the GOP.
An October 2016 Boston Globe article asked if the Democratic party had become the party of coastal elites and college professors. They interviewed Michael Dukakis (1988 Democratic party candidate for president). He said that in his day the thought of West Virginia being Republican was unthinkable. They also interviewed James Carville, who said that in the 1990's they traded West Virginia for New Jersey, a trade he said he'd make again. Well, we all know what happened a few weeks later even though Hillary had a lot more money.
Now, the working class is solidly Republican. Who would want to vote for someone who doesn't seem to respect or even like you? When people making $10-$15 an hour complained about their rent and grocery bill going up by 20%-30% the past few years, the Biden-Harris administration's response was, "Hey, the GDP is up, dummy!" Well, their GDP wasn't up.
We have two economies - one for those of us with assets, who have done very, very well these past few years. Then there is the economy for those who are essentially the working poor - who can't get ahead no matter what.
Trump and the GOP do not care a bit about working class people. But, at least they pretend to.
Reading the comments, it appears that readers of Zeteo are divided between those who believe the Democratic Party should continue as is because they've been winning elections recently, and those who believe that a change is required because first of all there's increasing inequality and too much support for repressive regimes, and we need to reverse that, morally, and also because the country's shift to the right (of, for example, Latino men) is something that will become increasingly impossible to overcome.
So do we split into two parties? Do we support/modify something that already exists? How does this viewpoint gain more traction?
I am definitely ready to stop holding my nose to vote for the "least bad" candidate.
Something I'm not seeing in the comments is an understanding that we have an increasing population that doesn't believe in democracy. In part, Trump tricked them, they voted for something they don't want, but in part, he promised to dismantle democracy, and that may be how many people think, not only billionaires.
Because: democracy did not work for them, they're ready to try *anything else.*
Also, because many people would agree that what we need is more loyalty, respect for authority, and less attention to protection of the vulnerable, less attention to fairness and justice.
Well this is where the point that they were lied to and misled comes in. But yes, they were no longer able/willing to vote for the status quo.
Endless rehashing of what went wrong and maybe it's too soon. But it makes sense to me that the Democrats became the party of better-educated reasonably well-off people. The rest were captured by grifting lying media that I've never personally seen.
Also Black Women, for whatever reason, stayed with the Dems.
Doubly-victimized status (racism/sexism) might lead a person to see things a certain way. White men and Latino men somehow think they can join the "men" part? White women aiming for the "white" part.
So Black Women not so easily fooled by the media that captured others.
But they are still voting for the lesser evil and don't see a way to equality and fairness.
The betrayal of fundamental human rights AKA GAZA stinks to everybody. People vote against something as much as for it and voters are mad enough to vote against themselves because it's really all the same mess of pottage
We keep hearing about the fortunes that AIPAC spends to defeat progressive candidates who might sympathize with Palestinians. We read about rich Jews who force institutions, like universities, to crush those young bright people, including many Jews, who want to proceed as humanists in a cruel world. Those few humanistic jews are only a distraction. On every side, it is influential Jews who support the right wing. My parents were both Jewish but to my mind it is shameful to be Jewish in today's world. Any thinking person should be part of the new Anti-Zionism, based on real, Jewish anti-human values. Israel has successfully marketed anti-semitism as a meaningless brand.
The Democrats are just GOP “light.” They don’t support the people, they just give lip service to the people while they accept donations from corporations and the wealthy. This will never change until the Citizen’s United decision is reversed and we get the money out of politics and stop allowing politicians’ insider trading. Their refusal to call for a cease fire in Gaza has been the very last straw for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never vote for the GOP, but I just couldn’t bring myself to vote at all this year, even to vote against Trump. This is something I’ve never done before.
Citizens United, full stop. Xcept!! Money makes the world go round. How do we straddle this divide?
By the way, dark money includes all kinds of foreign based interests, and organized crime based interests pouring money into elections and Lobbies. AIPAC somehow is just out in the open … As Though… it is an American institution.
Professional Dems aligned themselves squarely with the murder and total destruction of a people and their homeland. Shame.
Hope you wear steel-toed shoes as you shoot yourself in the foot.
All those "I am voting for my conscience" people are really the worst, aren't they? They didn't mind sending our own most vulnerable citizens here in the US and their children (now that they have no choice) straight to hell. Never mind actual Gazans in Gaza who wanted Harris to beat Trump.
And I hope you aim at your own head...
I'll take you at your word you never vote GQP. But not voting in pres elections means you probably didn't vote in STATE elections either. And state elections are in a lot of ways MORE IMPORTANT than pres elections.
That's how the GQP gained power. Electing all their creepy dorks into state office first. Then those types got elected to US Congress, amplified by talk radio and other platforms..
Patriotic Millionaires: please buy some AM Stations with the progressive message. Please.
Right on, Jan. Exactly.
I agree with your comment %100. I too could not vote for a presidential candidate who this year.
So don't vote next time.
Problem solved...
Wtf are we talking about here: first of all we've been winning elections more than losing them recently. Losing in a year where pretty much every incumbent globally lost does not portend a future where we keep losing forever. Secondly, half of Donald Trump's current cabinet picks are literally billionaires. Getting these people out of our politics is a noble goal but that is not the reason we lost this election. Stop with these post mortems asserting your particular pet peeve with the Democrats was the reason
AJ: boy are you lost in the Democrat propaganda machine. Open your eyes.
Yes let’s compete with one hand tied behind our back, both feet in irons, and blindfolded. Because of bad decisions like Citizens United we cannot get money out of politics for the foreseeable future. So instead we should just let the right with its billionaires and multimillionaires dump millions or more into races while we try to compete with all those $5 donations. Talk about naive.
...ok good point.
I think even a small shift towards that FDR esque rhetoric would have clinched many more voters for Harris tbh. People are certainly disengaged... https://www.10news.com/news/fact-or-fiction/fact-or-fiction-did-biden-drop-out-search-spiked-tuesday
Democrats just lost to one of the worst candidates in history, who was already an awful president for one term whose incompetence led to thousands of needless deaths and whose campaign had no direction or discipline and spent the entire time talking about people eating pets and the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick. They lost to that. Give it some thought.
They lost to him the first time he ran as well, he wasn't any smarter or nicer, and they didn't go on to lose every election afterward. Maybe you should consider that there are a lot of people who don't look at an authoritarian with bad character and see all of those things as the same sort of dealbreaker that we do. Clearly, he is a bad person. He is not a bad candidate. He's turned their party into a cult.
What makes YOUR postmortem — losing... 🤷🏻♀️ everybody's doing it — more valid than the writer's assertion that corruption does not inspire DEMOCRATIC voters?
And wtf does trump's cabinet have to do with anything? Is that where you're asserting the bar should be lowered to? If Democrats can make it over a bar that you've buried at the Earth's core, then there's nothing wrong, they shouldn't clean up their act, and no one has a right to criticize their corruption?
I certainly don't consent to that standard.
Or maybe that "cabinet" comment was meant to assert that if trumpthings like bowing to overlords, then the democratic base should too?
Seriously. WTF?
Neither party has any respect for the will of the people (a.k.a. democracy). Neither party has enough decency to understand that genocide is bad. That seems to have been enough of a "pet peeve," for the democratic base, to have made a difference.
It seems you are struggling with just reading what I said, so let me clear it up: I don't have a "post-mortem," I have not given a reason why I think they lost. I said that given the current political climate and very recent history, it is unlikely this one election means they are going to just continue losing elections. That is not a post-mortem.
Trump's cabinet directly contradicts this theory that Democratic proximity to billionaires is the reason they lost this election. Republicans are primarily funded and run by billionaires at this point, and they just won the election. See the illogic there? I'm not setting a bar. I am illustrating why the writer's assertion makes no sense.
Claiming they did nothing wrong is still a postmortem. (Calling me a poopy-head doesn't change that.)
Your excuse-making — "pretty much every incumbent globally lost" — qualifies as a postmortem, even if all you're doing is denying the fact that the patient died.
Likewise, looking at a Republican trifecta and claiming, "we've been winning elections more than losing them," also qualifies as a postmortem. It's just a very, VERY delusional diagnosis.
If you took a break from trying to insult MY reading skills, and tried a little harder to improve YOUR OWN reading skills, maybe you would have noticed that I have ALREADY POINTED OUT the fact that what trumpsuckers are willing to vote for, is not a measure of what the democratic base is willing to vote for.
Please find in my comment where I said they did nothing wrong.
You are inventing things to disagree with
Noting a fact is not "excuse making". Noting that before this election, we had recently been winning more elections than losing them is not delusional, it's an observation of fact. You disliking a factual observation doesn't make me delusional, nor does it make my observation a diagnosis.
Have a great one
Re: "Please find..."
Please give me a valid excuse, as to why I should have to explain the concept of a synonymous phrase... and why I should have to point out the difference between what IS in quotation marks, and what is NOT.
As for the rest of that: It is what it is. Call it what you like.
Ok ma'am, good luck lol
It's quite simple, actually. Republicans are America Only while Democrats are America first, Americans last.
THAT is the difference between the two parties.
Someone is going to have to tell me why it's Democrats' "ties to billionaires" that loses elections, but it doesn't lose them for MAGA when he campaigns with the richest man in the world and gives the highest civilian honor possible to Miriam Adelson. If people really have that deep an antipathy to billionaires, they sure have a funny way of showing it when they vote for 1) a billionaire, who 2) promised to let a centibillionaire run the federal budget, and 3) committed to a casino magnate widow decabillionaire to run foreign policy on behalf of Israel. What gives, exactly?
Because Trump at least LIES and promises to "drain the swamp" and lies some more and promises popular reforms. Plus Republicans in general aren't to keen on the whole "cognitive dissonance" thing. More people are turning left. And establishment and moderate dems are firmly right wing at this point. People on the left want actual reforms thay benefit ordinary Americans, and they see clearly how bought the dem party is (taking more dark money than Trump in 2020, prostituting itself and voters in support of genocide for the profit of the military industrial complex and AIPAC donations. Dems made it blatantly clear this election that their base is NOT the American people, but the donor class and elite capitalist interests to the point they didn't give a crap about preserving democracy from the likes of Trump, regardless of how they tried to fearmonger about exactly that.
You're twisting yourself into pretzels by saying that "more people are turning left" but that Republicans are winning the votes of people who are turning left because Dems aren't left enough, and they hate "the capitalist class" even though Trump aligned himself explicitly with the capitalist class. All you have is a hammer, and you're spending your time passionately arguing that something that doesn't even come close to resembling a nail, actually is one. It doesn't add up.
I strongly doubt that outside of some voters in Dearborn, there are very few former Dem voters going for Trump this cycle in order to "punish" the party. There are probably a lot of voters who either stayed home or abstained/voted 3rd party at the top of the ticket due to their disgust with Kamala's turn to the center and waffling on genocide.
As for billionaires, this is incredibly simple. Dems have a base that is put off by such ties, Reps do not. Many Americans did not vote in 2024, and although we cannot confirm it, how many were possible D voters who sat out due to D ties to billionaires? A R voter who is deciding between Trump or the couch is significantly less likely to have a hostile view of billionaires.
Are you surprised that voters in the democratic base, have different values than trump's followers? What trumpsuckers are willing to vote for, is not a measure of what the democratic base is willing to vote for.
I hope you're not one of those people who tries to diagnose a hundred million different people, as if "the electorate" is one collective hive-mind.
Also: What kind of an "anti-imperialist" needs to be convinced that billionaires shouldn't be allowed to buy democracy?
Rojas, and others like her, are exactly right about where the Democratic Party has wandered off since Obama and even before with Bill Clinton--both of whose administrations were more centrist than were acknowledged. Bernie's and other Progressive voices like his have been out there, crying in the wilderness but the DNC does its best to sideline them, if not shut them up completely. I never thought I'd see a Dem candidate parading around with the likes of a Cheney or a Cuban, and yet that is what Harris did in a vain effort to "court" Republican votes. I'm sure she didn't garner any with that strategy. All this "reaching across the aisle" talk has gotten the Party into so much trouble, and yes, has made it look too often like Republican Lite. Why do we fear re-installing a Newer Deal a la Roosevelt? Why cowed by claims of "socialism?" Like others, I wish we had a Labor or Progressive Party as a 3rd alternative, but it would take generations to make it happen, if at all, before the world burns up.
The reason we can't have an even slightly progressive candidate is because the dem party has been captured by the donors class/oligarchs. I agree with you, the only option is a strong 3rd party, revolutionary in nature. I disagree with you that it will take decades to build. That's just the propaganda they feed us talking. I think this movement is already happening, and doing folks, GenZ and alpha, are leading the way. If you're not following these kids on TikTok, do so! You'll be inspired!
OMG, I love this article. I feel like you guys nailed it on the political aspect. On a social aspect, we need to make our own media to talk to voters
Democrats ran the most centrist, pro American to a fault campaign I have ever seen in my life. It made the Bush campaigns look pinko by comparison.
The problem is that, even though the GOP doesn’t give a shit about Americans, they listen enough to market themselves to people, while Dems think they have it all figured out with “demographics” and advertise like it’s still 2008.
We just need to strip the Democratic Party to its core and rebuild it as a pro working class party. Everything else we believe about social issues can be addressed when Dems actually win elections, if they actually ever win
Not really any new revelation. Sell out, sell out. Puppets on strings dance for the dollar. Why do you think our elites push so much manufactured merchandise and propaganda to keep us distracted, divided, and dare I say, drugged...we are a complacent, selfish society that imagines a better world but lack the motivation or commitment to unify and make one happen.
You're in good company. Noam Chomsky stated the something very similar to this in his book Manufacturing Consent.
I'd like this comment more if I could.
Comedian Mort Sahl identified the problem back in the 90s when he said, "Bill Clinton is a new kind of Democrat. He's a Republican." That has been the path of the Democratic establishment ever since. As another wise person once said, "If you give the people the choice between a Republican and a Republican, they'll choose the Republican every time."
You hit the nail on the head! It has been a long time now that they have needed to cut ties with the lobbyists/big money. The Democratic Party is looking more and more like the Republican Party and both have help create an Oligarchy. It has taken me 46 years of voting to understand that our vote goes to the highest bidder and that my vote is only for show.
The Democratic party is just the GOP in a flashier outfit.
We at least need them to understand the 95% of us who are not multimillionaires…
We help run the economy and see little benefits from it. But they fear we would have too much leisure time.
Citizens United will be the inflection point where our fragile and arguable "democracy" came to an end…
But it will never work until they stop counting corporations as citizens.
I have concluded that the Dems would prefer to lose with candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris than risk winning with Bernie Sanders. In 2016, 2020, and 2024 the Dems had more money, but only won one of three. Wall Street, big pharma, and the tech sector fear progressives.
As I wrote in my book, Grand Collusion, on foreign and economic policy, the Dems have lost touch with working class voters and have become the light beer version of the GOP.
An October 2016 Boston Globe article asked if the Democratic party had become the party of coastal elites and college professors. They interviewed Michael Dukakis (1988 Democratic party candidate for president). He said that in his day the thought of West Virginia being Republican was unthinkable. They also interviewed James Carville, who said that in the 1990's they traded West Virginia for New Jersey, a trade he said he'd make again. Well, we all know what happened a few weeks later even though Hillary had a lot more money.
Now, the working class is solidly Republican. Who would want to vote for someone who doesn't seem to respect or even like you? When people making $10-$15 an hour complained about their rent and grocery bill going up by 20%-30% the past few years, the Biden-Harris administration's response was, "Hey, the GDP is up, dummy!" Well, their GDP wasn't up.
We have two economies - one for those of us with assets, who have done very, very well these past few years. Then there is the economy for those who are essentially the working poor - who can't get ahead no matter what.
Trump and the GOP do not care a bit about working class people. But, at least they pretend to.
Reading the comments, it appears that readers of Zeteo are divided between those who believe the Democratic Party should continue as is because they've been winning elections recently, and those who believe that a change is required because first of all there's increasing inequality and too much support for repressive regimes, and we need to reverse that, morally, and also because the country's shift to the right (of, for example, Latino men) is something that will become increasingly impossible to overcome.
So do we split into two parties? Do we support/modify something that already exists? How does this viewpoint gain more traction?
I am definitely ready to stop holding my nose to vote for the "least bad" candidate.
Maybe a two party system doesn't work?
Nah, that can't be it...
Something I'm not seeing in the comments is an understanding that we have an increasing population that doesn't believe in democracy. In part, Trump tricked them, they voted for something they don't want, but in part, he promised to dismantle democracy, and that may be how many people think, not only billionaires.
Because: democracy did not work for them, they're ready to try *anything else.*
Also, because many people would agree that what we need is more loyalty, respect for authority, and less attention to protection of the vulnerable, less attention to fairness and justice.
They were given the choice of the lesser of two evils, and chose MORE evil.
Well this is where the point that they were lied to and misled comes in. But yes, they were no longer able/willing to vote for the status quo.
Endless rehashing of what went wrong and maybe it's too soon. But it makes sense to me that the Democrats became the party of better-educated reasonably well-off people. The rest were captured by grifting lying media that I've never personally seen.
Also Black Women, for whatever reason, stayed with the Dems.
Doubly-victimized status (racism/sexism) might lead a person to see things a certain way. White men and Latino men somehow think they can join the "men" part? White women aiming for the "white" part.
So Black Women not so easily fooled by the media that captured others.
But they are still voting for the lesser evil and don't see a way to equality and fairness.
"Democrat" and "Republican" are both empty vessels to be filled by corporate gold.
10,000%
Unitl Democratic Socialism is recognized as a legitimate aspiration in the US, we will witness this fakery of Conservatism vs. Conservatism Light.
The betrayal of fundamental human rights AKA GAZA stinks to everybody. People vote against something as much as for it and voters are mad enough to vote against themselves because it's really all the same mess of pottage
We keep hearing about the fortunes that AIPAC spends to defeat progressive candidates who might sympathize with Palestinians. We read about rich Jews who force institutions, like universities, to crush those young bright people, including many Jews, who want to proceed as humanists in a cruel world. Those few humanistic jews are only a distraction. On every side, it is influential Jews who support the right wing. My parents were both Jewish but to my mind it is shameful to be Jewish in today's world. Any thinking person should be part of the new Anti-Zionism, based on real, Jewish anti-human values. Israel has successfully marketed anti-semitism as a meaningless brand.
Read Peter Bienart: How to be Jewish after the Destruction of
GAZA
It's almost as if a two party system is just a license to shoot yourself in the foot with your own 2nd amendment.