this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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This is what blows my mind about the "Democrats are center-right ghouls" (accurate) -> "Let's stop voting for Democrats that'll fix it" conclusion. The first part is accurate, the second is a terrible strategy to arrive at to fix it.
The whole of Washington is profoundly corrupt. Anything that comes within its AoE radius starts to suffer this overwhelming pressure (financial, narrative-manipulation, violent, social, whatever else) to become neoliberal. Sure, that includes Democrats too, a lot of them are the fuckin' worst. Fixing it and getting humanity back into the politics is an urgent problem. But just holding your nose and walking away, hoping that it'll then start arriving at reforms on its own, instead of trying to improve things (through whatever means), is pretty much guaranteed to failure I think.
Correct. Somehow a lot of users espouse the idiocy of "punishing" Democrats though
I notice that a lot of it is very emotional framings. "They betrayed us" "I'm so heartbroken" "They want us all to fall in line" "I'm so tired of showing up and then they always turn their back on us" and so on. Sometimes they specifically mention that they've always "voted Democrat," but after this latest thing, they just can't.
It's funny though, none of them seem to have a plan for how to prevent their new party from being similarly overrun by greed. If they somehow managed to overcome every organizational challenge to get a massive voter migration away from Democrats and to Whatevercrats, they would have to somehow vet the intentions of hundreds or thousands of candidates who never held office before. These are largely the folks who promoted Tulsi Gabbard and Jimmy Dore long after their grifts became obvious.
Yeah. (Edit: Don't forget Tucker Carlson! He's still on the sidebar for altmedia.house. Literally every one of the people on that sidebar who I looked into, who is still publishing in the modern day, is in some form or other spreading pro-Russia narratives. Just by random coincidence I am sure.)
Anyway, back to the "dumping Democrats as a way to promote the left" issue, it is almost exactly like how human nature involves greed, corruption, and deception, and then some people look at capitalist societies that are full of greed corruption and deception and say IF WE JUST GOT RID OF CAPITALISM ALL THESE THINGS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.
I mean, maybe. Certainly capitalism carries with it some unique evils that seem like they need better ways of eliminating than we currently have. What's your plan? How has it coped with greed corruption and deception when it's been tried in the past? What would you want to do specifically and how do you think it would play out? HOW DARE YOU LOVE CAPITALISM I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TRIED TO SAY THIS IT'S NOT A PROBLEM THAT IT HAS THIS MASSIVE GREED AND CORRUPTION AND...
I think a whole lot of that comes from right wing bots, just like the whole astroturfed "Walk Away" campaign back in 2018. I wish I could attribute it completely to the right wing, but I'm sure a lot of edgy leftists are doing it too. The arguments are terrible, but some do seem to genuinely buy in. Somehow the answer to "Democrats bad" can't be "Replace bad Democrats with good Democrats".
I mean definitely at least some of it is astroturf. There have been some accounts that have been pushing that and then got caught with weird little inconsistencies in their story, or were using non-American number styles and then got confused when asked about it, or otherwise let the mask slip that they were not what they were pretending to be.