this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
791 points (85.0% liked)
Political Memes
1807 readers
1 users here now
Non political memes: !memes@sopuli.xyz
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It pisses me off to no end when people conflate legitimate criticism of Democrats with tankie rhetoric. The Dems are complacent, listless, corrupt, and lazy. They refuse to stand up to the Republicans until it's too late or doesn't matter.
The people want progressive politics: universal healthcare, living wage, affordable housing, education, and food. We want a sustainable future and an end to corporate greed.
The donor class, superpacs, and other sources of dark money in politics are what keep nearly everyone corrupt. Its addictive.
Last election season went something like this:
Progressives: "Please stop sending weapons to a genocidal maniac who is using them to murder children in order to grab land. And stop actively protecting said genocidal maniac from consequences in the international community."
Establisment: "STFU tankie!"
Maybe if progressives in partisan primary states registered as Democrats and voted in the primaries, they wouldn’t be complaining about all the centrists in office.🤔
So you're ok with centrists supporting and actively protecting perpetrators of genocide?
What about my comment gave you that impression? I’m saying that if progressives voted in Democratic primaries with the same conviction they use to criticize the DNC, we wouldn’t have as many centrists in Congress.
Democratic congressional primaries are decided by ~20% of registered Democrats. You can look at PAC funding and vote for the Democrat that isn’t funded by AIPAC, who will have a better chance of winning the election than a third-party protest vote.
My point is that Democrats, whether progressive or centrist, shouldn't be supporting this. It shouldn't matter (on this particular topic) if progressives aren't voting; I'm not willing to give centrist Democrats a pass and will condemn them just the same.
I keep hearing that progressives aren't voting in the numbers that they should be, but there might be another problem: there simply aren't that many progressives to get offices. As a "Reddit refugee", I realized that we are overrepresented in a lot of these online echo chambers.
I’ve been left of the Democrats and stumping progressives/greens/independents since the 90s. Most people don’t even know if they live in one of the 30 partisan primary states. Copious amounts of New Yorkers were turned away at the polls in 2016 because they didn’t know they had to be registered as a Democrat to vote for Bernie in the primary. I’m sure that happened in other partisan primary states as well.
Yet in my experience, asking a progressive to register as a Democrat is the fastest way to get them to stop listening, even though it’s statistically far more effective than voting third-party. People need to stop voting with their feelings and start playing the game that we’ve been losing for decades.