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this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Jon carries a lot of water for the idea that the Democratic Party leadership are inept.
They are not. They accomplish every task they set out to.
The problem is that they don’t want the same things the voters in the party want.
They don’t want to “win”. The only thing they want is to maintain their proximity to wealth and power, and so they have cast their lot with the oligarchy, the same as Republicans.
The Democratic Party ”runs cover” (“block tackle” for you Europeans) for the Republicans while the Republicans overtly dismantle democracy. There is always a parliamentarian or a “blue slip rule” to help the Dems steal defeat from the jaws of victory. How many times do they need to strain credulity and invent some new excuse or mechanism for their failure for it to form a composite image of collaboration?
The Democratic Party is a honeypot used to attract and neutralize progressive policies and politicians, and prevent the “Overton Window” of American politics from moving left.
At every crucial moment they have supported the privatization and financialization of the commons, the wars of aggression, the surveillance & police state, and they will continue to do so until Palantir storm troopers are dragging people from their Blackrock housing to Amazon work camps to fulfill their mandated techno feudal district conscription period.
Thank you. I'm tired of people thinking the neo-liberals of the Democrats are their friends. They point toward the few pieces of legislation they pass that's positive when they ignore all the needed legislation they never even give lip service to. In all the time since its inception payments for disabilities and similar have not risen to meet inflation, the amount they can keep in a bank account hasn't changed since like the 1970s. There's SO much wrong that the Dems could platform on and spend so much time doing if they win but they don't want to.
If either party paid attention to their voters we would have had an election of Bernie Sanders vs Ron Paul years ago, but both of them have their chosen one, and the only time we've seen a massive pushback against that has been the time the alternative was actually worse.
Thank you! Like why are we acting like what's happening in the Middle East isn't chuck schumers lifelong wet dream in action??
I think you're wrong. Or rather, I think you're mostly wrong.
Like, in no way do I think they are extremely good at what they do, unless your argument is that they don't give a shit, which I also think is wrong. They definitely want to win. They definitely want to control things. They literally make more money (not the organization, mind you, the people who run the organization) when they are in control. It is silly to think otherwise. Heck, it is safer, too!
But, I think they are quite dumb, or maybe it's better to think of them as out of touch. They rely on political calculus, but they're using some pretty bad variables. Because otherwise, there wouldn't be any progressive Democrats at all. Like, that is inherently detrimental to their centrism. Giving crumbs isn't as useful to them as people say because it let's others know how hungry they are for more of that. Hope is contagious.
I think they work with what they got, and what they got is so rapidly changing that they freak out and pick what they think is the safest option over and over again. And their base hates it, but they'll deal with that part later, there's just too many fires for them!
Like, sure, there's a little bit of trying to control how progressive they can be, but they just... Suck at that, too. I dunno, man. A lot of people can skate by on incompetency, and that just feels more likely.
I think you’re missing the whole point of OP. The democrats exist to be a bulwark against leftward movement on the US political spectrum. Your point that the democrats allow progressive voices to exist within the party rather than outwardly excluding them actually reinforces this argument rather than weakens it. It creates the illusion that the Democratic Party is a leftwing party why the pragmatic end result is that the democrats do not produce leftwing policies.
This is all in the interests of their powerful megadonor who, make no mistake, would rather lose an election than let a truly progressive leader come to power in America.
If they wanted to win they would release the 2024 election autopsy. Instead they buried it. Yes, they dont mind winning elections but they absolutely would rather lose than allow progressives in power. They just buried the election autopsy a week ago and now everyone forgot about it. Same thing trump relies on to stay in power.
Folks like you being unrealistic about what we can all see happening is a huge part of their enablement.
"Gosh, golly, we blew it again, so sorry everyone! Being the good guys, we have a harder challenge, we have to fight for change the right way. Sometimes we lose by sticking to our principles 😞"
Yeah fucking right. Of course they'd prefer themselves be the current half dominating the other, but not so they can make any kind of sweeping changes. Just because it's cushier on top. And yes, the DNC is where the folks who sincerely do want to fix things end up. And just look how they're prevented from ever getting anything done. They get co-opted and sidelined, another major function of the party. Absorb the true believers and thereby dull and mute their influence.
The moment Dems have actual control and power - even for a moment - as soon as it's theirs they roll over. Recent shutdown capitulation was a perfect example, but it's just over and over and over. I'm not claiming every rank and file Democrat politician is "in on it", I'm claiming it doesn't matter, if the party structure and behavior is obviously corrupt and strictly self-serving as the commenter you're replying to laid out.
It's rich people against us, Dem leadership is against us. Please stop being so naive. Your naivete is a literal weapon they wield to abuse us all.
I don't believe I disagreed with the assertion that the DNC leadership wants to make sweeping changes. I said that they are NOT some type of controlled opposition. If they were, they wouldn't be fucking up as hard as they do at every aspect you stated. They are a combination of inefficient, out-of-touch, greedy, and... Lazy, but like they want everyone to like them which makes them inauthentic?
I think it's unrealistic to think the DNC is smart enough to undermine everything but somehow not smart enough to just... Lie better? You know? Why bother being so fucking pathetic when it is easier, cheaper, and faster to just lie? Why make an autopsy on why you lost the election and burying it because of your Israeli money ties if you were a genius and could just make a fake report that blames progressive policies real fucking easily.
Like, sure, call them sociopaths and everything because the DNC is having to defend legitimately bad positions in spite of its supporters opposition because money, but don't pretend that is out of some masterminded technique. They are not that smart.
They're controlled in the sense that they represent class interests that are opposed to those of their nominal constituency. By paying some lip service to vaguely progressive policies, they capture roughly half of the voters in a system built to exclude any real working-class political representation.
Controller by nothing and accountable to no one is a weird definition of controlled.
What do you mean? They are accountable to their class collaborators. They benefit from all sorts of "campaign contributions", corrupt dealings, lobbying and investments. For sure some of them have the additional guarantee of epstein-variety blackmail.
Systemic problems require no malice.
I'm not clear on what you mean here. The system is a kind of an embodiment of malice towards the poor. I'm not saying that all these politicians are consciously malicious, I'm saying that they don't work for us.
[edit - I did misread, and thought you were arguing they really do want the sweeping changes, that's my bad]
My assertion is the DNC leadership does not want to make sweeping changes, wants to avoid them at all costs, but nonetheless position themselves as the party of Change^TM^, thus necessitating all the lip service to ideals like justice and fairness, while constantly stacking the deck against everyone else* [edit: I originally said "citizens" here, which is an ancient habit, a word I was long ago taught to carry much more meaning than it merits. Gross, and not what I intended].
I don't know where you're getting the idea that I think they are mastermind geniuses, I think they are pretty garden-variety "pretend to look busy/effective while working for my actual interests" type liars, you can see that kind of behavior in any large corporate environment, too, it's ubiquitous. Gets more disingenuous, and common to the point of being mere table stakes, the higher one goes on those rungs too. Usually.
So I'm just not willing to call their failures incompetence. It's not a unified monolith of course, but the Chuck Schumer's of the world know EXACTLY what they're doing. And they're no dummies, even if I don't think they're some kind of magically-capable puppetmasters.
It's as simple as their interests being much more similar to that of their peers (of either party), and to the donors for both parties, and miles away from our interests. I'm not claiming special abilities, just regular tier competence. You seem to be insisting instead that it's incompetence with the right goals, and I don't see the evidence for that. I DO see lots of PR.
this is my assessment as well, they are competently achieving the wrong goals for society.
Hard disagree on your last paragraph. Cynicism serves them far better than starry eyed optimism.
Naive optimists have something to lose. Cynics don't register on political calculus.
If you believe the US is a uniparty, that's fine by them. Whether you are correct or not doesn't matter. You don't matter. You weren't voting or donating or volunteering anyway.
Stop being naive != be apathetic
I'm definitely not encouraging apathy, far from it. People need to know what they're fighting though. I don't get the sense that we'll agree very much on what should be done, but that's okay, I don't feel the need to bicker about it.
Sidenote, I think you mean "pessimist" instead of "cynic". Cynical people believe everyone is purely driven by self-interest regardless of other virtues or values. Cynical people believe the rest of us are lying when we say we do things for principles and ideals vs. just self-interest. Not the same as feeling pessimistic about things, though used interchangeably all the time. Politicians do tend to be extremely cynical, whether optimistic or pessimistic.
No criticism to you, just pointing that out.
Fair, calling you a cynic is bad faith. I don't think pessimism is unwarranted. We have a lot of reasons to be pessimistic.
I just think that when things happen, it's usually optimists getting them done. We need the optimists.
I very much want to see things done by optimists as well, as long as we mean something like "imagining a better society that doesn't excuse or hide atrocities, no matter where or against whom" and things like that when we say optimism.
I'm less interested if we mean something closer to "well this is what we have today and really those DNC folks aren't that bad, probably, so attacking them is actually counterproductive" - that doesn't sound like optimism to me. That sounds like defeat, some flavor of outright self-deception, or uneasy don't-look-right-at-it complicity, or collaboration.
But to be clear by this point I imagine we feel more similarly than differently, I'm really just staking out my own distinctions here, not saying "and that's why everyone should say I'm right and very smart". Lol.
Cheers friend.
I think you are right that we mostly agree. Thank you for engaging.
Sometimes I wonder if they don't have a monthly secret meeting where they look at which issues appear to be up and coming and then flip a coin for which party takes which side of it. Kinda like debate club.
It often looks more like performance art. The dems pretend to take one side of an issue, and then rally their base about how the GOP want to stop the solution or tear down current protections. And of course the GOP takes the other side and rallys their base against what the "lunatic" dems want to do (which of course the dems would never do because then the issue would be gone), and they start proposing ways to tear down whatever law already favor the democrats side.
When the dems get in power, somehow very few of the things they proposed before actually happen. And the ones that do are so soft an executive order can undo them.
It's just a shell game. Perception manipulation.
All of this is true, but by saying it you might somehow influence the outcome of an election in a manner that favors Republicans.
Therefore I hate you with every fiber of my being and denounce you as a Sockpuppet of an Enemy Nation.
I just haven't decided if you're a Russian Bot, a Chinese Wumao, or an Ayatollah Accomplice. Perhaps all three.