740
The party of sore losers.
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
740 points (99.6% liked)
Political Memes
11991 readers
2186 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Hanlon's Razor. Can their behavior be adequately explained by incompetence? I think it can, with a shake of self-servingness and, in some places, a small pinch of corruption.
It's better to look at things framed by incentives.
Some are incentivized to win while others are incentivized to maintain the status quo.
Why do you think it's just a couple "Democrats" changing sides or caving when Republicans need them to?
They are playing good cop/bad cop but they are both cops.
Sure maybe 49% of Democrats might have the best intentions but along as Republicans stand strong with their 51% they control basically everything.
It's naive to think that the rich controls everything except for the Democratic party. They do a lot of work to make it look like they don't own the good cop.
"Adequately explained" does a lot of heavy lifting in Hanlon's Razor, and it's supposed to. It's adequate to assume that the few people who always break with the GOP are on the take, and the ones who aren't doing anything about it are just incompetent. Sure, the oligarchy is buying up whoever they need, but they don't want to waste money on directly buying a politician if they can just Citizens-United their useful idiots into office.
Assuming malice in even 51%--while possible, sure--I just don't think is necessary.
Saying that it is just incompetence blames individuals for not being capable enough. The problem is that the incentives for the Democrats to do anything useful don't exist. Their budget comes from giant corporate donors who will never let them pass universal healthcare, support unions or public transportation. It's not incompetence. It's structural. They are well aware that progressive policy positions are popular and they continue to intentionally leave them off the agenda.
It's not incompetence.
I don't entirely disagree that the incentives aren't there, but I'd say that the bigger problem (particularly over the past ten years) is that they've allowed the entire party platform to just be "we're not as bad as the other guys, that's good enough, right?" and they're insulated enough to believe that that's true. I think the "common wisdom" in the DNC is probably still that progressive policy is actually politically dangerous; that is to say, they don't know that they're popular, or rather they still think they can build a big enough tent to bring in the right-wing rather than expanding the voting bloc on the left.
Which leads the party members into "just get us back to brunch" behavior, and makes the structure which causes a lack of meaningful action into an effect, rather than a cause. I'm hopeful that the AOCs, the Mamdanis, and the Talaricos will show the deficiency of that structure, but I don't think it'll be quick.
If it is incompetence, then for it to involve that many people and that length of time, it's systematic incompetence that's party policy. I'd be prepared to believe that.
I think there's a lot of evidence for that, yeah. I also think there's a decent amount of evidence for malicious actors to have encouraged and bankrolled the incompetent into office, too. I'm not taking that off the table.