this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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You're way too idealistic about what politics is or should be.
The DNC isn't good, or moral, and that's not it's job. It's a business, it only exists to be in power as a representation of the voters.
The voters influence the parties. The DNC shouldn't be trying to pull voters left. Voters need to be pulling the DNC left. If the most progressive candidates keep winning, if the most conservative candidates keep losing, it forces the entire Overton window left.
And that's really the dream, choosing the most progressive of two progressive candidates, not the least regressive of two regressive candidates.
Well, I must disagree. Factions in the Republican Party have been engaged in a decades-long campaign to pull voters to the right, starting with Sen. Barry Goldwater's conservative movement, leading into the Reagan Revolution, the Contract with America era, the founding of Fox News as a propaganda arm of the party, the (astroturfed) Tea Party, and on to today. The notion that a national party organization exists solely as the Platonic embodiment of the will of the voters strikes me as quite idealistic.
If the GOP ia trying to move people right it's is a complete failure though, isn't it? Women's rights are popular, LGBT rights are popular, inclusiveness is popular, religious affiliation is decreasing. Being conservative is uncool and unpopular.
What the GOP succeeds at is undermining democracy so it can seize power with a minority. In fact, undermining democracy is the GOP's only option, precisely because it fails so hard at pulling voters right.
That just doesn't track history, though. Nixon did many things, like creating the EPA, that would be considered leftist today, not because he liked it, but because that was the political reality of the time. Then Reagan swept in on the Goldwaterite tide. Clinton overtly and explicitly moved right to steal conservative positions with his New Democrat movement.
Now we have a Democratic President breaking strikes as if he were ol' Ronnie, and his supporters defending it because he got some minor concessions from the railroad for one of the unions involved. Even the signature achievement of Obama's Presidency was a Heritage Foundation idea, pioneered as RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
We certainly have moved right in as a country in lots of ways, and somehow we're on the verge of lots of people voting in a dictator.
US citizens are moving left, the government is moving right, because right wingers vote and leftists don't.
Not voting: fucking around
Not being represented in government: finding out
Yeah the people who most consistently vote for the last 50 years are the ones most likely to enjoy a dictator.