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Im skeptical a fair bit of time about those congressional ‘lefties’ but this is true, for the most part they’re doing what they can. What I do like most about them is when they show up outside of a legislative capacity, like showing up at strikes or going to meet unions. I think many people discount how important that boots on the ground work is. Imagine being a franchise owner of something trying to snuff out union efforts knowing you’re gonna have US Lawmakers who agree with your workers physically there with the workers. You better come correctly in that situation.
Just want to point out that they only showed up in support of the current labor movement after immense pressure was put on them after failing to support the historic Amazon JFK8 union drive. AOC and politicians like her still have to pushed, sometimes hard, to do the right thing.
They show an ability to learn from their mistakes, at a minimum. Can’t be said for all.
Sorry man I just fundamentally disagree and feel like you are ignoring/undervaluing the role grassroots organizing plays. This is pure political pressure, not a reevaluation of policy.
I say this specifically because as soon as you give a politician the benefit of doubt and remove that political pressure they stop “learning from their mistakes”.
Oh I agree with you and am biting my tongue to not talk about how disappointed people like them made me when it came to the railroad unions and strike in this thread simply because at the end of the day through mistake or other means nymag got it right that they do indeed do thing that have an impact.
Don’t bite your tounge! These are not people to revere, they are there to represent their constituency and it’s our responsibility to constantly push them to do so and righteously criticize them when they fail to act. Articles like this and bite your tounge comments are antithetical to a healthy democracy.
I don’t give a shit if AOC cried when she voted to increase the military budget for apartheid Isreal. All that matters is she was a deciding vote and Palestinian people are dieing because of it.
Good. I hope they achieve far more in the future, it would be a net benefit for everyone, even those who dislike them and their politics
The greatest threat to conservatives is other conservatives. Unfortunately, they’re just too stupid to understand why.
Their own party treats them with more disdain than their supposed “opposition party.”
AOC and the other actual left-wing minority making waves in a sea of right-wing neoliberals and righter-wing fascists is amazing. They can’t win, the game is fully rigged and the institutions are fully captured by monied interests with political bribery legalized, but it’s like watching Cap get up to face Thanos’ army alone, it’s inspiring.
Too bad no one, including most Americans, are on their left.
Because were too far into the sunk cost fallacy to reject
“free market”rigged crony capitalism.“We can’t re-examine our core economic beliefs! We already gave the owners all the money, and they promised for half a century to whip their dicks out and urinate golden showers of prosperity on all of us!.. any day now…”
The article makes an argument exactly against this mentality.
Did you read the article?
I read the article, and I agree with Freddie deBoer. This is just liberal apologetics. This is just the same arguments of things are getting better, just wait, blah, blah, blah. I’m old. It’s tired. Give me healthcare and change my mind.
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Organizing a General Strike .
So say by some miracle the political will to have a General Strike builds in America in 2026. Do you want to find out if Donald Trump will bring back the proud tradition of using the US army as a strikebreaking force after he has replaced all the leadership across the military with cronies? (The president can do this at will)
Would you rather Joe Biden was president instead?
I hope I’m wrong, but it won’t matter. America has a long history of Union busting.
Indeed, I am calling out to that sordid history.
Are you REALLY saying you predict no difference in how Trump vs Biden would respond such a strike?
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So until we get single payer healthcare, you won’t be happy with any other policy wins and you’d rather burn all your political capital fighting us instead of uniting against the literal fascists?
The left, the real socialist left doesn’t have political capital. So there’s nothing to burn. Incremental policy is great to alleviate suffering, but ultimately is masturbatory. Fascism will eventually overcome America. This explains why. Waiting for real, substantial policy changes with climate change happening is denialism. We’re waiting for enough people to realize this so we can organize and fight for the future.
I found that argument very unconvincing.
I think the author’s definition of fascism is nonsensical and ahistorical.
I agree that capitalism has the tendency to concentrate power (like every other social or political system ever in the history of humans), but the idea that we should just abandon the levers of power to the kind of people who want Donald Trump to be president is so insane to me.
The author even concedes that Donald Trump is uniquely bad but then bends over backwards trying to get back to his comfortable “both sides” narrative
I agree that it is insane to concede power to fascism. I have kids and will be voting for Biden for this reason. I’m aware that when full fascism comes, it will not be pretty. But I also understand that capitalism will eventually decay into fascism. So, I am sympathetic to those that want to do something outside the system of just voting. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m just trying to make people understand the situation we’re in.
Well I’m glad I don’t have to have the Cornel West argument here.
I think we agree that the whole Earth is in a dangerous and precarious situation and far too many people are still not acknowledging this?
Do you disagree that Biden has delivered more policy for the Left as a whole than any president since LBJ?
So … all capitalism is fascism; therefore “both sides are the same”; therefore reject incremental progress as illegitimate?
Incremental progress is not illegitimate. It’s just never going to be enough to solve the problem that is capitalism. If it were, the New Deal would have fixed this system and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Ok…so because the New Deal didn’t… overthrow capitalism forever… therefore working within the system is pointless?
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Isn’t that just the progressive left? As far as I know we don’t worship figureheads like the fascist right with their orange demigod.
America’s “left” is pretty middle of the road if you compare the US to other first world nations.
Things like free affordable / free university education, universal healthcare, consumer protection, and decent unemployment insurance are not controversial elsewhere. But in the US the right wing claims these boring ass ideas, that the rest of the modern world has embraced, are radical.
If left wing idea were hot sauces, the GOP would think mayo was the Last Dab on Hot Ones.
You can still respect and admire a figurehead without worshipping them. The difference is whether you bend definitions and rules to make exceptions of them when they deviate from expectations.
I mean, the article linked is an AOC apologist quite literally bending “definitions and rules to make exceptions” for her after another columnist said she was “just a regular old Democrat now.”
Branding the progressive left the “AOC Left” is also problematic and indicative of some hero worship on the author’s part.
Naming a movement after a figurehead is not worship, it’s just descriptive.
It absolutely is hero worship any time someone is put on a pedestal and their flaws are ignored.
That’s what the author of the linked article has explicitly done. He waves away the fact that she consistently defers to Democratic Party leadership—except for occasional, “token gestures of resistance to solidify the illusion” that she’s a hard-line leftist—and then holds her up as the face of progressivism.
If that’s not hero worship idk what is.
Edit: spelling
You are treating “differs from leadership” as if it is indisputably a flaw, and assuming that a person having a flaw means we should discount their achievements. Those oversights are just as fallacious as the supposed hero-worship you are accusing others of doing.
You’re misunderstanding me (probably because I misspelled “defers” as “differs”).
I’m saying she, as a proclaimed “progressive,” generally isn’t that progressive at all and generally defers to centrist, Democratic Party leaders: she does what they say rather than sticking to her ostensibly much more leftist guns.
Ah I see. I’ll gladly take that over someone incapable of compromise.
Nope, worship people claiming being other sex and making people to call them by a gender they are not. :)
You seem to be confused.
She’s the Obama of millennials, and will probably achieve the same political success. (Once the boomers preventing her ascension all die off.)
👍
It’s not the generation, it’s capitalism.
Just as subservience breeds subjugation, so choosing between differing forms of exploitation can only result in continued exploitation. Being asked to choose between capitalism and fascism does not change the direction we are travelling in, it only marginally changes the route we are taking to get there.
subservience breeds subjugation
I like that phrasing, goes well with ‘civility breeds cowardice’.
Can I ask where that quote is from? Or is it your own?
My own, used often in the same context you use yours.
Civility breeds cowardice, when will people learn that their civility has been abused by those with hands on their throats and their wallets.
You have a gift for metaphorical speech 🎤
Excepting the punctuation. 😅
The enemy of ‘good’ is ‘perfection’.
Contrary to the popular idiom, “Practice” does not indeed “make perfect”. Only perfect practice does, when imperfect practice only instills imperfection under the guise of labor and “sunk cost”. Either revel in glorious mediocrity or strive to do better than yesterday. No judgement, it’s up to each of us as individuals.
so most of this article was excuses as to why progressives supposedly cant achieve anything.
They are the ultra minority. I imagine the report points to that.
yeah probably gonna stay that way with them following a non-progressive party
The progressive caucus is 100/213 house Dems, it’s the largest Democratic caucus in Congress now. It’s been growing steadily.
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Eh, it is, but it’s not really 100 members strong. It means the word has good branding among Democrats, but members like Hakeem Jeffries aren’t going to go to bat to fight against business or do anything that might make the larger party uncomfortable if it doesn’t accommodate a progressive demand.
The lack of actual political analysis in this thread is staggering. Thank you for being a reasonable voice.
I have yet to see any realistic paths suggested which would actually achieve all those policies. The most common one I see is to ignore the law and do it anyway and challenge Republicans to question it. Which, for some reason, they don’t think Republicans will, despite a decade showing us to the contrary.
Even more ironically, they say that you are the fascist for disagreeing with them – not, you know, the person actually suggesting they ignore the law to implement their agenda.
I mean, making Republicans publicly block good things is good. Just because the Court is captured and Republicans are reliably awful doesn’t mean the best course of action is just quietly accepting their power.
You’re acting like the law is a hard and fast rulebook that you turn the crank and find the result. Our legal system is already full of gray areas, split decisions, and laws that are ignored because that’s part of the role of the people enforcing it. Student loan forgiveness wasn’t definitively illegal, it was only “illegal” because we knew the Republican court would find some way to stop it. They threw away the law to make that happen, and they’ll do it again, but the first step in contesting their power is forcing them to wield it against public opinion, the next step is to remind the public of the limits of their power. Simply saying “good game, you got us, the Court gets to do whatever it wants” is just cowardice.
democrats are currently at war with eachother which is most of what’s preventing them from achieving anything progressive. Even if things like renewable energy, closing the wealth gap, gun control, healthcare reform are popular amongst democrats, they’re far from unanimous. Even shit like ending the filibuster which would have given a democratic congress much more potency, was resisted by the same conservative democrats that poison the efforts of all progressive efforts.
Democratic fundraisers are pumping tons of money into both sides and getting nowhere. The path to achieving progressive policies is electing a progressive party, which does not currently exist.
I think that’s way more work than necessary. Look at what’s still been accomplished the last several years. Democrats and Progressives have still passed COVID relief, an infrastructure bill, and the biggest climate change bill the US has ever had. Mainstream Democrats all agree we need a $15 minimum wage and national paid sick leave.
Look at the conservative Democrats that are holding up removal of the filibuster and mainstream Democrat policies. There’s really just one, Manchin. Maybe Sinema too but I honestly have no fucking idea what’s up with her. All we need is another Democrat senator or two, and we can kill the filibuster.
If you look at the composition of the Senate over time, Democrats have only had filibuster proof control of the chamber for 2-3 months of the last few decades. They passed Obamacare in that time – which was originally going to have a single payer option, but a Manchin figure whose vote was necessary stood in the way.
The filibuster was also a bit less restrictive until recently. It used to be that you had to physically speak on the floor for a filibuster to happen, now you can just say it. The only appetite to really kill the filibuster has come very recently, in light of historic Republican stonewalling. We still have yet to send 50 Democrats who will kill the filibuster to the Senate. I think achieving that is much easier than creating a new progressive party, and it’ll also let us get to passing left wing policy sooner.
Vote for Excuses/Distractions- 2024. “Make America the Same Again.”
AOC is just another fucking populist. I do not understand how people fall for this shit over and over and over again.
Populist:
a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. “he ran as a populist on an anticorruption platform”
I one hundred percent agree that AOC is a politician who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
The critical difference between AOC and all of the right wing populists, is that she is concerned about people, and the preservation and expansion of human rights.
Right wing populists fire up their base by singling out minorities, and others that wield little to no social or political currency, and picking on them. Besides being morally repugnant at face value, the rhetoric and actual right wing policy never deliver tangible quality of life improvements to their base.
oh my god this is rhe dumbest thought ever. i hear this from “libertarian”(see:morons) side of America all the time and i just have to ask… how the fuck do you come to this conclusion??
because she works to get voters? her policy goals and platform are clear, she represents extremely vocal voting blocks of liberals.
how is any of that a populist?? because she’s trying to get voters? you don’t know what a populist is
Anyone under 40 in American politics is an automatic beloved novelty.
