Democratic (Party) Direction

totally in the tea leaves here and going off nothing other than my feeeelings, but if there isn’t a pretty marked course correction on the part of Dems I suspect to see their support among working and middle class black men go real soft in the not too distant future

(cue an army of bloodless psychopath consultants to tease these numbers out in just a way that means more money for more cops, and get even shittier on lgbtq issues)

HRC may be shitty on trans issues now, but would the two or three justices she appointed have been more or less likely to uphold trans rights than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett?

― F'kin Magnetometers, how do they work? (President Keyes)

is that like a meaningful question to you? i mean, that's not political discourse, you're talking alternate history. sometimes it can be fun to talk about alternate history, but meanwhile it's 2022, joe biden got elected president in 2020, and the democrats are about to be slaughtered in the midterms because inflation is spiraling out of control, corporate greed is going unchecked, and nobody can afford to fucking live anywhere.

in the meantime the supreme court has just declared absolute dominion over women's bodies and the response from the democrats is to retreat further from anything resembling a stand on principles or values other than to say look, if you vote for us consistently for the next 40 years we might actually be able to get a supreme court majority again and overturn the ruling overturning roe v. wade! sure. i believe them. i mean, look at the principled stand they took on merrick garland! if i can't trust these folks to get progressive judges on the courts, who can i trust?

in the meantime, all of the red states are passing laws making my friends illegal, and yeah, it does matter where you live. in 2016, i lived in indiana, and i was fortunate to be able to move to portland in the wake of that, because i'm white, because my dad died and left us money, because i and my partner at the time both had college degrees. being able to move to portland made a big difference in my life. without moving to portland, i'm not sure it would have been possible for me to transition.

i have a couple of friends who moved from homes in red states to live on the streets here in portland, because if you're trans you're better off living on the streets in portland than you are in texas. hopefully i can keep being able to afford to live in actual housing here. i'm one of the _lucky_ ones, the _privileged_ ones, the _respectable_ ones.

that's my life in 2022, i have to watch my friends who don't have the privilege i do suffer, sometimes die, and not be able to do anything to help them, because for all my privilege and respectability, it's not within my power to give them what they need. i'm just one woman. and maybe it's not within the democrats' power either. either they're unable or unwilling to help my friends. it doesn't matter which.

clifton heard doesn't bother me. this long-running alternate history society here on ilx does kind of bother me, yeah. i'm sure y'all are well-intentioned, but what is any of this _accomplishing_? like, i am legitimately a team player. i believe in compromising for the common good. i don't believe in rugged individualism, in one man one vote, i think that we need to build community, to work together to collectively advocate for our own common good against people who don't have our best interests at heart.

i mean there are people here who clearly believe passionately in the democratic party and want it to succeed, and i think that's great! i just think that the ways in which folks here are trying to support the democratic party might possibly be counterproductive and alienating?

like, y'all are talking about whether heard is a "soft dem" and i mean... i don't know the man but it's not something that's really of interest to me? i see someone who's suffering and powerless and victimized by (assuming he's black here, which is never actually stated) systemic racism and abuse and the discussion is about yeah but is he a _soft dem_? it just comes off as tokenizing to me, and it's kind of why i want to shift the discussion away from this guy because he's not here, he can't speak for himself, i'm not a fan of trying to analyze his motives. let the man make his own decisions.

why are you like rating people on a scale, like someone who doesn't vote is "better" than someone who votes for trump? like, what gives you the right to make those sort of value judgements? why are you telling voters to go fuck themselves? i mean, god, people say that we on the radical left eat our own but i would never dream of telling a member of a marginalized group to "fuck himself". like really? maybe this guy's lived experience is something i can learn from, maybe i should listen to this guy?

Decent HRC wouldn't have gotten any Justices anyway or if she did they'd have been 'moderate Republicans,' unlikely Democrats retake the Senate in 2018 under Clinton.

Decent chance

Kate otm

one thing I'll add here is while I do understand the urge to sit out or vote Jill Stein or whatever doing so operates on the assumption that the Dems might actually learn something from getting their asses handed to them, when we know that they actually never learn shit, and that even if they by the time they nominate someone halfway decent the Republicans will have made it illegal to vote Democrat

the thing is that when Dems do "learn something" from voters like Clifton, it's usually things like "Talk about pocketbook issues not culture war issues."

one thing I'll add here is while I do understand the urge to sit out or vote Jill Stein or whatever doing so operates on the assumption that the Dems might actually learn something from getting their asses handed to them, when we know that they actually never learn shit, and that even if they by the time they nominate someone halfway decent the Republicans will have made it illegal to vote Democrat

― frogbs

and how many democratic legislators will respond by changing their party affiliation, so as to better reform the system from the inside?

me, my friends, the people i care about, a _whole bunch_ of other people - we are under attack, coordinated, systemic attack. just staying alive consumes my entire existence, and i can't do that alone. i need other people who will be with me, who will stick with me when things get tough. centrist democrats don't stick with anybody. they turn around and walk away and mumble excuses. at least the republicans have the courage to hate me to my face.

well if it's any consolation polling seems to indicate that a lot of people feel the same way, and as useless as they are the Democrat party can sometimes be bullied into doing the right thing

this has become "Murc's Law, the thread"

I wonder if that’s because it’s a thread about the Democratic Party.

like it's one thing to understand why voters feel a certain way, as misguided as it is, it's another to pretend like we don't understand why gas prices are high right now or that Biden is somehow responsible for inflation.

I was with this thread when it was for calling out Biden/Dems/et al for being behind the curve on the Dobbs ruling as well as going for optics over action, but some of y'all sound like "I did this" stickers atm

sorry, I should say this is ACCELERATIONISM, THE THREAD

and I'm out, because fuck that.

I mean idk I do maybe have a problem with voters that blame only one party for economic issues, or people who can't see the aftermath of economic decisions politicians like Reagan/Trump make, even if they fool people into thinking things are great for five minutes during the temporary good it brings

wanna know why my (and my family's) life sucks now? BECAUSE FLORIDA REFUSED TO EXPAND MEDICAID DUE TO THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT BECAUSE OF HAVING ALL REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS FOR THE LAST DECADE. this directly affects my fucking family. it would have outright prevented a lot of what happened.

but hey, let's go on pretending nothing matters and forgetting that these decisions impact all of us IN AN ALMOST UNLIMITED NUMBER OF WAYS.

I guess the question then is why have democrats not found a better way to hammer things like that with voters xp

That the special learned class knows that actually Joe Biden is blameless for inflation and gas prices (which isn’t exactly true but nevertheless) doesn’t mean that the working class quite trotted out as a pull quote should know that.

Like maybe Democrats should figure out a way to improve his circumstances when they’ve held Congress and the Presidency? Might be popular!

There's a noteworthy tonal difference between "THEY ARE ALL HORRIBLE HORRIBLE PEOPLE!!" and "they do much less than we want them to do and we think they could be much better at making good things happen".

I got no problem understanding how someone's allegiance to the democrats can be grudging and provisional, based solely on the necessity for blocking the neo-fascists from controlling all our lives, but as Neando pointed out, actively discouraging even that grudging allegiance does no one any favors unless it is coupled with a reliable path to a better alternative.

Bringing up Murc’s Law is ironic since the Democratic argument is that they have no political agency - they’re not responsible for any of the bad stuff happening and also completely unable to reverse it.

Even if you agree that that’s true - what is the marketing pitch for that party?

A good chunk of dissatisfaction with Biden and the Democratic establishment is they can’t even get aroused enough to lie to us about having some plan to fight back.

That's a fair cop. There's plenty to be dissatisfied about. But most of what we do here is ratchet up the hopelessness in ever-more apocalyptic language. I'm not sure that does any good at all.

look, I ain't gonna shill for the Dems, but if we're pretending to empathize with voters who are ignorant of why inflation is the way it is, gas prices are the way they are, and fail to even account for the state of the union that the previous administration handed the country over to us in, as justification for re-considering voting for the guy who plunged us into this swamp....yeah, no. that's stupid.

it's also not 'alternate history' to bring up the SCOTUS justices, like....we know who nominated three Federalist judges, and we've seen what they have done since they've been seated on the court. I don't have to talk about what 'would have happened under Hillary', we're still paying for what happened under Trump and so will our children. and lots of parents and grandparents died due to him and his CDC stooge Redfield slow walking COVID at a time when it was ripping through nursing homes.

why was life better for anybody under Trump? simple - it was the last time in history before COVID existed and Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine.

Relevant:
https://www.gawker.com/politics/the-democrats-are-the-party-of-negative-hope

If ever the Democratic base were going to withhold its votes, this year — in which party leadership has all but declared its plans to lose anyway — would be the year to do it.

The counterargument to this position is that not voting is tantamount to voting for Republicans, and the Republican Party of 2022 is a fascist movement that finds it increasingly unnecessary to hide its contempt for democracy. This counterargument is true, unfortunately. For those of us who believe the American system should continue, the choice is between voting Democrat and taking to the street with sticks. We simply cannot afford to horse around right now. Last year, Florida passed a law protecting drivers who run down political protestors with their cars. (This law was subsequently blocked by a federal judge, so I’m sure the Supreme Court will eventually… oh no.) I can think of at least three right-wing paramilitary organizations currently making national news, and Republicans stormed the Capitol after the last election didn’t go their way. Now is the time to vote for elections to continue in the future, and that means voting Democrat.

This arrangement is gigantically dispiriting, because it reduces the range of political opinions I can responsibly express to a biennial yes/no vote on the Republican agenda. Even in this insipid game the odds are against me, thanks to gerrymandering and the inherent distortions of a senators-per-state system operating in a country that increasingly concentrates its population in cities, but as long as we all pull together in a herculean effort at the polls, we can make sure that nothing happens. Then we will enjoy a one-year window in which it is permissible to criticize the Democratic Party, before we all have to pull together once again.

"That's a fair cop. There's plenty to be dissatisfied about. But most of what we do here is ratchet up the hopelessness in ever-more apocalyptic language. I'm not sure that does any good at all.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)"

aimless i'm sure you mean well but for trans people it is that fucking bad, "apocalyptic language" is warranted. _hopelessness_ is not warranted, but i have no _faith_ in the ability or willingness of the national democratic party as it is to make things better for us. much love, though. the greatest of these is love.

"wanna know why my (and my family's) life sucks now? BECAUSE FLORIDA REFUSED TO EXPAND MEDICAID DUE TO THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT BECAUSE OF HAVING ALL REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS FOR THE LAST DECADE. this directly affects my fucking family. it would have outright prevented a lot of what happened.

― We were clothed, except for Caan, who was naked. Don't know why. (Neanderthal)"

see! this is apocalyptic language! this is warranted! this is good! this is real! republicans are psychopaths who are ruining your life! that's _exactly_ the point i'm starting from, florida is terrifying, florida is run by crazy motherfuckers, and what power do _you_ have to help? is voting for democrats going to help? does florida have free and fair elections? is this system ever going to give you what you want? you're a fucking _victim_ here, neanderthal, not just of the _republicans_, but of a vicious and totally broken system of government pretending to be a democracy that treats its so-called "citizens" like shit and then blames _us_ for the abuse we suffer at the hands of the people in power. i mean, i don't want you to despair, i don't want you to be hopeless, i want you to think about the possibility that _you_ have power, _we_ have power, we are not dependent on this broke-ass system.

we're dependent on _each other_. that's what politics is, politics is community, politics is being here for each other, and if someone's not gonna be there for me, i can't be there for them, i have to find _other ways_ to survive, _other ways_ to get what i need. i don't hate or blame centrist democrats, not really. i just don't _trust_ them. i got needs, and they can't or won't meet my needs. do you think florida democrats can and will meet you and your family's needs? do you think they will ever have both the power and the will to use it to help you and your family? does that belief, or does the _fear_ that they won't, keep you from stepping away from this vicious, awful cycle?

like, again, i want to root this in my lived experiences, here are the experience i've had with institutional democrats in the past couple of years, where i live.

i'm here in portland oregon, where our police are institutionally racist, and there were protests against the police, and the mayor, ted wheeler, came out to _talk_ with the police, and the police tear-gassed him. and he has legal power over the police, and what has he done? he's done nothing, and he got re-elected anyway, like i said above, and you know, if i get beaten or sexually assaulted or something like that, which _is_ a risk i face, who am i going to talk to? well, nobody, i'm on my own here.

did covid affect our quality of life? yeah, covid did affect our quality of life. am i frustrated about the response to covid? yes, i am. i am frustrated because a lot of anti-vaxxers chose not to get vaccinated and as a result of that choice, a lot of people, primarily minorities, the immunocompromised, and other marginalized groups suffered and died as a result of that, and who is holding the privileged people who have access to high quality healthcare and are acting with depraved indifference to the lives of people i care about accountable for that depraved indifference? nobody. nobody. they get to do whatever insane, malicious, bigoted shit they want, and it doesn't matter how many of us suffer, it doesn't matter how many of us die, all we get are more excuses, all we get are more explanations about how it's Not The Democrats' Fault. i don't _care_! i don't _care whose fault it is_! i just want somebody i can trust to _help_.

That was a booming post.

When I return, I want to post a response that I hope palliates the suspicion I'm a shill. I'm a somewhat public figure, so I hope there's historical context too.

yes, great post.

which, tbf, should be permanently stamped on all of your posts. I apologize for being antagonistic upthread.

I was thinking about this ILX thread, which, like some other ILX US politics threads, heavily includes people who might vote Democrat, people who used to vote Democrat, people on the Left, people who wish they could see a Left strategy for Democrats, etc, debating these things.

I arrived at this observation: this does not happen in the UK. At least, it does not happen on UK politics ILX - and even, to a large extent, I think it does not happen on eg: UK Left social media, for instance.

That is: in the UK, people do not bother debating the use or direction of the Labour Party as if it is or could be a good thing. They, we, used to. But we stopped. I feel that there has been a "mental break" for people in the UK, where they severed from caring about Labour, and even in some cases started to want it to do badly.

I am "projecting" my own views, sure, but I think this is wider. ILX poster Calzino would be one example.

I then thought: if this difference does obtain, why?

The obvious answer is that the US is a two-party system, and US leftists "don't have anywhere to go" outside that system, so stay engaged, in some way with the Democrats; whereas in the UK people might be able to turn to other parties. In Scotland, NI, Wales, certainly. But most UK citizens are in England, and most other parties in England are tiny, so we are mostly "protest voters" - at any rate those of us who vote Green or whatever know we are not voting for a party of government.

So I'm not sure if the two-party scenario is the whole explanation.

Then I thought of a second reason. People have often said: "The US equivalent of what Kieth has done would be if he drove Bernie Sanders out of politics and expelled AOC from the Democrats" -- etc. That is: UK Labour has actively purged its Left, whereas our perception is that the Democrats have not yet done that. Supposing that is true, it could explain why some US leftists still engage with the Democrats in good faith, whereas the UK socialists known to me now do not engage with Labour in that way.

The left is still stronger in Labour than in the Democrats, though - you had Corbyn and years of leadership. In the US there are 10 reps and 1 Senator even roughly on the level of the Labour left.

it's because the uk left had an opportunity where uk labour was its vehicle, briefly, and it was brutally crushed by the establishment, including the labour right, who are now more interested in crushing the left than anything else. there isn't any clear way that labour becomes a vehicle for the left again when they've changed all the party rules to prevent that happening ever again & are now attempting to deselect remaining labour left mps

the us party system is very different from most in that the parties are basically just positions on the ballot paper, there's not the same sort of formal membership and there's more actual democracy with everything having primaries. the way the dem establishment maintains control is largely through being better resourced in primary campaigns, which is very effective but not ironclad & it's much more difficult for them to completely cut off the possibility of left challenges. even if say, sanders got the nomination in 2016 or 2020 and the dem establishment blatantly sabotaged it in whatever way, there isn't the sort of centralised power that would allow them to do anything to block off further left challenges. third parties are also pretty much impossible to even get on the ballot in a lot of places and are even more of a non-starter in terms of ever having power than they are in the uk.

who are now more interested in crushing the left than anything else

"We are the People's Front of Judea!"

The left is still stronger in Labour than in the Democrats, though - you had Corbyn and years of leadership

not true, they've changed the rules to ensure that something like corbyn can never happens again. they've upped the requirements to get onto any future leadership ballot to ensure that the remaining left MPs will not be able to nominate anyone as a faction, have undertaken purges of remaining left-wing party members, permanently suspended corbyn from the parliamentary party, using control over pre-selections to ensure that no one remotely left-wing can ever run as a labour candidate, and are working on deselecting remaining left MPs.

gotta build some ramparts while the old boys are stripping out the copper wiring

Is the democratic party more on the left than it was twenty years ago? Ten years ago?

I mean if you compare us to Slick Willie, I guess

pinefox - good questions re: existence of "debate" or not. my thoughts:

first, i _don't_ generally "debate" electoral politics on a national level. political debate was a major factor in my deciding to leave ilx entirely in 2020, and until today i've stayed well clear of the political threads. why am i jumping in today? i mean, it's a good question.

one of the things which i think is a _significant_ meaningful difference between the us and the uk is that we have a set election schedule, and a long, long, long campaign season. so here we are in august discussing the what's going to happen in an election which will occur three months from now.

elections are frankly traumatic events for me, and have been since 2016. the extent to which the election of donald trump personally affected me and made me rethink all of the values and principles i'd based my life around up to that point really can't be understated. i am very much filled with gnawing dread and an impending sense of doom, even this far out. my talking about it here is not so much based around any attempt to improve the democratic party, but to address, in the least unhealthy manner available to me, these own feelings of doom and despair.

the impact of the recent supreme court ruling overturning roe v. wade also cannot be understated. it's an emotionally apocalyptic event, and, crucially, one that is _not easily reversible_. this is why there's so much argument about the composition of the courts - because of all the things a democratic president can do, it's the one with the longest-lasting impact.

regarding bernie/aoc - i would argue that they _have_ been driven out of the democrats, in terms of _institutional power_. if you look at the shameful way aoc and bernie were treated at the 2020 democratic national convention, well, i think it sends a pretty clear message. i wonder, though, if the national democratic party isn't institutionally weak in a way that labour isn't. i'm not really aware how the labour party works, but in terms of selecting candidates, the democratic party process is a tremendously convoluted and arcane process of byzantine complexity. it is also patently obviously unjust, unequal, and unfair.

however, while bernie and aoc have been shut out of the _institutional_ democratic party, they are both extremely well-liked and popular among the left. someone mentioned, what, murc's law? bernie and aoc's marginalization within the party makes them immune to it. they have no power, and therefore nothing that goes wrong is their fault. if bernie were to get power and govern like obama did, i find it not unlikely that we'd be hearing grumbles of "thanks bernie" for the next decade or so.

the institutional democratic party provided for the selection of, and provides support for the governance of, the nominal chief executive of the united states. when was the last time labour was actually in power? fucking tony blair, wasn't it? christ, that was a long time ago. the democrats, in contrast, allegedly are in power, yet are unable to actually effectively govern.

while it is of course true that joe biden was not responsible for putting the judges who overturned roe v. wade on the supreme court, i think there's a good argument that the overturn of roe v. wade is, in some sense, an indicator of _decades_ of strategic failure on the part of the democratic party. what do we have, clinton, two terms, bush, two terms, obama, two terms, trump one term... i mean, the republicans have spent decades packing the court with fucking lunatic extremists in monomaniacal pursuit of the overturn of roe v. wade. i mean, we know this, right? we all know this. the democrats allowed clarence thomas on the court _despite_ anita hill speaking up against his behavior, allowed his behavior to be _accepted_ and _normalized_. the democrats allowed the ridiculous chicanery that put gorsuch on the bench, again, took it as _accepted_ and _normalized_. two of the judges on the top court of the nation owe their positions to egregious miscarriages of justice!

and that's the thing of it for me, what a _mockery of justice_ exists in america right now. i mean, i'd be glad to take a break from electoral politics, but republicans' behavior is increasingly atrocious and the democrats, who allegedly hold a certain amount of civil authority, respond to their injustices with nothing but empty words. republicans are rightly mocked for offering "thoughts and prayers" to victims of the gun violence they enabled, but do the democrats in power really have anything more to offer?

i mean yeah it's not healthy for me to engage too closely with politics. i don't like to do it. there's going to be an election in november, and the democrats are going to lose, and they're going to lose badly, and they've already started making their excuses, they've already started throwing, say, trans people under the bus. they haven't even lost yet!

i'd like to just walk away and focus on the rest of my life, but i don't really _have_ anything left, seeing my friends being called groomers by their parents, seeing people advocating for our extermination while the democrats shrug, i mean, it makes it hard for me to do anything else, quite honestly.

i've tried to do self-care, i've tried to wait it out, but this is quite honestly a crisis situation. something needs to change, it needs to change majorly, and it needs to change soon. even if i had any genuine belief that things _will_ get better in november, i'm not really confident in my ability to hold out that long!

we're not doing too well here in america. nobody i know is doing well. covid is spiking again where i'm at. i was going to go out and do something fun this evening, but you know, they've mandated masks again and people have stopped pretending to care, everybody knows the laws aren't enforced, and more importantly, i'm just too fucking depressed to have a good time right now, you know? i'm sorry, but i am. i have a pretty busy social life, i try to go out, i try to spend time with friends, but everybody else is just as miserable and fucked up as i am, if not moreso. there's no distraction, no relief, no escape from this shit.

so i guess that's why i'm here, talking about the Future of the Democratic Party. i like y'all here. even if i don't necessarily agree with all y'all, you are good people and i think we do basically share the same common values, the same common interests, and it feels good for me to talk about what i believe in. shit, times are hard right now, and if we're gonna have any hope of making it through we at least have to be here for each other, as much as we can.

"so here we are in august discussing the what's going to happen in an election which will occur three months from now."

wait. it's july, isn't it? what even is time? it's the trauma, i can't tell the hours, days, months apart any longer.

Kate super otm, as otm as it gets

which, tbf, should be permanently stamped on all of your posts. I apologize for being antagonistic upthread.

― We were clothed, except for Caan, who was naked. Don't know why. (Neanderthal)

no worries, love you Neanderthal!

i wonder, though, if the national democratic party isn't institutionally weak in a way that labour isn't. i'm not really aware how the labour party works, but in terms of selecting candidates, the democratic party process is a tremendously convoluted and arcane process of byzantine complexity. it is also patently obviously unjust, unequal, and unfair.

this is what it comes down to, uk labour has much more centralised power which is now being used to completely prevent the possibility of future challenges from the left, while the democrat establishment maintains control less directly, and while the primary processes are a mess they are at least democratic and the establishment can be beaten in them. i would also think that the blatant uselessness of the establishment in the current moment opens up more room for anyone running to the left of them in primaries, even very normie dems seem to be getting fed up with the lack of action now.

the us situation is of course still very bleak & set to get dramatically worse if the republicans are successful in seizing power in the way they've indicated, but it's going to be an unstable, turbulent time where things get dramatically shaken up, so much so that further opportunities for the left aren't out of the question.

many xps but the Democrats don't have to change the rules or purge the left, because the left doesn't have enough power to bother actively purging them (throwing money at primary challengers out of spite is still a good hobby). Token DSA members work to the party's advantage, keeping some percentage of self-identified socialists voting blue because AOC and Bernie give them hope.

Labour seems worse because it's been better in recent memory but at the last Labour conference didn't they have a vote supporting sanctions against Israel and describing it an apartheid state? That wouldn't happen in a thousand years in the Democratic Party - less than ten Democrats could even work up the will to vote against Iron Dome funding.

As for whether the Democrats are more left than they were 10-20-30 years ago, Jesse Jackson did almost as well as Bernie in the '88 primaries (as a Black man in 1988) and his platform was equally progressive. Outwardly the party looks better (in part because social media amplifies voices who'd never have gotten on Meet The Press in the '90s) but institutionally it's hard to say it's improved (particularly given that Biden, Schumer and Pelosi have all been playing leading roles in the party for most of those 30 years).

there's a big difference between a party conference in the UK and the votes of elected US reps - a better comparison would be UK labour MPs to US dem house members, which still looks slightly better for the UK but again, the party is seriously trying to purge the remaining left (both membership and MPs), and there is no viable route for the left to expand its power within the party anymore. a UK labor government would not do anything remotely pro-palestinian if they win the next election, despite any symbolic motions the party conference may have passed, and the party has been actively working to expel anyone critical of israel.

because the left doesn't have enough power to bother actively purging them

there also isn't any way to directly do this in the US party structure, the democrats don't have members who can be expelled in the way that membership exists for political parties in most nations, so it would just mean trying to primary AOC etc. which they still have tried and just haven't been successful at yet

Congressional reps can be stripped of committees and completely isolated - withdrawing the whip but perhaps an even bigger deal since committee assignments are all-important in Congress.

but that'd be self-destructive rather than an effective power play, as it's still no guarantee of a successful primary challenge & it would mean they'd have less votes in congress

They still have just as many committee seats, they just get divided up among loyalists.

Fewer votes on floor votes and in leadership votes but that’s not much different compared to withdrawing the whip. The tools to discipline politicians are not wildly different - primarying and deselection, committee seats, etc.. Democrats don’t make use of them as much because they don’t need to, not because the organization can’t.

Fewer votes on floor votes and in leadership votes but that’s not much different compared to withdrawing the whip. The tools to discipline politicians are not wildly different - primarying and deselection, committee seats, etc.. Democrats don’t make use of them as much because they don’t need to, not because the organization can’t.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

idk, there are still conservative democrats who won't vote for literally anything meaningful on the democrats' legislative agenda. i think it's been noted in the past that such tools might possibly motivate these conservative democrats into supporting the democrats' agenda, but you know, it's a huge fucking risk, the democrats never have more than a razor-thin majority in congress. their ability to govern is always limited to what the most right-leaning democratic member of congress nationally will support. the republicans work in ideological lockstep with strong social cohesion - deviation from the party line, whatever the party line happens to be that week, is punished quickly and effectively. their failure to rule effectively is less about lack of organizational clout and more to do with the fact that their actual policies tend to be not just cruel and malicious but actually impossible to implement effectively - they are by any reasonable standard completely out of touch with reality. the democrats, in contrast, are a "big-tent" party, meaning in practice literally anybody who's not in absolute lockstep with whatever the republican party line happens to be that week (and yes, this even extends to bernie and AOC), which does sort of limit their ability to govern.

Well, I'm not sleeping, again, so I guess I'm just gonna vent some. Just, you know, talk about my life a little, what it looks like in practice, what it looks like to be me.

Went to look at another apartment today. My ex and I broke up. We both care about each other a lot, a real lot, to where it hurts for us to talk to each other, and we're both trying to navigate this divorce. Shit happens, you know? A lot of divorces, they just defy easy explanation, easy categorization, but COVID stress has a lot to do with it. We've been through tougher emotional shit before and made it but you know, neither of us are at our best, we all the external stresses, we couldn't work shit out between us.

I've been trying to find another apartment for the past several months. This place actually got back to me, which is nice, a lot of people don't, but they only have a showing at 2 PM. It's way over on the other side of town and it's in the middle of my workday, but fuck it, it's not like I'm getting a lot of shit done at work anyway. I work from home, and one of the things I've discovered since working from home is that not being in an office environment makes it a lot harder for me to get anything done. It's an ADHD thing, apparently. "Body doubling". Being around people who are productive makes me more productive, and I just don't have that.

I have a prescription for Adderall but it only does so much. I've been on this particular med-go-round before. I've been addicted to prescription meds before, benzos prescribed to me in ever-increasing doses by doctors at the low-cost medical clinic in Florida who didn't know what to do with me and didn't seem to have the energy to care, exactly. Didn't have the energy to bother telling me about the withdrawal syndrome, either. Just like the benzos, the Adderall does something, I guess, but not enough. My brother, he saw what the benzo addiction did to me, he doesn't like that I'm taking Adderall. He's straight edge, he thinks I'm taking addictive drugs so I can be a better capitalist drone, and maybe I am, but what are my other options, you know?

I mean honestly it's hard for me to get motivated this month at my job, working for a Catholic health insurance company. I mean, I like the people I work with. I like my co-workers, all of whom are women. I consider a lot of them my friends. Their being accepting of me made my transition a lot easier. You know, one of them is in with a bad crowd, hangs out at one of those Christian churches, had a Trump bumper sticker on her car in 2016 and probably voted for him in 2020, but I genuinely like her. I think she's grown a lot over the past couple of years, done a lot of work on trauma, worked a lot to extract herself from the cycle of abuse, and you know, she just doesn't see the church she grew up in, the political party she's culturally associated with, as part of that cycle right now. That's painful to me, but her? Her I like.

I like my bosses, too, the upper management, who are all men, just like my co-workers are all women. My acting boss is a good guy. I like him a lot. He's LDS, taking the opportunity to move out to Utah. You know, it's his culture, right? It's where he's from. The Mormons are institutionally patriarchal and abusive and have fucked a lot of people up, but my boss himself, again, he's a good guy, kind, accepting. We've learned a lot from each other.

People tell me there are lots of jobs available right now, that working for a Catholic health insurance company, no matter how much I like the people I work with, just doesn't seem like "me", but you know what, the rest of my life has fallen apart, and I need _something_ that's relatively stable, and really, they don't ask a lot of me. They've been really supportive of me, not just of my transition, but of my mental health. I've had two rounds of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the past couple of years, two intensive outpatient mental health programs to try and deal with the stresses of life over the past couple of years, and you know, the support has been helpful, it's helped me a lot. Not enough, really, not enough, but a lot.

No, what I need to focus on now is getting an apartment, getting moved out of this place. It's not my place, it was _our_ place, too many bad memories. I don't know why finding a place is so hard right now. Getting to the place is hard, Google gives me these wacky street directions and what they say is a street is actually a bunch of people's homes. The homeless population has skyrocketed. During the first couple of years of COVID, under Trump, there weren't so many homeless people, there were eviction protections in place, but now that we're in a "post-COVID world", whatever that means, I guess those protections aren't necessary any longer. I don't know where all of the homeless people are coming from, whether they're being evicted locally or whether they're migrating here from other places. And, yeah, it's a contentious local issue. A lot of landlords want to make the homeless disappear, keep them out of sight, they're bad for property values, and you know, that's pretty reprehensible. Also, an increasing number of my friends are homeless, and they at least deserve some modicum of respect.

But more than that they deserve to have places to live, you know? And that seems to be even harder than respect. You live out on the street, life is hard, people aren't always polite, people aren't always _accepting_ of diversity the way folks are in professional settings around here. Some of them - not all of them, of course, but it's not really easy for me to predict _which_ ones exactly - will maybe yell slurs at my friends, creep on us, threaten violence against us. And all of the politics are based around, you know, _respecting_ them, it's important for us to not shun them and try and make them disappear like the landlords do, but nobody's even talking about, that I can tell, finding any homeless people permanent, stable housing beyond the wholly inadequate steps that are already in place. A couple of years ago the local government wanted to move them into an old prison, but that didn't work out. Not because it's inhumane to put homeless people into a prison or anything, it just wasn't _practical_.

Anyway, if I don't find myself somewhere to live, I guess that'll be me too, so it behooves me to treat them with respect at least. There just don't seem to be a lot of places to rent, and the ones that do bother to get back to me, they seem a lot less interested in renting to me once they see me. I mean, it's probably just my imagination. Sure, nobody treated me like this the last time I was looking for a place, before my transition, but lots of stuff has changed since then. Maybe it's just not enough these days to have a house and plenty of money and a solid credit rating, maybe that's just not enough to get you into an apartment. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. I'm really tired and worn out.

They just renovated the particular place I'm looking at. I mean the complex is a shithole, but the apartment is renovated. Hell of a contrast. They make everything shiny and they put in all new appliances and jack the price up because of it. Well, I'm lucky, even the jacked up price I could still afford, if they were interested in renting to me, if I was interested in living there.

Everything has gotten a lot more expensive. I finally dragged myself out to the store the other day and a box of cereal costs $7.50. Look, I know inflation is a thing, I'm sorry to sound like a Karen, but that's a lot of fucking money. I work a professional job, I'm a white woman with a college degree and a professional certification. I get paid good money to stare blankly into the dead air a couple inches in front of my two monitors for eight hours a day. But you know, I'm trying to figure out how to manage on one income instead of the two my ex and I were living on, and it's an adjustment.

Wages have gone up on the low end, and I'm happy, but it's not even close to enough to live on. I remember just a couple of years ago the big thing was "fight for 15", and that's a bit of a fucking joke here right now. There are a couple of places still only offering $14.75 an hour, just as a "fuck you" to people who had the temerity to advocate for a living wage, but most fast food joints offer above that now, and they still can't find enough people to work at the wages they're offering, under the working conditions they're offering. It's great that Obama raised the federal minimum wage in 2009. It's what, $7.25? I can't say that the Democrats don't care about workers. I'm sure Biden would raise it again if it wasn't for those damn Republicans always wrecking their plans.

Nobody to work the jobs that we rely on workers for, and meanwhile more and more of us are out of work. Nobody can afford to rent or to own, which is I guess fine because there don't seem to be a lot of places available, even with the dramatic increase in the homeless population. It's weird. I don't super understand it. Probably investors or something. Real estate is apparently still a really good investment.

Anyway, I was talking about the apartment I was looking at yesterday. No cooling. It's stiflingly hot out, another heat wave, and it's only July. August is the really hot month. That was one of the luxuries of owning a home, we were able to put a heat pump in. If it gets too much over 100, which it does sometimes, even in Portland, it struggles to keep up, but on days like today, when it's only in the 90s, the heat isn't oppressive like it is for most folks around here. The atmosphere still _feels_ heavy and oppressive, but the temperature, the humidity, isn't.

I look at people talking about politics and they're arguing about, you know, what's more important to me, what issues matter more to me, "cultural" or "economic" issues, what policies the Democrats should take a stand on that would get me to vote for them, whether they _should_ even be trying to get my vote in the first place, and honestly I do think find it a little bit sickening? But I mean, there's a lot right now that makes me feel kind of sick and tired and queasy. Truth be told I'm going through another bout of suicidal ideation. I don't even like talking about it because everybody cares about me and wants me to be happy and wants me to get the help I need and I _have_, you know, I'm privileged enough that I _have_ gotten lots of help but honestly, you know, I tell my therapist this and she listens and she understands, she knows, my problem isn't mental illness, it's that being alive in 2022 is fucking bullshit. It's fucking bullshit and it sucks and it's totally ridiculous to ask _any_ of us to have to put up with the shit we have to put up with, on a regular basis. Human beings shouldn't have to live like this.

But hey, that's out of my control, right? Circle of control. Circle of control. No point in ruminating. No point in doom spiraling. I gotta take care of myself, because I'm worth taking care of, and if I don't have the resources to do that, if the many, many people who care about me don't have the resources to do that, well, you know, one does the best one can with what one has. And I am, and we all are. It's not really our fault that it's not enough. I'm as scared of change as anyone. For all the lit guillotine memes the kids like to share, I know it's my head that's on the chopping block like as not. No matter who's President, the fascists just seem more powerful than ever, right now, and yeah, I am grateful, these days, for anybody who's not overtly fascist, for everybody who's not actively calling for the eradication of "transgenderism". I just don't know how much longer I can keep living like this.

Thanks to kate for some booming posts upthread.