Republicans’ deal-making was democracy in action, writes Margaret Kimberly. By contrast so-called House progressives did nothing for Medicare for All during the 2021 speaker vote.
Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, second from right, negotiates with Rep. Matt Gaetz, in gray suit, on House floor on Jan. 6 during a vote on McCarthy for speaker. (C-Span)
By Margaret Kimberly
Black Agenda Report
In 2021 Democratic Party progressives asked those members of Congress who claimed to share their political priorities to stand up to their leadership, which meant standing up for the people.
Those progressives knew that President Joe Biden promised to veto any legislation providing free, universal healthcare, known as Medicare for All. But they did what any political activist should do. They made the demand anyway.
The call to #ForcetheVote was a request for House members to withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House unless she committed herself to bringing Medicare for All to a vote.
The House members who called themselves progressives did nothing of the sort. They elected Nancy Pelosi without demanding that she bring Medicare for All or any other issue for a vote. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus both failed to do what their supporters wanted.
In 2023 a different dynamic took place. Republicans won control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections. Some of their members, such as Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, are considered lesser lights and are routinely dismissed by Democratic pundits and propagandists as being dumb, crazy or a host of other epithets.
Support CN’s
Winter Fund Drive!
Whatever one can say about them, they did something that Squad members did not. They withheld their votes from Kevin McCarthy, who needed 15 ballots to become speaker of the House, a record in congressional history. The process was messy, the word “chaos” was used a lot and social media memes making fun of McCarthy and the Republicans proliferated.
There was a lot of finger-pointing and snobbery about the Republicans, but there was far too little analysis. Delving into the story in a truthful way would have meant dredging up the progressive Democrats’ shameful behavior two years ago and exposing them to the level of critique that Boebert and Gaetz received.
Lauren Boebert recommending that former President Donald Trump tell Kevin McCarthy to withdraw speaker bid, Jan. 4. (C-Span)
Not only did Democratic progressives run for cover when their leadership dropped the hammer, but they lied in order to hide their cowardice.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others claimed that they would lose the speakership to Republicans unless they all stayed on board. “We are just an extremely slim amount of votes away from risking the speakership to the Republican Party. It’s bigger than any one of us.”
The Republicans are currently doing what I was told could not be done & was performative, they are extracting concessions for their vote for speaker!!! Or as @AOC calls it “violence!” pic.twitter.com/ZOLTSoAuMC
— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) January 3, 2023
This statement was a bald-faced lie meant to keep liberals in line. Republicans didn’t lose the speakership to the Democrats despite taking 15 rounds of voting to select McCarthy. The overly hyped congresswoman known as AOC was doing the leadership’s bidding and protecting herself from criticism.
Actually, she may not have needed to lie. Many Democrats behave like cult members, mesmerized and hypnotized by con artists, living in fear of making any demands on any issue. They easily give in and have been indoctrinated into thinking they can never make political change.
AOC: I think what was important today was to send the message that we were united and that there would be no defections, that Democrats are here, we are not going anywhere — and if they want to play ball, we are open to that. pic.twitter.com/ECKHMOcIua
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 4, 2023
Now Joe Biden is sitting in the political catbird seat. He can wheel and deal and triangulate to his heart’s content, which is what Democratic presidents actually prefer. They don’t want to provide Medicare for All or student loan debt relief, or a minimum wage increase. Biden can now feign powerlessness; the propagandists will join him in declaring that his hands are tied because Republicans control the House.
Republicans like Boebert will be scrutinized and caricatured so that Democrats can make fun and/or scare their people into shutting up. But it is actually more important to watch AOC and her cohort. Boebert and company are just the bogeywomen and men of the moment who provide a convenient cover for liberals the next time they are ready to perform another stab in the back. Phony progressives are a far worse enemy.
In the final analysis, the Republicans’ deal making was democracy in action. Elected representatives debated and challenged one another. Most importantly, party leadership faced a challenge they couldn’t avoid.
This country would be far better off if the people who claimed to be progressive had acted likewise in 2021 instead of taking a dive when they should have been willing to confront.
Oddly enough, one of the demands that McCarthy met was a proposal to cut the federal budget to FY2022 levels. Such a cut would mean a $75 billion cut to military spending . Of course, Republicans don’t really want to do that. The military industrial complex survives with bipartisan support. But inadvertently the Republican renegades revealed how much their Democratic Party colleagues have increased defense spending.
This year on Jan. 16, Democrats and Republicans alike will fan out across the country and claim to pay homage to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King broke with President Lyndon Johnson when he denounced the Vietnam war, and was roundly criticized for doing so.
The progressives of today possess none of his courage and go along with their party’s oligarchy when ordered to do so. The right wingers on the other side of the aisle seem to have far more conviction.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and find it on Twitter and Telegram. She can be reached via [email protected].
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Support CN’s
Winter Fund Drive!
Donate securely by credit card or check by clicking the red button:
An awful lot of verbiage here, virtually all of which gets repeated every few years. Ralph Nader has been doing so for at least the past quarter century and he tried multiple times to create a focal point for people who understood the problem to gather around and create a movement to fix it, but there were simply far too few such people to create an effective movement. Bernie Sanders created a similar focal point over the past 7+ years, but his supporters were far too independent or had too short attention spans to plug away until they did create a coordinated movement.
In any case, one way or another, all that repeated verbiage doesn’t seem to have accomplished a damn thing – and this time around it hasn’t included a single proposal for how to fix that (previous iterations haven’t lacked such proposals but they obviously didn’t succeed either).
Are we just waiting for some born leader to step forward and do all the work of saving us? Sometimes it seems that the world has been waiting for someone like Putin to save it, while complaining at the same time about how he’s going about it (everyone’s an armchair savior).
And Force the vote would have produced what? At least the Republicans who opposed McCarthy had specific goals in mind and concrete changes. Force the Vote was toothless and would have provided no headway on the fight for Medicare for All.
Democrats in Congress, who, like the Republicans, are beholden to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries in virtually all instances would have to vote for the med4all bill or become susceptible to primary challenge. Republicans would have to vote it down even though a majority of their constiuents support it, making them susceptible to challenge. The issue coming to the floor for vote would have or will generate popular support that would have a unifying effect on the general population and undercut the non stop psyops around Russiagate, Jan.6, “misplaced” documents etc. The significance of forcing the vote for med4all and not just anything cannot be overstated.
Democrats today are just moderate Republicans who fled to the Democratic party when St. Ronnie shoved the Republicans so far to the right. There is no left left in the US. The Democrats sure as hell don’t deserve your vote. When the Prezzy and CEO who is the nominal head of the Democratic party comes out and flat out says that he won’t sign a medicare for all bill, that says it all. I’ve been voting 3rd party since Slick Willie. I haven’t voted for a winner but I have voted for someone I wanted to vote for and not simply the lesser of two evils.
What exactly is moderate about enacting WW3?
“…Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King broke with President Lyndon Johnson when he denounced the Vietnam war…”
The two men formed a very short-lived and uneasy alliance. LBJ may have finally supported civil rights legislation but he had his own reasons for doing so.
He took up the issue so that he could claim to be continuing Kennedy’s work. This helped him to disguise the fact that a coup had just taken place in America.
Johnson’s efforts were very successful and another benefit was that nobody with any credibility on the issue of civil rights would challenge him for the nomination in 1964. He acted because he had to and not because he wanted to.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that Stacey Abrams is a member of the board of trustees of the LBJ Foundation.
I remember reading somewhere that, since at least the 60’s, the American political system functions like a ratchet. The Republican role is obvious, to constantly and continuously spin to the the country to the right. The Democrats role is less obvious: they’re the pawl. It’s the part of the ratchet that stops it from spinning the other direction. So the Democrats role is to prevent the country from moving to the left. And they have been wildly successful at it.
At this point, anyone with a soul has to leave the Democratic Party.
The party itself is far right wing. It has had a ‘Progressive’ faction, but this is now revealed to be a charade. All the Progressives do is hold press conferences and send out fund-raising emails. They do not use the levers of power that are available to them. The actual policies of rule by Democrats are far-right.
To the above bit of wonderful writing, one can connect some more dots.
— Anyone paying attention knew that the ‘social spending’ bill was dead the second it got separated from Biden’s Must-Pass, Mega-Bailout-Bill at the beginning of the Congress. The social spending’s only prayer was to stay attached to the Must-Pass bill with the filibuster-proof rule. Yet, not only did the Progressives not fight tooth and nail to keep it attached, they then ran a charade for most of that summer by actually bragging about adding things to the Build Back Never bill that was obviously deceased and nada and never possible to pass over a filibuster. The Progressives willingly let social spending die, then staged Kabuki theater with the corpse as the star.
— The Chairperson of the Senate Budget Committee is always one of the most powerful posts in DC for obvious reasons. Everything that every Senator wants has to be included in the budget to become reality. The chair of this committee is thus always very powerful. Until Bernie. Bernie manages to be completely powerless and unable to influence anything while sitting in one of the seats of real power. Meanwhile, IIRC, Millionaire Bernie is like the rest of the rich and getting richer still.
The Progressives have been a Giant Fake, designed only to rope in lefty voters with functioning souls to a far-right alliance of Bankers, Generals and the Police Chiefs of America. Their goal was to elect this alliance to power. The next picture of the Progressive Caucus needs to occur under a Mission Accomplished sign, and likely with a mushroom cloud rising in the background.
Thank you Ms. Kimberly. I don’t read you enough, and it is always a treat when I correct that mistake.
Re what you are going through, and Kimberly goes through, and a lot of what Kiriakou goes through weekdays…is there a readable book out there that goes through Congress mechanics? Possibly a clean description would work [with defs of slang first time the slang’s mentioned] vs a how-one-bill-became-law thing (eventually getting to three instead…covering all permutations?). I knew there had to be some opportunity for someone to write some useful book, and it strikes me this is it!
In a way it’s a blessing, in another way it’s weird. The only book I ever want to read these days is one by John Sanford [not the quasi popular novelist by the same name I don’t think]. Also ran into a reason to go through one Patrick White novel again the other day, but such reasons are rare. I work hard [and CN & NC usually give even more background than I can actually handle after work, IOW enough]. Return time and again to a deep piece by Robert Bolton (Rutgers last I checked)…yep, convinced soul is the missing concept.
“Democracy in action.” That’s a good one. It was plutocracy in action, just like it’s been since this sh-thole country was founded…
shmutzoid, I love reading Margaret Kimberly’s articles for many years and always learn from her.
I DO agree with what you said in your post. So some people think I’m weird or trying to be cute for calling them DemoRATS.
Hey, “if the shoe fits, wear it.” At least the other mainstream party, the Repulsives, are up front in their dislike for helping ordinary people but prefer giving more tax cuts to the rich filth.
Lois, you nailed it on the true function of the DemoRATS and the phony so-called progressive small minority in the party.
Unfortunately its not new, as they’ve performed the same tactics for decades.
Biden screwed the railroad workers last month by imposing an antiquated law of 1926 against them. They had every right to strike the powerful and profitable railroad companies in December, and if JB had a modicum of honesty or decency, tell the railroad bosses, to give them PAID sick days, and meet their other demands which were not at all extraordinary, but no, Biden backed Big Business at the expense of the working-class.
Our Founders established a republic, also rightly called a democratic republic. This would entail leadership rising above party to establish policies in the interest of the nation. Most current discussion of “democracy” from that standpoint is sickening. And the answer to this insane “democracy” is generally not “bi-partisanship.” The main bi-partisanship now seems to be for wars.
I am glad CN generally sticks to analyzing and attacking the failure of policy, and presents policy alternatives, without sinking into this partisan divisiveness.
It is really easy these days to get fellow citizens in a froth, by throwing around names and inciting people. But that doesn’t make it good journalism.
This is why the brand (D) is finished as a legitimate “Party Of The People” as much as brand (R)…I’ve no love for either but I’m with Margeret on this, the “Freedom Caucus” Republicans’ actions over House Speaker exposes the spinelessness of the faux-progressive Democrats, easily. I just wish more people with working-brains would acknowledge it. Instead the liberal media keep talking about what a good job Biden is doing and how loopy Republicans are, and vice-versa, so that stagnant partisan-mindset still prevails for many. But for just as many it’s getting old.
YOUR both sides suck approach is pathetic. The so called Rethuglicants are criminals who sanctioned the capture and trashing of OUR capitol. The traitors you support will cut your throat and leave you bleeding IF given half ANOTHER chance. You’re a sucker.
This seems to be hard for some to understand, but the bottom line is that Congress knows universal health care makes no sense in a country that denies basic human rights (UN’s UDHR) to food and shelter to those left jobless, in poverty. It’s not going to happen. An estimated 10 million Americans are jobless (have no means of getting an actual count), many with little or no incomes. Would you expect doctors to write prescriptions for groceries and shelter?
Democrats are also attempting to stop evolution expressed via understanding the social change required to stave of environmental poisoning and catastrophic climate change.
Evolution is accelerating at an accelerating rate right along with Cosmos expanding at an unknown rate. Democrats are attempting to stop Cosmic powered biology from changing in step with Cosmos. They would be laughable if not for the pain and suffering and anguish they cause every minute of every day.
Progressive democrats voted 100% to fund a totally unprovoked attack on Russia, this defines the US political left.
Funny that Ms Ocasio-Cortez continually pointed out that Ms. Boebert barely won her district when it was said Boebert had more “balls” than she. Funny because Boebert took on the establishment of her party, while Ocasio-Cortez completely caved to her party’s establishment despite being in a stronger position in her district than Boebert. I’m past the point where a politician can disappoint me, but sheesh AOC sucks.
The Democrats only function is to stop the left, (the real left) from having any power. It’s so predictable, you have to be a total Dem tankie not to see it.
Just where is this ‘real left’ that you’re talking about? I’ve heard people squawking about it for decades on line without seeing much sign of potential political power from it.
The best any progressive third party has done in any recent presidential election was Ralph Nader (the Green party candidate) in 2000, with 2.74% of the vote. After that election the Democratic party establishment was so successful in blaming those votes (which it claimed would instead have been won by Gore) for its loss of Florida (and the presidency) to Dubya that the Greens turned tail in 2004 and gave their nomination to David Cobb, who asked voters in swing states to vote Democratic rather than Green (sound like any major progressive capitulation you’ve just read about here?). Nader, having become fed up with the disorganization of the Greens, ran as an independent in 2004 and won nearly four times as many votes as Cobb did. The Greens are still struggling to exceed 1% of the presidential vote and have no presence whatsoever in my state for lower-level offices.
Anyone who might be tempted to become a member of that ‘real left’, and thus give it some actual political clout, has the problem that they tend to be an adherent of the Democratic party and habitually subject to its ‘lesser evil’ mantra (which the Republicans do a great job of helping them promote: that’s why the duopoly is an actual conspiracy to maintain shared control rather than a serious competition).
Congressional progressives are faced with a related problem: if they’re too aggressively anti-party-establishment in office they’ll risk losing the support of moderate voters who helped get them nominated and the party establishment has plenty of ways to get them replaced by less inconvenient sheep.
So what’s the solution? Figure out some way to make a new party competitive (don’t hold your breath) or get enough progressives into Congress to become more influential (over the past few years at least some progress has occurred) or destroy the Democratic party establishment (they’re not incompetent enough to make that easy)?
And not only are you right, but one had to see it after the devastating work of Bill Clinton.
But binary thinking prevails and the left/right paradigm falls further into disarray.
Both parties are treacherous.
Both parties are the party of war and austerity.
You might be right in everything you say about the wimpiness of the so-called progressives in the Democrats but lauding the Republican hold-outs as democracy in action is going a bit far. With two Democrats consistently voting against their own party the loss of the democratic speakership in the previous congress might have been a possibility that this latest debacle never was. The far right Republicans might have disrupted their own party but they were never going to elect a Democrat Speaker. In any case neither party stands for the people, both are puppets of big money. Democracy in the US is close to death.
It was mighty generous of the Democrats to allocate $100s of millions from tax revenues toward free health care…in Ukraine
The US “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” and their bought and paid for representatives in Congress always create a freak show and distraction from the institutional corruption, abuse of power and de-facto one-party dictatorship.
As Margaret Kimberley says, phony progressives are WORSE than the in-your-face extreme right. (There is no “left” in the US Congress, check politicalcompass dot org if you don’t believe it).
The R faction stab us in the chest, and then the D faction stab us in the back. At least we can see the R faction coming…better get a rear-view mirror for our headsets to look out for the back-stabbers.
Great analogy about Rs stabbing us in the front while the Ds stab us in the back – I have used a version of it myself for some time :D
Not for nothin’; BUT, “It was over when “The Big Guy” reneged on the promise of $2000 checks.” 30% for “The Big Guy?!?”
“The Big Guy” who struggles, 24/7, to hold it together. NOT a public POTUS b/c his moments of lucidity & clarity have been replaced w/brain freezes, random ramblin, straight-up f/creepiness. “The Big Guy” tryin to make a Connection & CRASHES, hard!!! No $h*t, ’the fremdschamen-o-meter shot to 11!!!”
So telling, the TREACHERY aka 100% Bull-$hit, i.e., “Build Back Better,” A Malarky Factory to Manufacture “PPE,” Eradicate SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), Expand Medicare, “DACA & The Dreamers” DREAM Act to Come TRUE on DAY One, Cancel Student Loan Debt, Increase the Minimum Wage.
100% of BIDEN’S-HARRIS’ “Hope & Change” exposed as 100% Bait & Switch!!!
OhBama, DJTrump, Hilary, Biden Harris, AOCs/The Squad + 2, have always captured the minds and the hearts of the masses. This is how their actions are able to move forward, under the guise of good will. It’s not just with the “war on terror” but with many other subjects as well;”
AND, the WAR on TERRA!!! The way things are goin, many people are NOT “living the dream.”
The “living” is controlled by the State’s corporate coup d’état, in 3-D, Deception. Destruction. Death aka “The KRAKEN:”
1. Control over Science and Technology
2. Control over Financial Systems
3. Control over Access to Resources
4. Control over Weaponry
5. Control over Communications
The past 2 years of BIDEN’S-HARRIS’ “progress” has been 2 years of “mass” death per SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), Economic Warfare/$ocial Murder, War in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, the probablity of WW3, Biden-Harris, DJTrump, Zelensky, AOC & HER SQUAD + 2 (Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman); AND, the“National Security Strategy” are permanent fixtures. The Center of Democrat Control (CDC) is “The KRAKEN.” All roads lead to War NOT Peace.
Memo To: BIDEN-HARRIS
From: Xi Jinping
“He who ties the bell around the tiger; Needs to untie it.”
From the UNIVERSE: The Squad aka The Squawk, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, Tlaib, Bush, Bowman, The Democrat $ocialists are NOT socialists, they are FRAUDS!!! Straight-Up F/“Conformist POLITICIANS acting in conformity with the DSA’s political essence as a pro-imperialist faction of the Party of Jackasses.” Fugg ‘Em!
BIDEN-HARRIS, the Universe implores you to BECOME a Signatory to SAVE The Planet NOT Nuke it!!!
“A Plan to Save the Planet, ”developed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research & The Network of Research Institutes.” “KEEP IT LIT.”
The House Prog Caucus ain’t the only ones – Some years ago, when the House did introduce a M4A bill – HR 676, about 18 pages, Sanders, in the Sen, instead of simply attaching an S# to the bill, introduced his own, about 200 pages, which was then asked to be read into the record – the Clerk stated reading the bill and after about 15 minutes, there were complaints about holding up other Sen business (maybe like naming a PO, e.g.) and Sanders withdrew it.
Again, some years later (?) when the Rs were attempting to repeal the ACA, an R, (we are told, “cynically”) introduced an amendment that repealed it and REPLACED IT WITH M4A! NOT one of the D Sen., including Sanders, voted for it! In other words not one, for all the rhetoric, would GO ON THE RECORD for M4A, (of course, the Rs didn’t either) The Rs, I am sure, knew this was the case and felt free to challenge them – demonstrating, for the record, what hypocrites they were/are
Fact is none of the “Prog. Ds” were/are willing to buck the Party bosses who run the show in favor of passing or even fighting for the stuff they supposedly ran on …
I have oft said that though i do not like the “principles” the Rs run on, at least they have some, the Ds don’t seem to have any. The question in my mind is why do folks keep voting for them when there are, and have been, much better alternatives for – decades – I know, I voted for them since ’96 – it might well seem as if Prog” voters don’t have any more courage to fight for what they say they want than the D repres they vote for … Sorry folks, but we DO get what we vote for, even if it is not what we want ..
Thank you, Margaret!!!!!!! You nailed it. No conviction. The so-called progressive wing simply cave at every step. When Democrats hold the majority they just wilt and say, ‘oh well, we can’t overcome the “majority” ‘ (which means the Repubdemocratan one-party system who, as Margaret astutely observes, does not want to pass Medicare for All, Student debt forgiveness, Green New Deal, etc.). Nothing ever happens; meanwhile the progressive voters who worked so hard to elect these “all talk/no show” ineffectual nincompoops are left high and dry. Again and again and again. Lack of conviction. The PC (Progressive Caucus) see the system as too big, too overwhelming and, most importantly, as those providing financial support to party-liners, they have concluded that neither they, as elected officials, nor anyone can change it. Oh well. Might as well just play the game and stay in office so that the people will think they are truly being represented in Congress, that they truly have a voice in these august chambers. Total BS. So yes, absolutely, the right wing Repubs. are demonstrating what real democratic activism looks like. Would be real nice if it were practiced on our end of the political spectrum as well. Think of what could be accomplished with some conviction and courage to buck the system.
‘Deal making is democracy in action’??? Sarcasm? “Democracy” hasn’t existed in the US since a long time.
When was that golden age? I’d love to learn about it. That time when all people in the USA, men, women, all ‘races’, those with property and without, had an equal say in their democracy.
“Oddly enough, one of the demands that McCarthy met was a proposal to cut the federal budget to FY2022 levels. Such a cut would mean a $75 billion cut to military spending .”
More like “…would mean a $75 billion cut to” social programs. Cuts which the Dem leadership will “grudgingly” concede to.
Great article by M. Kimberly. As the fellow journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said a while ago now, “Democrats are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil.”
I have found it interesting and instructive during the McCarthy Speakership process that the MSM have been uniform in ridiculing the Republicans in their disunity and the lengthiness of the process … that it was a clown show, a debacle, a disgrace. One gets the impression that 100% votes for the beloved leader are a normal and desired outcome in a democracy … when exactly did that happen? Party wheeling and dealing behind closed doors is a wonderful and normal thing now?
Truly the American democracy is a light unto the world …
Why are we still discussing AOC as if she is a serious person?
The Republicans are secure in the knowledge that they can act with impunity because they understand that the feckless Democrats have no desire to hold their feet to the fire as “the Squad” does little to help the working class and the poor while the Democrats continue to engage in militant rhetoric overseas.
Always good to hear what Margaret Kimberly has to say. It’s spot on. Just marvel how 20 GOP members of the so-called ‘Freedom Caucus’ can hold their party hostage, extracting regressive concessions in exchange for voting for McCarthy.
……Meanwhile, the 90 or so members of the Dems’ “Progressive Caucus” do NOTHING to push their party one way or another. Two recent examples illustrate how quickly they lay down obediently in the face of a scolding from party leadership. —–> the withdrawn letter politely asking for the administration to consider negotiations in the US/NATO/Ukraine/Russia war.———> and, the craven backing of Biden’s steamrolling over the RR union workers. What a sick joke. ………More and more folks are catching on to just who the Dems actually represent – and it ain’t the interests of working people.
“More and more folks are catching on to just who the Dems actually represent . . . ” I sure as hell hope so !
Bingo. Kimberley is a clear eyed truth teller.
“more and more folks are catching on to just who the Dems actually represent” —yet sadly more and more folks (as in our so-called progressive voters) are still unwilling to “demand concessions” from whoever the Dem leadership anoints as their candidate for president.
Seems to me that such voters show just as little spine as The Squad does when it comes demanding anything BEFORE they give a person their support.
Where does the liberal “working class” meme get us? We’re middle class vs. poor, workers vs. their “brothers and sisters” who are left jobless.
The problem here is naming 90 people as being progressive. Oh, if only.
Thank you. It is not just bad elements or the DP leadership, it is the DP itself with its elite donor system that is corrupt to the core. This corruption started in earnest with Clinton in the ’90s and reached a watershed moment with HRC’s campaign in 2016. In the primary campaign against Sanders, the DP leadership revealed their enduring contempt for the DP base; the party’s elite will pick the candidates and the DP base’s job is simply to rubber-stamp that selection. This is the “democrat-in-name-only Party’s” definition of democracy. It’s commitment to engage with and work for the benefit of the public is non-existent. Non-existent.
At the same time, a credulous, easily malleable (Russia-gate was always an obvious hoax) DP base convinced itself that rewarding the DP’s bad behavior was the way to change it for the better; utterly self-serving. In fact, the DP “woke” base is pathetic and contemptible. They stand for nothing of any import, just the latest fad, which is one big reason why we and the world are now perched on the edge of a precipice. I have never expected any positive change from the Republicans, but on the other hand it is now a given that it will not, and cannot come from the DP. At least with Trump, people were out on the street; action/reaction, which is where any hope for a future actually lies. Positive change won’t come willingly from either party but it most especially won’t come from the DP or its base.
Your 5th line, last Paragraph causes me a great deal of concern, “I have never expected any positive change from the republicans, but on the other hand it is now a given that it will not, and cannot come from DP.”
I could point out to you that voters voted for Biden because many thought through, erroneous beliefs pushed by the MSM, Biden would be the lesser of two evils. We knew better then but the leadership of the democrats and many others ignored the truth of their predicament , same with the republicans. I figure they both must be rooting for a collapse of the government so they can take total authoritarian control. You may want to watch what it is you wish for.
This is signified by the lack of protests to the democratic party fixing the game of nominating a candidate and the republicans caving to a billionaires money and threats. However the major portion of the blame is a democratic party that seems to be fine with being “dead in the water” as long as they got paid off by the lobbies. Totally not giving one shit what the electorate tried to tell them.
I’ll the not condemn the republicans, they do a fine job of doing that themselves as those in jail currently prove that beyond any shadow of doubt. But I have a very real problem with you logic or the lack thereof. You openly condemn the DP but give the RP a pass. Both parties leadership currently are sorry assed losers and frauds.
You almost make amends in your last line, but you seem incapable of pulling the trigger, so to speak, on both the DP and the RP, both who roundly deserve it. At this juncture you failure is sealed and motive revealed when you include the democratic base. The base of the republican party has been revealed for what it is and it’s not a pretty picture. The democratic base in this election was far too multi-faceted and we see that revealed now. Just what DP leadership wanted and RP prayed for. For the sake of DOG figure this shit out my man.
I read this as a passive – aggressive tactic and I have news for you, you aren’t fooling me.
Now one more time with feeling. The two party system as it stands in this country is a bust for every
American. Your disdain for the DP and it’s base (term), seems very obvious and your pass for Trumpism betrays you efforts to complete a viable comparison of either party to the real problem(s) we have in this country or any solution. Sir if you think the American political system can be successfully repaired by rioting, as you seem to favor you have some serious problems, especially if you believe either party has the best interest of the electorate in their minds, they want total power and they want it now. Trump was too much of an “outlaw” for even the most blood thirsty of the Deep State.
Things are not as they appear on FOX, CNN, PBS or C-Span all being very bad propaganda. Hang around here and learn for yourself.