Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.
“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”
His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.
Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.
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“bOtH sIdEs” is only true for establishment Dems, and if you pay attention, progressives are gaining in power and prominence. DSA is not the only source, but it’s becoming a lightning rod.
Show me ANY good Republicans. I’ll wait.
The only hope for us is to support the actual progressives instead of lumping them in with the establishmen Democrats, because doing the latter is EXACTLY what the fascists want.
So it’s like you’re mostly right but critically wrong when you write off both parties. And yes, voting is critical, but what is even MOR critical is supporting progressive candidates before the primaries and into the primaries and THEN in the general. Always vote, and when you vote, always take the better - or less shitty - option. That’s where “vote blue no longer who” comes into play - in the general election, an establishment Dem is still less shitty than a fascist Republican.
Do they still want to genocide people and prop up genocidal states? Then they ain’t good.
I would have agreed with you before Biden neglected to properly go after Trump for J6 for reasons I still don’t understand. The establishment Dems don’t take the threat of fascist Republicans seriously, and still want to compromise with them.
The president isn’t supposed to go after anyone. His DOJ is supposed to enforce the law, and they had indicted thousands of J6ers in what seemed to be the lead-up to The Big One, where charges are brought against the ringleaders. You can say they did this too slowly, but it was literally the biggest case the FBI had ever prosecuted. Spare us this both sides crap.
The problem is that, through the electoral system, the limit to progressiveness is social democracy. Social democracy in the context of a dying imperialist power cannot save the empire from collapse, nor can it establish socialism, because you cannot replace the material base of society within the boundaries of a state set up to reinforce and protect the material base of society. Revolution remains necessary for socialism.
Only necessary if one believes heavily-regulated capitalism cannot work, sure.
That would be correct, heavily-regulated capitalism cannot work in the long-term for the same reasons capitalism in general cannot work in the long-term.
Seems to work fine in Scandinavia.
It really doesn’t. Scandinavian Social Democratic countries are seeing the same gradual decay in safety nets, because the imperialist system they depend on is gradually decaying. This is very predictable, however, because as capitalism goes on, and as its imperialist stage goes on, there are very understandable and gradual processes like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism cannot last forever, it systematically erodes its own basis. Imperialism as a stage in capitalism magnifies the problems with capitalism, temporarily reducing national-scale contradictions between workers and owners through safety nets while heightening contradictions on an international scale, between imperialist countries and the global south.
Jared Golden is a halfway decent Republican
btw, someone else replied to me nd I saw my comment again (my reply to you) - just to clarify that while “cute” might have negative connotations… I didn’t mean it negatively. You probably got that but I still wanted to clarify. heh
Cute, but for anyone else who had to look him up - he is a Democrat.