Damn, small city.

Urban sprawl doesnt always work like that though. Often residential areas extend faster than the amenities catch up.

Theres plenty of places nowhere near shops and restaurants, wdym?

I was translating.

You can tell by the first word.

Im not particularly hard up just saying a lot of people are.

Unsure why that upset you.

Translation, when I was young my parents could afford a home in a nice area with lots of local cuisine. My generation isnt so lucky.

Objectively they are a right wing party, you are a right wing country, nothing overtly left wing is allowed to exist. You might have a handful of policies that are vaguely reminiscent of left wing policies, but the reality is you have a right wing party and an extremely right wing party.

So losing is convincing, but voting for people who you believe personally benefit regardless of whether they win or lose is the solution?

Whats the mechanism there?

And I think “agree with my electoral strategy or you deserve to be punched in the mouth” rather neatly demonstrates the problem with your conception of politics 😂 you must end up in a lot conversations that frustrate you.

Losing is quite convincing. If enough people withdraw their support that you lose an election, you have a pretty strong incentive to win them back.

If you genuinely think threats of violence and terrorism are the only way to exert political pressure, I think we’ve reached a fairly fundamental disagreement. Thats lazy thinking as far as im concerned.

You’re conflating habitual non-voters with previously reliable voters deliberately withdrawing their support. They’re not politically equivalent.

A huge group that routinely doesn’t vote, for thousands of different reasons, sends no coherent signal. A measurable part of your coalition abandoning you over specific failures absolutely does.

And “make them fear you” is just a more dramatic way of describing electoral leverage. If losing those voters can cost Democrats elections, they have an incentive to win them back.

Whether they actually respond correctly is another question. But guaranteeing them your vote regardless of what they do certainly gives them less reason to, im sure you can appreciate that much?

It achieves leverage. If a party knows it gets your vote regardless of what it does, it has very little electoral incentive to respond to you.

Withholding support makes that support conditional: adapt sufficiently to win those voters back, or accept the electoral cost of losing them.

You can argue that the cost of doing that is too high given the Republicans, but that’s an argument about whether the strategy is worth the risk, not whether the strategy exists.

I’m not saying the Democrats themselves are going to create that dystopia, not directly. I’m saying that if people repeatedly vote Democrat and see no meaningful improvement in their lives, eventually some of them will conclude that voting Democrat achieves nothing and either disengage or swing even harder towards the Republicans.

“Vote Democrat because the alternative is worse” can work for a while, but it isn’t a sustainable substitute for actually giving people reasons to believe their lives will improve.

Thats a bit of a pivot from the topic, im talking about pressuring the dems to change, not taking to the street. Adapt or fail.

The response would be, to save millions more from a future even worse dystopia that potentially lasts indefinitely.

They weren’t leftists, or anything close, but rewarding them for being ‘at least you arent trump’ sends them a message that they don’t really have to try.

On the flip side, Trump has caused a ton of pain, and I think anyone who was trying to punish the dems for being shit is regretting it at this point, but I do see a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel here.

Nobody who’s thought on it even briefly thinks unfettered capitalism is good anymore lmao.

In no way trying to defend him, hes hardly unique in this regard. Deplorable, but at best hes just overtly deplorable.

I think the shamelessness is the hallmark of this government.

Sometimes people need to be shocked out of a lazy political engagement pattern, there arent a lot of ways to achieve it consistently.

Submit to reality, take no action and apply no pressure.

I dont rate this advice.

Expect nothing, demand it anyway.

These are not the sort of people to take advice, period.

Like an accelerating arms race.