Nowhere Girl
Democrats will reliably celebrate Republicans who vote against them 98% of the time while attacking leftists and progressives who agree with them at least 90% of the time and driving them out of the party altogether.
You can either conclude Democrats are just conservatives or that they have no moral or principled stances and politics is just a "pick me" game of craving white conservative approval.
I'm not sure there's a difference.
Nowhere Girl
As I've said before, at the state level, there are some pretty decent Democrats who recognize whoa, Republicans are out of their fucking minds and should be stopped.
But that doesn't carry over to the national party, where Democrats like Biden will call Mitch McConnell a good friend and insist on the importance of having a strong Republican Party.
Yeah, they don't like Trump, but they're less about defending democracy than they are about preserving the status quo of "normal" politics.
Nowhere Girl
Trump would have gotten away with even more in office if he pursued the exact same policies but acted "normal" about it in front of the cameras.
The Project 2025 guys figured this out. Instead of having Bannon as a weird Rasputin figure, just surround Trump with regular GOP operatives. They're all Heritage Foundation freaks but that doesn't matter to Democrats.
The main friction is the GOP base expect Trump to act like an anti-establishment strong man so he can't "play by the rules."
Nowhere Girl
Democrats keep propping up Republican has-beens like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Not Really Never Trumpers like Nikki Haley not so much because they're against Trump or even for democracy, per se, so much as for the preservation of the traditional, congenial two party duopoly in which Republicans and Democrats both hold the line on behalf of the interests of the ruling class.
Meanwhile, Republican voters view Democrats and increasingly the GOP establishment as the enemy.
Nowhere Girl
This is a losing proposition for Democrats and obviously for the rest of us as Republicans have gamed the system such that someone like Trump can easily win anyway and the GOP courts and statehouses have incrementally seized more control over government and our lives.
It makes sense to fire up left and liberal voters and fight Republicans everywhere, on everything. Because Republicans really are a minority. It's not a centrist or center-right country at all, as opinion polls constantly tell us.
Nowhere Girl
Democrats don't really believe it's a center-right country anyway; they just know that's where the money and the all-important white voter is and they would rather work for them.
And what we're seeing is a Democratic Party steadily moving rightward trying to capture the space "traditional" Republicans left behind even as the wealthy and white voters are veering farther right every day.
The rest of us don't really have a say.
But in the meantime, yeah, Democrats might be nicer to us.
Nowhere Girl
In the long term, all this is doing is enabling Republicans, Trump, and fascists like Trump.
Without him, the GOP may recalibrate around "nice" Nazis like JD Vance who can smile and speak in complete sentences while lying through their teeth and planning to slit your throat.
Is that an improvement? Democrats would seem to think so.
It also means Democrats are increasingly the party of banal evil conservatism while Republicans are the fascist wing, and there isn't much room for anyone else.
Claire, The Ultimate Worrier
@gwynnion I've really come to believe they absolutely understand this but choose not to pursue it because getting votes is a secondary concern next to bringing in checks from big donors
basically fundraising for the democrats has become an end unto itself
Nowhere Girl
@waitworry Democrats are a "choose your own adventure" type of shitty: some of them are just lazy and want a cushy job for life, some are just corrupt but in a pathetic, ordinary way, some are just conservatives but do PR for appearance's sake, some are just corporate shills, etcetera, etcetera.
There seem to be very few actual liberals in the party anymore.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.