• JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    57
    ·
    10 months ago

    At this point, it would probably be a major boon to the Democrats, since Biden polls incredibly poorly compared to a generic Democrat (as long as they pick someone other than Kamala or Gavin Newsom).

      • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        58
        ·
        10 months ago

        Sinc Oct when all the “progressive” Democrats collectively smashed their “support genocide” buttons, no, not really.

        The only democrat at the federal level qualified as this point, in my view, is Tlaib. I know others have since joined her, but I consider anyone who wasn’t IMMEDIATELY against Israel’s genocide to be basically dead to me forever… on the political stage anyway. Some random dipshit can learn and change their mind, ok. But politicians should have already known and been anti Israel before Oct. So, whatever, fuck em all. For the rest of my life, or until Palestine is free, I’ll be looking at each candidate and it they take money from AIPAC or express any support for Israel, not voting for them. If that means writing in or not voting, ok. The dems can get my vote if they value it. But they gotta give up genocide and that means give up Israel.

      • CommunistBear [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        34
        ·
        10 months ago

        Unironically Pritzker is someone to watch out for although imo not this election cycle. Of the democrat governors, I’ve seen more positive and less negative from him. Motherfucker got me legal weed and a paid vacation. That’s powerful energy going into the future

          • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            17
            ·
            edit-2
            10 months ago

            I have met more than one rich person IRL who gets what’s going on and understands how to actually keep capitalism running. Weirdly it’s the CEOs and people who have inherited vast sums (like Pritzker) that are the sharpest on this. Entrepreneurs and business owners are completely off the deep end though, they all think they’re characters in an Ayn Rand novel.

            If I was a soulless billionaire I would be pushing for social democracy tout court.

        • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          10 months ago

          I don’t want to say I “like” Pritzker, but I’m not sure I have the right words for it. He’s definitely made me ask myself which is better: a “leftist” politician like AOC or Bernie who won’t even try to get anything done (or just not very good at getting things done; to me AOC is the former or Bernie is the later), or a more centrist lib like Pritzker who at least can be funny and also an asshole who can actually get shit done, even if it’s just meager improvements.

    • buh [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      10 months ago

      Biden polls incredibly poorly compared to a generic Democrat (as long as they pick someone other than Kamala or Gavin Newsom).

      so basically the concept of a generic democrat but not any particular generic democrat?

            • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              edit-2
              10 months ago

              Been talking to socialist alternative about this recently. I think that since bourgeois politicians are in the end only going to do things businesses want, they prefer to run on bullshit over lying when possible. So they’re “a President you could have a beer with”, not the other guy, etc. They try not to make specific promises, in my local elections half the time they don’t even bother putting together a policy platform until they’re elected. When they are dumb enough to make a specific claim, they obfuscate and say it’s some other politician’s fault the thing didn’t get done and they’re “in talks” about it, or they have to try and gaslight everyone that they meant $2000 total instead of $2000 checks, or whatever. People remember that stuff; there’s a limited amount of lying you get before you lose re-election to the other party (representing a different slice of capital).

              The thing SAlt really liked about Bernie is that he made Medicare For All more important than the guy himself. Every time he got up on stage he talked about it and if elected he might have even tried to do it*. I think there is some value to getting specific policy proposals in the public eye. Everybody’s been calling for “police reform”, whatever that means, for the better part of a century. But once people started to say “defund the police” - literally decrease the police department budget - the gloves came off and we got a tremendous backlash from the bourgeois parties. It’s too specific. In a few decades they’ll probably be renaming police departments to Department of Resident Health and Wellness and calling it defund, but for now candidates who say they support defunding actually mostly mean it, voters believe that they mean it, and so the rest are forced to tell you straight that they won’t defund. In Chicago Lightfoot ran on “police reform”, but Johnson did not run on defunding the police and strenuously tried to avoid talking about it.

              * no enforcement mechanism obviously

                • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  10 months ago

                  I mean there’d be no enforcement mechanism to make President Bernie do M4A, once he’s in office he can do whatever. You could maybe theoretically have an accountable politician in a bourgeois democracy if their entire campaign apparatus was done by a worker’s party, and if they did bad stuff in office the party would guarantee that they would not be reelected. But dubious on a national level or with term limits - think of all the stuff the lame duck presidents do. Right now the social democrats have their own campaigns that get support from a bunch of different orgs, so when DSA helps elect a promising politician they can generally just fuck off, break all their promises to the org, and get reelected on their own as an incumbent.