"If you didn't want fascism you should have voted!"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/democrat-republican-elect-primary-1.6497911

It's apparently all part of a Democratic strategy aiming to help those seen as extremist Republican candidates to secure their Republican party's nomination. (Which Mastriano did win.)

The hope for Democrats is that those extreme Republican candidates would be much easier for Democrats to beat in the November general election. But the strategy has raised some concerns about effectiveness and whether it could have unintended consequences.

https://observer.com/2016/10/wikileaks-reveals-dnc-elevated-trump-to-help-clinton/

The memo named Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson as wanted candidates. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the memo noted.

Things have been getting worse my entire life regardless of who has been in charge. It gets worse more slowly under the dems, but it still gets worse.

Why is it too much to ask for things to get even a little better?

It gets worse more slowly under the dems, but it still gets worse.
Gay marriage? DEI? Pacific Protected waters? Arctic protected from drilling? It was getting better until Republicans were elected to undo it all. The Rachet Meme is a version "both sides bad" which is what helped Republicans win.

id like to remind you biden was a conservative running concentration camps for latinos at the border.

No, the DNC is why we have trump. It’s on them.

Obama wasn’t perfect at all, but his platform was at least change and progress. While he was originally against gay marriage he did listen to the public and change for re-election. If the DNC listened to the public instead of fighting against progress that would be great. But like… Biden was the throw away to conservatives for Obama’s VP to “balance out” Obama being progressive….And now he was their best idea on what to do for a better future? It’s pathetic, and demonstrates the above.

No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump. They’re saying the DNC is what even allowed trump to exist, by being greedy fucks who care more about their handlers than the American people and running the worst candidates they can. “Nothing will fundamentally change” is the dumbest, most “fuck you don’t bother to vote for me” fucking campaign I’ve ever heard.

No one is trying to say Biden was worse than trump.
The meme isn't that Biden was worse but that he did nothing. It's proveably false. Trump himself proved it by criticizing Biden at inauguration and immediately undoing Biden's orders.
- If it was that easy to undo what biden did, then practically he did nothing.
  
  Much of what Trump has “undone” wasn’t undone legally. Many of the things he did requires congress to rollback and other things are caught up in courts. But in the mean time they happened so it will be potentially unable to be put back even if it is ordered so.
  
  So, again, practically meaningless distinction. Until democrats are willing to use the same tools they leave available to republicans, the democrats are ineffective.
  
  Thing is, they don’t have the same opportunities. The one reason why trump has been able to push things through in this shitty manner, is because the Republicans have stacked the Supreme Court (because the holes from people dying got filled while Republicans were in power) and they have majority control of Congress.
  
  When judges die while democrats have power, they nominate milquetoast compromise judges while republicans just go full far-right crazy. Democrats don't fight to block the crazy republican judges nor do they even fight to get their own judges in. A great example is when Obama nominated Merrick Garland, an already lame pick, as a "compromise". The republicans insisted on waiting until the 2016 election concluded and the next president was sworn in and the democrats didn't fight back at all. Then as some dumb form of symbolism, they make Merrick Garland the Attorney General during Biden's term and Garland proceeds to not prosecute Trump for four years. That should tell you how great he would've been as a supreme court judge.
  So even if democrats do get a judge in, it's a compromised "centrist". How do you think the court will end up when one side packs in far-right wackos and the other side puts in moderate right-wing losers? Seems pretty clear what the direction would be even if democrats won every election until the end of time.
  
  So why wasn't Biden stacking SCOTUS?
  
  Because no judges died during his reign… they’re lifetime appointments.
  
  You're misunderstanding me. I did not say Biden could've appointed more judges. I'm saying Biden could've stacked (or "packed") scotus.
Its fine let them keep losing. I honestly don't care anymore. At some point progressives like Bernie, AOC, etc. will finally wake up & realize they don't need Democrats to win. You want to see people passionate about voting again then it is time to leave the establishment behind. Anyone remember Bernie's crowds in 2016? It was obvious he was may more popular than Clinton having to pay Beyonce & Jay Z for people to show up at her events.
- They absolutely, 1000% need Democrats to win. Maybe not their respective districts, but if they want to get anything done on a national level, they need about half the country on their side, and that includes Democrats.
  Now, they can certainly eat the party whole, the way the tea party and MAGA ate the GOP. That involves being more specific than "Democrats bad". In fact, how did they do it? Did you ever see them telling people to abandon the Republican party?
  
  I understand where you're coming from, but Democrats need progressives to win. If they leave Democrats, it will be Democrats that will follow them, not the other way around. I don't think trying to emulate MAGA is such a great idea. I know there are lessons that can be learned there, but I am still confident that a new party with popular progressives & populist policies would do more than trying to change a broken party from within.
  
  It's always easier to completely rewrite code from scratch than to make small modifications to an existing project.

Democrats didn't flip on gay rights until Obama, and the Supreme Court did marriage equality. (Yes better than Republicans) Democratic leadership is already trying to send trans people under the bus to try to save face with the Republicans. Both sides are bad! We need to demand more from the democrats and force them to support the working class and to never back down when talking about human rights. Right now. The Democratic party is nothing more than an enabler of our abusive and coercive government/economic systems that allows lessor evils to even exist.

Democrats didn't flip on gay rights until Obama
And Obama didn't flip on gay marriage until the end of his first term. Biden came out in favor of it, which forced Obama's hand, but it wound up being the right move; it energized the base when enthusiasm was starting to wane. Then, under Obama's leadership, they continued to do nothing to establish gay marriage at the federal level.
- "But he said something vaguely positive, that's exactly like legal enforcement of their rights!"

Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.

Gay marriage was legalized at the federal level by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The only time a Democrat acted on same-sex marriage nationally was when Bill Clinton banned it by signing DOMA in 1996.

Environmental laws have been all Democrats.

Nixon created the EPA.

If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn't have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.

If Democrats passed legislation, Biden's achievements couldn't be undone through executive order.

The parties are not the same, especially now that one of them is openly fascist, but you're giving Democrats credit for things they did not do. Also, the meme doesn't say they're the same, it describes the rachet effect, which is an accurate representation of how Democrats behaved on multiple issues. Look at how their economic policies have changed over the last 30 years, or how their views on immigration policies have changed since Trump was elected.

Is there a political community you found on lemmy that understands how this works, like you do. I see way too many Democrat apologists on these popular communities.
- Not on .world. I've noticed .world is more of a neoliberal, mostly pro-capitalism instance in general.
  Note, I'm talking more about the moderation rather than members.
  
  Okay. I don't understand all the different instances yet. I got instructions from someone on how to navigate it but haven't sat down to try.
  
  Basically all you need to know is every instance has their own admins with their own rules, and often times you will see instances who are focused on a particular group of people, like my instance, for instance, which is for hardcore computer geeks, but where everyone is welcome regardless of whether or not they are even into computers.
  I also like my instance because they explicitly choose to not defederate with any instance. I can choose what to block myself, which is how I prefer it.
  There are also instances like db0's (former /r/piracy moderator) for example, which focus more on individual freedoms/anarchist philosophy.
  I started off on .world for a month until I found my instance.
- Well, .world has a lot of users who understand this, but the loudest voices (who are often times moderators) are definitely Democrat apologists. Then again, some of the other instances, like .ml, have the opposite problem, and are full-blown tankie/authoritarian apologists, so it's kind of a, "pick your poison, damned if you do, damned if you don't," situation.
  
  I miss Reddit. R. I. P.
  
  Eh, I saw a lot of the same shit on Reddit. I think you'd have to go back at least 7 or 8 years to find a version of Reddit that wasn't trash.
  
  Nah. I had my feed highly curated to active and sane subs within my interests. It was too good to be true.
Your list supporting Republicans means you must support Trump. right?
I mean you can't have it both ways. Nixon created the EPA, Nixon was Republican, therefore Republican policy is to put the environment first. That's what you are arguing.
- Why can't stating facts just be that: stating facts.
  Instead, people have to insert imaginations of their interlocutor's position so they can try to dish an "own" before asking them for clarification first.
  And we wonder why discourse is broken in today's age
  
  If I said Republicans generally support racist policies, a reply could be the fact that Lincoln freed the slaves and was a Republican.
  Stating facts like that isn't neutral. It's the scientific equivalent of picking out one data point from an entire study to argue against a conclusion.
- That is absolutely not what I'm saying. I'm correcting objectively false claims you're making; environmental laws were not all Democrats, the Democrats did not do anything at the federal level to pass, "full gay rights with marriage," and the meme and OP did not say, "both sides bad." Those points are a statement of fact, not an argument.
  
  If you have to go back 50 years to find an example of when Republicans were good for the environment, you proved my point.
  It's no different than, "Republicans are the party of Lincoln!"
  
  First reply: "Giving Nixon credit for the EPA means you support Republicans and therefore Trump."
  Second reply: "NIxon was so long ago he doesn't count."
  You can't have it both ways. You can't claim pointing out a good thing Nixon did means I support modern Republicans while also claiming Nixon happened so long ago that he's not connected to modern Republicans.
  It's also just factually wrong to say, "it was so long ago, its like saying they're the anti-slavery party." Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy. He's basically the turning point for where the Republicans became the party we know today. He's the reason it's bullshit to point out Republicans are the party of Lincoln.
  
  It's also just factually wrong to say, "it was so long ago, its like saying they're the anti-slavery party." Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy.
  Those two sentences are in exact conflict with each other. You say "it's too long ago when Republicans were different" isn't a valid argument." Then in the very next sentence you say, "it was long ago when Republicans were completely different."
  WTF?
  
  You say "it's too long ago when Republicans were different" isn't a valid argument.
  He didn't say that. You did.
  He pointed out your hypocrisy when you said that stating the fact that Nixon created the EPA must mean he's a Republican (and a MAGAt one at that), but then turned heel and said that any politicians from 50 years ago don't matter (likely because the political landscape then is not the same as the political landscape now, which is reasonably true - he makes this same point by saying 1860 Republicans are not the same as 1960 Republicans or 2025 Republicans).
  You stated he's a Republican, then dissolved your own claim by saying support for past Republicans doesn't matter. You've closed your own logic loop.
  
  No, dude...just...no. You tried to claim that saying, "a Republican founded the EPA," and, "Republicans ended slavery," were the same, even though there was a century of history between those events. More importantly, Nixon is exactly the person you don't want to make that argument about, since Nixon is the very person who pivoted the party towards its modern strategy of using the politics of racial aggrievement to get working-class whites to vote against their self-interests. Going back to the Civil War, or even the early Civil Rights era, things get ideologically murky, but you can draw a straight line between Trump and Nixon.
  
  For the past 50 years, Democrats have been supporting environmental protection laws and Republicans have been against them.
  It is equivalent to compare "But Nixon started the EPA" to "Lincoln ended slavery." That Nixon started the EPA 50 years ago is irrelevant to all the following decades where Republicans have been consistently against the environment. It's no different than when Magas say they aren't racist because of Lincoln.
  If it's a straight line from Nixon to Trump as you say, then why claim Republicans are environmentalists with Nixon as your example?
  
  If it's a straight line from Nixon to Trump as you say, then why claim Republicans are environmentalists with Nixon as your example?
  He said straight line THROUGH Nixon and Trump, not straight line TO Nixon and Trump.
  The former implies distinct and self-evident political differences, whereas the latter implies political evolution from one into the other where both politicians have a common set of political similarities.
  I can't help but think at this point that we're reaching comprehension issues...
  
  I can’t help but think at this point that we’re reaching comprehension issues…
  There is a long list of envitroment, social and political laws that Democrats have championed and have happened. BEACHES act, expanding Pacific protected waters, protecting Artic. In social we have gay marriage now. Democrats did NOT do nothing while Republicans moved things to the right. If that were true there would be no gay marriage. If Hillary had been elected the Supreme Court wouldn't be right wing and Roe v Wade wouldn't have been neutered.
  The Ratchet meme is "both sides bad".
  
  If it’s a straight line from Nixon to Trump as you say, then why claim Republicans are environmentalists with Nixon as your example?
  I'm not claiming Republicans are environmentalists, but if you want to know why they got so much worse on the environment, the answer is the Ratchet Effect. The thing you misinterpreted as, "both sides bad," explains exactly how we got here. In Nixon's era, environmental issues weren't considered particularly partisan. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all had generally the same outlook on using the federal government to regulate corporations on the environment.
  Then comes Regan with a lurch to the right. He tries to de-fang the EPA and hundreds of employees resign en mass. But he's not all bad; he is instrumental in passing the Montreal Protocols, which effectively fixed the hole in the ozone layer, but he's much worse than his predecessors. H.W. Bush was a little worse than that. He continued Regan's deregulation campaign, and while he held several climate summits, he made no substantial moves on the climate.
  With Clinton, we can see how the Democrats stopped the Party from moving back to the left on environmental issues. Clinton was, economically, very similar to Regan and Bush, and placed the corporate profits above the environment. He tried to make some progress with the Kyoto Protocols, but it was mostly ineffective, relying on cap-and-trade policies that did little to reduce emissions. Then it was the next Bush, who pulled us back out of Kyoto and was generally worse on all fronts for the environment. Next came Obama, who certainly has a mixed history on the environment. He put us in the Paris climate accords, but also went heavy on coal and fracking, plus approved the Keystone Pipeline. Finally we get Trump, who is a climate change denier and Captain Planet villain, which was interrupted by a brief interlude from Biden, who put us back in the Paris accords for a few years but also expanded American oil production.
  Do you see how, over time, the Republicans move farther and farther to the right on the environment? Do you see how the Democrats fail to bring us back to the left when the retake power? That's the Ratchet Effect. Democrats aren't nice environmentalists that just want to fight the evil Republican polluters, they're constantly shifting right with the Republicans. This is true for immigration, the economy, crime, and if guys like Gavin Newsom get their way, it will soon be LGBTQ rights as well. Your binary, black-and-white view on these issues just doesn't reflect history or reality.
  
  the Ratchet Effect
  The Ratchet Effect is a "both sides bad" meme. It is provably false.
  Beaches Act, Oct 2000 Clinton. Pacific National Monument started by Bush, expanded by Obama. Biden Ban on Artic drilling 2024
  Democrats push left. Republican push right. There's no ratchet.
  Do you see how, over time, the Republicans move farther and farther to the right on the environment?
  And when Democrats have power, they push it to the left. It's not a ratchet. Both sides are NOT the same.
  DEI, Roe v Wade, The Environment, etc have all gone right only because voters have given so much power to Republicans to move it right.
  
  If you're talking about the Respect for Marriage Act, that was passed a decade after the Supreme Court established gay marriage as the law of the land. The overturning of Roe made Democrats decide that they should codify gay marriage, since they saw how badly failing to codify abortion rights turned out. It also reopens the door for Civil Unions and passed with large Republican support, so I wouldn't exactly call it a huge win for Democrats.
  As for the EPA, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but you are absolutely incorrect. Nixon proposed the EPA and NOAA through executive order, and it was later ratified by Congress. It's possible you're referencing some sort of dispute Nixon had with Congress on how they intended to create the EPA, but he absolutely supported it; it was his idea.
- What a stupid comment

I 100% agree with you but I'd also like to point out that the EPA was made by nixon in the 70s. theyve done some good stuff too, just less

The Democrats didn't do shit for gay marriage. That was the Supreme Court.

Also, Nixon created the EPA.

Socially left on some issues and economically right on all issues isn't left.

actually, your candidate running a dogshit campaign and telling everyone to the left of them to fuck off is why we have trump. we warned this would happen, too. anyone with a memory span longer than a pet goldfish remembers all of this.

Of course there was some good legislation along the way. Nobody is denying that. But the crisis we face now is there because the Democrats decided to ignore the danger. It really is that simple...

You can start with Citizens United. You can talk about the Dems after 9/11, the illegal drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, how the Dems celebrated the human rights violations then, which leads us to El Salvador today. You can talk about stacking the courts, which was a plan publicly announced in the 90s, that the Dems never seriously tried to stop, leading to the current Supreme Court...

If you want to say, "Well, the Dems are less evil," then great, many people partly agree. But that's not good enough. They fucked us all over by not stopping the Republicans from doing really horrible shit, even though we all knew what was coming. Maybe in a few years we can write on Biden's tombstone "Not quite as evil as Trump." Would that make anyone happy? Is that something to be proud of?

Decades of lesser evil voting is why you have Trump

No "vote blue no matter who" and not demanding actual representation is how we got Trump. People got duped by a con becuase they have never seen the real thing, so anything different can look appealing to the uncritical.

Never let perfect be the enemy of good or some shit.
- I love how liberals bleat this because it implies genocide is good.
  
  No it does not. It means do something to move the needle instead of sitting on the sidelines bitching about everything while doing fuck all. I know you guys are great at mental gymnastics but that's a stretch even by the standard on .ml
  
  Care to explain why people are stuck on the sidelines without a viable political party to represent their interests?

LOL no it isn't, Trump or someone like him was an inevitability because US elections are fixed and the people who have actual power in your society, Corporate board members, want fascism.

Truth there. I'm from a dark blue area yet city government here couldn't act any different than if I lived in a dark red state. In some ways I actually think they are worse. All they have to do is put D next to their name & the voters will support them regardless of their actions.

that was a very different party than current dnc. today’s dnc is controlled by two faced lobbyists pimps like schumer and pelosi, who will have trump win again and again than see aoc being a possibility.

in today’s dnc someone like al gore or obama will be suffocated out of primaries like bernie. heck schumer would probably have obama killed to keep dnc pro-israel

i will be surprised if aoc is not pushed out of the party by 28.

Spoken like a Weimar

Accepting gays is definitely the same as funding sex change for prisoners and sending them to a female prison, which was one of the most successful ads in history.

Correct. Not to mention the midterm congressional elections that only see ~20% turnout, and even less in the congressional primaries. The overwhelming majority are retirees, who will almost always pick the most conservative option in their party. People love to complain about term limits and appeasement centrists, but they don’t show up when they actually have a say in who represents them.