I've been seeing a slow splinter as of late between "establshment"-style Democrats focused on decorum, and the progressive-style democrats focused on overhauling the status quo. There definitely seems to be a slow shift towards people who want to take real actions an not stay stifled in years talking about actions.
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
Here’s some American context: a ~3 minute video. Bush and Reagan, during the primaries, trying to win over Republicans, answering a question about immigration.
Or even look at George @ Bush's calls for comprehensive immigration reform, and his repeated emphasis on treating all immigrants, legal or not, with dignity and courtesy: https://www.bushcenter.org/topics/immigration
Infrastructure funding is a pro-business position. At this point, most of the infrastructure that the Democrats are seeking funding for is maintenance, the definition of "status quo".
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
When have there ever been "civil disruptions" due to a low minimum wage in the US? Federal minimum wage has been underwater all of my life. If the minimum wage law had any teeth (requiring Congress to stop fellating business owners), it would at least be tied to the inflation rate (as Social Security tends to be).
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
None of that is conservative or liberal or leftist its common sense that both parties should be able to agree on. There are policies that are logically the right thing to do.
If implemented with a modicum of competence (which is admittedly not a foregone conclusion) and over a sufficiently long period (probably at least longer than one or two 4-year terms), all of those things would almost certainly have positive effects on the economy.
You'll notice that, except for paid sick leave, all these things are simply "keep the lights on" policies. That is conservatism.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals, which they have been "talking about" nearly the entire 40 years I've been alive. If I were to ignore their talk and judge purely based on action, it certainly seems like Democrats effect less change than Republicans.
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
They directly increased access to healthcare and infrastructure funding in the last 15 years, and both were very obvious, big bills. Perhaps it would behoove you to actually pay attention, instead of memeing online about things you don't actually know anything about?
Do you know any progressives? Do you follow any politics outside the US? I'm going to guess not, because your frame of reference for what a genuinely progressive win would look like is woefully miscalibrated. I suggest you rectify that before accusing anyone else of ignorance.
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
I directly responded to your whining about “action” - I’m sorry that you now want to have a different conversation because you realized how utterly incorrect you were, but I’m not interested in asinine purity bullshit from some “Enlightened Progressive” who doesn’t, faintly, understand European politics.
Healthcare, for instance, is not more expensive for the average low-income person because of the ACA. You’re utterly incorrect, completely misinformed, and repeating bullshit. “Progressives”. Lol.
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
“Their "first-ever female four-star admiral" appointed to lead the public health corps, which they falsely touted as a historic win for women, was actually a male transvestite.”
For one, the party either was in favor or did not take a clear stance on issues such as trans people in women's sports, DEI practices and other similar "woke" issues. That was enough to turn off a huge number of voters. Democrats of the Clinton era would have easily defeated Trump.
What a weird stance. A minimum wage guarantees all citizens can live a life in basic dignity. A worker is, even if part of a union, still a citizen of a state. A state is the sum of its constituents. There is, beyond the bipartisan war, room for compromise and mutual understanding for the benefit of all.
Unions are by far a net positive, but the way they fight against universal healthcare and minimum wage for people not fortunate enough to have the option of being in a union makes me question this belief.
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
The far left always portrays the democrats as being too far left, even though both parties have moved to the left.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts?
As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.
While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
That is an absolutely delusional position to have and speaks volumes to lack of critical thinking or the effectiveness of propaganda.
You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice.
They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects.
The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young.
Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.
If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
>”Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types.
That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
The whites can want a strict monarchy all they want but that won't be what gets the communists to not pick their arms back up again. Preferences don't change the political reality or what it takes to consolidate and keep power.
The Taliban can hate the west all they want, it's not politically tenable for them to engage in any serious effort to sponsor terrorism abroad. Likewise going full jackboot during reconstruction after the US civil war wasn't politically possible.
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics.
Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.