Comment by gruez
1 month ago
>Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces except the idea that he might want to vote for someone else ...
I get it's funny to dunk on dumb Republican farmers voting for the same party for over and over again, and not getting what they want, but it's hardly a farmer or Republican issue. How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
Fix your voting system. This two party system you have if caused by the First Past the Post voting system you have. Basically mostly all the is uniquely broken about US politics is downstream from FPTP. You can't get smart solutions if all your options are dumb and dumber.
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).
Republicans control the government, what on Earth do Republican voters have to complain about? They got what they voted for.
If they’re unhappy with the government they should complain to the mirror.
>How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).
Is there any indication this doesn't happen for Republicans? Around a decade ago there was a huge shift in the Republican party from being pro-globalization to protectionist.
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
Because democrats largely support M4A and socialized health care in general. A handful are squishy on the issue, and the structure of the senate requires significant bipartisanship to pass[1]. But if you want it to pass you want to vote for democrats, duh. If you do happen to vote for a democrat who actually opposes that and complain to them that they didn't vote for it, then yeah: you're dumb.
[1] The exception that proves the rule being the ACA itself, which passed on an EXTREMELY rare party-line 60 vote majority. And didn't include a government-offered insurance option because of the objections of Just One Guy (Joe Lieberman, representing the insurance hotbed of Connecticut) whose vote was needed.
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
They can see progress. ACA wasn't a slam dunk, but it was progress.
Also, you aren't voting for a Republican or a Democrat, you are voting for a person, and if the person you are voting for supports M4A, that's what you can do. If someone else in the same party doesn't support that, you can't do anything about that. However, your representative is one piece of the puzzle. Giving up on that is dumb.
It's not like the Democrats are under the heels of a tyrant leading their party and country over a cliff.
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
To be fair, the progressive movement in the Democratic Party is much larger than any actual working-class movement in the GOP. MAGA is not exactly pro-union, pro-striking, or even pro-farmer, given the tariffs. The Progressive Caucus otoh is now 45 % of the House Democrats. Zohran Mamdani was just elected mayor of NYC, and is already making big moves against landlords.
And that's even aside from the voters who don't vote for corporate Dems, and then get blamed by the DNC for losses. Every time someone asserts that "Bernie Bros" sat out in 2016, they're talking about Democrats who refused to keep 'voting for the same party over and over again'.
At least (some) Democrats actually say they want Medicare for all. The farmer parallel would be like voting for a Republican hoping for Medicare for all.
Though I'm a bit biased, because it seems like if you want anything other than for billionaires to get more money, you would vote Dem.
to be fair, this isn’t a perfect solution but it does get us much closer to that solution each time. There are still plenty of democrats whom don’t support solving these problems (for any number of reasons, I’m not going to conjecture here why)
The best solution I’ve seen is to just keep pushing leftward—even if we only get a few increments here and there.
I agree, keep pushing leftward. It feels like we will never get there, but I predict that we will get a wave of change eventually, with folks like Mamdani. Trump dramatically shifted the Overton window rightward, which just means that it's possible to move leftward.