this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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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).
Im not really "that" tuned into US politics. Are there really any democrat politicians people are into at the moment ?
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
It's wild that the richest politician in the country is somehow one of the better ones
Same reason FDR was smart enough to invest in guillotine insurance.
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.
Inb4 a mega billionaire takes it too far for them and accidentally presses the communism button that also guillotines them at the same time
Ayyyy another IL comrade!
Oh, I've been here. I've been contemplating going out of my way to see you play one of these days but I don't want to be cringe irl
Haha, you're all good! I've met a number of people from this site. DM me if you ever wanna!
It's better than nothing, but imagine what I would've accomplished without federal interference.
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.
As far as I can tell, not really, but there are certainly democrat politicians that are quite loathed. Simple indifference would be a massive improvement over the attitudes towards Biden.
No
so basically the concept of a generic democrat but not any particular generic democrat?
Chapo boys said years ago that they'd win every election if they just ran blank silhouettes named "[popular policy]" instead of any specific dem
well then they'd have to actually do the policy which would defeat the whole point of a bourgeois election
No, they get away with not doing things they promised all the time
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
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.