• WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s chief of staff. Hillary Clinton was his Secretary of State. His Vice President was Biden himself. His Secretary or the Treasury’s resume is classic neoliberal.

      Like, I can’t even fathom how you would call this unhinged. Obama was firmly in the centrist/neoliberal wing of the party. He ran on hope and change, but he filled his cabinet with Clinton alums and Wall Street bankers. He ran under the banner of a progressive, but he governed under the same centrist banner as Clinton and Biden.

      Did you forget how he wasted months of precious Congressional time by desperately trying to make the PPACA bipartisan? He let Republicans slow things down for months. He let them put all sorts of amendments into it. In the end, they all voted against it.

      If Obama was famous for anything, it was surrendering in advance. This was a massive topic of discussion at the time. Obama was infamous for performative bipartisanship. He wouldn’t propose a democratic version of a bill. He would start by magnanimously offering a compromise between the Republican and Democratic positions, hoping in vain to bring Republicans onboard. Republicans took his compromise-in-advance as weakness and never returned the favor.

      Have you really forgotten history that quickly? Obama was a neoliberal to his core. It was his cabinet that negotiated the bailouts of the banks. Progressives at the time were arguing that any bailouts should be made contingent on keeping people in their homes, perhaps writing down the balances of underwater mortgages. Instead, the centrists in the Obama administration bailed out the banks and left working families to lose their homes.

      Obama was firmly part of the neoliberal wing of the party, the same faction that’s been ascendant since Clinton. So yes, it is literally the Obama wing of the party that progressives need to fight against. Remember, Obama wore the skin of a progressive, but he actually governed as a centrist.

        • 3abas@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          What’s unhinged is people downvoting and throwing insults at people who say drone strike civilians Obama was a centrist neo-liberal.

          Stop worshipping politicians. Obama was not nearly as bad as any replication in living memory, but he is not a progressive or a leftist, he’s a neo liberal capitalist who serves the same class interests.

  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    Obama wing? I’d be much more okay trying to call it the Hillary wing or Biden wing. But even that is stupid. It’s the corporate/oligarch-funded Democrats vs. the Democratic Socialists.

    If you want to try and make your point, trying to tie Obama to the part of the party you’re wanting to attack will not help your case.

  • cloudshouter@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    As said by others, the old guard of the Democratic Party is center-right capitalists with a little dab of populist civil reform and the thinnest wafer of labor. They will always be too obsessed with acting like refined gentlemen to deal with the existential threat of the MAGA movement and the Dems as a whole will never be as unified in their actions as the Republicans and their Christo-fascist, white nationalist, anarcho-capitalist, grab bag of hate, greed, and willful ignorance. Still, the time to make change is in the primaries, in November it’s a literal fight for survival. Better to stand in place than let the Guardians Of Pedophiles keep destroying everything.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    The “moderates” love of money will cause them to lose even more money when a revolution starts and heads start rolling with it.

  • deft@lemmy.wtf
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    20 hours ago

    I love how people think the Democrats are exactly like the Republicans.

    Republicans bent the knee to trump x1000

    Obama faced stiff push back and was considered a progressive almost TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO. Obama is not the kingpin, he did not restructure the Dems or really change the overall party goals, he set expectations for more progressive administrations ahead of him and is part of the reason why establishment Dems can’t seem to get a bite.

    Say what you want, judge as you please but he opened up paths for other more progressive candidates than himself and if you’re too stupid to analyze his term clearly, you probably voted for Trump at least once.

    • sunnie@slrpnk.net
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      16 hours ago

      But he ended up actually not being a progressive.

      What he did was show that “hope and change” (progressivism) was popular enough to win an election, which admittedly did pave the way for future progressive candidates. Even if he was just pulling the rug out from under his supporters.

  • BonkTheAnnoyed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    20 hours ago

    This is the New York Times fanning the flames to divide the left. [EDIT for clarity: Divide the left means divide the vote means Republicans in power]

    I’m sure they interviewed actual people with real opinions like this, but these are the opinions they are choosing to highlight and thus shape the narrative.

      • BonkTheAnnoyed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        24 hours ago

        Okay, I see your flag and all of that, but I’m gonna take this in good faith.

        The New York Times and other media have an opportunity to cast the Democratic Socialist Party as the cool kids, and even if that doesn’t align with the corporate Neolib agenda, it does allow them to make coalitions and leaves them to co-opt the DSP in the future.

        TLDR, it is in the establishment Democratic Party’s interest to encourage and support the DSP. The New York Times in mainstream media is refusing to frame the politics that way.

        • BussyGyatt@feddit.org
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          21 hours ago

          It’s only in their interest if you assume their interest is in governance. If that is not their interest, if they are actually interested in maintaining the status quo so they can keep insider trading from congress, then it makes sense for them to fight against the rising tide of progress.

        • freagle@lemmy.ml
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          23 hours ago

          The problem with the DSA isn’t that they don’t align with the corporate neolib agenda. It’s that the DSA seeks to abolish the institutions that liberalism relies on for its power. It is not in the interest of the Democrats to support the DSA except in so far as it allows them to sheepdog proto-revolutionary energy into dead ends. That’s how they use Bernie and in the last decade or so it’s how they used the DSA.

          Until people understand what liberalism is, this confusion will continue. Liberalism is what made Thomas Jefferson want to split from the crown. It’s also the philosophy that allowed him to argue against importing slaves from Africa to increase the price of the slaves he sold from his “breeding plantations”, or rape farms as they might be more rightly called.

          Every conservative in the US today, with a couple rare exceptions, is a Liberal, and every Democrat in the US today is also a Liberal. They differ on how far liberal values should extend, but they rely on the same power system: private property, profit, corporate personhood, common stock, police, genocide, and ecocide.

          The DSA will only be a part of the Democrats insofar as they are a) ineffective or b) abandon their anti-capitalist pole. Outside of that, the NYT is doing the same job it always has done - protect the ruling class from the masses.

          • BonkTheAnnoyed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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            20 hours ago

            You are distracted by the term “the left.”

            This article and and others that support this narrative, serve only to divide the Democratic vote.

            Divide the democratic vote along any boundary and Republicans remain in power.

            If you think Neolibs are just as bad as Nazis, then I can’t help you.

            • freagle@lemmy.ml
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              18 hours ago

              Do I think the Good Cop in the Good Cop / Bad Cop routine is just as bad as the Bad Cop? That’s not the question. The question is why, after all this time, and everything you know, do you still think that cooperating with the Good Cop is in your interest. It’s not.

              The Democratic Party and The Republican Party are two fronts for the fascist elite of the Eurocentric empire, they have a single shared purpose. They collaborate on that purpose and take up oppositional positions in the public sphere to maintain and divide the loyalty of the masses.

              Democrats winning has done absolutely nothing to stop the march of fascism. In fact, Democrats actively participate in the never ending fascism that birthed and sustained the USA for its entire existence. Don’t forget, not only did FDR put anyone vaguely asian-looking into concentration camps, the government stole their private property as well, while they were also building the racist redlining program into the banking industry.

              The Democrats can’t save you because they have no intention of saving you. They are active collaborators in the whole fascist system, and part of their role is to get you a coffee and apologize for the bad behavior of their partners. But they’re not doing that because they intend to fix it. They do it because it gets you to support them and ignore the alternative.

              • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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                18 hours ago

                You’re using words as if English were an immutable language, which it isn’t.

                Yes, FDR was president of a very racist country and Jefferson owned slaves. But neither one pointed to a minority, thought “I can scapegoat them”, and then used violence and terror to break the political system and commit genocide.

                No one can stop you from using 'facism" as a label for what I might call eurocentric globalism, but if you do so please do not expect anyone to react as if you were talking about genocidal bigotry.

                Especially when we have actual genocidal bigots more than happy for you to dilute their second-most infamous label.

  • Trump Rapes Kids@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Because the establishment Dems never cared about you. They were just a part of the show. Them and the old pre-trump Reps would play fight and put on a good show and both keep selling out to corporations and pawning the country.

    They didn’t wage a war against Trump because he was a Republican. He wasn’t threatening their job security. He could do whatever insane fucked up things he wanted, and at the end of the day you’d come crawling to the Dems to make it better.

    But now? These pieces of shit are daring to run as Democrats and take establishment Dem’s positions! How will the establishment Dems keep getting loads of money from our corporate masters if they no longer have votes to sell?

    They have something to lose in this. Their job. They had nothing to lose in Trump fucking the country over. Us poor slobs did.

  • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    Because the working class have always held the real power, being the real reason work gets done, and as a result have always been the real enemy of the people in power and the real threat to their power. Some of them are just better at pretending, because they want to play “Good cop, bad cop” against us, and that strategy has been working really well for them lately.

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Controlled opposition in madness because actual opposition is rising. They’ll do literally anything but let anyone even try slightly improving the system.