Ha. Good catch, but that was entirely inadvertent -- a lucky shot if you will.

How about policies such as higher minimum wage and affordable college and healthcare and things like more infrastructure spending and less military spending ?

I think there are some pretty easy wins available but the Dems are just too corrupt to go after them. That and they don't really want to be in power. It's nice to shrug your shoulders and say "I'd help you if I could, vote harder next time".

I don't think any of those are easy wins. Republicans would frame them as hurting small business, raising taxes to help the lazy/poor-decision makers and weakening America. Remember when Republicans hated Obamacare but loved the ACA?

I was talking about presidential elections. Since voting rights midterms have been flat with the exception of 2018. But that’s irrelevant to presidential election turnout dipping post watergate to about 2000 then rising.

It's not really corruption, you just need to think of politics less as about parties and more about issues. In general, democrats have made progress on every issue that you mentioned, it just wasn't the kind of progress that satisfies you or many millions of people around the country. They won't go that far unless you vote in candidates who support the changes you want, but what you'll find is a big obstacle is that most democrats just aren't that liberal. I would like to see major changes in the criminal justice system. There are democrats who have done some honest work there. And obama was relative to clinton bush trump a light in the darkness; he did do some positive changes. But is any democrat in congress addressing the changes that need to happen in my opinion? For the most part no, I cannot name a single congress person who is considered liberal on criminal justice issues. That doesn't make them hypocrites, they just aren't that liberal.

I agree with you re criminal penalties. Compared to most other other Western democracies, the U.S. electorate as a whole is quite conservative with respect to criminal penalties.

Seems like it’s the exact opposite if what you think is good is also what you think is popular. We end up with poor candidates, in your opinion, because primary turnout is so low. You might not like that people only feel motivated by making sure the other guy loses, but given 7 options, none of which are all that terrible like in the last Dem primary people just don’t turnout.

I personally think that not voting leads to way worse outcomes than pretending like voting was mandatory and elections were run offs between Dems and Republicans.

Infrastructure is an area where this country really should have made much more progress. If Trump had made improving the nation's infrastructure the #1 priority of his administration (minus the big dumb wall), he would be president today. Infrastructure spending is one of the few things that is relatively popular across the political spectrum, especially during periods when it is badly needed. And big infrastructure projects would have been well-suited to Trump's egomania.

I found it odd that the republican party pushed back so hard against any infrastructure trump wanted to build. It was as if their priority number 1 was not to build infrastructure. I'm not exactly sure what happened with that. I wanted to take the great trump road and drive past trump castles to go see the great trump wall.

Of course the GOP would whine, that's all they ever do.

But IF the policies are popular people will respond. I mean, that's kind of how a democracy is supposed to work I think.

Right. They aren't leftist or liberal which is why I always mock Paul D and his ilk.
I get that.

But the fact that policies that are popular with 'the voters' aren't implemented or even debated in any serious way is a symptom of corruption. Maybe the individual idiot politicians aren't smart enough to be corrupt but the system they work in certainly is.

Criminal justice reform probably isn't one of those universal things either. I'm for it for many reasons but Americans do trend fascist.

I know.

Mussolini got a lot of traction out of big infrastructure projects.
I don't get why the fascist party went against their own playbook.

I guess Turtle didn't want any Dem senators to bring home the bacon on that one.

I think one of the most common mistake made here is conflating what GOP politicians say and want with what GOP voters do.

The GOP was sent scrambling in the 2018 MT's with the lie that it was them who was trying to protect Pre Existing Conditions even as they were in court trying to end those protections as it was clear thru polling that, that issue was the major driver heading into the elections and why the GOP was going to lose.

We know on Minimum Wage and most of Biden's BBB, the major planks poll higher than almost any legislation proposed in the modern area and not just with Dem voters, but also Independants and GOp voters.

I think the Dem party elite have been good at convincing so many centrist Dem voters, to 'do not believe just because people overwhelming want certain things' that they would vote for them, as a way to get the support of their main voters without having to give on any of the big planks the voters are saying they want.

I think a lot of Dem centrist voters call for that and repeat 'oh just because it polls high across the board ...is not really a reason to offer or deliver on it'. And I think that is sad and why politics is where it is today.

We could have an issue like Minimum Wage poll 99% across all segments and you would have centrist Dems argue it was still not good plank for Dems to run on and deliver on as they instead tell themselves some small regional dynamics are what matter more.

I believe that to be an undeniable obvious truth.

Why have politicians historically always offered Seniors so much more than young people? Because they vote reliably and in a block mostly and they cana and would shift their vote to the party who was offering them the most.

Why did they take black voters for granted historically? Because they felt they had no were else to vote regardless, as the Dem party was always the lesser of two evils.


it took monumental frustration that threatened to cost Dems elections due to threats of declining turnout and some shifting to the GOP, to make the DEM party elites change on that. But even still the lesser of two evil tactic is used.

And as long as a Party knows it can win offering little or nothing and just point at the other party as an evil that needs to be beaten they will do so. Heck that is the entirety of the GOP midterm platform.

Come 2024, if Trump is running, you can expect nothing delivered again by Dems as they know Trump rouses the lesser of two evils vote like no one else.

If parties do not feel the genuine threat of losing the election if they do not offer voter 'wants' and instead know they can coast on lesser of two evils, they will do just that.


it is precisely because people were rejecting the Lesser of Two evils approach that Progressives were making such inroads in Primaring the incumbents as the Lesser of Two evils, devoid of positions candidate would lose to someone with a real agenda. It is really only the Corporate Dem and corporate media, alongside GOp demonization of the Progressives that has slowed that as all sides unite in wanting to slow down that upstart group who actually believe in delivering a populist agenda and legislation.

This is not that hard actually.

Corporations and the Rich are the only true priorities in the Elites of both parties.

A giant infrastructure bill and spending puts a lot of pressure then on what you can do with give aways and tax cuts, etc.

Look at the deficits Trump ran doing basically nothing but gifting taxpayer money to Corporations and the Rich, and then imagine adding massive infrastructure spending on top.

While there might be others, the only Congressperson I can name who has been openly "liberal" on criminal justice issues is AOC.

I think You're right. What i'd ask is what's the end game here? A refusal to build infrastructure even during their best opportunity, a gop congress and president who campaigned bigly on it, they didn't build anything. That was a common theme of his campaign: "we never build anything anymore! "

So what is the gop playbook for infrastructure long term.

My girl Ilhan Omar has done some work on criminal justice issues. She introduced legislation to attempt to create a new federal agency to examine all police shootings of civilians.

Not related, but she also stood up to AIPAC. "It's all about the Benjamins", indeed, as she worked to defend and support the Palestinian people, while the rest of The Squad threw her under the bus.

She's vastly better and more brave than AOC and the rest, and has been since minute 1. I'm such a fan. In fact, I might be drawing up a long-term plan to marry her. I'll keep 2p2 up-to-date on this important mission.

There are a small handful of people who may agree with me on these issues. outside of congress you have da chess boudin, da larry krasner. in congress i'd imagine cori bush agrees with a lot of what i'd have to say and to a lesser extent someone like aoc. It's possible a guy like ron paul and me could find common ground with me but in my experience most libertarians like to talk about how horrible throwing people in prisons for possessing plants is but lack any real knowledge of decaf real issues.

I would combine the most decarceral instincts of the right( designer drugs guns white collar crime ) with the left( pot, decriminalizing poverty, help instead of jail, leniency in sentencing, demilitarizing the police) . I of course could go on and on but you get the idea.
Some on the left sound like they're for reform but they really just want to incarcerate people they don't like as opposed to people they do; for example leniency on drug possession, massive new incarceration for business owners etc.

edit: F autocorrect but still close enough to what I meant so not editing.

You cannot mock me. You argued with other people over simple concepts of finance and tax matters while being entirely wrong. You're an ignorant populist. You cannot work out basic problems with society because you don't even know how or why those problems exist in the first place.

You fling words around like fascist at people who simply disagree with your empty and cherry picked world view.

You can crow about how guys like me are really right-wing. Someone who is actually left. I have supported UHC since the 90s, but understand the monumental task of changing the country's view towards it. I also support Wall Street reforms, tuition free college, and other liberal views. The best obstruction to those things aren't right-wing people. It's people like Trolly, vic, you and others who demand things from others instead of advocating for those things and showing others how those systems work better than current systems. You're a mirrored version of Tucker Carlson.

So keep on pissing off other voters and keep losing while screeching about things you know little to nothing about.

It's always really bothered me that murder is the most serious crime but out of 535 congressional members not 1 has been convicted of murder. They should have at least one for diversity of viewpoints sake.

Chomsky, the most well-versed in "America bad" populism... ends up calling Trump a statesmen. Trump being the one who said we should paint jets up like China to fool Russia.

This is all you online fake leftists will ever be. You bark and bark and will align yourselves with Trump because you have no beliefs.

I genuinely disagree with noam chomsky about this, but are you saying noam chomsky is a fake liberal??

Don't know what you're talking about to be honest.
But if you think I can't mock you for being a condescending fake leftist who couldn't do a better job of representing why the Democratic party is no good to anyone anymore you're only going to get mocked some more.

The New Orleans levees failures tell you everything you need to know.


Predicted by the Army Corp of Engineers that is was a matter of 'when' and not 'if' they would break and how the cost of the devastation in dollars (ignoring lives)would be exponentially higher than fixing it up front.

Still each successive gov't ignored and crossed their fingers wishing 'please just don't fail on my watch'.


There is no incentive system that rewards the gov'ts that put massive amounts of capital into fixing something, not yet broken. You can't run on or get a boost from 'we fixed the levees' and as such no gov't wants to waste any budget on it when they can hand that same money out to special interests and get lots of voting bang for the bucks.

Both Trump and Biden promised Infrastructure and had the ability to deliver. Both largely fail to do so once in. What game are we playing here, again?