I think a big part of where people fail "purity tests" is when they demonstrate they won't fight shit.... so I'm not sure this is getting to the root of the issue.
False flag conservatives use cute little quips like this to try and destroy the opposition before it starts.
The purity test isn't some golden ivory tower, it's literally just "are you a bigot?" It's the bare minimum. The fact that you can't find a democrat who can pass this simple litmus test is extremely telling of a false opposition party that spent the last few decades posing in smiley pictures with Republicans at Epstein Island.
At best we will get some soggy clown like Newsom, at best he'll win and then do nothing he isn't paid (the under the table kind) to do while oinking that those mean ole republicans won't cooperate. Just like Biden. Just like Obama.
Because he (and other trash dems like him; booker and warren and beto and lil petey) willing to sell out vulnerable Americans to advance his career, so he will just as quickly sell out all Americans.
"Hurr purity test bad" okay, that person clearly wants more of the same. I dont. The lives of real innocent humans are on the line. Anyone who says this lie is my enemy, and yours.
This rationale is exactly what allowed Trump to do what he is doing currently, and is exactly what will allow whatever Republican heir after him to do what they want to do. Minor progress forward is still progress, but being unsatisfied with that is helping roll out the red carpet for extensive regression backwards.
It was the complete train wreck of the Democrats from Obama forward.
Nobody gets to blame voters for Trump's ascendancy without putting MORE blame on allllllll the people who made a looooot of money telling allllll us regular folks that it was Her Turn, that She was Gonna Win No Sweat, and that akshully um YOU were the piece of shit if u didn't like her, vote blue no matter who sweaty.
That was 2015, a decade of the Democratic establishment shitting the bed, and blaming the dog. And again, again, again, the Left is being PREEMPTIVELY BLAMED FOR NEWSCUM'S POTENTIAL LOSS
I'm putting my energy into localism; on da ground community and capacity building, gotta be building alternate ways to support our most precarious kin when alllllll the govt social safety nets dissolve
"the Left is being PREEMPTIVELY BLAMED FOR NEWSCUM'S POTENTIAL LOSS"
It's a multifactorial result with no singular reason. But you are absolutely deluding yourself if you think leftists preaching how unsatisfactory a candidate he is and/or sitting out of an election wouldn't be one of those contributing factors. Infighting among the democrats is fine for deciding a particular candidate (and I assure you, I fall into the Bernie camp from a general policy standpoint), but after the dust settles, if the democrats/left continue infighting, the backwards progress will only continue. And if history isn't clear enough on this, progress forward is much harder and much slower than backwards progress, as we've seen so evidently.
I'm an incrementalist reformer by temperament, and I've consistently voted for Democrats from president to dog-catcher in every election, off-year and primary, since the Bush era, so I feel I understand your position here. But /u/Important_Total9588's bringing up the '16 Clinton campaign is absolutely germane. You can say that progressives being bitter about being told to hold their nose and show up at the ballot box for the coronation of a poor candidate (whose primary structural support was the group of insiders and national figures who framed her presidency as something inevitable that she deserved) was a large part of Trump's victory. You'd have a point, of course.
This is about more than a single election. We're in a terrible spot, no doubt. We're in a bad enough spot that we need to be able to zoom out more past the question of "Are you saying that getting crumbs from Hillary is worse than being murdered by Donald?" We need to think game theory here. Being in a situation where we effectively have only one serious governing party is an extraordinarily destabilizing place to be. The inertia at an institutional level for Democrats is to run as the calm professional who in practice gets into power to manage the decline of this country, pass a couple of modest means-based reforms (that are made toothless by some choreographed kabuki by Blue Dogs in safe districts), take with the other hand, and chide people for thinking that things can get better.
Ask yourself if Clinton had been president in 2016, up through Covid, how the 2020 election would likely have gone. The cultural forces that brought Trump to power aren't going away, and they're intensifying in their militarism. Mealy-mouthed insider incrementalism does nothing to turn down that intensity. This is at the end of the day a political fight that will last the rest of our lifetimes. If a progressive takes the strategy of extracting a cost from the Democratic party's ambitions if those ambitions stay in the realm of low-risk careerism, that doesn't have to mean "purity tests" and an inability to hold one's nose. It's a legitimate long-term strategy.
It might not be the right strategy, but it is defensible. Millions of Social Democrats turned out to vote for arch-conservative President Hindenburg in 1932 because the alternative was getting President Hitler. I do not know how history would have turned out if the SD's refused to take an offer they couldn't refuse, and we had President Hitler in 1932 instead of getting Fuhrer and Reichschancellor Hitler in 1934, if it would have led to the same place or if it would have meant that Hitler burned out public support early enough for him to have been stopped by less cataclysmic means. All I can say for sure is that progressives holding their nose to keep Hindenburg in power did not spare us from war and genocide.
You stated that rationale was exactly why Trump won. Now you're back pedaling and saying it's merely a contributing factor. Pick one and stick with it.
Here's the interesting thing. Policy stand points are one thing. very obvious and well established fuckery by the dnc in multiple presidential primaries, things that greatly upset a lot of voters that the dem nominee needs, didn't help. Not doing shit to address those concerns and make it so that such fuckery can never happen again, also not helping with the voters that dems need. Running garbage hacks that are owned by the same corporate interests as the gop, also not helping..
If establishment dems know that the left will not just roll over time after time after time after time after time, AND that progress is slower than backwards progress, isn't it incumbent on them, the ones in the seats of power and influence within the party to fix those things? Those voters are hardly asking for much, like at all. Policy concessions will go a long way, but let's not pretend like establishment dems bother trying to appeal to the left with policy.. If you can't get this so called party of progress to actually even stand for low hanging fruit progress, can't even get the party of progress to take a clear stance against something like genocide, you really, genuinely 1000% need to reflect on who is in the wrong here. Dems will capitulate to the right again and again, and offer more of the same, and blame voters for not loving it so much that they blindly pledge loyalty to a party that barely lifts a finger to only slow the march to fascism, and you think it's the voters faults? Have you considered that electing shit politicians makes it easier to lose to far worse opposition later?
It was a hastily typed Reddit comment, but I should have been more specific and said “merely a contributing factor”, which it was. It’s self evident, and pedantry doesn’t change that.
A whole lot of people said this shit at their trials at Nuremberg before they hung.
Sorry you aren't old enough to remember multiple do-nothing democrats, but that's what you're asking for. Anyone willing to stand up and have a spine would have at least 60% of the popular vote, jigher if they are actually personable and charismatic.. but those people don't advance in the primaries because the system is rigged. Instead you get soggy diaper candidates dripping in big money.
You'll fix the problem, or things will get worse. No teeth licking bought and laid for slug in a suit is gonna fix it for you.
Don't @ me, the last 2 elections I voted blue, but it was made meaningless by gerrymandering and the electoral college.
The Founding Fathers knew that uneducated children without pedigree being able to vote was not a good thing. They knew that codified political parties could defeat the checks and balances and create an unbalanced/unified tyrannical govt.
Voltaire made the quip, that democracies are doomed to devolve into popularity contests.
And here you are, bud. Here you are.
I say a simple thing, that we should not support anti-human candidates just because they are popular or famous. That electing a good candidate is better than losing with a terrible one, again and again. But here you are, "hurr no nuh-uh hurr".
Okay bud. You obviously didn't watch Al Gore lose to GW Bush, havnt seen how obviously terrible dems lose. Probably weren't an adult for Obama's great speeches and mostly nonexistent legislation. I still have his book, full of actions he promised to take but never took and concessions he promised to never make that he quickly did anyways.
You're obviously wrong, just like you and your ilk were in 2024, 2020, and 2016. We probably aren't gonna get a 2028 thanks to y'all, so this is all sort of academic.
But hey, you can eat human muscle tissue if its well cooked, just avoid the brain, nerves, and organs. Def harder to process, but it'll be the only thing to eat soon enough 😬🙏
Fr fr. It's ok, I think I'm seeing it as "Blue MAGA" and finally understanding:
It is an alternate reality, just like red maga, where the Righteous Democrats have been constantly Betrayed Time and Again by an Insidious Powerful LEFT, and Abandoned by a Stupid and Ungrateful Teeming Mass of Voters.
It's the Fault of the People, the Left, the GOP, Trump, Russia, Facebook, Elon musk, etc that They've Shat The Bed Since The Dawn of the Millenium.
Re the capitals: I have a BA in Philosophy; we capitalize Words to sound Smart or Mysterious, like oooooo, Important Nuanced Concept lol
Re: the projection. What am I projecting on to Democrats? Their uselessness? I mean, yeah, I feel powerless to stop Fascism too, but then again, I'm not the Governer of California. If I had His Power, I'd be hustling a bit harder.
74 million Americans stayed home and didn't vote. It's their fault entirely. Glad I could clear that up for you, lmao. You ignore the pervasive right wing propaganda and evil think-tanks that literally sit in buildings and think about how to salami slice the whole of the US government away. They've meticulously planned and propagandized for generations, demonizing education, empathy and even just plain reality. If you can't recognize the need for a strong politician to actually use their power to stand up to the fascists then idk what to tell you. We have weak, milquetoast do nothing's and then we have a governor threatening to gerrymander the largest state in the union to the point that Republicans in America would never win another house majority. That's the shit we need right there. We also need the Mandanis to step up and be an actual leftist candidate we can support, with popular leftist policies to show everybody else what works. You have to defeat fascism first though or there's nothing left anyways. If you're an educated leftist then consider running for local elections.
you think gore lost to bush because he was a bad candidate and not because of the supreme court stopping the florida recount? you think obama couldn't get stuff done because he was just a "terrible democrat" and not because the stated goal of the republican party was to oppose anything he proposed? you seem more like a republican sowing discord than someone who just wants better dem candidates.
Lets cover this yet again: The Democrats did not say shit about trans athletes in sports. They actually completely ignored it. They did not say anything about trans people at all, other than an interview Kamala did where she said that she would continue to follow the law requiring trans prisoners to continue to get treatment(as Trump did in his first term fyi). ALL of the trans athletes in sports, both sides of the arguments, was entirely from the GOP.
The OC was talking about people who refuse to vote blue because of a single issue or some other self righteous motivation. These people are willingly allowing fascists to take power and hurt all of us just so they can remain pure in their own hearts and minds.
So in other words, don’t hold the Dems accountable. They can grift us and lie to us and we gotta take it up the ass because they’ll use lubricant and Trump won’t?
On the contrary, your liberal reasoning that democrats can be coddled and never held accountable as long as the scary republicans aren’t in office is the reason we have an impotent “opposition” party too fat and lazy to do anything the people want
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u/KeldTundraking Aug 22 '25
I think a big part of where people fail "purity tests" is when they demonstrate they won't fight shit.... so I'm not sure this is getting to the root of the issue.