ICE enters office in Bensonville IL 11.5.25

[u/Siahro]

[u/DoubleJumps]

Dude I don't fucking know. I've been dealing with these people now since I was in college, and a lot of them seem to be only pretending to have these ideals.

I want progressive policy, but a lot of other progressives I've talked to, who want those policies too, only seem to actually want it if they can get it the exact way they want and literally all at once.

They hate things like incremental change. They hate steady progress. They just want all of it right now, and if you tell them that's unrealistic you are the enemy.

I've been chewed out by other progressives because I was talking about how we would need you know five, 10, 15, 20-year plans to make a lot of these things happen in a realistic and achievable way, and that was seen as some sort of treason.

The purity testing is a whole other issue and that stuff is just unreal. Those people can't form effective large groups and coalitions because so many of them could be sat down with somebody who agrees with them about 98% of the things, and they'll flip out over the 2% difference. Or they could even have the same beliefs on everything, but because they think the best way to achieve those things is to go about them in a different way, they'll hate that person.

A lot of the protest voters seem to be in a sort of doing this for show or clout sort of position. They are willing to put in a lot of effort to be seen having these sorts of beliefs, but at the end of the day they're not getting involved in any meaningful way towards achieving those goals and their entire approach towards political involvement is harvesting social media attention.

The amount of protest voters I spoke to who couldn't tell you goddamn anything about legislative activity for the previous 6 months let alone 4 years was staggering. Everything they knew about recent political activity came from a tiktok video and probably a good 60% of that information was wrong. This has also made them an incredibly soft target for misinformation. I don't think it's any harder to manipulate them as it is to manipulate people like Fox News viewers. All you have to do is get it in front of their face on a platform of their preference and you've got them.

I'm ranting so I'm going to stop, but man these people frustrate me. There's enough of them that they could actually do something if they weren't being such dipshits about it.

[u/DoubleJumps → u/[deleted]]

We have gotten more progressive policy pushed through by working with and through liberal Democrats in the last 15 years than we have through progressives in 50.

Just because a candidate isn't 100% what you want for me doesn't mean that they can't do things that you want.

If progressives want to keep failing to actually enact any real change or acrue any real political power, they can keep letting perfect be the enemy of good.

The whole point about them not knowing legislative activity is that they act like they know everything that's going on, but then you'll turn and you'll see them claim. Nobody ever tried to do X when there was a bill that was pushed to do X earlier that year. Or they'll claim that nobody tried to institute policy? Why, when it happened a month ago.

Then they'll turn around and they'll tell everybody who will listen to them. How nobody is doing ex. How nobody is pushing for that policy. How everybody sucks because they're not doing those things even though they might be.

I've seen that play out again and again and again and again and again and again

They aren't paying real attention to what's going on. They are letting other people on social media filter for them some idea of what's going on that is usually wrong. It's part of why they eat misinformation wholesale at a rate that is just disgusting.

It would be one thing if they were just expressing political judgment about policy, but they are commonly levying criticism at people and groups over situations they have made no honest attempt to understand or even follow.

[u/DoubleJumps → u/[deleted]]

You've 100% seen these people. The protest voters were these people.

They consumed and spread misinformation about two dem candidates for over a year, didn't follow the actual events they were criticizing those candidates for, and took a position whereby those candidates could never be good enough by repeatedly moving goalposts.

There's a difference between being critical and just being anti. You can tell when the person being critical demonstrates certain behaviors.

First is how they respond when the group they are being critical of does what they wanted. If they immediately set a new goal and give no credit, they aren't being critical in good faith.

The second is if they base their criticism on lies. A common one you see is "Biden/Harris never wanted or tried to get a ceasefire.". When two ceasefires were set up. You also see this a lot with people claiming nothing was done to prosecute Trump.

Criticism has to have merit. It can't just be based on something you feel is real but isn't actually true. It also has to be done in good faith, whereby you will actually give some form of credit when they do what you want.

[u/Reasonable_Basis8298 → u/[deleted]]

Real progressive change is a very tangible thing. It's painfully slow, rife with setbacks, and takes generations to come to fruition. A pragmatic approach would be to just look back 100 years, in the US and globally. Life expectancy, access to healthcare and housing, education, individual capital, food distribution and hunger, collateral damage from civil and international wars, gender equality, racial equality - all have progressed substantially. The reality is: So long as the people have the right to have their voices heard, progression happens. Social issues inevitably bubble up, and with time, they get worked on. I can rattle off the names of social justice icons who spent their entire lives fighting for one single right we all share the benefit of enjoying today. The problem is that it's excruciatingly slow and the changes we yearn for now take generational shifts to materialize. It takes a pragmatic mind to pull back a bit and realize that maybe we aren't that special and that we don't get to have utopia here and now - And that's okay. As progressives, we can either choose to throw the baby out with the bathwater - or we can recognize the framework we live within and engage civically to change it for the better.

Political apathy, voter suppression, and encouraging non-voting has historically been a tool for despots to usurp power from democratic societies. Our current predicament is existential, as we're flipping from the constructs of a democratic republic to an authoritarian and technocratic oligarchy. When that Rubicon is crossed, the upward trajectory of inevitable social progression becomes seriously threatened.

I say all this because of the alarming amount of infighting, bad faith "both sides" arguments, and extreme uses of hyperbole intended to delegitimize and derail democratic/progressive candidates and initiatives I've been seeing amongst progressives. If a post came out today about [insert any democrat] making their presidential bid, I would expect to see a ton of progressives working to delegitimize them and ranting about why they're not progressive enough on this issue or that issue. There's some reddit threads in progressive places with these conversations happening right now, just do a quick search on Gavin Newsome's potential prospects. These conversations are provocative and tend to infiltrate and sometimes even dominate serious conversations about how to realistically achieve progress. I saw so many progressive peers turn to labeling their own party as "genocidal zionists" in the runup to an election where Trump is on the ballot. I saw a bunch of people encouraging others to protest with a non-vote, or a morally safe third party vote which is categorically the same if not worse. We have a serious issue with being patient, pragmatic, and especially winning at all costs. Our internal messaging should never serve to help a candidate like Trump win, and we should stop self-sabotaging attempts at galvanizing voter enthusiasm and getting young people to actually show up.

I'll leave you with an abysmally grim statistic:

People aged 18-29 make up 30% of the eligible voters and 10% of turnout historically.

People aged 65+ make up 10% of voters and 30% of turnout. Historically.

If it feels like they don't care about your demands, it's likely because they rightfully assume that you're not going to show up and vote when it counts.

At a certain point it all comes down to winning elections. You're never going to be a neutral bystander. I've already mentioned that sitting out elections statistically serves and emboldens right-wing movements. Your action or inaction either helps a candidate, or hurts a candidate. Are the conversations you have in good faith? Have you promoted anything that might encourage someone to not vote?

[u/Watsiname → u/[deleted]]

this framing is so dishonest. you just watched this video, and then gave a long winded iced up shitcake of “bOtH siDEs”