this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Can we stop acting like the Dems aren't in on it?
Edit: All your downvotes are wrong
Hanlon's Razor. Can their behavior be adequately explained by incompetence? I think it can, with a shake of self-servingness and, in some places, a small pinch of corruption.
Why do you think it's just a couple "Democrats" changing sides or caving when Republicans need them to?
They are playing good cop/bad cop but they are both cops.
Sure maybe 49% of Democrats might have the best intentions but along as Republicans stand strong with their 51% they control basically everything.
It's naive to think that the rich controls everything except for the Democratic party. They do a lot of work to make it look like they don't own the good cop.
"Adequately explained" does a lot of heavy lifting in Hanlon's Razor, and it's supposed to. It's adequate to assume that the few people who always break with the GOP are on the take, and the ones who aren't doing anything about it are just incompetent. Sure, the oligarchy is buying up whoever they need, but they don't want to waste money on directly buying a politician if they can just Citizens-United their useful idiots into office.
Assuming malice in even 51%--while possible, sure--I just don't think is necessary.
Saying that it is just incompetence blames individuals for not being capable enough. The problem is that the incentives for the Democrats to do anything useful don't exist. Their budget comes from giant corporate donors who will never let them pass universal healthcare, support unions or public transportation. It's not incompetence. It's structural. They are well aware that progressive policy positions are popular and they continue to intentionally leave them off the agenda.
It's not incompetence.
I don't entirely disagree that the incentives aren't there, but I'd say that the bigger problem (particularly over the past ten years) is that they've allowed the entire party platform to just be "we're not as bad as the other guys, that's good enough, right?" and they're insulated enough to believe that that's true. I think the "common wisdom" in the DNC is probably still that progressive policy is actually politically dangerous; that is to say, they don't know that they're popular, or rather they still think they can build a big enough tent to bring in the right-wing rather than expanding the voting bloc on the left.
Which leads the party members into "just get us back to brunch" behavior, and makes the structure which causes a lack of meaningful action into an effect, rather than a cause. I'm hopeful that the AOCs, the Mamdanis, and the Talaricos will show the deficiency of that structure, but I don't think it'll be quick.
It's better to look at things framed by incentives.
Some are incentivized to win while others are incentivized to maintain the status quo.
If it is incompetence, then for it to involve that many people and that length of time, it's systematic incompetence that's party policy. I'd be prepared to believe that.
I think there's a lot of evidence for that, yeah. I also think there's a decent amount of evidence for malicious actors to have encouraged and bankrolled the incompetent into office, too. I'm not taking that off the table.
Some people say the world is flat or that Elvis was a space alien, so go for it.
Why have the Democrats never put universal healthcare on their agenda even tho it is a universally supported policy position, especially among their voters?
Speaking as broadly as possible 90% of Democrats say the government has a responsibility to make sure everyone has healthcare. When you phrase it as "Medicare for all" the support drops to 78%, when you say government run healthcare instead of private healthcare the support is 71%, and when you phrase it as "single payer" it drops to 52%. When you only ever have a slim majority, how a plan is implemented drastically affects the number of votes.
Dems need to stop chasing polls and go back to persuasion tactics. The GOP figured this out a long time ago. They don't care about issue polls because they taught themselves how to manipulate their base and a large portion of independents via appeals to emotion. Just look at how many people have gone backwards on gay rights since 2013. Persuasion strategies take time and investment but they're highly effective.
Unfortunately the dipshit dems did nothing over the last 30 years to counter the growing GOP media empire so now they've made things much more difficult. In fact in some cases the Dems actively shot themselves in the foot by allowing media consolidation.
Breaking up the big media mergers needs to be a top priority for the next Dem president, assuming they can think past the next election for once.
110% agree. The tough part is that simple appealing lies are so much easier to sell people than messy complex truths.
That's why I mentioned investment. Communication is a tough skill to develop. The Dems don't need to communicate complex truths, they need to boil their issues down to emotional appeals. It sucks that it's necessary but it's a time-tested strategy and it's just how human brains work.
It's worked for progressives in the past (i.e. Teddy and FDR were great at image building, messaging and making emotional appeals, although of course it was a very different time)
The GOP has dozens if not hundreds of will funded think tanks and this is one of the things they excel at. The Dems haven't been short on money historically, but they've blown most of it on short term planning while the GOP's been playing the long game. Because it's not just their media empire, they have a permanent ground game in every state whereas the Dems only spin theirs up a few months before an election.
Dems push unpopular things all the time, but only when it serves the wealthy.
Those unpopular things usually have bipartisan support
So what I'm hearing is that "At worst, a majority of voters support preferred phrasing for universal healthcare" but somehow the Democrats have never once even attempted to cater to a majority of voters. Why would that be?
Elvis WAS a space alien though. Cave rat told it to me.
He's not an alien, but he did have a time-travelling brussels sprout from an alien planet called Barry (the sprout, not the planet) living in his head for a while there.