Not voting (in your election)

The important thing to understand about Democrats is even when they have power they actually have no power.

I think you're confusing Democrats (who won the House and Senate and controlled Congress) with progressives (who didn't).

Manchin and Sinema were Democrats. They became independents in 2024 and 2022 respectively. Fetterman and other conservative Democrats are still Democrats.

The Democrats controlled Congress in 2021-2022, and Manchin and Sinema and Fetterman were part of that ruling coalition.

Manchin and Sinema and other conservative Democrats sabotaged the Democrats' feeble attempts at progressive legislation, and that was one reason the Democratic Party failed to accomplish anything during Biden's administration. Another reason was the Democratic Party leadership was either unable or unwilling to control those conservative Democrats.

And still another reason was Biden's weakness and political cowardice. Which is painfully apparent now, since Donald Trump has proved a President with a majority in Congress can do whatever he wants by executive order. Biden with a Democratic Congress could have done the same thing if he had the guts. If Biden had actually used the power of the presidency, Manchin would have been an irrelevant footnote instead of the single most important vote in the Senate.

But you cannot say that Democrats didn't control Congress. The Democrats controlled Congress. And then the Democrats let a handful of conservatives in Congress set their agenda and block progressive reform until they lost power.

And the fact that they didn't do shit for America when voters put them in charge, because party leadership sat on their fucking hands and let their conservative wing set the agenda, is the whole fucking point of the post.

Effectively, yeah. Even when they do actually do something 'good' it's only to bring things 5 degrees to the left of where Republicans moved it, which is 30 degrees to the right of where it used to be. Ratchet effect in full force. I'm not arguing for the lesser of two evils, I'm arguing for non-evil to get better at building a base outside of the main two parties. Get to a point where people actually have some local and state reps in the green party, or a labor party or whatever, and they might actually vote for them in a national election. But it'll never happen until they've actually had a chance to see those parties doing something instead of just (with the biggest fucking air quotes imaginable) """spoiling"""" the general