Mfw both sides same
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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The dems keep sliding right because that's where they hope to gain new voters without losing any on the left
This is weird because he didn't say they were the same.
I really dislike this both sides argument. Democrats are not the same as republicans. Slow yes, but not fascists.
And if you keep voting left then the government will get more and more left. This both sides argument just stops people voting at all and if less people vote then republicans win.
My point is that we can move the Overton window to the left if we keep voting left.
And if you keep voting left then the government will get more and more left.
This has never been the case, and every single brief look at any historical voting pattern will tell you this is wrong. Clinton round 2, Obama round 2 in modern times easily disproves this theory.
FDR? New deal was such a success at the ballot box that it basically took until Reagan to (significantly) undo it.
FDR's policies were the product of labor organizing and the fears it instilled in the ownership class.
The Americans voted right again after Clinton and Obama. Stalling any good work that they had done. Imagine if the next president had been on the left? Imagine if Gore had got a majority instead of “both sides are the same”.
Honestly if over half the population is going to vote against their own interests why even bother trying to help?
No. People voted opposite what the president did. People tend to do that when the president fails to do things, or does things that the other candidate would have done.
You're thinking and applying legislative changes and votes to a presidency. People notice more than that. They notice when Presidents refuse to veto far-right bills. They notice when presidents give guns to cartels. They notice when presidents spend their political capital calling black children super predators and ordering the DOJ to go after children with harsh jail time. They notice when they drop more bombs per day than WWII on random goat herders that had never thought about harming our country before then.
People tend to vote the opposite of what they see. If they see that 'Democratic President Bill Clinton and his Wife Hillary' pushed propaganda and the DOJ policy demanding the harshest sentences for black teens and set internal DOJ policy to explicitly order gang connections to be found for 'violent drug pushers' increasing their sentencing and destroying yet another generation of young black men -- then they associate that action with the Democratic party.
Those people will either then vote the opposite party in hopes it behaves in an opposite manner, or they stop voting entirely.
Obama was so right-wing he was the second president in history to receive less electoral votes for his second term than his first term. If any other person besides Mitt Romney ran under the republican banner, Obama would have been a one term president. And he would have earned that failure.
Are republicans objectively better than Democrats? No. Are they worse? Depends on if you think leukemia is worse than colon cancer. Both are pretty bad. Neither is really preferable. Only those damned to one or the other would even think of picking one, and without suffering long enough you'd never have enough information to make an informed decision.
People vote for what they want, even more than their sports team.
People do not vote when no candidate offers what they want.
People do not want the 'lesser evil.'
People want progress, and to be left alone to enjoy said progress. Dems took this to mean they could run on progressive values and then do nothing actually effectively progressive since 1968. Republicans took this to mean they could say Dem policies are what's preventing progress and then do nothing actually effectively progressive.
The two parties aren't the same, just like leukemia and colon cancer aren't the same. But if I tell you your son has colon cancer you're not going to be happy its not leukemia.
The Democratic party is the paid opposition party. Both the DNC and GOP are corrupted by billionaire money. The difference is the DNC prevents movement to the left while pretending to be progressive only when it comes to issues that are not economic in nature, and the Republicans actively push back on the social issues while also serving the rich, except more blatantly in order to further shift the Overton Window such that serving the rich is the only "reasonable" policy belief to have in politics.
This is just a natural effect of having a capitalist system. The wealthy elite will always find a way to buy politicians, regardless of what kind of regulations are set in place to stop that kind of corruption. Those regulations will inevitably be chipped away at and its loopholes exploited until they essentially no longer exist.
The only way to actually solve the issue of corruption is to prevent it from being able to happen to begin with.
Gore did get a majority, by over half a million votes.
Yeah. What happened in Florida was a disgrace. But if he had got one more state… it would have been more difficult to do what they did.
He did get one more state, but the Supreme Court decided it was the Rs turn instead. I'm not particularly convinced they would have been more reticent to fix the result for two states than one.
Please analyze more than one country before drawing sweeping conclusions
It's on you to attempt such an analysis before you demand it of others.
I am just kind of tired of americans writing shit like this
every single brief look at any historical voting pattern will tell you this is wrong
and when you look inside, it's patterns from the us in the past 50 years
But we're talking about US politics here. You came to a thread about US politics to complain that we weren't considering international perspectives.
The point is, there is nothing that special about US politics, and to better understand US politics, you should try to understand the political systems of other countries.
EDIT: even under this same post there is completely meaningless speculation about whether the US can overcome the two party system. While there is a real life case study about this that you could look at, New Zealand. They had the same voting system. They had the same two party structure. Both former british colonies.
They're not just "slow."
"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."
"Slow" would be making only a small reduction in military spending, as opposed to increasing it to what was an all-time high. "Slow" would be enforcing international law and arresting Netanyahu if he set foot in the country, but otherwise doing nothing to stop the genocide, as opposed to actively arming them and violently suppressing protests.
The only "slowness" of the DNC is slowing the rate at which they're pressing the knife in deeper. But the knife is certainly not coming out if they have anything to say about it.
Can you name any specific policies the DNC has endorsed and campaigned on to curtail presidential power? If not, there is literally no difference between the Democrats and Republicans in the fascism department. They both want authoritarian power, just for different aims. Republicans want authoritarian power to go after liberals and leftists of all sorts. Democrats want authoritarian power to go after anti-Wall Street groups, police protesters, and anti-Zionist groups. They both want fascist power. The Democrats just have a shorter list of victims.
There are no "both sides" to this. It's a one party system.
Evolution of politicians is a concept too hard for some people. Remember, the majority of Americans read at the "great day for up!" level.
Harris wouldn't have made anything better for us, it would have been the same slide to corporate fascism as it ever was. I'm tired of people telling me I shouldn't be angry at that.
Hmmm. A moral lecture from someone on Twitter. I guess I should listen to what they have to say because I do not understand irony
It was never a society built for humanity. We are cattle.
And all you really need to do to understand this is detox from the culture and spend time to think critically. You don't even need education, it's all right there in front of us.
Only spend money on absolute necessities. The extras they push are the Crack Cocaine of their power over those that don't think critically. We should be getting our power and energy from honest community, and honest genuine expression, things that exist without government and are completely natural to raw humanity. Otherwise you are funding what you claim is the problem without understanding you yourself are a key part of the problem.
Preach.
How privileged of you to notice. This is not an insult
I see this sentiment more and more, but there are never concrete plans, only shit talking. I think the closest I've seen is David Hogg and "Leaders We Deserve" he co-started after the DNC ratfucked him out of being vice chairman. They've gotten a few people elected even.
But that's what it would take, people who's full time jobs it is to canvas and door knock and advertise and run candidates and get donations, not just angrily posting online.
And how do you propose escaping the two party system?
(Hint: voting 3rd party without changing how elections happen first is mathematically equivalent to throwing away your vote for the better of two evils and helping the worse evil. And there is very definitely a better and a worse.)
(Hint: voting 3rd party without changing how elections happen first is mathematically equivalent to throwing away your vote for the better of two evils and helping the worse evil. And there is very definitely a better and a worse.)
Hint: this is incorrect in all possible mathematical ways.
If 34% of any election goes to a third party, that third party will win FPTP. It takes that low of a percentage to win a majority.
And that simply isn't going to happen. (Without at least one major party collapsing and not being on the ballot.)
Actually it would happen if every person who thought like you voted third party. Or, instead of courting either dem or republican voters, a third party targeted non-voters exclusively since they're still the majority voting block.
I mean this honestly, how do we understand what the issues of non voters are? Is there a consistent populace that never votes or is it a variable pool? Has it been shown that non voters care about entirely different issues than voters?
My impression is that most of them just don't care about politics (or much else).
It's like that blue-or-red button thing that's been going around.
The critical mass of people willing to vote that way (and this assumes there's only one 3rd party that everyone in question agrees is better) would have to exist first before they would be willing to vote that way.
We're more than a decade past that critical mass existing. No human being wanted to see Hillary Clinton in office. There were zero genuine supporters of hers amongst the working class. She was an awful human being during the Clinton years - literally the worst woman in US politics up to that point, on the same level as Margaret Thatcher.
And absolutely no one really supported Donald Trump except as a protest to establishment politics. Trump 1 didn't have the cult yet, and I think a lot of people forget that. He was just a clown outsider that was voted in as a protest against the ridiculous number of exact same 'things' in skin suits that participated in the RNC Primary, and their near exact counterpart that was Hilary Clinton.
That's why Donald Trump won the first time. He was the third party. Except he chose to run under the republican party banner because he knew he could guarantee 20% of Americans would vote for any Republican because of the work the party did in the 1970s and 80s becoming the party of American Christianity.
Why did Harris fail? Because she promised to be Biden 2.0. Why did Biden win his first term but was projected to lose by the worst margins in US history for his second term? Because people wanted something different. Biden proved to be Donald Trump but quiet.
It's not "helping" the worse evil. It's helping neither.
If third-party voters and non-voters "helped the worse evil" then the worse evil has won every election in recent history in a landslide victory. In reality, removing them from the equation has no impact on which of the major parties gets more votes.
It's only if you assume that a party is entitled to people's votes that the word "help" could possibly be used. And that's not how anything works. No one is entitled to my vote.
The first step to dismantling the two party system is to replace the currently entrenched parties. You can't change the two-party dynamic, but you can certainly swap one of the parties out for another. Where do you think the Republican Party came from?
I told my rep I wasn't buying his bullshit. He stopped texting me.
As it stands now, the GOP in the US has an extreme advantage.
They appeal to stupid and egocentric and racist people, the dems do that as well, but to a lesser extent.
This means that with a system using FPTP, any division on one side will benefit the other, and since the dem voters are more open to alternatives than the other side, it means that any small uncoordinated movement toward other parties other than the dems, will benefit the GOP.
Both current parties would loose influence if FPTP was scrapped in the US.
The one peaceful way out of the current two party system, is coordinated voting, a third party needs to actually win districts over the other two parties, preferably a majority of them. This would open up opportunities to push for reform in the voting system getting rid of FPTP.
Which in turn would enable better representation, paving the way for new reforms, and actual change.
Hey my buddy is friends with him!