I've seen a depressing trend of Democratic politicians embracing anti trans talking points and compromising gender affirming care for young people. This is extremely concerning as states and the federal government are undermining access to care now more than ever. Democrats standing by trans people has far more dire consequences now than ever, yet we're being treated as politically disposable by people who used to campaign on lgbtq issues like Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg.
I can't say I'm surprised. Liberal papers like the New York Times has been uncritically promoting unscientific transphobia for years that claims alternatives exist to gender affirming care. My guess is that people see a person transitioning as an unfortunate thing, desperately wishing there was another way. They ignore the fact that gender affirming care is both the best treatment for dysphoria, and one of the most successful treatments for any mental condition ever discovered.
To put it simply, making gender affirming care harder to obtain for kids will kill many of them. Kids being kept from care by their parents already drives people to suicide, and a slimy politician preventing supportive parents from helping their kids will do the same. Every time I see people claim these guys are our best shot at beating fascism, I die inside. I have no doubt that they'll eventually axe care for all adults like everyone who was originally "worried about fairness in sports" is currently pushing for. The only way they won't is if we make it a costly issue for them.
Not only Democratic politicians, I see it here in the Fediverse all the time. People seem to think that the Democrats winning is more important than human rights.
I just don't understood that kind of dogmatic thinking.
Because when the other side is explicitly promising a theocratic fascist dictatorship, you have to pick the lesser evil to even have a chance of things getting better without large scale violence.
A lot of things need to change to get to the point where we're not picking between two evils, but those changes have to start at local and state levels, and it takes time to propagate to the federal level.
Trans rights being side-tabled for a bit is better than them and every other "undesirable" getting sent to concentration camps.
It's not that we're simping for the Democrat leadership, it's that we're smart enough to realize it's currently a binary system and the other option is exponentially worse.
What happens then, when the "lesser evil" gets in power, and rolls back 5% of what the facists did, bomb a bunch of innocient people, give mountains of money to their rich friends, and continue to attack "undesirables"?
Yes you are
But that's not true. The other option is only slightly worse, and Democrats keep spending their time trying to get as close to that line as possible.
If they want our votes, they should try doing what we want, like supporting basic human rights, instead of supporting the fascists.
If you think the Democrats are only slightly better than Trump and the rest of MAGA, I have a bridge to sell you.
Both:
But yeah, go ahead and tell me how much better the Democrats are.
Vote for the next lesser evil until its all rolled back and we have a non imperial foreign policy.
If you don't work to build a leftist movement you'll never have one. Voting for harm minimization is still helpful as we build.
And hows that been working out? The lesser evil keep marching towards the right. They even fight against anyone who says we can do more than just roll-back 5%.
Or we could just vote for leftists, instead of right-wingers who lightly cosplay as leftists in the hopes that one of these days, they'll change course and become actual leftists.
We've not been doingi it. Non voting is the biggest block for decades now.
Like I said
Yes we have. We did it under Obama, and Biden. Guess what happened? They rolled back %5 of the facist policy, beefed up the rest, gave handouts to their rich friends, took away more civil rights, and bombed the fuck outta people.
And I'm saying: I am building one. By voting for actual leftists, instead of cosplayers.
Non-voting is still the winner in those; further we don't have a consecutive lesser evil in those, so that does not help as much as it could.
Still,
Not everyone is going to have a leftist in their local and state ballot. Its rather privileged of you to say this is not helpful to the rest of us.
What happens is that there's 5% less fascism. And also it doesn't increase by whatever amount the fascism party would've increased it by.
The other things would've also happened (and more even!) under the fascism party.
I don't want 5% less facism, I want a party that fights against facism, instead of supporting it. The Democrats spent their time building out the tools for fascism, then put on their shocked-picachu face when the facists use those tools.
Nobody wants just 5% less fascism. But your options are full fascism or 5% less.
What are you gonna do? Not vote for either party? You just removed a vote from 5% less fascism.
The reality is, there is a fuckton of fascists in america. If you want no fascism you gotta for for less fascism first, to signal to the political parties what you want. When they see that less fascism gives them votes, they will shift towards less fascism until there is none.
Just like Americans signaled so much that they want more fascism, that both the republicans and democrats got more fascists.
Aparently the Democratic leadership does, since that's what they keep doing.
That is not true, but the Democrats have convinced a lot of people that it is true. We have a ton of options.
You mean the same party that have spent the past few decades ignoring their voters? The same party that helped build out the tools that the facists are using, even when their voters didn't want those systems?
A vote for Democrats tells them that, even when they support things like facism, genocide, and taking away human rights, you are gonna stick with them. I'm not going to, because I am against those things.
Don't worry, I'm not American, I don't have to stick with no American political party.
You claim that you have other options. Which ones are those? The third parties that will never win because the system strongly favours a 2-party system?
No, the third parties that can win. The same types of parties that have taken control before, in the US and other countries.
You realize the left needs to win for us to have human rights? Your critique makes literally zero sense.
Are you talking about the party that isn't able to win, and also doesn't support universal human rights?
Maybe they would have more luck with the former, if they tried the latter.
If the left needs to win, then we can't vote for most democrats.
I think it's more that people think winning is more important than performative losing. It's not pragmatic to promote talking points that hurt your own cause.
For example, I'd wager that cutting hundreds of billions from Medicaid will hurt the general population AND the trans population far more than gender affirming care for kids or trans rights in sports would benefit trans people.
And consider this, every time we lose, it's going to get worse and worse and keep shifting the Overton Window to the right.
Are we supposed to pretend that strategy and tactics aren't applicable to politics? Winning the broader war wins many smaller battles by default.
I'm looking at the current Democratic strategy of moving to the right, and continuing to lose.
You are correct that strategy and tactics are applicable. Maybe if the Democrats want to win, they should avoid their losing strategy.
The US democrat party has a huge problem. That it is in the US. Therefore, there can only be 2 parties. Yet, the spectrum of politicians is huge. It's big enough for it to be hated by everyone.
The right will hate the democrats because they are woke and young and pro-trans, pro-brown, pro-immigrant.
And the left will hate the democrats because they are fascists, old, anti-trans, racists and anti-immigrants.
The media can pick and choose what democrat they want to demonize, and that ends up hurting the entire party. The left will hate the rightmost democrats, and the right will do the same with the leftmost ones.
Which ends up with conservatives voting for the republicans, and progressives not even bothering to vote because they are too much to the right.
They only win sometimes because the republicans are so ridiculously horrible that any good big policy will land the democrats the white house. But good luck getting that whole spectrum + their donors to all agree on one good big policy.
almost as if the Democrats should run an actual Leftist candidate so the Left would turn out for them.
worked for the Republicans. the Right turned out for Trump after the party withered under decades of neocons.
That's where the next problem comes in. America has a fuckton of fascists.
Turning to the right in a right environment will always be more successful than turning to the left.
The only way out is to advocate for leftwing policies without stating they are left-wing. Whatever is labeled "woke" in America is probably not going to gain them many votes.
is Mamdani woke? is Luigi woke?
they're both extremely polarizing, hated by the establishment and extraordinarily popular. kinda like Trump was, actually.
I haven't looked into it, but mamdani is probably extremely popular in NY, but hated by the MAGA crowd. Since they probably heard him from fox news than from his policies.
I haven't heard Luigi be called woke. But what he did is not (just) culturally left, it is economically left. Which is what I think the left should focus on. Culturally left is "woke" because that is what the commies do in their cities, "real hardworking manly Americans" don't have trans people in their rural towns, but they do have bloodsucking healthcare companies.
Listening to the children's feelings is "woke". Increasing the taxes on the billionaires to deliver drinkable water to Americans is not.
I think you are glossing over a big part of the picture: Where the Democratic leadership gaslights their voters, and pushes against popular, leftist candidates, and popular, leftist policies.
Yes, the Democratic party has a huge problem: They actively fight against the politicians and policies that their voters want.
To be fair. They have tried with what they believe Americans want.
It's been on the decline lately, but the last ~10 years there has been a big trend of "Americans wants black women". If a movie had a group of at least 4 people, a black woman was one of them. If an ad had 4 people in quick succession, a black woman was one of them.
So they saw this opportunity and decided that the most important thing would be having the first black woman president. They might just be incredibly bad at seeing what the voters actually want. And of course, going for cultural-left made them lose against the most incompetent opponent.
Or they might just be physically unable to be an economically left party, so they go with cultural left in order to differentiate themselves with the fascism party.
No they didn't. Americans have very clearly been saying that they want someone who is not a status-quo, neoliberal politician, who is only in it to help out their donors. The Democrats keep saying "Nah, we're just gonna pick the candidate for you."
They didn't do this because they are bad at reading what people want, they did this because their core philosophy is directly oppositional to what Americans want.
What are you talking about? I've never heard anyone say that. It might shock you to hear this, but movies aren't where you find out what voters want.
No, they saw the opportunity to have another corporate shill who won't rock the boat and took it. She just happened to be the VP at the time, so they could justify not having an actual primary.
No, them picking terrible, center-right candidates, running on terrible, center-right policies, and openly telling their voter-base to sit down and shut up is what made them lose.
They aren't physically unable, they chose to be bound by what their donors tell them.
Winning an election is step one. Policies that benefit everyone (except maybe the very top) is next. Then win the next election and pull the country left. Then rinse and repeat. We didn't get here overnight.
But Democrats aren't winning. They are moving to the right and losing. In the rare circumstances where they do win, they generally end up supporting right-wing policies anyway. It's almost like there's a correlation between those.....
We have two different problems. The democratic party as everyone knows, is a feckless bunch. So it must be turned into a viable party once again. But we can't rehabilitate it and kneecap it at the same time. They also have to win (and then cycle/replace candidates that aren't with the program.)
The Tea Party did it to Republicans. We have to do it for Democrats... It would also be great to erode resistance to ranked choice voting.
It's a tall order. We should have been doing it twenty or thirty years ago.
The Democrats learned from what happened to the Republican party, and set up systems to prevent that from happening. You can keep fighting to rehabilitate them, but I'm not gonna waste my time. Just like you can fight to rehabilitate the Republicans if you want, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for that either.
Probably traditional tribal resistance to criticism that calls into question dominant cultural scripts. It's the same instinct that demands resistance only be peaceful and legal.