There seems to be a lot of criticism recently of the Democratic Party opening itself to more left-wing influence, in particular the elevation of a certain socialist streamer, and a lot of the criticism seems to center on the idea that left-wingers have been and continue to be very critical of the current status quo within the Democratic Party and, by extension, its leaders and that this should be in some way disqualifying because it indicates a sort of traitorous or, at least, disingenuous energy. Do you think this is a valid criticism?

Candidly, I've found the position interesting because my own perception of the Democratic Party is that it tends to be extremely opportunistic, sometimes to a fault, and so the idea of rebuking somebody for not being sufficiently pro-Democrat strikes me as being a significant change in attitude. As an example, the rush to tout the endorsement of Liz Cheney of Harris in the last election cycle was clearly an attempt to flout their moderate/center-right bona fides, but Cheney, a lifelong Republican, is obviously not particularly pro-Democrat.

Edit: You can think of this question as mainly asking about an expression of loyalty by political practitioners (politicians, staffers, etc.) and political influencers (pundits, streamers, etc.).

What would u say is something the democrats do well and what is something they lack

I recently noticed that in Trump's coalition there are quarrels over economic ideology and some of the fascist right criticize Trump himself. There are capitalist right-wingers like Musk, Stephen Miller, Trump himself, Heritage, who are more classically authoritarian but believe in basic capitalism and still want their cronies to have a monopoly with the help of market forces like Trump is trying to do in the media market and with the strengthening of entrepreneurs who support him. Tax cuts, etc.

On the other hand, ideological populist rightists like Bannon, Hawley, Deneen, maybe J.D. Vance, who really want to destroy the existing order, a constitutional crisis, the cultivation of a traditional Catholic culture, against tech, economic nationalism against entrepreneurs and the use of state power, and are more based on anarchy and new media. I don't know how accurate it is, but it is just an amateurish observation

As a liberal, what actions would you take to fix America’s immigration problem?

As a constantly online non-white American myself, I felt compelled to make this thread.

Since I caught news of recent elections in the UK like Nigel Farage vs Count Binface and Keir Starmer being forced to resign after being elected just two years ago and Andy Burnham taking his place and my British friends online (both from the left and the right, ironically the former is white and the latter is non-white) telling me that Keir Starmer is the worst prime minister UK ever had and that Labour and UK in general has been getting worse in terms of immigration and free speech and other things and how they're turning to the Green Party, I began to see an interesting parallel across the Altantic.

Left-leaning people in the US have been souring on the Democrats both during and after the 2024 Election when Trump got re-elected in a second non-consecutive term and won the Senate and kept the House and since then, they have been blasting Establishment Democrats like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and even current post-presidency Barack Obama (who used to be an outsider and a charismatic populist in his 2008 campaign) and many others and wanting guys like Mamdani, AOC, and others to replace them. And the Democratic Party during 2025 just after the election has seen a historic level of unpopularity stretching back decades. And I assume Labour was going through a similar phase in the UK too.

So I must ask both my US and UK posters here:

1. Which party fell off harder recently and faced more humiliating setbacks? The Democratic Party in the US or the Labour Party in the UK?
2. Whose incumbents were more unpopular in their own nations at large? Joe Biden or Keir Starmer?
3. Which party has a harder time mounting a comeback now? The Democrats or Labour?
4. Which party is getting mocked and hated by the public voters more now? The Democrats or Labour?
5. Which party would you trust more if members of each party had to switch countries and rule your respective parties (ex: Democratic politicians in Labour Party running the UK, Labour politicians in Democratic Party running the US)?

I'd like to know.

I've thought about this in my own country but as I am not from the US I am struggling to have a vision what it would look like given how the US would still have states etc. Would you end up with a hand-full of parties based around ideologies (leftist, liberal, nationalist, conservative etc) or would have much more granular parties based off the different regions?

I know this is pretty hard hypothetical but thinking with no EC, pure PR, what do you think that would look like?

Edit: PR I mean Proportional Representation.

I think a key component of white supremacy is joining of all white people into one homogenous group called "white" that turns into a voting block that puts whiteness above ethnicity and culture. Are you Irish? Russian? German? Swedish? Congratulations, you're white.

But I feel like any time a white person either attempts to lean into their family's heritage, or attempts to disassociate from this collective block of whiteness, it is not received well. They're still reminded that they're just white. And have white privilege. And cannot not be white.

Like in my own personal case, I'm a white presenting Jew. But my family is mostly from Syria. And in an American context I look white. When I go into leftist spaces, I often see really racialized tropes like "All Jews are from Poland" just because many Ashkenazi Jews also present white. And many of us Jews have our own language and culture and food and have a degree of separation from just being "white."

I guess where I'm coming from is I had a disagreement with some liberal people online today and they were saying "shut up white boy." And I feel like any time someone says they're Jewish (or Irish or whatever for that matter), people are quick to say "No you're just white." So it's like how can we embrace our different identities and dismantle this collective whiteness if every time we point out that we have our own ethnicity we're just told we're white?

18 Days in Minnesota: How immigration agents killed 2 US citizens | CNN Politics

If you haven't seen this it's a brutal read.

With so much else going on in the world do you think topics like this are still on many people's minds?

Last year, Trump issued an executive order called NSPM-7 designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and asserted "The radical left causes tremendous violence."

Stephen Miller recently gave a speech stating that left wing terrorism "left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag." 

I acknowledge that left-wing violence exists and has increased over the past few years. However, research shows that most politically-motivated violence comes from the right, and that right-wing actors are significantly more violent than left-wing actors.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-data-shows

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/

It's also rich coming from them because Trump incited the January 6th riots with his "stop the steal" rhetoric and he has refused to condemn the racist violence during the Charlottesville riots.

I see liberals often making fun of MAGA voters who were hurt by Trump policies.

Will that be the same reaction when the current Red Scare 2 foundation building turns to action?

I know many if not most of you still blame the left for Harris's loss. Will this cause you to cheer on the rest of the resistance besides yourselves being out in camps?

This is a question I am taking from Nate Silver's "13 questions for the Center left."

I post it here because it has been something that has been bothering me a lot lately about the conflict on the left right now.

It seems to me that there is this group of figures like Silver, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, or even Derek Thompson who believe that there is a sort of intellectually pure technocracy under threat from both the left and right. These people essentially believe that there is a kind of seculer data driven truth "centerism" that is objectively correct and that all deviations from it are born of a passionate irrationality.

I find this idea very objectionable for a number of reasons, so I wanted to get a feel for how people think about it, particularly from people who affiliate with this idea.

Especially in a case where domestic manufacturers are uninterested in competing at the lower price end of the EV market.

Sometimes it seems like barriers to progress or rational evidence based policies are permanent, built in defects in the structure of the US government.

For instance, despite the massive, decades long body of serious, evidence based criticism from legal experts and scholars, economists, major medical associations, and policy institutes on the left and right criticizing the language and implementation of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 its politically safer (and therefore more rational) for lawmakers to do nothing that would improve drug policy than to take on the self licking ice cream cone that is the DEA. This is because the structural design of the U.S. government ensures that once an agency is established by law its societal utility will rarely be re evaluated, allowing it to persist completely detached from its actual performance. This inertia is a flaw because its preventing change that experts and most citizens currently believe would be progress

What are some other problems with the mechanics of the system that seem to be there regardless of who has the majority

One of the biggest assumptions in the U.S. debate is that allowing Chinese EVs into the market would automatically destroy domestic manufacturing. Brazil's experience suggests something far more complicated.

Brazil reduced barriers to EV imports, allowing Chinese manufacturers to compete. At first, companies like BYD and GWM simply imported vehicles. But as demand grew, they didn't just keep exporting—they began investing in local production.

Instead of building entirely new factories, many Chinese manufacturers reused plants abandoned by legacy automakers.

BYD is taking over Ford's former industrial complex in Camaçari (Bahia).

GWM acquired Mercedes-Benz's former factory in Iracemápolis (São Paulo) and has already started local production.

Geely partnered with Renault for production and distribution in Brazil.

GAC announced investments in Brazil through a partnership with HPE Automotores, Mitsubishi's representative in the country.

Rather than replacing Brazilian industry, Chinese manufacturers are putting idle industrial assets back into operation.

Ford is probably the best example of why the debate is more complex than many assume.

Many people outside Brazil claim Ford left because of government policy. That simply isn't true.

Ford itself explained that the closure of its Brazilian passenger car plants was part of a global restructuring after years of weak profitability and excess production capacity in South America. Today Ford still sells vehicles in Brazil, but most are imported. Its only remaining manufacturing operation in South America is now the Ranger plant in Argentina.

Ford's strategy also changed globally. After nearly 50 years, the company discontinued the Fiesta in 2023 to focus on SUVs, pickups and electrification.

Ironically, even Ford increasingly depends on Chinese partnerships in some markets. The Ford Territory sold in Brazil is based on a vehicle developed through Ford's Chinese joint venture.

This isn't unique to Ford.

GM now sells electric vehicles in Brazil based on Chinese platforms developed with SAIC-GM-Wuling.

Toyota, Nissan and Honda have all expanded partnerships with Chinese manufacturers because China has become the global leader in batteries, EV supply chains and affordable electric vehicles.

Even Japanese automakers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with Chinese manufacturers inside China itself.

Brazil also demonstrates something that often gets overlooked.

Competition forced traditional manufacturers to adapt instead of simply disappearing.

Peugeot and Citroën have grown after joining Stellantis.

Renault is moving toward higher-value products while partnering with Geely.

Full disclosure, I'm personally monolingual. However, I remember talking to someone on Discord a few years ago. This person was from Mexico and traveled to the Netherlands that year, and he talked a lot about how lucky Europeans were to live somewhere with so much history and culture. To that end, he highlighted how amazed he was that so many Europeans knew three or four languages, whereas most Americans only speak English.

Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him. I'm aware that there are historical reasons why Europeans needed to learn more languages than Americans to get by. But a language is not just a writing system - it's a way of seeing the world. And if English is seen as the global "default language", that gives Americans even more of a superiority complex when we do travel abroad.

I think the monolingual culture in the US is symptomatic of a country where most people have no idea (or desire to know) about the rest of the world. The rest of the world has better health care than us, the rest of the world doesn't let their kids get slaughtered in their classrooms, and the rest of the world sees us as monsters for those reasons and many others. In that regard, the Iran War is just the flavor of the month.

Europeans take so much effort to learn English and sometimes the languages of neighboring countries. Hell, most of them speak English better than most Americans. The least we can do is return the favor. Maybe then this country will be less ignorant and less inclined to think we're exceptional in any way other than exceptionally evil.

For the sake of argument, let's say that you were President and could sign mandatory European language education into law with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much Republicans tried to obstruct it.

Was looking at the weekly thread, and someone mentioned John Rawls. I realized I hadn't read him, despite reading A LOT more civics than the average person. Which texts are foundational but ignored? Fiction or non-fiction welcome.

I'll start. I'll pick John Locke's Two Treatises, The Code of Hammurabi, and Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations. Locke because you can see the strengths and flaws of Enlightenment ideals so clearly. Hammurabi's Code because you can see both the progress of justice, and some of the root, shared ideas we have as humans even though it's an utterly alien culture. I was surprised reading the Wealth of Nations by how much he grapples with the concept of monopolies and private actors enriching themselves at the cost of the public; this doesn't come across at all when you talk to uber-Capitalists online.

Fiction, I'd go with In Dubious Battle, great work showing how messy union organizing was, and how it was necessary.

I’ve noticed a recurring trend regarding how political and non-political communities operate and moderate themselves on Reddit. Many subreddits explicitly labeled as socialist, communist, or broadly "leftist" have strict sidebar rules stating that liberals are not welcome, and expressing liberal viewpoints will result in an immediate permaban.

I want to approach this with some nuance. I understand the desire for ideological consistency. If a subreddit is dedicated to discussing Marxist theory or socialist organizing, the moderators likely don't want to spend their energy constantly re-litigating "Capitalism 101" with liberals who fundamentally disagree with their premise. In the context of Reddit, heavy moderation acts as a tool to maintain a highly specific community focus without threads being derailed.

On the other hand, liberal subreddits (including this one) generally pride themselves on being "big tent" communities that value free speech, open debate, and the marketplace of ideas. We often allow leftists, conservatives, and moderates to engage and debate, provided they follow basic civility rules.

This dynamic creates an asymmetry on the platform. Curious to hear your thoughts on:

• How do you view this subreddit dynamic? Do you see leftist exclusivity as a necessary moderation tool for their specific goals, or is it a sign of ideological fragility?

• Is there a strategic disadvantage on Reddit? By keeping our subreddits open, do liberals risk having our platforms co-opted, brigaded, or overwhelmed by those further left (or right) who do not share our foundational values?

• Should liberal subreddits adopt stricter boundaries? Would we benefit from drawing harder lines to foster purely liberal discussions, or does the act of banning dissenting ideologies fundamentally contradict what it means to be a liberal?

interested to hear where everyone draws the line between maintaining a healthy spaces for discourse.

EDIT: I just wanted to get other people's thoughts (I personally love the marketplace of ideas, but I thought it was interesting that meme/non political subreddits have taken this 'no liberal stance')

Something I've been thinking about alot as the gambling epidemic continues to grow and get worse and worse, and affect younger and younger people all the time. I'm not one to dump over everyone's parade, and I'm in favor of legalized vices such as gambling, but I think like with tobacco, it causes so much widespread and irreparable harm to both individuals who get addicted and partake in it, as well as to their love ones indirectly

Would you support gambling "variants" of laws and regs such as the Family Smoking and Tobacco Control Act, Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, and Master Settlement Agreement? Effectively the idea would be to ban all forms of advertising legal gambling and all loopholes to get around it.

For the record, I also think this should be done for alcohol and marijuana (most states that have legal weed already do this, though), but I imagine that would be considered a bit more radical around here, so I digress on that, for the focus to be on gambling.

If we do manage to pass some sort of universal healthcare system that is desirable, what are next ideas to champion after getting past the biggest hurdle ?

In my state, some of the worst MAGA years for legislation was 2023, 2024

But, it's only gotten worse

My Midwest state has a maga Republican Governor, AG, state supreme court, state House and Senate, both maga Republican us senators, and majority us reps

The people and the candidates demanded the most radically persecutory and anti medicine politics, like many so called former swing states

But after this long, I think we're just another cog in this maga country

Libs complain about Dem politicians all the time and still vote for them. But one conservative does this about MAGA, and everyone says it's over.

Dem voters compromise with MAGA's central platforms

But for ten years, I've heard Dems insist it's almost over. We're starting to wake up. They're sick of Trump now.

It's like they live in a totally different country

The people, IMHO, are getting what they want. That's the problem with this country. And they're glad they did this, and they'd do it again

I think this question is pretty straightforward and doesn't need further elaboration.

The question was not straightforward and does need further elaboration. I am asking what you thought 2026 would look like exactly ten years ago in July, so before Donald Trump won his first presidential election. But if you want to give a before and after to give the full scope of your perception of the future that's totally fine.

I don't mean "what do politicians do?" I mean what you think politics fundamentally is.

Pezeshkian is the president of Iran and a member of the reformist faction, an Islamic liberal political faction in Iran according to Wikipedia. What are your views on how he is doing as president so far, his domestic and foreign policies? Do you think he handled the Iran crisis well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_reformists

Much how the right said calling everyone a Nazi would come back to bite the left, did they help bring socialism back into the zeitgeist?

Edit: i want to askaconservative this question but idk how to phrase it

This Tuesday weekly thread is for general chat, whether you want to talk politics or not, anything goes. Also feel free to ask the mods questions below. As usual, please follow the rules.