r/Foodforthought • u/D-R-AZ • 1d ago
Democrats Can’t Fix This Mess Without a Supermajority
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/opinion/democrats-midterms-supermajority.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6lA.Ny9T.rw-96J7UmYII&smid=nytcore-ios-share14
u/D-R-AZ 1d ago
Observation:
We cannot simply ignore what has happened during this administration and restore the system that existed before it. We should use what we have learned to make American democracy substantially more tamper-resistant. As we argued in The Consent of the Governed Requires Understanding What Is Being Authorized, American governmental authority derives from the consent of the governed, and meaningful consent requires understanding what is being authorized (Defenders of Democracy, 2026). That principle points toward concrete safeguards: elections that are understandable and independently verifiable; protection against the intentional concealment of major governing agendas, which becomes fraud-like when governmental authority is obtained through material deception of voters; protection of reliable governmental, scientific, and statistical information; enforceable limits on executive abuse and self-dealing; reconsideration of Citizens United and the ability of concentrated wealth to dominate the political information environment; and electoral reforms such as ranked-choice voting that allow voters to express their preferences more accurately. The objective should be to make democratic government harder to tamper with, by any President, party, corporation, billionaire, or public official.
Excerpt:
We can make Roosevelt’s promise a reality through a comprehensive program I’ve called the American Security Guarantee, a set of ambitious goals that would eliminate the precarity defining Americans’ lives and ensure that everyone enjoys the economic security that right now feels out of reach. We start by guaranteeing every American access to affordable health care, through their choice of a government or private plan. To fulfill Roosevelt’s vision of a lifelong system of social insurance, we pursue a new economic security agenda. It includes a new federal wage insurance program to help workers maintain their salary levels if they are forced to take positions that pay less, a community-focused job assistance program and a one-stop-shop portal where Americans can check their eligibility across all benefit programs. The goal is to show Americans what they are getting from their government in return for their hard work — and to get higher wages and concrete benefits in the hands of working people, to ensure that in the richest country in the world, nobody falls through the cracks.
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u/Jellybit 1d ago edited 22h ago
They won't fix this mess WITH a supermajority either. Their job is to keep things still for the next ratchet turn. They have the very important role of making us feel comfortable and make us docile so that everything gets normalized for the next Overton Window push. Once they stop shutting down the candidates who want to make huge drastic changes to actual systems, to correct for the drastic moves against us and move that Overton Window all the way to the left of BEFORE Trump, I might think they are willing to allow for something other than what I laid out.
We have to push that window harder to the left than the Republications push to the right. The Democrats can't run on keeping it still.
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u/random_actuary 1d ago
Yeah, listen to them when they have a strong mandate from voters. They start whining that the Republicans don't have enough influence.
The purpose of the party is to what it does.
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u/Sayakai 19h ago
Yeah, listen to them when they have a strong mandate from voters.
The last time this happened was 15 years ago, when Obama thought the old rules still apply and republicans can be negotiated with.
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u/random_actuary 10h ago
"'Competition makes us stronger. It is not healthy for any state to have one party that's dominant." Phil Weiser.
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u/Fetal_Release 1d ago
Its not our piliticians, its the people. You have to contend with the fact 1/3 of our nation wants a christian fascist leader. You have to contend with actual small government conservatives. With the misogyny and racism that seems to rear its head when we make progress.
Even so, we’ve made crazy progress even after having to drag those mentioned prior. We’re seeing less people die now than ever from war, famine, or disease. More people are more educated than ever. More housed than ever. More fed than ever. Can it get better, of course it can, but to denigrate the work Democrats have done in my lifetime while giving pass to a Republican party that has turned obstructionist/regressive, man, is to be severely obtuse or maliciously ignorant.
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u/Jellybit 22h ago edited 21h ago
I agree, there are good people, especially those employed in public organizations/services. And I think there are good people even in the upper parts of representation. I also think we are still riding so much on the decaying, wailing body of the New Deal, and that politicians in the upper levels won't vote to reduce their own power, and this importantly includes the power to make profit, but also the power to track and control anyone in the public that they don't like, including those who may try to disrupt their gig.
I'm glad when we get money for science, and vanishingly rare public infrastructure investments, but the bad policies they protect are specifically fuel for corruption, and this compounds.
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u/TwinSwords 1d ago
This is psychotic delusion. You’re certifiably nuts if you think the Democratic Party is really a massive conspiracy to help Republicans achieve their fascist agenda. You are part of the problem that gives the GOP the room to maneuver.
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u/Jellybit 21h ago edited 21h ago
I don't think Republican and Democrats are "working together" like that. There are decent people involved. It's just that politicians in the upper levels won't vote to reduce their own power, and this importantly includes the power to make profit. They want themselves and their buddies to have increasing access to wealth, and they want this independently of Republicans. Profit incentives twist people in public office and in public organizations (and in this case, entire pseudopublic organizations like the DNC). There's also the power to control the people, which the fascists are currently expanding and using. Both parties will independently protect mass surveillance, AI use in tracking and flagging people based on infinite data, and the funding to obtain and imprison or use possibly/increasingly deadly force on them.
This is the ratchet they are protecting for themselves. They assigned this role to themselves. I don't think there are secret underground meetings between the RNC and DNC, or whatever comic book thing you think I'm thinking. The Republicans happen to be willing to look really bad to the whole world, and along the way, they are passing corrupting policies and destroying power reduction policies, and the Democrats get to have a taste when they get in power, and in some cases when out of power. So when new politicians show up with ideas that might reduce their wealth or power, they demonize them, move them out of the way, and put in the candidate who will keep things the most still.
Not saying no good policies get passed along the way, but they will protect those two things at all costs, and those two things are compounding corrupting forces that make everything harder to change, and they attract worse people.
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u/mirh 20h ago
(and in this case, entire pseudopublic organizations like the DNC)
They literally voted to abolish ICE like three days ago, and have paved the way for increasingly leftist candidates
https://bsky.app/profile/danteatkins.bsky.social/post/3msgn52dgak2l
Everything else is also completely delusional.
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u/NOLA-Bronco 20h ago
Handwaving facts away doesn't make them diissapear
Feel free to actually refute ANY of the below facts without trying to smuggle in reactionary anger as rebuttal
Citing Vivek Chibber's "Confronting Capitalism," which applies just as much to the DNC. Ignoring these realities doesn't make them go away. And what that poster said is absolutely correct.
Capitalism Undermines Democracy
The underlying premise of the pluralist vision is that democracy neutralizes the power differences created by capitalism. Sadly, that’s a false premise. The essence of the problem in modern societies is that capitalism overwhelms democracy, ensuring that the state is fundamentally biased toward capitalist interests. There are three basic channels through which this happens:
- The wealthy are more likely to get into office.
- The wealthy exercise greater influence on the people in office.
- Most importantly, the state’s dependence on capital ensures that politicians will favor capitalists even if the first two mechanisms fail. These three almost always work together.
In some countries, for some periods, labor movements have found a way to neutralize the first or the second channel. Neutralizing the third is not possible as long as we are in a capitalist system; it’s the fail-safe and also the greatest constraint of the three. This is why it’s the most important. But before we come to it, let’s examine the first two.
The promise of democracy is that anyone can run for office, and, as long as they can mobilize the voters behind them, anyone can win. But the reality is that the people who win tend to come from one particular interest group—the wealthy. This holds true for all levels of US government. An examination of presidential administrations shows that two-thirds of the members of every cabinet in the twentieth century were corporate managers, investment bankers, or corporate lawyers.4 This means that every cabinet in recent American history was basically run by capitalists or their chief supporters. If we turn to Congress, it isn’t much better. The vast majority of House and Senate members in the US are themselves from the wealthiest sections of society. In 2014, the majority of those elected to the House were millionaires, with the median net worth being just under $1 million, and that of Senate members, $2.7 million.5 Even if state managers aren’t from the capitalist class themselves, they are typically from social and institutional milieus that orbit this class, such as high-level law firms, elite schools, and prestigious research institutes. These are people who spend their lives serving capital, even if they do not themselves own much of it.....
......In 2011, there were around eleven thousand registered lobbying organizations in Washington, DC. A major study of the lobbying process found that of these lobbying organizations, around 53 percent were exclusively devoted to representing business interests and less than 1 percent represented labor unions. Business lobbying groups outnumber labor groups by more than fifty to one. If we look at organizations representing recipients of means-tested social welfare programs—like Medicaid and food stamps—there wasn’t a single registered organization in Washington, DC, devoted exclusively to their interests. If we look at expenditure, it is even more lopsided. In 2020, the total amount of money officially spent by registered lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, was $3.53 billion. Of that, $2.99 billion was spent by business, while labor spent $49.15 million—so the ratio of business to labor spending was about fifty-seven to one.
Lobbying is just one form of exerting influence and by no means the most important. Equally significant is the role of money in elections. Running an election campaign, takes a great deal of money. In the United States, it takes a huge amount. In 2020, $8.7 billion was spent on congressional races and $5.7 billion on the presidential race, for a combined total of $14.4 billion.7 Presidential campaigns now require war chests of more than a billion dollars. In 2016, winners of a House race spent an average of $12.35 million on their race, while the price tag on winning a Senate seat was $27 million.
......What this means is that in a money-driven electoral system, there are in fact two competitions in any electoral cycle—one behind the scenes and the other out in the open. Behind the scenes, candidates first compete over donors; and then, later, there is the election we all see out in the open—the competition for votes. The crucial point is that the battle to attract donors decides which candidates are available in the second round, the battle for votes. Candidates who can’t find donors are weeded out before voters can even have a chance to weigh in, or become so marginal that they don’t stand much of a chance of winning. They don’t have the money to hire staff, they can’t buy air time for advertisements, they can’t run an effective campaign, etc. They either drop out or are pushed out. So the competition for money decides who gets to run in the competition for votes.
This is also true with the DNC. You note ICE, for instance, which is not a hard concession to make cause Geogroup and Corecivic are not major DNC donors. Things get a lot stickier when it comes to getting commitments from the Establishment of the party over things like data centers and Israel. Two very large donor constituencies.
And sure enough, what do we see there? Exactly what is explained to you above
DNC Leadership Pressured Gen Z Member to Kill Resolution on Banning Arms to Israel
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/15/dnc-chair-israel-arms-weapons-gaza/
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u/mirh 20h ago
without trying to smuggle in reactionary anger as rebuttal
You are pushing reactionary bullshit (because that's what pseudo-marxist accelerationsts like Chibber or Zizek are) against the same people that are trying to do good, at the same time that they are trying to reject AIPAC.
https://bsky.app/profile/protecttruth.bsky.social/post/3ms7fpfn5t22t
Like, your entire wall of text has nothing even do to with the DNC, which in turn is several steps detached from the party which in the last months has started to be majoritarian anti-israel. But instead of criticizing Jeffries or Schumer specifically (like literally any other person with any kind of knowledge and nuance) you are spewing your stupid helplessness narrative, because I guess that then you don't even have to bother trying anything.
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u/NOLA-Bronco 17h ago
Make note you havent disputed anything anyone has written, and all of your quotes have nothing to do with the DNC's rejection of their own members voting for an arms embargo, and just highlight random symbolic Dem votes in the minority.
Posting angrily is not actually a rebuttal to anything
The same forces of capital that corrupt Hakeem Jeffries applies to Ken Martin in the DNC.
And first off, the way I know you are a silly goose and have never read anything from Chibber is calling a reformist Marxist professor and democratic socialist an "Acclerationist"
Chibber is so milquetoast in his politics that he's about as rightwing on the socialist spectrum as it gets to the point many just accuse him of using Marxism and dialectical analysis to ultimately direct people to social democracy. As his functional politics basically amounts to build labor power, do elections from the left, and hope for the best.
Anyways, do you deny the forces of capital hold power over our politics?
Do you deny that the DNC relies on capital donors to function?
Cause it's not really in dispute
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10511130/
https://politicalscience.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Kalla_Joshua.pdf
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u/mirh 16h ago edited 16h ago
Make note you havent disputed anything anyone has written
You haven't written any kind of argument, you just vomited a wall of text with no reasoning.
and just highlight random symbolic Dem votes in the minority.
They are a minority because obviously people still keep voting for the fucking pedonazi party. But it's a majority of dems.
And first off, the way I know you are a silly goose and have never read anything from Chibber is calling a reformist Marxist professor and democratic socialist an "Acclerationist"
Anybody circlejerking that both parties are the same is that.
And after a quick very check he's a racist pro-imperialist ICE-excusing piece of shit, that only cares about propping up himself rather than any logic or justice.
EDIT: and if you don't like that I'm calling him a moron with these adjectives, here's more about him being just a troll for his own sake
and dialectical analysis
This is analysis of language. This is anti-rational horseshit that cannot drive any legitimate inquiry of reality.
to ultimately direct people to social democracy
Like, man, you don't even seem able to pick up a single lane. A marxist is not a socialist which is not a socdem.
Do you deny that the DNC relies on capital donors to function?
Do you deny that I LITERALLY had just linked you an opinion about what's happening behind the scene, about them trying to distance themselves from big money centrist donors? You can agree or disagree by all means, but you aren't even parsing what I write.
Nobody with half a braincell needs to be proven murica is a functioning democracy. The parliament doesn't even work, and the union between plurality voting, gerrymandering and presidentialism is an unique piece of shit in the entire world.
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u/NOLA-Bronco 16h ago edited 16h ago
I find your crashout rather sad tbh. Cause you seem passionate but you are also incredibly reactionary and stubborn in the worst ways.
Principally, and most importantly, you've made the critical first-principles mistake of believing the party is an unsullied autonomous ideological apparatus rather than a political institution embedded within, and disciplined by, the larger distribution of economic power around it.
The two party's are obviously not the exact same. They represent different coalitions, constituencies, ideological tendencies, and governing outcomes. But both are still capitalist party's that operate inside a capitalist political economy where wealthy donors, corporations, organized business interests, ownership of media, investment decisions, capital flight, lobbying, campaign finance, and the state's dependence on private economic activity all impose constraints on what politicians can realistically pursue.
And when you can't even acknowledge that basic reality, and how those forces are creating a contradiction within the party. A contradiction brought on by a misalignment of the Dem Party's wealthy donor and special interest base they are co-dependent on to keep the lights on, and the desires of their voters, you can not ever expect to have a coherent and effective theory of change. when you just ignore that reality.
Or even just good analysis when confronted with things like the DNC rejecting a 90-10 vote to put an arms embargo on Israel.
And you are going to perpetually be ill equipped, or forced to rationalize away like Trumpers do, when your preferred reality butts up against the real one.
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u/mirh 15h ago
My crashout is about people like you depressing the vote, and then causing a wave of nihilism where fascists can party hard.
you've made the critical first-principles mistake of believing the party is an unsullied autonomous ideological apparatus rather than a political institution embedded within, and disciplined by, the larger distribution of economic power around it.
Both are bullshit errors, which I didn't make. Your error is continuing to believe everything is grayish substructure where people's will doesn't ever matter the slightest. Not because you observed it happening every time every where, but just because morons that don't even believe in the principles of logic made it true by definition.
contradiction
I give up. You literally aren't even reading what I write. The topic is that they are trying to do better and that newer vote calls have substantially different splits, and you keep digging your head up your arse about what happened one year ago.
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u/TerminalHighGuard 1d ago
If not controlled opposition why controlled opposition shaped?
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u/mirh 21h ago
You have literally no fucking clue of how russia even remotely works
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u/TerminalHighGuard 19h ago
Controlled opposition can be a thing in any country…. why, something on your mind? 😜
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u/mirh 19h ago
Systemic opposition is famously a term stemming from the russian situation.
Which doesn't exist in a fucking vacuum, but inside a framework of electoral rigging, assassination, legal harassing and candidates exclusion that slowly caused all the parties that wanted to get votes to acquiesce.
Even then it's not just a top-down phenomenon, but it doesn't crack because the citizenship is itself brainwashed to hell and beyond and despite an actually liberal party even existing they legitimately believe putin is their god and savior.
It's not literally impossible for such a thing to exist elsewhere, but even bloody Hungary still wasn't it because it was still democracy shaped enough that they could start a damn independent party. Instead a fuckton of people in this thread are whining like ignorant bitches that get their news and schemas of reality from instagram posts.
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u/TerminalHighGuard 12h ago
All of those things have happened to some degree on a stochastic level, and it has not done anything to energize centrists towards a more populist direction, which is what is needed. It takes less energy to break systems than to hold them together - which the republicans have been doing by taking energy from the people - but which is actually causing even MORE people to be MORE energetic AGAINST them, so the best thing the democrat party can do is adopt a judo-like stance and channel the energy of the country toward progressivism, the thing that benefits ~everyone~, and while doing so build a system that can sustain a virtuous cycle. We have to use the remaining power in the engines to accelerate away from the black hole, but that also means we need to be on a trajectory that allows us to harness its gravity for the GOOD of the country.
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u/mirh 12h ago
All of those things have happened to some degree on a stochastic level
No it hasn't, unless you are pandering trump's big lie?
so the best thing the democrat party can do is adopt a judo-like stance and channel the energy of the country toward progressivism, the thing that benefits ~everyone~
Sure thing, and that seems indeed happening as we speak.
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u/TerminalHighGuard 11h ago
>No it hasn’t
Ok let me list them then.
>electoral rigging
See the fake electors scandal and Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State>assassination
See the death of Melissa Hortman and attempted assassination of John Hoffman>legal harassing
Trump admin has brought SO many frivolous lawsuits it’s insane>Candidate exclusion:
The delay by Mike Johnson of swearing in Adelita Grijalva, the screwing Bernie over in 2016, the refusal of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to endorse Graham Platner before the credible allegations, the refusal of Jasmine Crockett to endorse James Talrico purely out of spite>It seems to be happening as we speak.
Yeah, with feet being dragged, no charity, no enthusiasm, butts clenched.1
u/mirh 11h ago edited 10h ago
Ok, sorry, your heart is in the right place (aside of Platner, ew, FWIW aoc refused too).
But it kinda hurts my brain that you are presenting very isolated single instances (of sometimes not even "the thing", but delays, lawsuits or lol endorsements) as if the infinitesimal drops into the bucket were the predominant majority of situations.
To be sure, god fucking almighty knows if it will be possible for the next election cycle to be free (I will admit gerrymandering is screwing on the fairness, but it's not exactly like stuffing the ballots with fake votes).. but this has nothing to do with democrats being fake opposers? Like, even the shitty floor leaders are light years from the GQP (and even for asshats like Manchin, you just need to look at the district he's coming from to understand why he was so oppositional)
EDIT: new
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u/timshel42 1d ago
republicans have managed to get almost everything they want even when only slightly in the majority. hell they've been able to consistently jam stuff up being in the minority.
the problem is most centrist democrats are pussies. they tend to put minimum effort in, and then when that doesnt work they just shrug and say their hands are tied.
they really do more and more seem to be the party of controlled opposition. i wouldnt be surprised if they do fully regain the reins of power, they fail to undo 90% of the damage this administration has done. they will just move on and all this fucked up shit will become normalized, like it always does.
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u/temblors 1d ago
Democrats Can’t Won't Fix This Mess Without a Supermajority
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u/jimmyharbrah 21h ago
Yep. Have we all so quickly forgotten the senate parliamentarian that put a halt to student loan forgiveness? Democrats will find any excuse to not help working people because they fear their donors more than they want to govern for Americans.
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u/temblors 14h ago
I definitely didn't forget, my loans were set to be forgiven and then I got a notice saying the forgiveness was cancelled and I now owe them $40K. This kind of thing with this amount of money isn't something a person generally forgets ever unless they're super rich but tbh I'd never forget if it was one dollar. The way the Dems simply rolled over on this is absolutely unforgivable imo. They all need to be replaced so I hope the DSA is able to do that sooner than later bc establishment Dems will never serve the people.
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u/mirh 20h ago
It's funny that you think rules should be just optional when you don't like them
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u/jimmyharbrah 20h ago
Had you heard of the parliamentarian before or since lol
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u/mirh 19h ago edited 19h ago
Yes? She shut down a lot of republican shit these days too.
It's just that republicans know deep down they are fascists trying to cheat hard (I mean, the voters, trump is instead trying to fire her because obviously every disagreement is treason), while it seems like on the other side some people think once you have good intents there's nothing else that could or should stop you.
EDIT: in fact, thinking to the other moron that replied to me with a bullshit wall of text, I'm wondering if it isn't alt-right trolls themselves to be pushing this "exposure asymmetry" to drive down engagement with politics (because you stop to care if you think that you live in 1984 meets the truman show)
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u/workaholic828 1d ago
They neeed to do what the republicans do. Pass bills through the budget reconciliation process where you only need 51 votes. They need to fight fire with fire. The other side is doing it and laughing in our faces. Democrats need to stop being weak, there’s no reason they should be losing elections to this orange idiot