Of course. Our precious political class has delicate sensibilities and nedds time for self-care.
Oh and Dem voters, no need to join organizations or take direct action. Just sit around being a little stressed out and blaming everyone else is plenty. You did your part! If you must do something, go to a one-off police escorted protest with no feasible demands or threats to do anything that would ever exert pressure.
It also still almost worked. This is how subservient and propagandized the US political electorate is. The idea of supporting mass murdering children was only a dealbreaker for a small minority, but enough to do most of the work in tipping the scales.
Kamala probably would've won with false promises to end "the war", some token Arab speakers, and "I see you and hear you" pandering.
The capitalist party that writes its own rules and does not adopt literally any positions via bottom-up mechanism? No, nobody can take it over except other capitalists. So in a sense you are correct, as US progressives are still fundamentally of the political ideology of capitalism.
The party works against you but, ironically, convinces you to help it for your own and others' interests. Instead, we must work together against capital if we want liberation and justice.
You can do useless things that take up very little time all you'd like. Doesn't bother me.
But if you want to have political agency you will need to do something real with organizing other people who can take direct action as a bloc.
There was no opposition to genocide.
I know people with disabilities caused by police responses to our fight against genocide.
Genocide apologist, beg for forgiveness.
Hey now, that's not fair.
Israelis and Boers would say that, too. And some Germans, still, believe it or not.
I agree with everything except the "it's working!" part. Unfortunately, Bernie and AOC are very much insiders that prioritize their capitalist party over common people. They go to bat for their "backstabbers" every time, they tell you to support Biden and then Harris, they shy away from the word "genocide" while voting to materially support one. The function of the Bernie-AOC tour is to keep the disillusioned from leaving the party behind. Which is what is actually needed to fight fascism. We already have civic fascism, we export the worst effects of it to other countries. It's just making a little visit home and there's a risk people will understand this violence as a normalcy of the system and that we must organize ourselves against it rather than just spend 30 minures every four years for a certain flavor if genocidal racist.
When it comes to the left, which now has the bar set at, "does not tolerare genocide", the Democrats cannot fail, they can only be failed.
You're welcome for the civics lesson, citizen. Don't forget to buy war bonds!
Those 90 million people are more correct about the nature of US electoral politics than any Dem voter.
You cannot take over the Democratic Party. It will just change its own rules before you get the chance. The people running it are all feeding from the same donor trough, either as politicians or consultants. You think they will let you just take the trough away? Friend they make the party rules! They will just change them! They already did this against Bernie, an imperialist socdem, someone who isn't even a real threat to capital (just the insurance industry) and they thwarted that even when it had momentum and kids allowed themselves hope for healthcare without poverty. This is the basic nature of capitalist parties: they are beholden to capital, not the people, and certainly not you or I.
By the time the Democratic Partu is "taken over" by anything, it will be because it has found a way to make capital happy by adopting a policy that costs them nothing. Which means we win nothing of serious value and the spiral of capitalist degrading conditions continues.
In the meantime, what role do these reformers actually serve? If they can't change what needs yo change, what other effects do they have?
Well, they mostly just convince people to have false hope for the party, delaying its need to crash and burn and be replaced, ideally with something more effective than a bourgeois electoral party.
Blocking movement to the left is why you're left with a rightward trend. Not just because the right itself "moves right" but because Dems' political nature breeds false consciousness and confused disillusionment. Dems promise basic things like a student debt jubilee and then do a little weak attempt at it. So then people leave them behind. Even worse, Dems help create the degrading conditions that provokes an anti-liberal backlash (liberalism being the dominant ideology of capitalism, not just US Dems), and then Dems work their hardest to fight the associated leftward shift. But not the right: their radicals are useful for crushing that new left, as the left is anticapitalist.
Most importantly, the bourgeoisie electoral system provides an illusion of control. You don't actually choose the lesset evil. You just throw in a vote for candidates preselected for you by capital and the party (a party in which you have no say) who will never actually be able to fight the right or adopt anticapitalist positions, and will therefore never be left. You, and the people, are not in control in this scenario. This scenario just provides consent for what capital wanted anyways, just with two different flavors: genocidal fascism with a good PR team for the theoretically empathetic and genocidal fascism with an okay PR team for braying hogs.
Consent of the governed exists basically nowhere, including so-called liberal democracies. There is no "do you consent to this government?" question that results in a major change if you or even a majority say no. All are subject to an oppressive state, the only question re: consent is whether you want that state organized for or against the ruling class.