Really admire your optimism here, but I’m far too cynical on Dems to think this can work without a whole new party to replace them. The Democrat brand is so incredibly tarnished by corruption and disingenuousness.

While you’re right that the DNC chair does hold a lot of power in the party, I struggle to recall a single instance in my lifetime when any dem held real power and leveraged it effectively to benefit the working class.

Don’t blame him for what happened before he had total control.

Don’t expect me to ignore 40+ years of history on the basis of mere promises, when broken Democratic promises paved the road to the fascism we’re having to fight today. Frankly, it’s unreasonable, and no one should expect Democrats to do what they say they’re going to do until they demonstrate it.

Didn’t Obama basically have the same platform? If anything, Hillary ran on healthcare for all while Obama didn’t in 2008. He’s certainly more charismatic and had the image of “not a typical politician”, which helped him win that primary, plus but I think he benefited from W’s economic mess and McCain unwillingness to be an asshole on the campaign trail, unlike Trump with Hillary and Kamala

But honestly, I’m speaking anecdotally. It’s been extremely depressing how many people have told me that a woman can’t be president because being on her period will make her nuke china. But maybe people just think it’s okay to be sexist out loud more than racist these days.

Hillary lost because of a multi-decade campaign against her by the right wing propaganda machines.

Sexism played a role in Harris’ loss but overall her issue wasn’t focusing on economic populism.

AOC faces a similar level of hate from right wing media.

Thank you for saying this. I’m a pretty aggressive feminist but I think this desire to paint the losses of Harris and Clinton on sexism alone is dangerously reductive. I strongly feel like until neoliberals categorize women losing as an individual losing and not an entire gender losing we won’t have real success there. Like, when McCain lost no one was like: WOE MEN CANT WIN it’s OVER for white men boohoo!!

I hate when they do this boohoo shit over women while running the least charismatic rat fucked campaigns. Wearing pink and holding a sign when they need people wearing red white and blue and open carrying the constitution with brimstone fire.

That being said, I genuinely in my heart think that AOC has a chance. As long as the controlled opposition doesn’t rat fuck her

I think that’s called being a good person but don’t bother telling the republicans that

Hegseth? Davidson? Who are you referring to?

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proven likely true means not proven true. Way to many factors. I personally thing the theory has a sorta merit but is very limited and vague (in the sense of there is no identification of where the exact sweet spot of taxation levels are). For example the punitive measures for not paying taxes at very high levels need to be very severe to curtail such behavior. So five figure owning person or mom and pop shop you give a slap on the wrist. Maybe 10% of owed added. Wealthiest individuals and companies get knocked completely out of their level so like 500% of what was owed.

So the cut that went into effect in '83 was passed in '81, just before a recession hit. So the US seeing an increase in revenue compared to the few years before that where unemployment was up over 8% and gdp dropping, is really more about the economy recovering than tax policy changes.

nor does it justify any cut after 1983.

That was my point on how it is misused.

The comment you’re responding to really doesn’t seem to be condoning those things; the thing being argued here is whether there was a push in a progressive direction, you said these events are evidence against that, which they countered with the idea that war has a regressive influence, something your quote is supporting.

My apologies, I guess I wasn’t clear enough. My point was that it’s unfair to blame those things as results of progressive policies.

But hey, thanks for the gross mischaracterization of my perspective.

There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.

The colonial era of the 1400s to 1900s resulted in an industrial scale enclosing, enslaving, and extermination of entire ethnic cohorts. This was not a leftist move by any definition. It was 500 years of settler colonialism which resulted in some of the most abysmal living conditions in recorded history.

We have not yet recovered from this massive global reconfiguration of human society. While we enjoy more advanced tools and industrial scale infrastructure, we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.

So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss.

We have a modern economic system that produces more homes than people, while guaranteeing a certain population will remain homeless their entire lives. We have a system that produces enormous surpluses of food, but guarantees a segment of the population will remain malnurished. We have a system that produces vast excesses of professional expertise, but guarantees only a fraction of the population can access professional services.

All of our shortages are manufactured. Trump’s latest tariff wave is the most blindingly obvious example of how these shortages are imposed - not even via some convoluted market mechanism, but through the whims of an authoritarian madman.

This is not progress in a social sense. It is a huge regression from our historical roots. We are prisoners of the state and of the economy, subject to arrest, torture, and execution at the whim of the local leadership. And the only reason you and I are not personally under a boot right now is because we haven’t been targeted yet.

Tell me, do you think a Black person is safer living 100 years ago in the USA, than today’s USA?

Thanks to modern technological innovations, sure. Clean air/water, safer public transit, vaccines, etc go a long way towards improving quality of life for everyone, including the bottom of the social hierarchy. But has a black person in 2025 enjoyed the same degree of prosperity as a white peer over the intervening years? Absolutely not, and for the same reasons. They’re more predisposed to experience tainted air/water, they are comparatively less safe traveling, they have diminished access to modern medicine like vaccines and prenatal care, etc, etc.

And this is a deliberate function of public policy. The sky-high arrest rate of African Americans (particularly while traveling) is the result of a Nixon Era campaign to over-police black and brown neighborhoods that every subsequent executive and governor seems to have endorsed. The higher rates of cancer, the higher rates of obesity and malnutrition, the higher rates of disease transmission and mortality from preventable illness or injury all stem from eugenics policies pioneered in the OG Progressive Era. Even some of the pseudoscientific theories around mental, physical, and social aptitudes have endured.

it’s no where was common as before

The arrest rates of black men peaked in the 90s, during the height of the Reagan War on Crime. They’ve fallen off somewhat in comparison to arrests and harassment of hispanics and east asians, but are nowhere close to comparable to white peers. This is downwind of the reactionary media hijacking progressive language and ideology and weaponizing it against a population that its leadership believes is subhuman.

What we have in the modern era is rationalization of reactionary policy in progressive terms. The propaganda we experience is caped in progressive language. But the goals are the exact opposite.

Yeah, as that’s what that time period is called: “Progressive Era”.

The top level comment is referring to the New Deal/Great Society period, which followed the depression and the tariffs that the post itself is referencing. There’s some confusion because “Progressive Era” was capitalized in that top level comment, but that’s not what they were actually referencing.

Yea no matter how you slice it, there are no good use of tariffs, and if one were to insist, then it would only be like just barley enough to push up the price above parity, and only on very select items. But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.