On Tuesday, May 19, the U.S. House passed H.R. 2616, the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” by a vote of 217-198. The bill would hand the Trump administration enormous leverage to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, codifying into federal law the anti-trans definitions from Trump’s executive order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” It would also require public schools to forcibly out transgender students to their parents before using their pronouns or chosen names. The bill is significant on its own terms for the harm it would inflict on transgender youth if it became law. But what made Tuesday’s vote especially notable was the eight Democrats who joined every Republican to pass it—the largest Democratic defection on any standalone anti-trans bill of this Congress.
“Centrists” do not exist amongst the American populace.
You are either courting the far-right, approximately 20% of the US population, or you are courting the entire rest of the US population, all of whom are further left than the Democratic party.
Ah… They may be “farther left” than the Democratic Party, but by world standards the average American is a right-centrist.
I’d like to believe that too, but it’s clearly not true. About 1/2 American voters voted for trump. That’s not being left of Dems. At all.
Not everyone that voted for Trump is right-wing. We can argue about effect of vote versus ideological reason for vote for decades, and people have, but the short answer is MAGA isn’t the only group that voted for Trump.
It also wasn’t half of American voters. It was half of people that cast a vote. 77 million adults voted for Trump. As of November 2024 there were around 280 million adults in the US. That’s 27.5% that caused Trump to be elected, or 72.5% of people that did not vote for Trump, not including the ~60 million children that also have to suffer and largely have been against Trump as they’ve started aging into the adult population.
Given historically Republicans represent no more than 25% of the vote (and do note most republicans aren’t actually right-wing, they’re idiots) we can assume the extra are protest votes, misguided people, idiots, accelerationists, or even just people that genuinely still believe Trump is antiestablishment for whatever reason.
Do note that most polls suggest 70-90% of the population agree with socialist and communist policies, as long as you do not use those terms; from universal health care, to unionization, to abolition of the billionaire class, these are incredibly popular ideas.
The 6 trillion or so dollars spent by the US to brainwash Americans against the words socialist and communist since 1914 has caused a mess of people voting against their own personal ideology.
Fair. (Except in my lexicon ‘American voters’ are the americans who actually vote - different from ‘eligible voters’.)
So what’s the best way forward to fix the ignorance and get progressive minded people to vote effectively?
There would have to be a party of inspiring politicians that can inspire some confidence that something will positively change. People vote for change.
Obama ran on the idea that the old guard, the old government, had to be changed and he would bring in a completely different government.
So did Trump.
So did Bush.
So did Clinton.
So did The Other Bush…
And so on. The only thing that engages voters is blatant admission that the US government is horrifically formed, inefficient, and objectively is not a representative democracy by any possible definition of those words separately or together; and the promise they will fight to make it more of a representative democracy.
When Kamala Harris came out and said ‘oh the Biden administration has made everything so much better so we’re going to just do more of the same’ when every single demographic under a 400k net worth was objectively worse off under Biden than they were under Trump (yes, yes, extenuating circumstances, blah blah recovering from a global pandemic Trump would have made worse) people could not get behind that message.
When Harris promised to stay the course, her campaign ended. When Biden promised to keep doing what he was doing, his campaign ended. It wouldn’t have mattered if the bastard child of the literal incarnation of the Evangelical Christian Devil and Hitler transformed into an eldritch cosmic being that turned every person that gazed into it into a statue ran as the republican candidate, it would have won against the Harris campaign.
At the very least any candidate that wants to win has to acknowledge how incredibly awful the modern American has it. We have worse wealth inequality in the US than at any point in WORLD history. Slaves in the American South had less wealth inequality towards the richest kings of Europe than we comparatively have towards the owners of the US.
Any Candidate then has to, at the very least, pay lip service to the idea that drastic, severe, violent change needs to happen. There is no more incrementalism. There is no more ‘lesser evil.’ There is no more ‘we sacrifice our generation so the next can maybe have it better but we’re not going to do anything to realise that anytime soon.’ We are a full fucking century past that idea. We are a century deep into that idea. It has not worked. It will not work.
tl;dr Promise change, don’t have a history of promising change and then doing nothing, don’t shy away from violent rhetoric, don’t ‘play politics’ and be nice to the ruling class, don’t pretend incrementalism or lesser evilism works when we have a century of proof that it doesn’t.
That’s an interesting theory. But how does it explain Obama’s (or other presidents’) two terms?
Harris couldn’t say she was drastically different because she was part of that previous administration.
Look at their opponents and their campaign. Let’s take Obama, because he’s the liberal darling despite running roughly the same platform as Ronald Reagan;
Mitt Romney did not run on a platform of change, in fact he was against an opponent who made ‘Change’ their whole political identity. Romney ran on a campaign of ‘Return to normal,’ which was just Bush in the mind of political base. Romney didn’t identify any of the proletariat’s problems, didn’t promise a change from Obama or Bush, didn’t identify how exactly he would improve things.
He ran a campaign essentially saying ‘change is bad, this change was bad, I strapped my dog to the top of my car while it had the shits and continued driving for at least 500 miles, I promise to return to the policies that caused you to lose your house.’
This, unsurprisingly, lost him the vote. This is also why Obama ‘didn’t break the brains of the right’ or ‘cause the racists to come out of the woodwork.’ Those are mischaracterizations of the right’s response to Obama based on the extremely loud minority that are Fox News viewers. If either case were true, Romney would have won.
But Romney didn’t, Trump eventually did. The only effective difference in their campaign was that Trump promised change and was believable as an agent of change.
I don’t understand. Most Republicans aren’t actually idiots, they’re idiots. I don’t get it.