the civics lesson comes off as condescending, because it’s stuff everyone learned in high school. and it also seems to take the stance that process is more important than results, at a time when a lot of people could use some results and the process does not seem to be working. the flippancy of the hexbear users in this thread comes from those two things - the perception that you’re being condescending, and frustration at your apparent priorities, which differ from theirs.
the argument is that Manchin is the designated “vote no guy,” blocking legislation the corporate donors oppose while allowing the rest of the democrats to say “gee I’d like to help my constituents but I can’t.” People point out the apparent lack of serious pushback or pressure on Manchin from the rest of the democrats.
if you just made this thread as a ploy to draw out hexbears to block — ostensibly because you are annoyed that they swarm threads — then you could have simply found one of those previous threads that annoyed you and blocked the hexbear users there, instead of creating a whole new thread just for the occasion.
It’s a cheap cliffhanger in a paperback. “Uh oh, your basic rights are in jeopardy again!” As long as we’re fighting a losing battle just to stand still, we have no leverage to ask for progress.
We need dual power — networks parallel to the established political system, able to organize effective protests, marches, demonstrations, and mass worker strikes, and to support individuals who are arrested or fired from their jobs in the course of those activities. Otherwise we’re fucked imo. Voters don’t get to choose policy. We vote for people. We vote for promises that are not kept. We vote for weasel words, vague convictions, “aspirational” platforms. At best, we vote to stall the inevitable, to pause the one-way ratchet of American politics for another turn. It’s a ratchet that will slowly crush us.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
and later, more bluntly,
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
I see it the same way I see the lead-up to the holocaust: an effort to scapegoat a minority group and divert the outrage of a downwardly mobile middle class away from wealthy capitalists
Most people aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its playbook, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the conservatives’ plan to enact a sweeping “Don’t Say Gay” policy that will effectively blot out all LGBTQ content on the internet as well as any published material with LGBTQ content, no matter how benign.
Project 2025 is a coalition of prominent conservative organizations that includes the Claremont Institute, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Hillsdale College, Heritage Foundation, Freedom Works, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Principles Project, and dozens of others. The organization’s goal is to lay out a “first 180 days” agenda for the next administration, and to recruit conservatives to fill positions within the federal government appointed by the executive branch.
The Heritage Foundation alone is a massive, well-connected think tank with an annual budget of $38 million. Mike Pence joined in 2021. They were instrumental in staffing the Trump administration and directing his policies, with at least 66 Heritage Foundation employees and alumni given positions in the administration.