Democrats must abandon ‘neoliberalism’, Connecticut senator warns, as party leaders face strongest backlash in years

Summary

Following Kamala Harris’s unexpected defeat, Democratic leaders are scrutinizing their party’s failures, particularly with working-class voters.

Figures like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Ro Khanna argue the party lacks a strong economic message, especially for those frustrated with stagnant mobility and neoliberal policies.

Sanders emphasized Democrats’ disconnect from working-class concerns, while Murphy criticized the party’s unwillingness to challenge wealthy interests.

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison announced he won’t seek re-election, leaving the party’s leadership in flux as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prepare to assume top roles amid a Republican resurgence.

  • @[email protected]
    1•9 days ago

    This hasn’t been an issue for climate science at all. People have done separate studies and come to the same results.

    No, I didn’t mean climate science hasn’t been replicated. It’s also not a straightforward distrust of science, but that’s not far off. Republicans will generally trust their doctor’s recommendations, but for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

    How much of this distrust a prospective member of the tent would share, I have no idea.

    This is conflating trust in the institutions with trust in the people. I’m sure most people would be happy to change the individuals in charge of the systems.

    If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

    But I doubt those same people would be interested in radically changing those systems.

    Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

    The US needs majority rule democracy.

    Agreed.

    The US needs socialism. We need a welfare state for the people who fall through the cracks. It’s too easy for businesses to fire the poorest customers on essential services like housing, even when a person works multiple jobs.

    Do you mean something beyond my “safety net”?

    We need to regulate businesses to prevent conflict of interests, malpractice, and oligopolies.

    As far as I know, tech is the main area we don’t already do this, just because it’s relatively new.

    We need to have a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires to reinject the wealth that is not larger circulating in the economy.

    I’m partial to a “death tax” (estate tax) myself. Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

    We need to redirect the owner class’ source of wealth. The workers need to own the means of production.

    I don’t trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

    I mean if we could get rid of those while keeping all the benefits the technologies give us that would be pretty cool right?

    Eh… You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

    I see a stateless society like that as an ideal to strive for by removing unnecessary or theoretically redundant layers of hierarchy in our society.

    I might fight you on the particulars… I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

    I’m a social democrat. Some people would say I’ve taken from market socialism, but it’s not my fault if they only have one idea.

    Market socialism is the only socialism that seems remotely plausible to me, and I have absolutely no objection to cannibalizing someone else’s system. I’m a software developer, so that’s pretty close to what I do.

    The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic. I’m fine with federalism as long states’ rights are about governmental separation of concerns. When states’ rights become states have the right to be a dictatorship where people have no rights, that is where I have a problem.

    Yes, that behavior is one of the main reasons the system as designed didn’t have enough guard rails. That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though. We may be about to see the opposite scenario play out.

    I would like to see a radical change with how we fund government agencies. We should get rid of the debt ceiling. Congress will still need to budget for the year. But if agencies need additional funding they should be able to pull from Congress who could choose to approve or deny funding as needed. Like a US military model of pulling resources as opposed to a Soviet military model of pushing resources. Government agencies shouldn’t be in a position where they aren’t fully funded or think they won’t be fully funded if they don’t use all of the allotted funding. But there should be transparency to the process of funding.

    If we can find a way to make Congress take money seriously, I’m fine with all of that. Running a deficit should exclusively be an emergency measure, and the debt should then be promptly paid down when times are good.

    I’m not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

    Single payer health care

    Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don’t generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

    free college tuition

    This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can’t, that’s society deciding this is not worth doing.

    decomodify housing

    I’m not familiar with this one, and a brief search makes me think it may be HOAs on steroids. Do you have an explainer you can link?

    public drinking fountains

    ? You mean just more of them? We have them in like every park around here.

    Defunding the police by having them focus on solving crime and giving the excess funding to agencies that specialize in jobs we don’t want police doing like mental health or animal control, etc. Cops shouldn’t be making wellness checks on patients or wasting their time catching stray dogs.

    I would at least give various levels of police support for the wellness check, ranging from a police radio to backup close at hand.

    I recommend talking to people from this generation. The people I have met in person are all well adjusted people.

    Yes, it’s worth noting that was based on recent reports from teachers that I have seen on Reddit, in center-aligned politics subs. I am expecting that if it’s a real problem there will be press on it soon.

    We will need a massive and sustained cult deprogramming effort for people who have been watching Fox News for nearly three decades. The alternative is continued political unrest and domestic terrorism even if we manage to educate the rest of the population out of neoliberalism and fascism.

    How do you even go about that?

    Based on what you wrote I’m going to guess that the cult deprogramming position is going to be the most disagreeable with you.

    My own parents are the best possible argument for it, but it would still need to pass muster in terms of the Constitution.

    I definitely have a distaste for media that attempts to proselytize, though.

    You’re likely to come across people and communities that are prone to fed posting, if you haven’t already.

    I had to look that up. That is irresponsible at a personal level as well as a societal one.

    On the other hand I don’t think we’re getting out unscathed from this trap we’ve set for ourselves.

    (I had this name several months ago but apparently Lemmy pruned me? I am increasingly uncomfortable with Reddit, but my re-registration was actually prompted by a temporary problem that made me think the Reddit app was demanding notification permissions on my phone to continue functioning.)

    • @[email protected]English
      1•17 hours ago

      Here’s part 2 of my comment because lemmy wouldn’t me put this in the first reply.

      I’m not familiar with this one, and a brief search makes me think it may be HOAs on steroids. Do you have an explainer you can link?

      What Does It Mean to Decommodify Housing?

      Federal policies enabling real estate speculation have allowed private actors to profit off housing investments while evading their fiscal, social, and legal accountability to tenants (Ferrer 2021). Combined with the disinvestment in public and subsidized housing, this has led to an unprecedented level of commodification, which produces and perpetuates housing injustice. To achieve increased (and ideally universal) housing affordability and access, advocates are calling for housing to be removed from the speculative market, or decommodified.17 This entails removing a significant portion of the housing stock from the private market, thus reducing the impact of speculation on housing access and ensuring permanent affordability by shifting to alternative housing models that promote public or community ownership and focus on protecting residents from displacement.18 Decommodified housing models fall into two broad categories:

      ◼ Public or social housing, which is generally owned by governments or other public entities, and

      ◼ shared equity models, in which ownership is generally shared between residents and community members or organizations

      https://www.urban.org/research/publication/decommodification-and-its-role-advancing-housing-justice

      ? You mean just more of them? We have them in like every park around here.

      For a while, Pierre-Louis writes, drinking fountains were a more popular source of water than bottled water. But the trend reversed and today drinking fountains are, by all accounts, disappearing. “Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums,” she writes.

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-thinking-public-drinking-fountains-are-gross-problem-180955931/

      I would at least give various levels of police support for the wellness check, ranging from a police radio to backup close at hand.

      Having security for social and health care workers or someone to restrain a patient is a separate concern from what the police do. If the police show up they can use deadly force, which isn’t wanted in health care cases. Social workers will most likely own a cell phone to call 911 and could easily be provided with one. I recommend watching Last Week Tonight, they’ve done extensive research into police reform.

      https://themighty.com/topic/mental-health/police-respond-mental-health-crisis-check-dangerous/

      https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-police-are-trained-to-do-when-confronting-suspects-2015-4?op=1

      How do you even go about that?

      The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA), which I have developed and tested to combat cult mind control, encourages a positive, warm relationship between cult members and their families while helping to raise essential questions for cult members to consider.

      It seems there has been work done on this topic. There are apparently more effective ways to go about it than 1970s cult deprogramming techniques. By all means, do those. But the answer cannot be to do nothing. It’s got to be to do something.

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-of-mind/202303/beyond-cult-deprogramming

      My own parents are the best possible argument for it,

      My Mom and my deceased Grandmother are as well. I’m sure lots of people can attest to this.

      but it would still need to pass muster in terms of the Constitution.

      I definitely have a distaste for media that attempts to proselytize, though.

      The foundation of freedom is the truth. That’s true of free speech and free press. At the bare minimum the media needs to be committed to telling the truth. To be clear, correcting errors is important, but I am referring to the Fairness Doctrine. We used to have standards for this.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

    • @[email protected]English
      1•17 hours ago

      No, I didn’t mean climate science hasn’t been replicated.

      We are discussing climate science, so this wasn’t relevant at all. Specifically we are discussing climate science in the context of Chris Murphy’s assertion that we need to embrace climate science skeptics and other people on the right. A populist movement will be able to bring uniformed or even misled people into a broader movement without needing to compromise on any of the social, cultural, gun and climate issues listed in his tweets. The Democratic Party needs to build a populist narrative that will attract people into a coalition, not continue the failed strategy of trying to grab moderate Republicans while alienating progressives and socialists.

      The above paragraph is what is relevant to the discussion at hand. I thought it was fair to exchange a general list of positions since part of the topic is coalition building. I am going ahead and responding to most of these topics, because what we as individuals need to be doing is educating ourselves and others.

      Also, I’m not google, and I don’t always have the free time to respond. If we dive too deep into any of them we will miss the point of this discussion and the lengths of our comments will get too long. If you want to go deeper into any of these topics, I recommend starting a post in Ask Lemmy or another relevant community. As it is I am going to have to break this reply into multiple comments because we’ve hit the capacity for comments with our discussion.

      for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

      The anti-vax movement, which has existed for centuries, is the reason the COVID misinformation was so widespread.

      https://www.verywellhealth.com/history-anti-vaccine-movement-4054321

      If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

      For many people, if not most people, these are one in the same. The idea that institutions themselves are what need to be changed is seemingly unintuitive in today’s society.

      Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

      There are people who want a dictator that agrees with them.

      Do you mean something beyond my “safety net”?

      Fear of losing customers, and therefore revenue, may prompt business owners to allow outdated payments. By not enforcing price increases for all clients, businesses ultimately will lose money as they struggle to satisfy unreasonable customers rather than focus on clients willing to pay the current rates.

      Best business practices involve not doing business with ‘unreasonable’ people who won’t pay higher rates. Unreasonable is a cute way of saying a person cannot afford to pay more. I’m sure for some businesses who only deal with rich people this advice seems harmless. But when it’s the same advice that a landlord would use when raising rent it goes from cute to making people homeless. In a capitalist society, it isn’t profitable to target the lowest income brackets. Especially when the initial investment the business needs to make is in new buildings.

      https://postpressmag.com/articles/2015/top-5-reasons-to-fire-a-customer/

      As far as I know, tech is the main area we don’t already do this, just because it’s relatively new.

      The majority of the industries in the U.S. have oligopolies that are dominated by a few large corporations. This creates significant barriers to entry for those wishing to enter the marketplace.

      We aren’t doing this enough in every sector. Tech is a noticeable example of this.

      https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-examples-oligopolies.asp

      I’m partial to a “death tax” (estate tax) myself.

      Waiting for billionaires to die will take too long. We needed wealth redistribution decades ago. Billionaires have access to the best health care money can buy and they are in no hurry to die.

      Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

      When it comes to tax policy, Congress has broad latitude to enact policy as it sees fit, within constitutional limitations, of course. And to that point, the constitutionality of retroactive income tax changes is well-settled. They are allowed.

      More recently, in cases such as United States v. Hemme, Welch v. Henry, and most notably, United States v. Carlton, the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed that both income and transfer tax (e.g., estate and gift taxes) changes may be implemented retroactively, “Provided that the retroactive application of a statute is supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means…”

      We have the capacity to write tax laws that do not give legal windows for capital flight and we have the capacity to enforce those tax laws. The US legally freezes assets, usually as part of sanctions, routinely. We need the political will to do so.

      Also, we are currently spending more money than the next nine countries combined on defense spending. We are logistically capable of stopping billionaires who attempt to illegally move assets out of the country. The 2024 article is more recent but the 2020 article does have some interesting comparisons with the rest of the world.

      We also need to cut defense spending, because it’s taking money from education and essential services. Not to mention electing a dictator who does whatever other dictators want is bad for national security and military readiness. So not educating people is actually bad for national security and military readiness since an uneducated populace is easier for a christo-fascist dictator to manipulate to take power.

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreylevine/2021/06/11/can-congress-really-increase-taxes-retroactively/

      https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/

      https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/04/30/us-spends-military-spending-next-10-countries-combined/

      I don’t trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

      It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of understanding ideas and math. This is the prevalence of neoliberal ideas my argument references. Incremental reforms will not work because the owner class will always take measures to thwart them. This is because they will always be incentivized to behave that way. And as long as they have the money to do so, they will be able to act on those incentives, both economically and politically. There is no catastrophe that will be triggered if rich people are less rich and everyone else is better off. Instead we would see economic prosperity.

      Eh… You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

      This attitude could have been used to dismiss any technology. Star Trek popularized the idea of computer tablets. Now we have tablets. The humans in Star Trek live in a post-scarcity society. If we don’t dismiss it out of hand, people could be living in such a society or comparable society in the future. In real life the answer might not be replicators, but more equitable and inclusive political and economic institutions.

      https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago/

      I might fight you on the particulars… I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

      If the costs of the redundancy outweigh the benefits we should remove the redundancy. The redundant elements of society are billionaires and millionaires. As long as we use a market base system people are going to amass a certain amount of wealth that can easily stretch into the tens of millions. Billionaires have billions does not add anything to the economy. Having an investor class with tens or hundreds of millions that give loans can allow for new small businesses to take off. But we need to regulate these investments and eventually replace them with other systems or else investors will amass too much wealth.

      That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though.

      It works as long the federal government is representative of the majority of people.

      I’m not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

      That’s what deficit spending is. The US is not a household. Deficit spending is a strategy and is not inherently irresponsible or responsible.

      Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don’t generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

      There are currently 17 countries that offer single-payer healthcare: Norway, Japan, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Sweden, Bahrain, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, and Iceland.

      https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer

      This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can’t, that’s society deciding this is not worth doing.

      This is an issue of political will. As the Republican Party wants to rule, not lead, having an uneducated population makes their job of deceiving people easier. Trump is notorious for his comment on loving the poorly educated.

      https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-love-poorly-educated/