Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway.
Those non-violent protests shook them so bad they wanted to charge non-violent Quaker protestors with terrorism.
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Protests mean nothing if it doesn't change how people vote.
Voting means nothing if no candidates represents how 75+% of the nation feels on the biggest issues.
It feels to me that all the issues of concern are represented on the ballot. People are just too stupid to figure out which door tells only lies.
Not in USAs case.
On every big economically significant issue of the last 40 years both parties have been on absolutely the same page, none of the candidates would make different choices (at least for both houses and presidents, not sure about state levels, Im not from over there).
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Even policies that one party publicly "opposed" were then carried on by the same party when it came in power (eg Bill Clinton).
So both parties would and have brought constant deregulation (financial markets especially), the same wars & anything war industry related, public infrastructure cuts (healthcare, schools, etc), taxation of profit, etc.
They bicker by design on issues that are huge for the non-elite (but meaningless to the elite as they can circumvent such issues), like lgbtq+ and reproductive rights.
59 Democrats voted for Single Payer, 0 Republicans, it failed
60 Democrats voted to expand medicaid and protect preexisting conditions, 0 republicans, it passed
The USA then elected more Republicans. Republicans used that majority to cut taxes for the rich, raise taxes on everyone else, a plan that would have expired in 2026 if the USA didn't just elect more republicans AGAIN.
Seems pretty fucking diverse, mate.
This is simply a lie
Health care is a prime example of how badly youre lying.
Act & position themselves differently, but make sure the end result for the rich doesn't change.
Eg - where is their one-payer system? At any point they were in power they could have implemented it. They just did not.
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Or how many people (and how much expenses) does medicade even cover?
Democrats have a lot of instances where they are miraculously one vote short of what their official positioning is (especially in the last like 30 years when each of the parties vote almost unanimously on the same issues).
What's funny is the majority of the country supported the war, at the time. Less than a quarter of polled citizens were against the war. (That's me! I was there!)
When polled now, the majority of the country claims they were against it at the time.
Echoes of the Civil Rights era, where at its peak, it was deeply unpopular, but the Boomers spent the last 50 years re-writing their own history to pretend they were always on the right side of history... only for Trump to make them feel safe in being racist again.
Who are you supposed to vote for when both parties drift right indefinitely?
I see it differently; despite campaigning to attract cowboys Kamalla still wanted to cancel student debt, tax the rich, and legalize weed.
The old Democrats are dieing of old age, the young ones want Green New Deal.
If you elect 60 democrats you might not get single payer because only one of them has to object, but if you elect 60 Republicans you will get pure privatized healthcare and millions of people will die stupid unnecesary deaths because of it.
So you see people don't feel represented when neither option gets them what they want? FPTP-voting is the problem.
One party specifically opposes any progressive election reforms. We'd all be so much better off right now if H.R. 1 For The People had passed, but it got the Mitch "The Reaper" treatment.
I mean personally I do vote every election I can, but people did change how they voted after protests were ignored. The pro-Palestinian protesters and the uncommitted movement during this 2024 election had a basic demand they wanted met, that was ignored by the Harris campaign and some number of them didn't vote because of it. And yet a lot of people blamed the protesters for Harris's loss (of Michigan at least), even though that is literally changing your vote because a protest didn't get her to change her position.
And that's also skipping over however many people didn't show up because of other positions she changed, like healthcare, fracking, the border, etc. And I do get it, I know Trump will be so much worse, and like I said I did vote, straight Democrat down ballot like I always do. But if the point of a protest is meant to show that a group of people is unhappy and you're losing their support, having that group turn around and vote for you anyway means that you can just ignore protests.
And again, I know I'll probably need to keep saying this, I voted for Harris. But the fact that the lesson a lot of the DNC is seemingly taking from this is that they should go more centrist just boggles my mind, because the point of people not showing up to vote for her after they protested and were ignored is literally that going more centrist and ignoring your base will lose democrats elections.
It's no surprise though, the DNC receives a ton of corporate donations so why would they seriously support policy that hurts those donors income. Like Josh Shapiro condemning the killer and those who supported them, and thanking the police who caught him in PA isn't surprising when he received $10,000 dollars from UHG in 2023 (the second most of any candidate). This is what people mean when they say voting is pointless, even if you somehow voted in a senate of 100% democrats, a house of 100% democrats, and Bernie Sanders as the president, they wouldn't support a proposal for something like single payer healthcare because most of the other democrats in the house and senate get money to not support major reforms like that.
You didn't like blood so you helped elect the river? I at least hope most people at those protests weren't as stupid as you imply. The whole point was to get the institutions being protested to divest from Israel.
Honestly, at this point I'm not convinced that Trump will be significantly worse for Palestine than Harris would have been. Neither one is going to stop sending weapons, and the stuff Trump supports are so extreme that Israel wouldn't want to do them anyway, like nuking Gaza. Either way in 4 years I can't see the US being the reason anything changes there.
I'm also talking about specifically the uncommitted movement and protests at the DNC, which were meant to get Biden and then Harris to support an arms embargo. The consequence promised by those protests was losing voters, so if that didn't happen it would mean that the Democrats could see these as empty threats and safely ignore them.
There are only so many times you can say "vote for me because the other candidate is so much worse" before people get tired of voting against their interests just to prevent someone else who is also against their interests just more so. Either way you're voting for something you don't support, and eventually people will give up. Blaming voters for a candidate losing and not the candidate for abandoning voters doesn't make sense. It's not the voters job to represent a candidate, it's supposed to be the candidates job to represent their voters.
Yeah thats true, real change is going to come from the house and senate, not the president.