- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- politics@lemmy.world
Democrats are mad that their base are demanding and expecting them to at least try to do something.
For some reason Axios posted like at least 3 variations of the same story:
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/12/democrats-grassroots-groups-moveon-indivisible
Why it matters: Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in the room — on Monday complained activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible have facilitated thousands of phone calls to members’ offices.
- “People are pissed,” a senior House Democrat who was at the meeting said of lawmakers’ reaction to the calls.
- The Democrat said Jeffries himself is “very frustrated” at the groups, who are trying to stir up a more confrontational opposition to Trump.
- A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday
Zoom in: “There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this.’ … People are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority,” said one member.
- Some Democrats see the callers as barking up the wrong tree given their limited power as the minority party in Congress: “It’s been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).
- “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).
The other side: “People are angry, scared, and they want to see more from their lawmakers right now than floor speeches about Elon Musk,” Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg told Axios.
- “Indivisible is urging people who are scared to call their member of Congress, whether they have a Democrat or Republican, and make specific procedural asks,” Greenberg said.
- “Our supporters are asking Democrats to demand specific red lines are met before they offer their vote to House Republicans on the budget, when Republicans inevitably fail to pass a bill on their own.”
Reminder that Richie “I reject and resent the implication” Torres spent the election trying to get the political streamer Hasan Piker banned for antisemitism (read: criticising Israel).
I also remind dipshit Democrat defenders to hold Democrats to account. They ran a failed election campaign. They decided adhering to genocide was more important than winning. This is how they respond to their base expecting literally anything of them, is to resent them and tell them to shut the fuck up and plead there isn’t anything they can do so they just have to roll over.
People hate it when you bring up how shitty both sides are, but this is what lib centrists have been supporting for decades. When you promise a guaranteed vote for nothing in return out of a theory of harm reduction election after election, you’re left with a party so out of touch, so intellectually stunted, that they’re struggling with the mere concept of being an opposition party.
Unfortunately, the time to do anything about it has passed. Progressives and leftists have been shouting about how awful the Dems are since Bill Clinton, but instead we always had to “Vote Blue No Matter Who” and that our time would come someday. We could have spent the last 10 years primarying out all these weak-ass corporate stooges, but nobody wanted to divide the party. Now, we’ll be lucky to still have midterms in 2026.
Can I ask why “limp wrist(ed)” has reentered everyday speech? Does it have some connotation that isn’t “f*g”? Because that’s the only way I ever saw it used, but I’ve also recently seen people shocked it has that connotation.
It does have a broader connotation of being effete and dainty, which I think is what the intent was?
But, yeah, the old connotation doesn’t go away just because we’re using it differently. I don’t like it.
I wasn’t aware of any previous connotations, my apologies. I just didn’t want to call them limp-dicks, it felt too gendered and crass. I’ve always seen it as a cleaner version of that. Is limp-dick also meant to be a gay slur? I’ve edited the post to just use weak-ass.
Limp dick is more an attack on masculinity than gay men.
Yeah, I only asked because it seemed out of sync with the rest of your message, it didn’t seem like you were intending it to have that connotation. It might be something that jumped out at me due to my age and experience with homophobia (kids in the 90s would literally make a limp wrist gesture at you to call you gay), especially since every time it’s brought up people seem unaware of the anti-gay connotation.
To my knowledge there’s no anti-gay connotation with limp-dick, it’s just gendered as you pointed out.
Holy shit today I learned, I would have never connected those two things on my own. My ex-boyfriend used to make fun of people unironically trying to use that hand gesture, but I never once thought of it as a limp wrist!
The left in the US needed to do something similar to redmap, basically take over the party from the ground up. Field leftist candidates in every position at every level. School boards, dog catchers, literally everything all the way up to president. maga started this decades ago, and it’s why they have so many people in influential positions now. The left got outsmarted, outmanoeuvred, and beaten to the punch. And it’s quite likely too late for them to do anything about it politically as the US political system doesn’t look like it’s going to survive much longer.
That strategy also has been tried and failed repeatedly since the 1930s.
Outsmarted and outmanoeuvred? The left has been trying to make progress for decades. I’ve personally worked on some of those local campaigns. The problem is that the American people routinely rejected us, every single time. We never had any corporate donors or massive amounts of personal donations, no large media support to help get the word out, so is it any wonder we kept losing? There was a brief hope that social media would help level the playing field, but we all saw how quickly that got corrupted by fascists.
The white moderate did not want socialism, so they have gotten fascism.
Just a question from outside the US. Did the minority moderate want socialism? From outside it seems like a general issue with us moderates that they fear anything labeled leftism, not a specific white policy
I’m honestly not sure. I can definitely say those local campaigns I worked on received support mostly from queer people and people of color. I’m not sure how many minorities in the US still identify as moderates after the way the empire has treated them, but I know there are blocs of super Catholic South American migrants and ex-Soviet EEU migrants who hate leftism.
I was using the phrase to refer to MLK’s letter where he specifically calls out “the white moderate” as being one of his greatest obstacles on the path towards civil rights. If you’ve never read through the letter, I highly recommend it, as it describes the white moderate perfectly.
Is it the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” you are referring to? If so I’ll read it t tonight after work.
I’ve basically only seen the “I have a Dream” speech from him (except the cultural osmosis knowledge of FBI linked death and such) so the reference to white moderates went straight over my head and it just looked so odd to put a racial target in a post which otherwise seemed to view the struggle to rights from a classist view point rather than racial
Yes, it’s a really, really great letter IMO. Almost sad how well it applies to what’s currently happening.
Oh do read that. Read more of MLK than just the whitewashed sanitized shit. Also read malcom x and Fred Hampton.