Mentalist, on 03 November 2026 - 08:08 PM, said:
Chance, on 03 November 2026 - 08:00 PM, said:
I'm no American but too me it seems that the further left the democrats go the more they alienate the middle and the less likely they are to win the next election. It kinda seems the basic working of politics in most of the west really.
there's a growing polarization between cities that are becoming increasingly progressive, and rural/less economically developed areas, that are becoming more conservative/culturally backward, especially as the more progressive youths are moving out into said cities.
In places where electoral system is set up to favour the less populated areas, this leads to a significant rightward slide overall. The only real way to address this is to either reform the system, or pull up the backwaters.
The founders of the country, who lead to us Americans living life now, set up a Senate system that says Wyoming and North Dakota (less than 600k and less than 800k) have more and stronger representation on a federal level than the Los Angeles metro area (~18 million people). It's a very broken system that leads to much stoppage of progress and much weakening of large city power.
The middle isn't actually alienated much by overall Democratic policies and implementation - the middle is generally swayed by media companies that claim to be journalistic and mostly want the right wing folks to win elections. The coverage of the policies and candidates have slumped into "Republican said or does horrific, illegal, corrupt things, we can't do that" and "Democrat weak, yet able to propose and implement coherent policy that we don't like because it's not wealth extraction."
The faith of many older Democrats and voters in a mythical non partisan nature of major media entities is neglect in updating assumptions. The battles aren't lost and Brazil figured out how to mobilize and fight effectively with Lula's election.
Of course, our Secretary of State proudly aided and abetted Bolsonaro in fleeing Brazil illegally because we have a bunch of corruption mongers in power right now.
I survived the Permian and all I got was this t-shirt.