> Over the last thirty years, courts and permissive regulators have allowed large companies to get larger, resulting in higher prices and limited consumer choice in daily expenses such as travel, cable, and food and beverages. And because concentrated market power leads to concentrated political power, these companies deploy armies of lobbyists to increase their stranglehold on Washington.
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017/07/A-Bet...
This is unrelated to the concentration of media. Plus, if they cared about that, they should have passed the law ensuring it when it hit the floor in 2009.
You realize that quote basically says "we've helped this happen for the past thirty years, but we've changed now!"
But it's equally arguable that it's just facing up to electoral reality. Winning elections costs a lot of money, Citizens United is a thing that exists, the other side has a lot of billionaires willing to bankroll them, too many voters still choose based on whose face they've seen on TV the most, and if you can't afford enough ad buys you're probably going to lose.
(And some of what's being cited in that Intercept piece is just plain sour grapes. The quote from Zephyr Teachout leaped out at me in particular: the district she ran for is the next county over from me, and I've been volunteering with a group trying to get Faso out in 2018. It's a mix of long-time party members and volunteers, angry Berniecrats, DSA radicals, and newbies to politics who had their Oh Shit! I gotta do something! moment when Trump was elected. (I fall into the last group.) One of the not-very-many things that everyone in that room agrees on was thank gawd Teachout isn't making another run at it. She'd be a fine candidate for a solidly blue district, but the party was absolutely correct to work against her in NY19; she was 100% not going to win that district against anyone who knew the words "librul" and "carpetbagger".)
But I digress. Look, I agree with you: the Democratic Party is a deeply flawed institution with a talent for unforced errors and own goals; they've been parasitized by too many expensive "consultants"; there's a gazillion things I wish they'd do differently. But "they're not changing quickly enough" or "they're not selecting candidates in the way I personally would prefer" doesn't translate to "therefore the whole party platform is a lie."
For me the Trump year has been a (sobering and sometimes humiliating) exercise in working with the situation we have, rather than the situation we want to have. And the situation we have right now is, frankly, a choice between that flawed and often disappointing party on one side, or barely-figleafed kleptocracy on the other. There just aren't other viable options right now, much as we might wish there were.
They've given no reason to expect things have changed, and their method of selecting candidates runs counter to their platform. The candidate that can raise the most money in a Citizens United world can't work against those interests, unless they only target opposing monopolies. And that's a kleptocracy too.
If you wish there was another viable option, you have to stop supporting what you consider "the lesser of two evils." Opposing other options is one of the areas the parties show true unity.
I again recommend a piece from The Intercept as a reminder that these problems run far deeper than Trump. https://theintercept.com/2018/02/17/bonus-intercepted-podcas...
I have my issues with the Democratic party but I don't take nearly as dim a view of them as you do. But even if I did, just opting out of the process as you suggest would just do even more to support the status quo.
Many of these candidates already proved that money didn't end in a win. And what does their winning matter if they can't represent your interests?
>I have my issues with the Democratic party but I don't take nearly as dim a view of them as you do. But even if I did, just opting out of the process as you suggest would just do even more to support the status quo.
War is a primary issue for me, and the status quo is basically the same voting R or D there. I'm not opting out, I'm refusing to support the current situation.
This is the height of arrogance.
Either major party can be characterized as the reigning party of broken promises and slime. Both of them will represent their own policies as of six years prior as reprehensible when the opposing party runs on those same policies; and both will use whatever power the electorate gives them to enrich themselves (or at least their own cause), if that is an option.
It is our duty to be objective and rational, and that requires us to challenge and reject "false equivalence" arguments whether it's Putin, or Assad, or Duerte, or Erdogan rationalizing their despotic government or US Republicans rationalizing their unprecedented and unequal malpractice in American government.
I feel that anyone who dares suggest that "both parties are the same" is so fundamentally ignorant that they're suffering from Dunning Kruger / illusory knowledge.
One only needs to read about "starving the beast" (a nefarious legislative plan of cutting taxes and not spending, to intentionally manufacture budget crises surrounding debt, to cut social welfare programs) or the Project for a New American Century (Republican PAC in 1999 which planned the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran and Syria in the early 90's before GWB re-invaded the middle east -- that list sound familiar?) to understand how the modern assault on Liberal Democratic order in the West was planned and executed.
I'm just so tired of false equivalence.
That's an odd thing to cite as it really isn't a form of corruption.
A limited federal government is a core pillar of conservatism and the republican party. That "nefarious" plan is the what they (and many right-voters) consider the most viable strategy for reducing the size and scope of the federal government. I think you'll find more instances of corruption/pandering/populism on the right, in the places where they are expanding the federal government.
Its a bit like calling democrats corrupt because they have a "nefarious" plans to confiscate more of your money (in the form of taxes) to pay for federal programs.
I find this is the way many of the back-n-forths go in the "party x is more corrupt" game. <insert party here> is so demonized in the minds of their opponents, literally acting in accordance with their political philosophy appears like a form of corruption.
I guess the "they want to kill your babies!" style rhetoric actually works.