Yes we are all Democrats. That is checking a box. No, we don't seem to have common aims in general.

[BainsBane]

78. How does insulting Democrats help your cause?

We again see another post that is all about telling people on DU how they are unacceptable for not taking your precise approach to politics. I won't say values because your fundamental mistake is assuming a different view about a candidate or tactic means an entirely different set of values. If you think people here actually believe what you claim. you haven't payed attention to those who disagrees with you.

A Democrat is someone who votes for the Democratic Party. A number of people here have said they do not and will not. Therefore they are not Democrats. I myself only became a Democrat following the 2000 election. While I often voted Democratic, I also voted Third Party, and wouldn't identify myself as a Democrat because I have never found capitalism an acceptable economic and political system. However, the Bush presidency convinced me to adopt a more pragmatic approach. He was so awful, I decided I had to vote consistently for Democrats.

Now on DU i have been called a Third Wayer while discussing Marxist theory and reminding people that change comes from social movements by the people, reminding them of the history of their nation and how the structures of government were set up to serve the interests of the wealthy rather than ordinary Americans. I then get insulted from people with little to no familiarity with history, Marxism, or leftist thought more generally, all because I don't share their obsession with defeating a single presidential candidate. You see, the idea that such values rise and fall with Hillary Clinton or any other individual is a complete fiction, ahistorical and counterfactual. To focus entirely on the presidency is to limit oneself only to contests among political elites. It does not promote or accomplish social change.

A key difference I have here with many is on the idea that the presidency is the be all and end all of political reform. To think that way limits enormously the possibilities for change and makes impossible the goals you list above. Those can only be accomplished through local, grassroots organizing that transforms the party, or creates a new party, from the ground up. And even then electoral politics are only a small part of the change that's required to realize your goals. Too many imagine a president will spontaneously transform American and deliver what you want. It doesn't work that way.

If you want a party to stand up against capital, I'm all for it. That party, however, is not the Democratic Party, which has never rejected wealth or profit. It is a mainstream party in a capitalist state. There has never been a time when it did not serve capital. Many wish for another FDR, with no sense of the historical context he responded to. If FDR were alive today, he would not govern in the same way because he responded to a series of social movements that threatened to undo the capitalist system. He constructed the New Deal to assuage the worst excesses of exploitation and thereby saved the capitalist system.

What you seem to want is closer to socialism than what the Democratic Party has stood for. I'm all for socialism, but I would like to know how you think we can make it work it within the confines of our current electoral and campaign finance system.
My question is how do you propose to enact those values you list? Do you have a reform to organize around? How do you propose to bring about those changes? Or do you think "corporatism," as you call it, rises and falls on the fate of Hillary Clinton? Because if the goal is simply to defeat a candidate, that accomplishes none of the goals you outline above. It simply is a different face heading the capitalist state.

If the goals of people really are to transform the relationship between politics, money, and citizen, why is it that so many devote most of their time to attacking other Democrats? That suggests to me goals not in keeping with what you claim.

Lastly, in prior discussion you disclosed to me that you in fact have no problem with corporate profit, as long as it is on the part of gun manufacturers, an industry where wealth is accumulated based on hundreds of thousands of deaths. I find that troubling and entirely inconsistent with what you write above.

Lastly, I find it fascinating that people who rail that discussions of racism or misogyny are divisive have absolutely no problem dismissing the majority of Democratic voters as beneath contempt. I once again come away with the impression that the only thing that people really care about is their disgust for Democrats whose thoughts, knowledge, tactics, or interests disagree with theirs at all.

The kind of change you are talking about requires a great deal of organizing and solidarity, and if you refuse to listen to the concerns of others, you make it impossible to effect any of that.