We are Democrats - All of Us

[Martin Eden]

243. Thank you for that long and thoughtful post

I really do appreciate you taking the time to express and clarify your views.

I did not know DU was so thoroughly infested with RW trolls who can post for years and gain followers without being outed and tombstoned.

Nevertheless I still have doubts it's as pervasive as you describe, and it's very hard for me to believe the notion that so many of the prevailing views expressed by lifelong progressives such as myself are the product of RW instigation. Perhaps some of the incivility, but not what we see and understand with our own eyes and minds -- that the political goalposts in this country have been moving steadily to the right for decades and the Democratic Party has moved along with it.

Corporate money is supplanting representative democracy, and both parties are caught up in an inherently corrupt electoral process. If the American people through the Democratic Party do not produce and elect leaders whose mission it is to change this course, participation within the established political process will be increasingly meaningless and ineffective.

You did not address that at all in your post, perhaps because you consider it off-topic. But it cannot be ignored. As much as it breaks your heart to see what DU has devolved into (I was brought here in 2002 by my good friend Scubadude, who has since left this site) it is orders of magnitude more heartbreaking to see what our country and the Democratic Party is devolving into. We are passionate about substantive change that is critically needed to improve the lives of real people. Eventually we get to the point and yell Enough! -- no more status quo! To dismiss this as a "purity test" or the influence of RW trolls is IMHO unfair, untrue, and divisive.

We want the same things, though we may disagree as to how on earth they can be achieved. Frustration reaches the boiling point. Life (what we see on the news) imitates art in the theater of the absurd, the ignorant, and the cruel. The Democratic Underground has some value as a source of information, but notsomuch as a tool for effecting change. Nor, with increasing evidence, is it a community of mutual respect in which disagreement in the discussion of ideas benefits the participants by increasing understanding through exposure of diverse experience and views. It's more of a contentious battleground, but not entirely without good people interested in honest interaction.

Yes, we have to find a way to work together or we will accomplish nothing. A great man once said A House divided against itself cannot stand. This not only applies to DU; we see it at the national level across the entire spectrum. The American people as a whole are in bitterly divided camps because, I believe, the Powers That Be want it that way and have engineered it. A People divided against themselves cannot stand together for their own common interests. While the Left and Right are at each others throats, the Plutocracy further consolidates their grip on wealth and power.

You see in DU a microcosm of that larger paradigm, and on that I think we mostly agree.