90% of folks can’t be trained to kill.

Half of the remainder would rather frag their own commanding officers than some poor foreign kid.

You seem to be assuming that they didn’t vote for no apparent reason.

Conservatives, liberals, and neoliberals are all just subtypes of the classical liberal.

These terms are rather well understood by leftists, it’s only liberals who think they mean the same thing.

Inseperability. Codependence. A lack of notable distinction.

Y’know, like how our “two” major parties are the opposite faces of the same capitalist coin.

What does that have to do with anything?

It disproves your BS.

He’s a member of the right-wing monoparty, isn’t he?

He was an independent, switching his allegiance to the monoparty didn’t help him win any federal elections.

You can’t be an independent if there are no parties to be independent from.

You seem to have very suddenly switched from accepting the reality of the American monoparty to suggesting that no parties exist at all. Are you sure you’re arguing in good faith?

Why is Bernie Sanders such an ultra-capitalist far-right Republican?

He isn’t, that’s why he’s not president right now.

I would like an explanation for this because I didn’t realize he was, but your own logic says he is.

You’ve never discussed my logic, you jumped straight from “American political parties only pretend to be separate entities” to “America’s most famous center-left social democrat is actually a right-wing ultraconservative” as if making the latter claim would disprove the former.

There’s a reason why the Democrat superdelegates refused to nominate the most popular American politician in 2015.

What goalposts?

America has a capitalist monoparty that only pretends to be two parties so as to maintain the illusion of choice.

The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.

You’re not wrong, but it’s irrelevant so long as we live under parties that benefit from this status quo. There’s no way to get ranked choice voting without overthrowing the two-party system first. Things will have to get worse before they can get better.

We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed.

You seem to have contradicted yourself. Are we a democracy or are we flawed? If the system is structured so badly that fascists can claim totalizing power, can you really call the system democratic?

It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism

“We” don’t get to make that choice. The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.

I have much respect for drag and don’t disagree with that point in general, but in this particular case I must protest.

Democracy is a process for legitimizing a government. The voters cannot fail at voting, they can only be failed by elected parties that don’t faithfully represent their interests once in power. The responsibility is entirely incumbent on the parties themselves, as they get to pick how they manipulate public sentiment into supporting them and the voters have no agency in the decisions those parties make.

60% less than the last presidential election. The one Biden won.

Stop blaming third parties for the Democrats’ failure to build a coalition within its own party.

It’s been so frustrating to have to put up with Democrats that try to enforce a Republican-style party line instead of building the coalition they need to win.

It’s even more frustrating when they put a hundred times more effort into trying to build a coalition with members of the party they claim to be a threat to Democracy instead of their own left wing.

“Thoughts and Prayers”

Seems a fitting epitaph for America.

Sure, blame the voters for the lack of choice they were given. That seems very productive and totally not just an excuse so you don’t have to admit that the Democrats are responsible for enabling genocide.

Harris should have lied, then. There’s no punishment for promising the world and failing to deliver.

We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves.

The purpose of a system is what it does, and America has never done Democracy. Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.

Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.

Literally all of the third party voters could have voted a straight Democrat ticket and it wouldn’t have affected a single swing state. Third-party voting was down by about 60% versus 2020.

You’re not wrong, but there’s no way to get there from here that doesn’t involve the American political system becoming something else first.

But you have to admit that RBG didn’t step down during Obama’s term, that they let Republicans keep Merrick Garland out of the SC and gave them that seat, that they didn’t put Roe v. Wade into law during any of the chances they had to do so.

Admit that they were excited about Cheney and Bush’s kids giving an endorsement and never even bothered putting Sanders on stage at a campaign rally.

Admit that their presidential candidate underperformed the abortion-legalizing state ballot measures in every state that had one.

If we’re talking about a distinction without a difference then we can admit that America is a one-party state that only pretends to be a two-party system.