#ostrich dems

[thatstormygeek]

“What surprised me most was that Democrats punished gender nonconformity at roughly the same rate as Republicans,” he said.

“On the left, the bias against gay candidates has moved from ‘don’t be gay’ to ‘don’t look or sound gay,’” Martin Naunov, an assistant professor of political science and a faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, told Northwestern Now. His paper was published recently in the Journal of Politics. “Voters across the political spectrum, including those who think of themselves as allies, still show bias against candidates who look or sound even slightly gender nonconforming — a key cultural marker of gayness,” Naunov said. “This has real consequences for who gets elected and represented in public life.”

A study examined support for gay candidates based on gender presentation. The results may surprise you. - LGBTQ Nation

A new study turns a hypothetical candidate for Congress "gayer" and "straighter."

Among all voters, identifying as gay dropped a candidate’s probability of support by seven points. A gender nonconforming appearance dropped a gay candidate’s support by another seven points. Both Democrats and Republicans penalize gender nonconformity at the same rate. Maybe the most thought-provoking finding was that the gender nonconformity penalty applies to both gay and straight men. A straight man who looks or sounds gender nonconforming also pays an electoral cost, Naunov found. “We used to refuse to elect gay people. Now we elect them, but so long as they conform to a very particular version of masculinity,” Naunov said.

[thatstormygeek]

The thing that Democrats, as a party, have still not yet accepted is that they have to solve the problems. Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place. It means you have to expand the Supreme Court and put in term limits and end the antidemocratic unaccountability of the institution, rather than hoping that the inherent robustness of our storied institutions will somehow reassert itself in time to save the day. The distinction that I’m making here is less ideological than practical. The entire pseudo-civil war inside of the Democratic Party over “socialism” is a canard. Nobody really knows what socialism means, and the policy overlap between the socialists and the “progessives” is significant. What is propelling the popularity of the socialists in certain districts is less an upswell in Marx-reading and more the fact that these candidates are touting both policy positions and a fighting attitude that would solve the problems of the people. Medicare for All solves a problem; incremental improvements to Obamacare do not. Aggressive wealth taxes combined with aggressive promotion of mass unionization solve a problem; minor tax increases on the rich and “business and workers can thrive together” platitudes do not. Expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on justices solves a problem; calling on the next Democratic president to appoint someone liberal does not. This list can go on and on and on. The point is that in each of these cases, the left-most position is the one that would actually make a significant positive material impact on the macro-level problem, whereas the incremental approach would mitigate the underlying problem to such a small extent that the average person could be forgiven for not perceiving the change at all. Instead of thinking of the differing approaches to these issues on a left-to-right or radical-to-conservative axis, it can be helpful sometimes to just ask: “What would it take to actually solve this problem, as opposed to just moving somewhat in the right direction on it?”

You Can't Solve Half a Problem

The moderate's delusion.

Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good.

It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude. Billionaires are going to fight against you raising their taxes, period. If you’re going to have the fight, it might as well be over a change that would, if you win, solve the problem. Moderates are shocked when they can’t mobilize Americans over policies that would not meaningfully change their lives for the better. This is, frankly, stupid. Assess our economic and social and political problems honestly. Decide what measures are necessary to solve those problems. Then fight for those measures. Do not cut your request in half before you begin to fight, due to your mistaken belief that this will make winning your fight more realistic. It won’t.

[thatstormygeek]

It's...interesting...that this is the fight that was picked, is it not? The one that just happens to give the party itself more power. One that may technically go against one of their positions...but it's not like it's an important position, such as backing the blue. Or supporting billionaires. It's not that the party really has an issue with gerrymandering - they just don't like to lose. An anti-gerrymandering position was another "look, we're better than the GOP" bit. Now that they've found a reason to promote gerrymandering that's acceptable to the "left," there's not much reason for them to continue holding the anti position. But we'll see.

It's also the most anti-democratic fight. The one that erases the voices of voters. That so many supposed progressives are on board even "temporarily" as an "emergency measure" is disheartening. (look at DHS and ICE if you want to see what temporary emergency measures look like in practice)

When the fight was demanding healthcare for their constituents, they folded. When it was not rubber-stamping Trump's cabinet picks, they folded. When it was not funding war or ICE? Over and over they folded.

There has been the occasional hint of growing courage and they've finally actually managed to stand up against the SAVE Act (though only if we keep the message focused on cishet married women. try to bring up literally any other demographic harmed by it and suddenly all that resistance is pointed your way). But the national Democratic party has a long, long way to go before I'm personally convinced they are worth even half a shit.

Go. Fight. Win.

The way forward.

[thatstormygeek]

Democrats had essentially never held a better hand, which to a few of them appears to have meant it was the perfect time to fold.

"What is the point of the Democrats?" a federal worker at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked me via Signal late on Sunday night. A solid question: after 40 days, the longest shutdown in US history, eight members of the minority party in the Senate broke ranks and voted to throw all the people they had theoretically been fighting for under the bus. "What in the fuck was the point of this shutdown?"

'A Slap in the Face': Federal Employees Feel Betrayed by Democrats' Shutdown Cave

"I would rather be an actual pawn. At least pawn sacrifices are calculated and achieve something."

Though of course opinions across whatever is left of the two million-plus federal employees will vary, and most will surely welcome the return of a paycheck, everyone I heard from said that their colleagues were all more or less in lock-step at this news. "Most of us are furious, disheartened, & very much feeling 'we had low expectations but not THAT low,'" said a National Park Service employee. "[With] many of us relying on internal charity networks & living out of cars, we STILL predominantly (in my experience) want Dems to keep fighting. None of us want to have literally bled through this shutdown only to have a few senate Dems abandon the vociferous screams to stand firm." The Senators who voted with all Republicans (save Rand Paul) included Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Dick Durbin (IL), John Fetterman (PA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Time Kaine (VA), Angus King (ME), Jacky Rosen (NV), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH). Literally none of those are up for reelection in 2026; Shaheen and Durbin are retiring, while the others can hope everyone forgets by 2028 or 2030. Notably absent from the list is, of course, Chuck Schumer — who presumably can hide behind his no-vote while trying to downplay his failure as party leader to maintain a united front. ... Durbin, Schumer's second-in-command in the Senate, insists that everyone criticizing the vote is just a small-minded imbecile, more or less. People "need to understand how the Senate works," he said on Sunday night, claiming that the elevation of healthcare subsidies to national issue — totally, no one was worried about insurance costs before — counts as a win. Republicans, meanwhile, continue to count "winning" as a win. "Nevermind the administration disappearing people off the streets or murdering Caribbean fishermen on a whim or shutting down agencies illegally or declaring war on trans people or openly accepting bribes, Dems picked a fight on health care and couldn't even find the spine for that," the NOAA employee said. "I would rather be an actual pawn. At least pawn sacrifices are calculated and achieve something. All this for a fucking meaningless vote."

[thatstormygeek]

Libs on bluesky are invested in telling a trans woman that if she doesn't commit to potentially voting for an explicitly anti-trans candidate three years before the 2028 election, she is the reason Democrats will lose.

Not that it's better over here. Just today I saw a post talking about how 3rd party voters and non-voting leftists are to blame for everything happening in the US right now.

The complete inability to conceive of the idea that maybe, just maybe, party leadership might need to do a little soul searching is just mind-blowing to me.

[thatstormygeek]

Look, it's simple:

If the Democrats were actually an opposition party, they wouldn't be voting with Republicans. At all. It wouldn't be "well, my constituents at home actually really do like blowing up Iranian elementary schoolers so I'm voting in favor of war" It would be 100% unanimous opposition.

It's not.

Which is how we know their claims are lies.

[thatstormygeek]

The voters Booker was scolding from the Michigan stage have told surveyors, repeatedly, exactly what would have brought them to the polls. Almost none of it looks like what he’s selling.

When Democrats lose and demand unity, the demand tends to run one direction. Voters are told to get behind the party. The party is almost never told to get behind the voters. Booker’s Michigan speech is the most viral recent version of that demand, delivered in the register of a parent disappointed in a child. It’s also, if you look at the research on bringing Biden-to-dropoff voters back into the party, about the worst possible speech he could have given.

The Scolding

Cory Booker went to Michigan to yell at the people who sat out 2024. The voters he was yelling at have been telling pollsters what would act

This is a scolding. Strip away the football and church metaphors from earlier in the speech, and what’s left is a United States senator telling a room full of Democrats that the voters who didn’t show up in 2024 are the reason Trump is president. They got hung up on 10% ideological purity. They let it happen. Be mad at them. It’s a righteous-sounding scolding. And I’m sure it lands for Harris voters who turned out, watched others stay home, and have been stewing ever since. I get the stewing. I voted for Harris. I wrote pieces making the case for voting against Trump. I went on CNN right before the election to talk about trans rights specifically, even though Harris’s stance on that issue was weak enough that I was making the argument despite her, not because of her. I’m not the person Booker is lecturing in Michigan. I’m one of the people sharing his exasperation. But the exasperation doesn’t make the scolding a good strategy. And shaming voters who already opted out of a political process they found disappointing is a strategy with a track record. The track record is that it doesn’t work. ... Now look again at what Booker said in Michigan. He characterized the skippers as people who agreed with Harris on 90 of 100 issues but sat out because they couldn’t stomach the 10. Righteous purists. Hostage-takers of the party. The data says the opposite. A meaningful share of these voters stayed home because Harris spent her campaign seeking out Liz Cheney instead of talking to them. These were voters who watched the Democratic nominee chase Republican endorsements and concluded the party wasn’t going to fight for them. And Booker’s prescription in Michigan is more of what caused the problem. His message: everybody get behind the nominee. Get in line. Unity means not complicating things. Stop being the reason we lose.

[thatstormygeek]

Look at this full-throated allyship...

"I know there are two sexes, men and women,” Talarico told the news outlet. “I also know there's a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."

One party wants us violently exterminated and the other is all "there's two sexes and the freaks rare abnormalities" after using nonbinary people as a provocative punchline.

But sure, let's everyone rave about Democrats being assholes on social media. Because that's definitely a rare trait that we need more of in government.

Willingness to get into online spats is not what I'm looking for in a representative. But obviously I'm a fucking weirdo. So whatever.

As long as the party refuses to draw hard lines about what it stands for, Democrats are not trustworthy. And each time the conversation even approaches this topic, there are immediate cries about how we have to "stop the purity tests," so I don't see that changing soon.

The "stop" part is extra amusing, because that would require the Democratic Party to stand for literally anything other than "we're not the GOP." And even that's negotiable, depending on if said Republican is willing to go against the more hated wing of their party. Please tell me when there has ever been a "purity" test for a Democratic candidate for anything.

Instead, we're going to get more of this:

But most devastating for transgender people was the uptick in Democratic support. Previous anti-trans bills had drawn defections from only a handful of habitually anti-trans Democrats—usually just Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who have voted with Republicans on several anti-trans bills and amendments brought to the House floor. Tuesday's vote was different. Eight Democrats joined every Republican to pass the bill—the largest Democratic crossover on a standalone anti-trans bill in recent memory.

"instead of the usual two transphobic Dems, this time there were 8!"

Well, yes. Because when those two faced no real consequences for throwing marginalized people into the meat grinder, others who are less committed to their bigotry were bound to follow.

Fuck all establishment politicians. Directly in the ear.