House Democratic lawmakers reportedly used a closed-door meeting earlier this week to vent their frustrations with progressive advocacy groups that have been driving constituent calls and pressuring the party to act like a genuine opposition force in the face of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on federal agencies and key programs.
The voted third party so I imagine not.
Except unless they had been lobotomized, they knew damn well that their vote was being thrown away and that Trump would be the likely winner.
Which is tact approval of Trump and everything that came with it.
You’re rephrasing the post as though you’re making a “gotcha!” statement, when it’s just the thing they said. Their argument is that the Dems needed to lose for any chance of party reform to occur, and they voted in a way that would encourage that outcome.
It’s an argument that I find compelling, especially given the fact that the Democrat leadership seems to be actively trying to learn all the wrong lessons from their humiliation, where they are trying to learn anything at all. This indicates to me that, to some degree, OP is correct and there wasn’t even a snowball’s chance in hell that party leadership would have done anything significant had they coasted to victory based solely on being not-Nazis.
To seat his logic in another context, where the Trump of it all is not a factor, it’s the same argument I’ve heard lefties trot out in a discussion about legal vs illegal protest tactics. Which is to say, effective protest is protest which forces people to engage with the issue being discussed, and legal protest is ineffective because, by design, it is easily ignored by both the public and the powers that be.
All that being said, the argument is not so compelling as to convince me that any pain caused to the Dems in service of organizing an actual progressive wing is worth the pain Trump’s election is causing people, the environment, or the world in general. I don’t know anything about OP, so I don’t want to state this as fact, but, to me, it smacks of the privilege that comes with figuring they will make it through this period okay (if not particularly great). Therefore, it’s worth it to them to endure this inconvenience, in the hopes that it effects change in the Dems. Attack their argument on that front all you like, but you’re not contributing anything by saying “you helped elect Trump!” when that’s what they said they did and they’d do it again.