This is where the democrats need to smarten up. They should be hammering “tax and spend” Trump, 24x7.
The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.
Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks.
If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files”
I'd argue more largely that the right is a loose coalition of people with differing goals...whether it's conservatism, lower taxes, anti immigration, religious right, etc. I'm reminded how my econ professor would say that hardened bootleggers and hardcore Christians would pretend to be friends just long enough to vote to keep alcohol illegal.
I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain.
Don’t bike shed. Tax and spend Trump is making your gas more expensive and allowing you Latin American burgers to out American farmers out of business.
The current US right is a hodgepodge in terms of what they love, but for Trump's victories was unified by who they hate.
The Republican base doesn’t give a shit about “tax and spend” either. For all their hand-wringing about deficit spending, Republican administrations have for decades been the party of excessive spending and ballooning deficits.
They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back.
The Democrats are not smartening up.
The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.
The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class.
Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating
DSA are democrats.
clearly they are smartening up
DSA is its own party; DSA affiliated candidates only run as democrats because the US system basically all but disallows third party success. I guarantee you that DSA members would not associate themselves with neoliberal Democrats at all, given the choice.
How is that different than the Tea Party republicans?
Smartening up in the sense of winning elections? Or serving their constituents?
They have been winning elections.
And (in Ossof and Mamdani’s cases) serving their constituents.
Trump and MAGA also won elections. My point is winning with a shitty plan is not smartening up, unless your only goal is winning the current election. The Republicans committed suicide, we saw it live.
Yes
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> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.
That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself.
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> replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo.
Isn't it clear to you that you're misrepresenting DSA's position?
I don't think so. I'm not an expert and I'm not an American. I did read their web site, I listen to what their candidates are saying and doing. I could very well be wrong. But when they say "socialism" there are two or three options. The first is they don't understand what that word means. The second is they do understand what that word means. The third is they've redefined this word. We already had a word for what people want, it's social-democratic, not socialism. So if they called themselves social-democrats and not socialists I would support them and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
"We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control."
What are they not saying? They are not saying things like we should raise taxes to fund social programs so we can be more like Europe. Europe is capitalist. Europe has free markets. DSA opposes capitalism. DSA wants to, in their words: "We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.".
What am I not understanding? Barrack Obama wanted accessible healthcare for all, he was not DSA. That's an awesome idea for the US that Democrats rallied behind and partly failed. Show me in DSA's words, material and action, how they are really social-democrats who just want more vacation, healthcare, worker protection while still maintaining capitalist free markets - like Europe. I mean they want all that but not in that way.
This 100%.
I think most of us want a moderate Democrat. I hope populism dies with Trump/MAGA in the coming years. We don’t need to match them with our own distasteful populism.
moderate corporate democrats are repeatedly getting trounced in elections and the DSA crew are starting to win so citation definitely needed
How is DSA populist? The United States is a country famously opposed to socialist, I don't think they could've picked a more controversial position.
CHAZ was an idealistic symptom of applying John Lennon's Imagine to a neighborhood of Seattle, and it wasn't the only city tempted by this endeavor (if only it didn't finish with an arms dealer taking leadership of the locality);
"Defund the police" was a campaign slogan at last election.
I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are. If it's not socialism, it sure shares the same conclusions. And yet "The most extreme left in the US is the most extreme right wing for Europe" is a common belief.
>I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are.
I am often impressed how abusive and violent US policemen are. And they have budgets rivaling the defense spending of whole countries and are armed to the teeth with military grade equipment.
>But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years.
Except form the million of black people living in the south of the US. For them, the USA is a democracy only since 1964.
And if you argue "yes but it got better", the Republicans are making everything to get back to before 1964.
Incidentally, your "we can't let workers decide" sounds a lot like "we can't let negroes vote" or "we can't let women vote". And is as much FUD.
The world has moved forward. There was slavery in many places.
I had a similar discussion in real life. Where we concluded it that Roe vs. Wade being overturned was the biggest step backwards. Most of the other stuff is noise but this one is a biggy that's hard to fix. It sucks for Americans (which I'm not but I was debating an American).
Nobody is saying we can't let workers decide. Most of us are workers. Most of us vote. We are deciding. The US has also made progress on workers' rights at the state level to my understanding. At the end of the day we still have to lean on the democratic process, we need to debate policies and we need to get people to think critically and think things through. This is very hard to do today given the public discourse and tribalism.
Clearly a social component can exist within a democracy, European nations are an example of this? Are there any proposals more radical than European-adjacent style social policies?
As a citizen of one of the European countries you mentioned, let me tell you: The DSA would run as a center-left party in pretty much the entire union. You have—respectfully—not a clue what socialism means, because the DSA agenda has absolutely nothing in common with communism in the first place.
Respectfully does the government run the grocery stores in your European country? Is public transit free in your European country? Do your center-left parties advocate for abolition of your parliament and democratic processes? Do they talk about how the rich are the source of all evil? Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?
And sure, there are also ideas like healthcare for all which I think are similar but that isn't really what the DSA is about. It's definitely not about transforming the USA to have a better social network like healthcare or protection for employees. It's a lot more radical than that.
> Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?
Yes, they are center-left at best, and your frenzied rebuttal against regular people trying to improve their lives and the country they live in is alarming. Free public transportation..the horror.
>> Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?
> Yes
Respectfully, you may have skimmed some material or watched a couple of minutes of MSNOW, because you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the DSA just wants free public transportation otherwise. Key aspects of the DSA's goals and the actual policy implementation actions of elected DSA-aligned politicians that are quite well aligned with the position of a person holding communist and other relatively extremist sympathies:
- state-controlled grocery stores [0]
- public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries [1]
- abolition in full of police and prisons ("cut police budgets annually toward zero") [1]
- ending sanctions on states backing terrorist activities [1]
- permitting open, uncontrolled immigration [2]
- disregarding the existence of Israel ("democratic secular state [Palestine], from the river to the sea") [3]
- giving voting rights to noncitizens and prisoners [4]
[0] https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-groceries (a city headed by a DSA-aligned mayor)
[1] https://program.dsausa.org/
[2] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/using-power-builds-po...
[3] https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-the-ceasefire-in-gaza/
[4] https://program.dsausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DSA_WD...
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I think what amazes me the most is that you read all of that and said “nope”.
I can’t wrap my head around why you would sacrifice your life and well being so that a small number of people can become impossibly wealthy?
I read those pages and find it absolutely fantastic. How someone could fight for the position to be a wage slave with no security against inflation, cost of living or bankruptcy or homelessness due to illness is frankly insane.
Did the person above you say that the DSA suggests that the states should run public grocery stores, and did you gloss over it, parodying him?
Wouldn't you recognize that bad faith characterizes the DSA lines?
Canada has government-rune liquor stores, they're doing ok. Not exactly a "grocery store", but still PRETTY SHOCKING. UK has co-op (chains). There's Mondragon in Spain - I know it's employee-owned but that's not much different than government-owned if you really think about it.
Public-transit where I live is not free, but it is subsidized, with various recent efforts from municipal and state governments to further reduce costs for all residents.
Germany is defined as Social Democracy or a Social Market Economy. It marries free-market capitalism with social welfare policies, state regulation, and collective bargaining to ensure economic growth and social security, including robust social safety nets.
The US once had stronger unions and basic worker-oriented safety nets. This has been dismantled since the 80s, while piling on the National Debt by pilfering the treasury and "returning" the money to the (rich) end of the tax base.
There was a great quote in the original Deus Ex: "In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent."
In my mind the DSA is trying to shift the Overton window towards something more reasonable, that has already existed in the US. Focusing on the extremes to dismiss the DSA entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Free public tenant is very common. The wealthy being massive sources of the problem is very common. The U.K., hardly a bastion of socialist views, has massive amounts of food banks and he only attempt to overturn democracy I’ve seen was on Jan 6th 2021.
I disagree. When I moved from Finland to the US, I was surprised to find how popular actual "abolish private property" style socialism was among young Americans. I hanged out with leftist people when I was a student, and I kind of knew many of the people who eventually ended up running the Left Alliance (the main left-wing party). My impression was that they had all accepted free markets as a necessary evil, rather than advocating for the socialism of their predecessors. But it looks like Finnish students have started adopting American socialist ideas in the recent years.
Bernie is probably the most well-known democratic socialist in the US, but he is not a member of DSA. By his political positions he would be either in the left wing of Finnish Social Democratic Party or in the mainstream of the Left Alliance. He would probably choose the Left Alliance, since it is more like a coalition of like-minded activists, while the party is the primary actor for the Social Democrats.
AOC, another well-known democratic socialist, would also fit in the Left Alliance. She is part of the moderate wing of DSA. But if you start looking into the ideological wing, you find plenty of actual socialists who would make Finnish mainstream leftists uncomfortable.
> DSA's agenda is socialism via the democratic process, and
> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.
So, getting into elected office by winning elections is wanting to abolish the democratic process?
I think I'm beginning to understand why the hardcore MAGA folks loves Trump so much.
>The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.
You misspelled "Trump".
There is only one party making it harder for people to vote, and it is the Republican party.
They are part of the democratic party so they are democrats.
As for their agenda, you are wrong.
I'm going to believe what they say:
https://www.dsausa.org/
"The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters in all 50 states. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few."
"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."
"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. socialism conflicts directly with democratic values. At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side. All previous socialist "experiments" were not democracies.
If 'democratic values' are everyone having an equal voice in how the systems of a country are arranged. And if those people, through a democratic process, decide that the systems of their country shouldn't support the exploitative elements of capitalism, then it would definitely be democracy in action to make that come true. Anything counter to that would be, by definition, anti-democratic.
When you say "socialism conflicts directly with democratic values" I genuinely have no idea what "democratic values" you're talking about.
> "democratic socialism" is an oxymoron
No it's not, check out Europe, mostly northern countries, it's working just fine.
> At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side.
Again, northern europe screaming at you.
So you're wrong...
Also, you're Canadian, maybe it's not your business
I am also a Canadian, and since midnight we are in a big economic war with the USA.
I feeel those topics are a bit of my business.
Who exactly imposed those tarriffs?
Scandinavian countries you are referring to are practicing Social Democracy, they are not Democratic Socialist states.
In other words, Social Democrat != Democratic Socialist
Scandinavian model relies on competitive private enterprise to create wealth, combined with strong labor union collective bargaining, universal public services, and high consumption/income taxes that apply broadly across society.
DSA seeks to move past or dismantle the capitalist economic system, advocating for social, public, or worker ownership of the means of production.[1]
[1] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism...
No they do not and it doesn't say that anywhere in the linked website.
Why are you lieing?
From what i can read they want the same scandinavian model with strong labor unions, universal public services and so on.
"We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation."
From the linked website. Now, that's not quite "the means of production", explicitly stated. It's just "the key economic drivers", so most of the means of production.
Maybe you ought to be a little less quick to accuse others of lying.
The largest energy producer in Finland is state-owned and most cities own their own energy production. What’s the big deal?
So what's wrong with that phrase?
Norway collectively owns its 'key economic drivers'.
Is that a bad thing?, they're still capitalistic, just with better respect for its people.
You probably collectively own things via the stock market too.
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"Democratic Socialism" is VERY different from "Social Democracy"
In socialism with supposed democracy, where the state owns the means of production and supposedly the workers supposedly have a say about everything, they actually end up with a say about nothing (at least not without greasing the right palms in the inevitably corrupt system that arises).
In Social Democracy, capitalism is the underlying system, where corporations and workers can own means of production, but it operates under sufficient regulation that the excesses and systemic failures of captialism (e.g., failure to prevent Tragedies Of The Commons, tendency towards monopoly and excess concentration of power, consistent tendency to abuse and impoverish workers, etc.), you end up with successful systems like Northern Europe.
The two are very different, and we need to hold the DSA people to the latter and not let them sneak in the former.
You are wrong.
The term you are looking for is communism, not socialism.
Nordic countries are practicing Democratic Socialism.
DSA is not communist.
Why are you spreading this crap when it takes 2 neurons and a few searches to find out you are wrong?
You are mistaking Democratic Socialism (of DSA fame) for Social Democracy practiced by Nordic countries.
Different beasts as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49404166
Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism are the same thing
They themselves literally say out loud that they want to abolish our existing institutions. If you want to debate that point, go debate the DSA candidates themselves.
You're wrong again.
> he populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.
Leading but honest question: Are those candidates the same as Trump? I do not see how they share anything other than strategy and spin, and those things don't make policy.
The Democrats are part of the system.
Huh? Check out the Twitter feeds of your favorite Republican or Republican-aligned personalities. It's racial or nationalistic dog whistles all day every day.
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That would be confusing considering he forced a vote to release the Epstein files.
If that is confusing to you, you are probably not ready for politics :-) Politicians act with hypocrisy or twisted plans (where the most straightforward conclusion is not necessarily the truth) all the time. Random example from yesterday: the same person who said 19 T deficit is too much before being elected, contributed to moving the deficit to above 40 T.
However, I also highly doubt Schumer would be in Epstein files. People seem stuck on the meme that being in Epstein files is the main reason why someone acts one way or another. This degenerate over-simplification has to stop.
I really don't want people to be left with the impresion that this is Democratic Party incompetence. It is not. They are complicit in pretty much everything the Trump administration has been doing. They know what works. Just do what Obama did in 2008 and run on a populist economic platform. They don't want to do that. It's a choice, not incompetence.
If Chuck Schumer is asked about the weather, he'll first check with Netanyahu.
Just look at what Senatorial campaigns Schumer supports and doesn't. There's a lot of suspicion that Schumer (and the DSCC) is going to leave Abdul El-Sayed out to dry because he's anti-Israel, basically. Mandela Barnes got similar treatment in 2022. And yet you have blockbuster challenges like Jaime Harrison's, which spent $130M to oust Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10. Trump won by 12 so I guess he gained 2? Well done, everybody, the system works.
Oh and what did the DNC do with Jaime Harrison after he spent $130M to lose by 10? They made him the DNC Chair. The Democratic Party loves a loser. Just like Howard Dean.
The vast majority of sitting Democratic senators voted against funding for Israel this year.
The DSCC funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall funding in these races, and they have their own goals which may or may not be aligned with the party as a whole.
If your single issue is Israel funding (which it probably shouldn’t be but that is your choice), the Democratic Party and presidents did far more to reign in Israel’s behavior than republicans.
I think parent's broader message was the Democratic party leadership being out of touch with potential Democratic voters.
Support for Israel's current government (elections in October 2026) being but one example.
You need to realize just how performative most votes in Congress are. The Democrats, for example, will vote for all sorts of progressive policies when they know they won't pass. For example, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor on a Medicare for All Bill. She didn't run on that in 2024. What's the difference? Well if she won in 2024, she might have to deliver on it. In 2019, Trump was in the White House so there's zero chance it would pass.
Republicans do this too. Two of the seats they're at most risk of losing are Maine and Alaska held by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (respectively). They currently have 53 votes (well, 52 with Mitch McConnell MIA). That means they can pass things with 50 votes (and JD Vance's tie break) on anything that can get past or doesn't require cloture (eg approving judicial nominations, reconcilation). So, every time you have a controversial nomination or bill, you'll often find Collins and Murkowski vote no because their votes aren't needed. The leadership is insulating them from attack. But when their votes are needed, they're there (eg Collins's required vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh).
As for the number of Democratic senators who voted against weapons for Israel, it is significant because it never would've happened 5 years ago, but it's also mostly performative because there's no way it was going to pass.
As another example, Democrats did a rare move to invoke the filibuster last year to stop ICE funding. This resulted in a government shutdown and important programs being punitively defunded (eg there was a reserve fund for food stamps that was intentionally not tapped). What happened? The Republicans needed 60 votes to force a vote. There were 52 votes. 8 Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with Republicans. That's so weird. It's the exact number required. What a coincidence. Whatever that number was, 1, 5, 8, 12, it doesn't matter. There will most of the time be that number of exact senators requried. This, by the way, is part of the rotating villain role within the Democratic Party.
This is how calculated it was. All 8 of those who crossed the floor were either retiring or they weren't up for re-election in 2026 so the voters couldn't punish them. John Ossoff, the current liberal darling, was going to be one of the 8 but he's facing re-election this year so Chuck Schumer whipped another vote to replace him.
Another classic example was the Epstein transparency act. Trump threatened members who signed the discharge petition. Mike Johnson actually shut down the House for 7 weeks to try and get those that did to change their vote. yet when the discharge petition got 218 votes (the minimum required), suddenly the votes in the House and Senate were almost unanimous. Well, if support was almost unanimous, why not just have a vote to begin with?
Mitch McConnell can really be credited with pioneering a new era of obstruction in the Senate. He realized there was a political cost to some votes. Some things were popular and he didn't want to pass them so he'd just make sure they never made it to the floor for a vote.
So my point is that imagine the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2029 and that same Israel funding bill came up. Will all those Senators and House representatives vote for it when it might pass and become law? Nope.
> The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.
Honestly wild opinions to have. Watch 30 seconds of fox news. A significant chunk of their coverage is about protecting women and children from migrants/pedos/trans people. They want a tough on crime executive branch almost as much as they want low taxes.
So either they care about the safety of women and children, or they want to have some brown skinned and "weird" people to heave their hate on. I know which possibility I think is most likely...
That's a false dichotomy.
I recommend this short piece, "The Missing Mood"[0]. It describes the concept that the motive and behavior of someone as it relates to a proposed set of actions is important. e.g. Someone proposing war might be correct, but one hopes a war hawk laments the need to go to war, vs. celebrating it and being bloodthirsty.
Fox News ideology may at times declare opinions that, in complete isolation, might seem reasonable. "Border control", "safe streets", "responsible government" etc. But they approach it from a place of exaggeration and lies, and an outright visceral anger and hatred toward migrants, trans people, etc. They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security.
So I agree with your parent comment, that Fox News and many of its viewers pick and choose what to say they're angry about, either out of intellectual dishonesty or, in the case of the viewer, outright ignorance or deeper thought about the whole picture of the government and society right now.
[0] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.htm...
I implore you to simply talk to a few conservatives living normal lives in the real world. I am related to many and grew up in the south. I assure you, most are not nefarious.
> They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security
Conservatives, above all else, assume everyone in government is corrupt and terrible, hence wanting smaller government. That they can't reconcile that with their love of social security is a matter of self preservation, not malice.
I do know several, including my dad, who when talking to him about life, love, poetry or movies is a nice guy, and doesn't wish harm on the people he meets.
But he lacks empathy for groups of people he's never interacted with, and ultimately, if they vote for Donald Trump or his enablers, they either believe a lot of lies told to them by media claiming to be on their side, or they aren't as good of people as they themselves think they are.
Respectfully, my quote and your rebuttal have nothing to do with each other. Nice people can be hypocrites and ignoramuses, which is what one must be to willfully support the GOP in almost any race in the country at this critical time.
edit to add some stories:
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I'm in Texas.
My relative tried delta 8 and liked it. He doesn't drink alcohol much anymore because of headache and urinary stuff. He took a little and he laughed more, relaxed, and enjoyed some movies. My mom took it for her body aches and she said it helped with pain and made cooking dinner a little more fun.
Now they'd both be felons. I told my relative that they would be felons for having any, and that I too would be one for using this cheap, safe drug. I joked that maybe he could at least vote Dem for Texas Lt. Gov. to kick out the moronic criminal who pushed the new law.
He said "No, I'll never vote Democrat". He talks about trans people being a problem. He's never knowingly met one. He says they should be left alone, but shouldn't in sports or adopt kids.
He has no idea what kinds of laws are being created to wipe trans people from legal existence across the country, and he's fine supporting felons and criminals and people who want me to be in jail for using delta-8. When I told him about one of Trump's proven criminal acts (taking $500 million from the UAE buying stock in his cryptocurrency clearinghouse) he said he didn't believe it. When I talk about Trump's sex trafficking scandals and Epstein, he's silent. When I ask about the Iran war, he's silent.
He would rather his nephew be a felon for a safe and decade-long-legal drug than vote for a Democrat, because of lies and hatred he watches on Fox news from his middle-of-nowhere plot of land where he interacts with about five people a year for the last two decades.
I could go on about how he rants about socialism as he considers using Meals on Wheels, or how his wife got Medicare-funded palliative care for almost no money out of pocket, or any other number of things. But he, living in rural Texas, mentions Mamdani's "communism" for considering opening a few publicly-operated grocery stores in a city of 10 million people.
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I have to re-iterate: I know many GOP people are good people. I certainly don't hold them to the same individual responsibility for the ongoing coup of the federal government for which I hold the elected politicians. Many are duped by Fox News, and many more are checked out of the daily updates of crimes committed and norms broken. But that's what's happening, and I refuse to acknowledge any merit of an argument for supporting Republicans in elections until the threat from Trumpism is eliminated, the government repaired and patched against the vulnerabilities exploited, and the Democrats screw up royally somehow again.