Why are you a Democrat?

I am a democrat for voting purposes. I am a progressive in my heart. My head is a realist. I’m 61 in 16 days. I grew up in union family. I went to a (Northern) Methodist church. I only specify Northern, because I don’t know what Southern Methodists are like. I am no longer a Methodist, or anything for that matter. In my church, we collected clothes for neighbors who had a fire in their house. We worked meals on wheels to assist the elderly. we would have evangelists come around once in a while, but I only remember hearing stories about love, and helping each other. This was the early 60’s. I cannot comment on the state of the Methodist church today. In my day, there was no ‘Fire and brimstone” In my church. There was love, empathy, and tenderness. If you asked, you would be forgiven.

At my grade school, there were about 20 white kids, and about 6 black kids. But they were just kids we grew up with. 55 years later, if I run into LJ, I squeal and hug her, because she was one of my friends.

I grew up in a union household. I guess, I have never wanted much, except for fairness for everyone. Love for everyone. Peace for everyone

I am not a Democrat, because I am not an American citizen 😁

I support the nearly-defunct British Labour party.

I'm a Socialist because I believe that human evolution was enabled by co-operation and mutuality.

The Right seem to work on the principle of "survival of the fittest". Social Darwinism. Raw, unmitigated, competition. Well, we are animals, but we are distinct in our "intelligence".

At the moment, that intelligence seems insufficient, because our embrace of competition is leading our species into destruction.

One thing our state party did after Jane Kleeb became the state Democratic Party chair from her successful campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, was to launch a programme sending cards to every voter to let them know who their Democratic candidates were in their area for every office from President to cemetery board.

Since Nebraska elections are by law non-partisan (no party affiliation is allowed on ballots or candidate campaign materials, except for federal office), that helped Democratic voters sort out the crypto-conservatives, particularly in areas where political coverage is very thin. (Amongst other things, that helped us flip our school board to Democratic control.)

One side note about Nebraska state senator Megan Hunt. When she announced her first candidacy for Legislative District 8, she filled in a "get to know your candidates" survey form for the Omaha World-Herald. In that, she outed herself as an atheist.

That came to the attention of Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist), who invited her on a podcast to ask her why she would do such a thing. Being an open atheist (or being outed as one) is usually the kiss-of-death in American politics.

She noted in the podcast she wasn't concerned about Republican reaction: She expected attacks on her for being a single mother and bi. She brought out the atheism in the survey to head off Democratic Party attacks for being an atheist. By putting it out front, she hoped to prevent our own party from attacking her over religion, and she was right.

She got that by observing the election of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) in his first primary. He took out attack adverts against then-sitting Rep. Pete Stark for being an atheist, and blared them all over California television. Stark was sunk in the primary by Swalwell for being an atheist.

For all the praise Swalwell gets for going after Republicans in the House, if he ever ran for President I could not support him. As a minority "religious" faith, he attacked my community (Pete Stark) for how he worships, not on policy. Swalwell would not get support from me unless he was the last Democrat standing (and only because any Republican would be exponentially worse).

The reason democrats aren’t seemingly able to get things done is republicans are blocking everything they can. As McConnell said when Obama was sworn in, he was going to block everything Obama tried to do so he would look bad and ineffective.

The reality is democrats are getting things done but are slowed by all the other crap republicans throw into our way.

We just have to double down. I will always vote straight tickets now with the finer choices made in the primaries.

It really sucks we have such a large segment of the population so fucked up they vote for Trumps, Ozes, Desantises, Jordans, MTGs, Boeberts, Gaetzes, or Greenes, but that’s what we are stuck with.

We can only do what we can. No matter how hopeless or discouraging anything feels, we still have to vote. Otherwise the bastards win for sure.

Murphy Brown. In 1992 I was the divorced mother of 2, had gotten through business school but was still struggling financially at the time when Dan Quayle and the Republicans started their morality wars on single moms. That's when I went to my first Democratic caucus; by 1994 I was the senate district chair, throughout the '90s.

I regularly voted before in the big elections, may have voted Republican once or twice but my first vote was for George McGovern in '72.

The '90s churned on with Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh turning up the hate and peeling off white males for their brand of hateful conservatism. (I suspect this is where guns and white male grievance started their toxic mix.) I'd hear friends and family parroting that bullshit, feeling dread about the future.

By 2000, when the GOP engineered the election by stopping the Florida count at the supreme court after the "Brooks Brothers protest", I was thoroughly demoralized when Gore conceded. Helped found a Minneapolis VoterMarch organization; we rallied for democracy, set up event tables for voter registration, and protested that steal. After September 11 it got worse as the GOP lied us into a war. I protested until those jackasses were out of office. It almost seems quaint compared to what's going on now.

I will never vote Republican. We may not get everything passed that we want, but we'll get closer when 2/3 of the senate is Democrat and we hang onto a majority of the house.

Maybe enough Republicans will wake up to how our kids are getting killed because the NRA owns the party? That's what I'm talking to people about right now, that the Democrats already have passed bills to protect us from getting killed. My Trump-voting ex-SIL agrees with me, wants to see a federal assault weapons ban. There's gotta be more out there like that.

My parents grew up in large, poor families. Together, working in union jobs, they managed to achieve a comfortable life for our family. As a teen, when Mom was on strike, she brought me to the picket line with her-a great lesson!

Also, my sister and I attended Sunday school in the 60's. (Baptist church, mind you...imagine that) Our teachers emphasized the social gospel. Of course, the pastor brought the fire and brimstone, but if there had been any ranting about guns or immigrants, my parents would have walked out.

They weren't perfect. The Wisconsin community where they grew up was snow-white, and they grew up believing the racial stereotypes taught to them by their parents. At the same time,some of my dad's army friends married women from other countries, so that opened the diversity door a tiny crack.

It saddens me that today's young lefties don't seem to recognize how instrumental the democrats have been in civil rights progress for women, minorities and LGBTQ folks. Even worse, they join the right in demonizing us.

I do believe they hold the key to future progress in economic reform and environmental concerns. But until they demonstrate more evidence of critical thinking themselves, I'm not ready to hand over the car keys.

I have been a Democrat all my life. I started becoming interested in politics during the Watergate scandal. My mother and father were apolitical. Both were in the US Navy, and felt that military personnel (and my mother later a veteran) should remain apolitical (the strong indoctrination of military personnel to stay out of politics). My mother finally abandoned her apolitical stance when her former US Senator Mark Kirk was outed as a person claiming stolen valour in the Navy, and his opponent was the disabled veteran Tammy Duckworth (upon whom Illinois Republicans heaped an endless stream of lies about her service as the veterans coordinator in Chicago, her service, and of course, race and female). My mother now is a keenly aware political creature as she devours everything she can get her hands on (even calling me for political opinions).

As I got older all I saw from the conservative side of the aisle was more cruelty and more power-grasping.

I finally ran for office myself, for my village board (city council) in the most conservative US House district in the nation, and I won. I was reëlected in 2014, then lost in 2018 to a person who ran on a platform of "You don't want an atheist representing you on the Board" (literally all he ran on) and was defeated by three votes. (By the way, don't ever let someone tell you your vote doesn't count. A lot of elections in this country are decided by margins that close every year.)

Third parties in the United States (or any first past the post system) cannot arise. Large groups of people will array themselves into two broad polities to achieve their goals, and that is true for any nation with such a system. The only way a third party in our nation has ever arisen is when a major party collapses into ruin. (The Anti-Federalists collapsing lead to the rise of the Democratic-Republican Party, the collapse of the Federalist Party lead to the rise of the Whig Party, the collapse of the Democratic-Republican Party and the Whig Party led to the rise of the Democratic Party, and so forth.)

While the average voter doesn't pay much attention to the grand themes which unite political ideology, the foundation of liberalism is the Enlightenment and reason. The goal of liberalism has always been the spread of reason and education, and distributing power amongst more and more people. The foundation of conservatism as defined by Edmund Burke is the retention of power, so an aristocracy can be maintained with capitalism as a tool of control to subvert democracies. (Edmund Burke by the way was an aristocrat and very rich, so that wasn't a self-serving position. /s)

All the apologetics for conservatism since Burke have been differing ways to justify the gathering of power and subversion of democracy in the service of power.

As for Democrats not being able to get anything done, part of that is the nature of the Senate, which is an anti-democratic (small d) institution. The last election awarded the same number of seats to each party, though the Democratic senators represent tens of millions of people more than the Republican senators. The filibuster used to block legislation is a holdover from opposing Civil Rights legislation.

All politics is local. To get a deep bench of capable national politicians, they have to start at the bottom. It is just as important to support, talk about, write letters to the paper, &c for local candidates as it is state or national ones.

From a non-Americans point of view. What can they do? Simple gun reform is out of the question.

It has been like this since Newt Gingrich showed up and now the Supreme Court has chimed in.

Citizens United was a disaster for your country.

I get the frustration but I think it's a bit rich blaming democrats.

i choose the lesser of evils.

For a long time, I considered myself independent. That is not to say that I was voting Republican as I have never voted for a republican presidential candidate. Then I saw the shitshow that the country became when trump was running and saw it get even worse when he was elected. I watched as the republicans pillaged this country and turned it into a worldwide joke. I realized that there wasn’t a single thing that any of them did that I agreed with and that there was a zero percent chance that I would ever vote for a republican, even as the town dog catcher. So I registered as a democrat. Democrats are not perfect but they are so much better than the party of treason that the GOP has become. Watching all of the lies that have been spread about the election being stolen make me sick, as does the attempted insurrection of our country. I can’t believe that I live in times where that could ever happen. Everything that the republicans do is designed to hurt anyone who is not a fat, white, old billionaire. Any party that has trump as its figurehead is on the wrong side of history. Anyone who says that the two parties are two sides of the same coin is a fucking gaslighting idiot. That it seems likely that trump and his cronies are very likely to get away with all of the laws that they’ve broken and all of the damage that they have done is beyond infuriating. It should have never gone down this way.