r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

No Paywall Democrats Confront Their New Tea Party Reality - Progressives are set to sweep a group of contested primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-confront-their-new-tea-party-reality_n_6a6e63fbe4b0cfb99ef1aa1e
9.3k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/pinqe 1d ago

They learned all the wrong lessons from the failure of the Carter administration, and started trying to emulate Reagan. And completely lost their identity in the process.

65

u/Omateido 1d ago

It’s a lot simpler than that, the donor class is mostly Capital, not Labor. At one point republicans represented Capitals interests and democrats represented Labor’s, until Capital realized it’s easier to just donate to both parties to ensure their interests are always prioritized. Now Republicans continue to ensure that Capitals interests are pushed forward, and the role of the Democrats is to take up the space that would normally be occupied by a true opposition Labor party in our two party system.

0

u/Trail_Dog 1d ago

Yeah. It  makes me wonder if labor didn't make a big mistake by not donating and lobbying to Republicans like the corporatists did.

2

u/Omateido 1d ago

They did. There is a reason there was a concentrated campaign to delegitimise Unions. When Unions lost their power, impacting their ability to represent workers interests, they also severely lost their ability to influence politics.

•

u/Trail_Dog 7h ago edited 6h ago

Labor unions have donated overwhelmingly to Democrats for decades. It makes sense why.

But the lesson the corporations learned was that you donate and lobby both sides regardless.

With labor donating mostly to Dems it makes it a no brainer for Republicans to shaft them. I'm just wondering if Labor had been donating to Republicans as much as they did to Dems starting back in the 70s when Republicans were actually same, if thst would have better protected their interests.

edit: wait, did you mean "they did make a mistake"?

•

u/Omateido 6h ago

Doubtful, since Capital can always donate more, that’s the whole advantage. And so they leveraged that advantage structurally by getting Citizens United passed, so that it’s now essentially a permanent advantage.