I don’t know why, but of all the things that happened in the presidential debate, the fracking thing was the straw. Trump accused Biden of planning to stop fracking, something ALL my friends my age are in favor of stopping, and Biden’s response was that it’s an issue about which he and Trump agree. It was over the line.
There’s something I desperately need earnest Democrats (especially from older generations) to know.
I, and many of my friends, have spent our entire adult lives watching our political beliefs show up more often in fearmongering Republican propaganda than in Democratic campaign platforms.
We’ve been redrawing the midpoint since (at least) 2004, when establishment Republicans, facing an eroding base, weaponized homophobia to bring radical religious voters to the polls (by putting same-sex marriage bans to a vote in 11 states).
Each subsequent election has seen both parties take substantial steps to the right, to the point that, in 2016 and 2020, the Democrats have been further right economically than past Republicans.
Using the Political Compass test (https://www.politicalcompass.org/test/en), I graphed my views and asked my friends (the small blue dots) to do the same. The site has used past speeches and actions of presidential candidates to graph their positions as well. While the test is limited, the graph highlights some stark realities about the state of our representation in America. I don’t have real data on how many of us there are, but Bernie Sanders’ popularity should give you some idea that we’re hardly alone.
For a long time I’ve been voting Democrat because, while they didn’t represent my values, I believed they would not make things worse. But it turns out that the real proposition of the last two decades of the Democratic party has been to make things worse at a slower pace than Republicans.
Before you freak out, I already voted Biden, because of course. Another four years of a Trump presidency will erode the foundation of American democracy probably beyond repair. Also, and this is important, nobody in that cluster of blue dots that represents my friends needs that explained to them, so please for the love of everything, stop doing it.
But maybe, when others down in the green with us claim there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats, you’ll start to see where they are coming from. Republicans are moving us so far to the right we’re likely to fall off into the Fountainhead, and Democrats are just ineffectually pushing the brakes.
I turned 18 in 2002. In my entire adult life, my beliefs have never been represented in American politics, at any level. And in the last 20 years, the nation has only become more hostile to my beliefs and way of life. What I need Democrats to understand is that when you “expect” my vote, when you say “all liberals MUST vote Democratic,” it is growing tantamount to abuse, because you’ve had my vote and any money I could spare in every election I’ve been able to vote in, and this is what you’ve chosen to do with it.
I bring this up now because I desperately need you to understand that this MUST be a dramatic turning point. It can’t simply be a return to Pre-Trump. If we don’t manage to move back to the center, we are headed for an unsustainable society, one in which the environment continues to deteriorate, systemic racism continue to fester and kill, military spending continues to make up over half the US budget, inescapable poverty rots the future of this generation and the next, and we continue in a race to see which of the biblical plagues will come along and perform the coup-de-grace. All while the solutions to these problems are in front of us, but we can’t get anyone elected to implement them.
There is only so long I can live in a Democratic Republic without being represented. There is only so long any of us can.
“The mid-point between conservative and liberal is an ideological line. It evolves over time, but it is not, as we have been acting, an average that moves back and forth based on the average views of the population. ”
Graph: Political Compass Test. The graph illustrates that all of my friends and I fall in the bottom left corner, the Liberal libertarian quadrant, where every major presidential candidate of the past 20 years has fallen in the Authoritatian Capitalist quadrant.
“I turned 18 in 2002. In my entire adult life, my beliefs have never been represented in American politics, at any level.”