What are the underlying factors? That capital within the tech industry is horribly mismanaged and that maybe we should let the public decide how technology is shaped in this country rather than a small group of people that unironically believe in monarchies and hold deeply anti-democratic views?
Don’t blame the public. If only BOTH sides didn’t give us clowns to vote for. I hope the dems prop up some solid candidates next time because the past 8 years has been a total joke.
A large root of that problem is that Americans have been successfully sold on the false idea that getting to choose every few years between one of two candidates chosen by wealthy donors is democracy (or even government as a public trust).
And please don't say 'third parties'. The two major parties enjoy overwhelming structural advantages. Third parties are crippled even before they get started, and sabotaged if they show any signs of life. For example, in 2024, the No Label movement, whose sole intent was to provide a reasonable alternative to the major party nominees for President, was targeted and in the end never even got a nominee.
A rock that sits on the ground and does nothing would have been a better President than Trump who campaigned on actively harming our economy with tariffs then did exactly what he said he'd do and look where we are now
I use to blame voters too, then I started organizing for a decade and now I rarely blame voters. I always blame the politicians and political parties instead.
When the democratic party was the party of workers (the new deal coalition), they had super majorities in both houses of Congress for multiple lifespans (1930s to 1990s for the House of Reps alone) but for the last 50 years the party has slowly become more corporate and corporate politicians campaign a certain way. A certain way that ignores the material needs of people, by ignoring these material needs they're left to campaign on culture issues. Culture issues are very finicky. For example, it's not hard to find people that like solar panels, believe in carbon taxes, want a green new deal, but also believe in abortion and are evangelical. Since both parties no longer cater to workers, they're left to chase after cultural issues.
Not going to write a whole blog post out but hopefully you know where I'm going with this: the only way to truly win back sustainable power is provide real systematic needs for every American. Needs like providing medicare for all, universal childcare, universal college/vocational training, public housing, and a public jobs programs. All these issues poll at well over >60+%, across party lines too; but they all require more taxes against corporations + elites.
Once you build a party for workers, you can do actual sustainable systematic change; but you lose this contract once you betray the workers.
Last time we did this we put a man on the moon, imagine what we could truly do with the public backing you with todays advances?
If you can't convince people to vote for you, you have to change your platform. People don't really care about neoliberalism so repackaging it as abundance just means every election is a coin flip; it also doesn't help that the democratic party leadership is just as unpopular as Trump because party members, myself included, see how weak and useless they are but somehow always have enough muster to provide corporate welfare or engage in imperialism.
> Needs like providing medicare for all, universal childcare, universal college/vocational training, public housing, and a public jobs programs
Do you remember how divisive the ACA was? Or how the Republicans have been threatening to gut it for over a decade now? They literally do not support ANY of the things that you mentioned.
You can both-sides this all day and night, but it does not reflect reality, where large swaths of unpopulated land get disproportionate representation in Congress.
Just look at /pol/ as an example of what happens when you censor too much and they go into their own dwelling. Most memes including trump/trump 2 started as a direct result of /pol/, the killing of Harambe, and gamergate. Zoey Quinn got trump elected twice. Let them say what they want to say here or they get meme magic which literally destroys human civilization over time.
There is an argument that the VC-class is actually not a very good way to direct socially productive capital deployment and it'd be better to tax the LPs and direct the research using a public (but meritocratic) process.
For example China (not without its flaws) largely skipped over the digital drug phase and went straight into funding socially beneficial things like energy and materials production, AI and robotic enabled manufacturing, and large scale infrastructure build out. So ten years later they have a lot of socially productive things and we have a lot of socially unproductive things.
They didn’t skip over it. This was specifically chosen as a path by those in charge because they’re set on ruining our peaceful way of living for their personal gain.
