Political Memes

"Adequately explained" does a lot of heavy lifting in Hanlon's Razor, and it's supposed to. It's adequate to assume that the few people who always break with the GOP are on the take, and the ones who aren't doing anything about it are just incompetent. Sure, the oligarchy is buying up whoever they need, but they don't want to waste money on directly buying a politician if they can just Citizens-United their useful idiots into office.

Assuming malice in even 51%--while possible, sure--I just don't think is necessary.

I don't entirely disagree that the incentives aren't there, but I'd say that the bigger problem (particularly over the past ten years) is that they've allowed the entire party platform to just be "we're not as bad as the other guys, that's good enough, right?" and they're insulated enough to believe that that's true. I think the "common wisdom" in the DNC is probably still that progressive policy is actually politically dangerous; that is to say, they don't know that they're popular, or rather they still think they can build a big enough tent to bring in the right-wing rather than expanding the voting bloc on the left.

Which leads the party members into "just get us back to brunch" behavior, and makes the structure which causes a lack of meaningful action into an effect, rather than a cause. I'm hopeful that the AOCs, the Mamdanis, and the Talaricos will show the deficiency of that structure, but I don't think it'll be quick.

I think there's a lot of evidence for that, yeah. I also think there's a decent amount of evidence for malicious actors to have encouraged and bankrolled the incompetent into office, too. I'm not taking that off the table.

He's not an alien, but he did have a time-travelling brussels sprout from an alien planet called Barry (the sprout, not the planet) living in his head for a while there.

Speaking as broadly as possible 90% of Democrats say the government has a responsibility to make sure everyone has healthcare. When you phrase it as "Medicare for all" the support drops to 78%, when you say government run healthcare instead of private healthcare the support is 71%, and when you phrase it as "single payer" it drops to 52%. When you only ever have a slim majority, how a plan is implemented drastically affects the number of votes.