How the Democratic Party became a tool for Wall-Street

[Citizen (The) Doctor]

I've put some thought into this, and I can only keep coming back to Machiavelli's "people are fickle" line. And in politics, they are.

In regards to what Sawx wrote, frankly, the way the Democratic supermajority went about things was haphazard in hindsight, yes, but I don't think it would've worked to even attempt to push what we term "populism" as far as we want. For example, if we went the cut out Lieberman route, where would we have gone next? Cut out the 40 or so Blue Dogs that constituted the majority in the House? Cut out every moderate Senator in the South? Like it or not, the reality of the situation is that we have a Democratic Party that constitutes a wider and larger tent and regionalism would've trumped true-leftiness every time.

And Memphis is absolutely right. The only way you can drag voters away from self-interest politics that concerns only the change in front of them is to gut the American dream. But no one is willing to do that because no one is willing to be told that their lives are horrible. Otherwise you follow yourself into electoral suicide.

There's that great moment from The West Wing, when the Chinese ambassador tells CJ Cregg "Your American dream is financial, not ethical." And as so long as we glamorize the small business, the self-made millionaire, everyone will aspire to be one. And people aren't willing to pay the price to help everyone else because no one cares about a sense of equality anymore in regards to your financial future. Whether you make it or break it in life is your fault, not the system's, and these people teach their children the same ethos.

"It doesn't matter if most voters don't benefit, they all believe that someday they will. That's the problem with the American Dream, it makes everyone concerned for the day they're gonna be rich."