“What’s funny about that is they assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.”
I think she will run for president, but is holding off from officially announcing it. That would give corporate ghouls less time to coordinate and circle their wagons.
Sadly, I fear the Dems keep her around for the same reason they keep Bernie.
To keep them reigned in so they don’t become a threat to the old money powers. The last thing the Dems want is for them to splinter off into a viable third party, gain traction and actually make life better for the poor.
Keep your friends close and all that…
I don’t even know if that’s a thought. This country has little hope of a third party without radical changes to how we vote.
But keeping loud progressives in the party where they can be seen and heard is good to keep progressive voters engaged. Note that Bernie, AOC, and the more outspoken libs are given more airtime come election years whereas they only get minor sporadic coverage the rest of the time. So the Dems attract the progressives by amplifying convenient voices when it suits them, but otherwise progressive policy is essentially nullified by neo-lib willful failure to block shitty conservative policy.
The only way a third party gets in is if there’s a coup. The Big Two aren’t going to let anyone else at the table willingly.
People doom way too much about the two party duopoly. It’s a deeply ahistoric and defeatist narrative.
Yes, you can’t have a stable three party system in the US, but independent candidates can win and the parties in the duopoly can be swapped out for one another. Ross Perot almost won in 1992, losing only because he suspended his campaign for a time. And the Republican party was itself originally a third party. Abolitionists got tired of do-nothing centrists dragging their heels on slavery. Ultimately they found it was easier to start a new party rather than to work within the existing power structures that had been thoroughly captured by slave interests.
The US system is similar to the UK as far as I can tell, and our two party system is starting to collapse.
The third party in question is actually even fucking worse, but at least it’s no longer a two horse race.
I think any system of government where one party can end up with an overall majority over everything is fundamentally flawed. Policy needs discussion and compromise, not just shoving through because “we won you lost get over it”
The US system is similar to the UK as far as I can tell, and our two party system is starting to collapse.
Not really since UK has a parliamentary system, which is far more hospitable to third (and fourth and fifth…) parties.
We’ve never been as two-party solidified as the US and our system isn’t thaaat similar really imo
They elect the president by state, with senate and house seats separately
We elect our priminister by voting in mps in constituencies and then the leader whichever party if any has enough mps to vote down the other members is the prime minister
It’s more like, for the US, if the leader of whichever party wins the most members of Congress appoints the president but there’s way more congressmen and smaller constituencies and the senate isn’t a thing
We’ve had hung parliaments and coalition governments - both recently and in the 40s, 10s, etc - and that just doesn’t exist in the US
Don’t get me wrong, our version of FPTP is bollocks and leans toward a two party system, it sucks
But I don’t think it’s really comparable to the US
One thing i never see coconsidered is in the two part system, which two parties does it have to be? Third parties in our system will never work, but who said those two parties need to be dem or gop? There used to be different parties.
At some point, if traction cant ve made to cha ge the parties, then we may have no cboice but to replace them. Not with an unserious party like the green party, but a real party
This is literally how the Republican Party was formed. Slaveholders had captured both parties. Abolitionists found it easier to create a new third party rather than working within the other two.
Yeah, and Bernie spawned AOC, the Squad, Max Frost, and more, and there’s more on the way. They all can see the door Bernie opened, and they have already enlarged it, and are pouring through it.
It’s too late for the DNC. We don’t care what they want. They better do what they’re hired to do, or they’ll face the same punishment as MAGA.
She’s a prodigious fundraiser and a fantastic “this left and no further” stalking horse
This headline makes me want to kick someone’s trashcan.
Plus the article itself is primarily dramatic fluff writing, followed by something I loathe: quotations from social media reactions. I’d love for anyone that does like them to share why because I cannot see the utility.
TV news has effectively done the same for as long as I can remember - send a reporter out with a mic and cameraman and ask random people what they thought of current events.
Hey, those interviews are responsible for some of the best memes in history.
We never would have had things like I like turtles, Hide your kids, hide your wife, and wouldn’t you like to know weather boy.
she didn’t answer the question at all
I like her mentality. <3
I hope she makes it but I doubt she will. Not in America.
She will kiss the wall like the rest of them.
she speaks more truth than any of her constituents
Don’t you mean colleagues? Her constituents elected her!
yeah, that
It’s a cult of personality. She was against stopping weapons to Israel, and she voted with white supremacists in the past. I’m against MTG, but I’m also against promoting people no matter what. There are many people who are more suitable and that have integrity. AOC doesn’t have it.
Boo
I take it you must be a teenager
No, he’s just right to boo you
No. They are not. Integrity is everything and I stand by it.
lol ok buddy
People like you are the reason why we are constantly at war and can not have nice things.
Boo
That’s my girl.
I have been thinking about the problem with politicians in general: they want to climb, they want positions of power and probably also money. But do they want to make policy even more? As in, for the people? Maybe in the beginning, but at some point, it seems, they all made a deal with the devil.
I hope what she said is an answer to such thoughts.
As a European this is how I read it too. Politics in the US are so driven by “team sport” and grand personalities the actual policy sometimes gets forgotten. “He says what I think” and “I’ve always voted for party X.” are very common arguments and you may occasionally hear about some wedge issue, but really understanding how these people would govern?
AOC has policy goals and fight for them regardless of her title. If she thinks she can there as President she will run, if not she will do something else.
There won’t be anymore meaningful elections in the US. Just pageantry.
Everything that we thought made our country different and agencies for “checks and balances” were just an illusion
Yep Americans thought they where special.
It’s possible that the United States itself could collapse, and that democracy could exist in some form of whatever came after.
But in the United States as it exists now? It’s not even the same country.
This is why I love her.
“single payer healthcare is forever”
The chronically underfunded NHS creaks as I weep.
I don’t disagree with her point though. In the UK, after decades of neoliberalism reigning supreme, I am often extremely depressed at how it’s changed things culturally. I was born in the 90s, so all of my life, I have seen the people who are struggling most scrutinised ever closer, and the state becomes more and more like a business.
If the NHS didn’t already exist, I can’t fathom there being political will to implement it right now. There would be far too much outcry over people “reaping rewards from the system despite not contributing to it”. There was that kind of opposition when the NHS was founded too, but far less of it. It was a different world. As I understand it, the Reagan and Thatcher era of politics were a big part of what caused things to change.
Learning the history helps ground me. A political philosopher I read a bunch of last year who influenced me greatly was Frederic Jameson, who advocated that we should “always historicise”, because connecting to our history is a great tool in resisting the cultural logic of late stage capitalism.
Or to put it a different way: the society we live in has a way of making itself seem eternal and immutable, but things have not always been this way, and they need not always remain this way. If AOC spearheaded a campaign that led to single payer healthcare, but the scheme was later repealed, that achievement would still last forever, in that it could serve as a template for those in future.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense. I’m just depressed and trying to clutch at hope. I’d say I don’t know if it’s working, but hey, I’m still alive — that’s something. I should probably get some sleep though
There is a solution for that, tax the rich and fund the NHS. This isn’t rocket science.
Yeah, but my point is that there’s currently a lack of political will to do that
The chronically underfunded NHS creaks as I weep.
The NHS isn’t the problem. The chronical underfunding and privatisation is. The tories have both been underfunding it and selling it off to their gentlemen’s club cronies. Of course it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean that nationalised healthcare is a bad idea.
The problem is Britain doesn’t have a left wing party with any power. Labour is just tory-light (and not that light anymore really). It was encouraging to see the greens doing so well but also very scary to see ‘reform’ doing even better. I put ‘reform’ in quotes because what they want to do is not reform anything but just to fuck everything up for everyone. They should call it the ‘fuckup’ party.
Insomnia, eh?
Yeah, the NHS is horribly underfunded - but I think it’s still one of very few things the UK can still be proud of. I think most people wouldn’t mind paying a little more tax, if it were specifically ringfenced for the NHS. Yeah, I doubt it would be created today, and it’s constantly fighting creeping privatisation but it still has a great deal of public support. And desperate as services are these days, I’m still alive because of it.
Glad you’re still here with us. For a variety of reasons, I’m similar. The average person is pretty pro-NHS, but when it comes to politicians, there seems to be a lack of political will to change anything.
I think something that makes it harder is that it’s not just a case of funding (though that is also needed), but a restructuring to reverse some of the insidious privatisation and outsourcing that’s so prevalent these days. Additionally, there needs to be more money put into skilled administrators — whenever there’s talks about cutting the fat from the NHS, pointing the fingers at “unnecessary” administrative staff is an easy tactic, but a lack of skilled administrators means that medical staff have to spend more time filling in forms and chasing up referrals.
The greatest lie ever told about the NHS is that we need to pay more tax to fund it properly.
We don’t.
We need to unwind a web of outsourcing agreements that siphon money away from care provision and into the pockets of the 1%.
There’s enough money if you remove the grift
Edit typo
A decade or so ago my mum was in hospital for a couple of days. She had to go for a test and so missed her evening meal. So at around 7 or 8 one had to be brought to her. It was a small microwave meal for 1, still in its plastic microwave container. One of her nurses told her that the charge to the NHS for this single meal from the catering company was £45
Yep. I’m on the NDIS in Australia. You can get a quote for out of pocket for say 40$/hr or whatever. But as soon as companies hear NDIS, they charge the govt the max. It’s ridiculous.
Even though the NDIS funds only a small portion of the population, it costs MORE than Medicare which funds most of the country. Crazy shit
A while back, I spent a couple of weeks in hospital despite there being nothing medically wrong with me
My carer had died a few months prior, and social care services were fucking around a lot so I spent a long while without any daily living support at all, except the occasional friend travelling across the country to spend a weekend helping me. A friend who hadn’t heard from me for a while called emergency services, because they were worried I might have tried to kill myself, because the last thing they had heard from me was pretty concerning in that respect (I was in a bad place mental health wise).
When paramedics got there, they found me on the floor, having had a fall. I hadn’t even in a week, and was severely dehydrated. They took me to hospital, got me hydrated and stuff, but then I was in limbo for a while. They couldn’t discharge me, because it wasn’t safe to send me back home without care. But the various services that were meant to be supporting people like me just weren’t working. It was basically like the NHS and social care services being the meme with two versions of spiderman pointing to each other.
And so I took up a valuable hospital bed for multiple weeks, in a place that wasn’t well situated to even support me. It made me so angry because of the inefficiency of it all. It’s all so preventable, but there’s so much inefficiency.
And that’s not even counting all the x-rays I’ve had following a fall that I had because wheelchair services were fucking me around, so I had preventable falls that cost the NHS more money.
The US and UK has the same problem of two party system and late stage capitalism. Although, the UK has a much more dramatic shift, not seen since the 1900s, because of the rise of Reform and Green Party.
The chronically underfunded NHS creaks as I weep.
Yeah this is an example of why you can never stop fighting for what’s right. The Epstein class will spend millions in order to not only save themselves taxes but put their own tax on us by privatizing essential services.
I already have an AOC 2028 shirt my maga fil got it for me, I’m not quite sure he expected me to like it as much as I do.
What a considerate gift.
Something like 75% of American voters want universal health care, 90% of Democrat voters want it, and over 50% of Independents.
(these are approximations there are many polls pick your favorite)
Unfortunately, in the USA it’s “donations” that control legislation, cash is king. Our reps have two choices… do what Americans want (healthcare, higher wages and benefits, less bombs), or do what makes them and their entire family filthy rich.
It’s hard to resist the allure of money, they won’t give it up willingly. Landing leadership positions means millions of dollars a year, cushy political appointments, and other fantastic benefits.
Whenever polls regarding universal healthcare are discussed, I always add that that if you want to gauge how popular universal healthcare is in the US, you need to subtract the over age 65 respondents (which leads to it polling even more favorably). Why? Because despite being the age demographic most opposed to universal healthcare, that is the one demographic that already has universal healthcare. And it’s not because they think Medicare is bad - on the contrary, Medicare is very popular among seniors. They love it. They just think they deserve universal healthcare while everyone else just wants to mooch off the system. So frankly I don’t care what they think about universal healthcare, actions speak louder than words.
