cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/60005391
Top Virginia Democrats have decided against exercising a controversial procedural end run around last week’s state Supreme Court ruling that struck down their redistricting, which wiped away a gain of four House seats, the Democratic leader of the state Senate told The New Republic.
The decision—which nixes a complicated idea, discussed over the weekend by Democrats, to replace the state Supreme Court and get the case reheard—is likely to anger rank-and-file Democrats who had hoped the party would respond aggressively to the ruling, which has made it more likely that Republicans hold the House this fall.
The decision also contrasts sharply with moves undertaken by many GOP state legislatures in the South, who are aggressively gerrymandering their states with wild abandon to erase decades-old majority-majority seats from existence, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key Voting Rights Act protection against racial gerrymanders.
When will you learn that Democrats are not real opposition? They exist to give you the illusion that someone is fighting on your behalf, when they’re in power they fund genocides and war crimes while gaslighting you and backing off on most of their top issues, when Republicans are in power suddenly they care about minorities and women and healthcare again. Rinse and repeat.
Run on single-payer healthcare; when in power, establish and defend a Republican healthcare plan. Run on protecting Roe; let it get shredded after decades of fundraising off the threat. Run on student debt relief; deliver a means-tested maze and call it historic. Run on climate action; approve drilling, pipelines, and record military budgets while telling you to recycle harder. Run on labor rights; break strikes when workers become inconvenient. Run on immigrant justice; expand deportation machinery, cages, surveillance, and border militarization, then act horrified when Republicans use the same tools more openly. Run on criminal justice reform; fund more cops. Run on democracy; crush third parties, sue to keep opponents off ballots, and tell you there is no alternative.
And every election, the pitch is the same: “This is the most important election of your life.” Not because they intend to transform anything, but because fear is the only thing they have left to sell. They point at Republicans and say, “Look how bad they are,” as if being slightly less openly cruel is a political vision.
The function of the Democratic Party is not to defeat the right. It is to absorb anger, neutralize movements, discipline the left, and protect the ruling class from any genuine alternative. They take the language of justice, diversity, feminism, labor, climate, and peace, strip it of any threat to capital or empire, and sell it back to you as branding.
They do not fail because they are weak. They fail because their donors, consultants, lobbyists, and institutions are getting exactly what they paid for: no universal healthcare, no end to empire, no serious redistribution, no confrontation with capital, no real democracy in the workplace, no liberation from police violence, no break with apartheid, no politics beyond managed decline.
Republicans tell you they are your enemy. Democrats tell you they are your friend while helping your enemy build the cage.
At some point, we have to stop mistaking betrayal for incompetence.
And they aren’t even doing that anymore.