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I get that statistics can be manipulated but...

https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...

> Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report.

> The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

> “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row.

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PMI is a sentiment survey of 400 manufacturing executives. Vibes only.
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ironic given top comment on this thread is pure vibes. interesting you chose to repond with this "vibes" comment to this instead.
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While the top comment is pretty vibey, it's not presenting itself as firm statistics.
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Manufacturing has never really declined in US, not in absolute terms.

It's simply facing the same fate of agriculture: automation.

Politicians want to sell to people they can bring back manufacturing jobs, but it's not like in china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand. It's all automated everywhere.

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Have you seen that SmarterEveryDay video about trying to make a grill brush in the US? That obviously would’ve been possible in the US 50 years ago but is borderline impossible today because every manufacturer laughs in your face and just says “make it in China, we can’t help you”
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This is the most recent of those videos:

https://youtu.be/vS6HEes8daw

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> Manufacturing has never really declined in US, not in absolute terms.

Is a factory making 2GB RAM chips twice as productive as one making 1GB RAM sticks?

Because if manufacturing output is merely constant while chipmakers’ output has skyrocketed (on paper, as PCs went from 32MB RAM to 32GB over a few decades), other manufacturing output must have fallen a great deal.

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Every founder I know in manufacturing is thankful for this admin. There is a ton of invested interest in not having tariffs or a pro-manufacturing industrial policy as a lot of people got rich shipping it overseas. For some reason this is all ignored because the president is a very unpopular person (for obvious reasons)
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What are they manufacturing? It must not involve any metal. Due to the tariffs on metals manufacturing costs have increased significantly for anyone using them.
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It must not involve electrical components either, or any of the other inputs the US cannot produce at the scale or price-point of other countries.
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As someone who grew up in a machine shop, still in manufacturing, and have my own hobby shop, its gross how much raw materials cost. I can get finished parts shipped from China cheaper then I can buy the raw material here in the US. I almost wept looking at over $500 for a simple 2x4 foot sheet of 1/2 inch thick 6061 aluminum.

Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead.

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It is going to get worse. Iron/steel and aluminum are some of the most common elements on the planet. They are literally everywhere. The cost is in the energy for production, and to a lesser extent transport. But energy is not only going to become more expensive but actually hard to get (thank you again AI). Canada has energy, from empty land for wind/solar/hydro, to oil, to enormous piles of uranium ore. That is not an enemy worth making.
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Perhaps their founder contacts are in the ragebait and clickbait manufacturing business.
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> Every founder I know in manufacturing is thankful for this admin

Are they MAGA?

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What’s your sample size? Unless it’s 30+ politically-neutral manufacturing founders, you’re citing anecdotal evidence.
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why aren't these comments on top comment on this post saying this with no evidence "Manufacturing is still declining, not returning and a man "
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Everybody I know in construction, especially larger scale, is losing their minds because nobody can bid on jobs without risking loosing their shirts. Tariffs could hit somewhere between the bid and the time the job starts and could increase material costs by 150-200% and could cause more delays. It's been like this for 2 years or so and they're losing their minds.
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Tariffs have been hell for marina renovation work I'm associated with. Things paid for well in advance have exploded way past their budgets thanks to all the raw material costing so much more. Thanks to Trump.

Even the MAGA folks I have to deal with are bitter about it. They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect. I think they'd still vote for Trump though. I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

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Some kind of "derangement syndrome "?

It's funny... laugh.

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> They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect.

I'm sure fox news will give them some Olympic tier training in mental gymnastics and they'll be blaming - with certainty and conviction - brown people, democrats, trans people and/or women in no time.

> I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

A family friend recently sent me this and it's been helpful to wrap my head around some of the naked hypocrisy:

``` The reason they aren’t more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren’t more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality.

They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man, and that naked hypocrisy is the point.

They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth?

Their will is a hammer that they are useing to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent.

They are trying to build a Flat Earth. ```

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Spite for others can overpower any self interest. If the person has been shaped by past experiences to rely on spiteful actions as a coping mechanism they will struggle to do anything else. The reward centers in their brain respond more to the disadvantage their actions have caused the other party rather than any advantage they create for themselves. Rebecca Kazinka's actually been doing studies on this for a few years now if you want some reading.
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[delayed]
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What's your sample size?
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Then every founder you know has no idea how policy should be done. There’s a difference between having a pro manufacturing policy and applying tariffs and trade wars ad hoc based on how you feel slighted and giving no warning to any businesses nor having any sort of stability to your plans for any sort of appreciable time in the future. Also, the whole announced news on Friday changed it on the next week so that whoever is betting on the stock market can make some money also is not great for a pro manufacturing base. It’s all a grift and your buddies are dupes to believe in it.
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Really? I know people in the hardware space for whom the tariffs have been an unmitigated disaster. They had to go through a lot to not lose their customer base outside the US. I have seen many US-people with businesses swearing about that admin, especially the smaller ones.
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Uh, I'm in manufacturing in the US and EU. Can confirm the tariffs are a total disaster. It's increasingly difficult and expensive to ship raw materials and components to the US!

"Just find US suppliers."

It's not that simple. There are a lot of things that simply aren't made in the US. (The majority of tool steels, all titanium alloys, everything made of tungsten, and I could go on all day.)

Besides, dealing with the Chinese is like life on easy mode. Handshake agreements are always respected. In most cases service and support are 24/7. Importantly for QoL, they never make you fill out a dozen forms, pay for a D&B report, "let's get on a Zoom call to touch base," and all of that nonsense. American B2B firms aren't really into customer service, as a general rule, I think.

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Until that handshake deal isn't respected despite you doing everything right i.e. know supplier, know broker.

https://youtu.be/as2KoDtsS_0?is=3H1TVc2PZPbGLdPK

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it's remarkable how much presentation can distort ppls judgment .. they'll actually admire narcissistic behaviour as long as its wrapped in a polished and presentable package (the ex PM of cananda) and yet label the less polished, ill mannered person with common sense as the narcissist ..
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That’s the point. He wants to crash the monetary market and he has allllll the investments in digital currencies, ai, data centers, energy, computation & weapons. Why prop up a system that literally tried to kill him and will wreck havoc on his family after he’s outta office stripped of power. Dude is operating on death ground right now.
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> Manufacturing is still declining

Do you have evidence for this?

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>His economic and foreign policy are dictated entirely based on who flatters him the most

Are you sure, it seems mostly based on illegal share trading. Murdering foreigners and sending soldiers to die is a lever Trump/his handlers keep pulling because they 'win' $millions every time.

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One could call facilitators of his self-enrichment and abuse of office "flatterers".
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Hope the voters remember this for the next couple election cycles.
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I'm not sure how old you are, but shortly after Obama took office in 2009 there was quite a bit of reporting claiming that the Bush administration had been so disastrous and young people had been so thoroughly poisoned by Republican policies, that it would likely be a generation before the Republicans had the chance to win the presidency again. Remember, Bush left office in the depths of the Great Recession. Instead, it took less than 8 years for us to get MAGA.
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They didn't in the last couple. Those elections went 49% vs 51%. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the next couple. They feign surprise, but it isn't like it was a mystery as to what he was going to do. He campaigned on everything he is doing.
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The last few elections have been the most active in history, especially in 2020 essentially everyone voted.
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Which should inform the credibility of anyone declaring one issue or another would definitely motivate voters to come out and vote for whatever policy they want to say is a winner: the last two elections, despite enormous new voter activation, the split in preference followed polling trends anyway.

The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.

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The vast majority of voters don’t ever understand why they’re being screwed by economic policies, they just know when they are.
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And they’re too dumb to remember who caused the problems and just blame the other team no matter what.
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This is difficult even for experts paying attention because economics is cyclical and policies can take time to show their effects
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That's a part of the whole issue, isn't it? People have been trained to disregard (and disrespect) nuanced factual information un favor of political platitudes.
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They don't even know that, come on.
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And blame the other side lol
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The voters watch Fox. They will not see this.
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They won't. I have industrial clients who are financially eating shit from all this and they have posters of Trump hanging on their office wall while extolling his antics. The workers think the same way. We're boned unless these morons wake up (they won't.)
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They won't. Hope to be wrong though
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Voters don’t go and actually look at the data themselves. They rely on pundits and the news to tell them the salient points.

The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.

This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.

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In essence we took the grand market place of ideas, and then let it get completely owned by a few firms.

The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.

We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.

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I don't think it's helpful to suggest that "both sides" are equal in American politics, but I do think you have to be a least a little understanding that the democrats aren't an attractive alternative to most Americans. I'm afraid a pretty large minority of Americans have landed in the lose-lose position of "if i can't make it better, i might as well make it worse faster".
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My Bangladeshi immigrant mom and her sister are complaining on Facebook that they were "good Democrats" until "Obama, AOC, and Bernie" brought their "radicalism." Democrats wave away this stuff as "performative," but people feel it viscerally and it subdivides and splits the coalition.

Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.

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Anyone who says Obama, of all people, was radical clearly listens to too much Fox News and conservative talk radio (which is an entirely different problem).

The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.

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My mom watches CNN and liked Obama as President. But my parsing of her comment—I haven’t talked to her about it, just saw it pop up when my aunt responded “me too, sister”—is that she views Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.

This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.

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> Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.

Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.

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I get that you are trying to state facts but to the average person they are all Democrats so it don't matter.
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Educate her.
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> they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.

You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful.

Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe.

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According to polls democrats are the worse side, they are the most unpopular party maybe in history and are at an extreme low in terms of their approval rating. Trump is almost 20% more popular than the Democratic Party and they are polling below AI and ICE, they are right around the same approval rating with the American people as Iran.

And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.

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Part of that is because progressives also hate the Democrats for being hypocritical and/or ineffective. Doesn't mean they're going to vote for an R, though.
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Your comment is spot on. Don't know why you're being junked.

-Independent..

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Not based on the special election results the past year, and primary turnout along with gains in polling numbers of Democrats compared to their Republican counterparts. Just look at Texas, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, even Kansas. Bunch of red seats in play.
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"But...but...but what about gender equity in high-school sports?" - Voters
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Social issues are just as important to voters as the economy and attacking them for caring about this issue, one that very clearly the people have asserted their opinion on, is dumb. If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.
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Anyone voting on the basis of the issue is the dumb one, sorry.

It’s a manufactured controversy with only a handful of trans athletes (usually at high school level) in the entire country. It does not make the slightest difference to the lives of the vast, vast majority of voters. If you let it outweigh factors that actually affect your life then you’re a dumb voter.

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It affects woman and parents of girls. It's seen as men taking things women had to struggle to get and safety issues. I can see how it would affects women in general but I agree has little affect on those men who do not watch sports and are not pro women.
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“It’s seen as”

Is the crucial statement there. Not “it is”.

> It affects women and parents of girls

No it doesn’t. It’s a new boogeyman to demonize that isn’t actually a factor in almost anyone’s lives. Not to mention that the people pushing this issue are proposing things like genital inspections to ensure the boogeyman never arrives:

https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-republicans-pass-bill-genita...

As the parent of a girl I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about that than I am of a trans kid wanting to play sports.

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If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.

I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well.

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It's Republicans who are dying on the hill of unpopular policies. Nobody cares about men in womens sports to the point of dying from diarrhea or closing shop.
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You're funny
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This is where the democrats need to smarten up. They should be hammering “tax and spend” Trump, 24x7.

The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.

Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks.

If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files”

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I'd argue more largely that the right is a loose coalition of people with differing goals...whether it's conservatism, lower taxes, anti immigration, religious right, etc. I'm reminded how my econ professor would say that hardened bootleggers and hardcore Christians would pretend to be friends just long enough to vote to keep alcohol illegal.

I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain.

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The current US right is a hodgepodge in terms of what they love, but for Trump's victories was unified by who they hate.
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The Republican base doesn’t give a shit about “tax and spend” either. For all their hand-wringing about deficit spending, Republican administrations have for decades been the party of excessive spending and ballooning deficits.

They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back.

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The Democrats are not smartening up.

The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.

The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class.

Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating

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DSA are democrats.

clearly they are smartening up

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DSA is its own party; DSA affiliated candidates only run as democrats because the US system basically all but disallows third party success. I guarantee you that DSA members would not associate themselves with neoliberal Democrats at all, given the choice.
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How is that different than the Tea Party republicans?
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Smartening up in the sense of winning elections? Or serving their constituents?
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They have been winning elections.
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And (in Ossof and Mamdani’s cases) serving their constituents.
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Trump and MAGA also won elections. My point is winning with a shitty plan is not smartening up, unless your only goal is winning the current election. The Republicans committed suicide, we saw it live.
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DSA are not "democrats". DSA's agenda is socialism via the democratic process (vs. with a violent revolution, the way we typically get there). There is nothing between their agenda and principles and those of the traditional Democrats. The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.

Socialism (to contrast with social-democrats like some European nations which are primarily democracies, free markets, with a social component) is not a democracy those are opposing ideas.

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> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.

That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself.

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You can't just go and change everything. There are always unexpected consequences.

The US process is far from ideal. I agree with that. I'm not American and looking from the outside there's a lot of head scratching I can do.

But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years. You can't just take that and throw it in the garbage and replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo.

Seriously. It doesn't work. You can't say let's take Germany's process and apply it in the US. It won't work. We should know better. There is a delicate balance of power (arguably already somewhat disrupted) and there is a culture and a history. That's why we also can't just bring "democracy" to non-democratic countries that easily.

The DSA are saying let's break everything and then figure it out. It won't work. We need responsible adults not revolutionaries to fix things with care.

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> replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo.

Isn't it clear to you that you're misrepresenting DSA's position?

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I don't think so. I'm not an expert and I'm not an American. I did read their web site, I listen to what their candidates are saying and doing. I could very well be wrong. But when they say "socialism" there are two or three options. The first is they don't understand what that word means. The second is they do understand what that word means. The third is they've redefined this word. We already had a word for what people want, it's social-democratic, not socialism. So if they called themselves social-democrats and not socialists I would support them and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

"We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control."

What are they not saying? They are not saying things like we should raise taxes to fund social programs so we can be more like Europe. Europe is capitalist. Europe has free markets. DSA opposes capitalism. DSA wants to, in their words: "We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.".

What am I not understanding? Barrack Obama wanted accessible healthcare for all, he was not DSA. That's an awesome idea for the US that Democrats rallied behind and partly failed. Show me in DSA's words, material and action, how they are really social-democrats who just want more vacation, healthcare, worker protection while still maintaining capitalist free markets - like Europe. I mean they want all that but not in that way.

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This 100%.

I think most of us want a moderate Democrat. I hope populism dies with Trump/MAGA in the coming years. We don’t need to match them with our own distasteful populism.

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How is DSA populist? The United States is a country famously opposed to socialist, I don't think they could've picked a more controversial position.
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CHAZ was an idealistic symptom of applying John Lennon's Imagine to a neighborhood of Seattle, and it wasn't the only city tempted by this endeavor (if only it didn't finish with an arms dealer taking leadership of the locality);

"Defund the police" was a campaign slogan at last election.

I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are. If it's not socialism, it sure shares the same conclusions. And yet "The most extreme left in the US is the most extreme right wing for Europe" is a common belief.

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>I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are.

I am often impressed how abusive and violent US policemen are. And they have budgets rivaling the defense spending of whole countries and are armed to the teeth with military grade equipment.

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>But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years.

Except form the million of black people living in the south of the US. For them, the USA is a democracy only since 1964.

And if you argue "yes but it got better", the Republicans are making everything to get back to before 1964.

Incidentally, your "we can't let workers decide" sounds a lot like "we can't let negroes vote" or "we can't let women vote". And is as much FUD.

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Clearly a social component can exist within a democracy, European nations are an example of this? Are there any proposals more radical than European-adjacent style social policies?
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As a citizen of one of the European countries you mentioned, let me tell you: The DSA would run as a center-left party in pretty much the entire union. You have—respectfully—not a clue what socialism means, because the DSA agenda has absolutely nothing in common with communism in the first place.
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Respectfully does the government run the grocery stores in your European country? Is public transit free in your European country? Do your center-left parties advocate for abolition of your parliament and democratic processes? Do they talk about how the rich are the source of all evil? Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?

And sure, there are also ideas like healthcare for all which I think are similar but that isn't really what the DSA is about. It's definitely not about transforming the USA to have a better social network like healthcare or protection for employees. It's a lot more radical than that.

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> Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?

Yes, they are center-left at best, and your frenzied rebuttal against regular people trying to improve their lives and the country they live in is alarming. Free public transportation..the horror.

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>> Have you studied the DSA agenda in depth?

> Yes

Respectfully, you may have skimmed some material or watched a couple of minutes of MSNOW, because you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the DSA just wants free public transportation otherwise. Key aspects of the DSA's goals and the actual policy implementation actions of elected DSA-aligned politicians that are quite well aligned with the position of a person holding communist and other relatively extremist sympathies:

- state-controlled grocery stores [0]

- public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries [1]

- abolition in full of police and prisons ("cut police budgets annually toward zero") [1]

- ending sanctions on states backing terrorist activities [1]

- permitting open, uncontrolled immigration [2]

- disregarding the existence of Israel ("democratic secular state [Palestine], from the river to the sea") [3]

- giving voting rights to noncitizens and prisoners [4]

[0] https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-groceries (a city headed by a DSA-aligned mayor)

[1] https://program.dsausa.org/

[2] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/using-power-builds-po...

[3] https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-the-ceasefire-in-gaza/

[4] https://program.dsausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DSA_WD...

[edited for formatting]

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I think what amazes me the most is that you read all of that and said “nope”.

I can’t wrap my head around why you would sacrifice your life and well being so that a small number of people can become impossibly wealthy?

I read those pages and find it absolutely fantastic. How someone could fight for the position to be a wage slave with no security against inflation, cost of living or bankruptcy or homelessness due to illness is frankly insane.

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Did the person above you say that the DSA suggests that the states should run public grocery stores, and did you gloss over it, parodying him?

Wouldn't you recognize that bad faith characterizes the DSA lines?

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Canada has government-rune liquor stores, they're doing ok. Not exactly a "grocery store", but still PRETTY SHOCKING. UK has co-op (chains). There's Mondragon in Spain - I know it's employee-owned but that's not much different than government-owned if you really think about it.

Public-transit where I live is not free, but it is subsidized, with various recent efforts from municipal and state governments to further reduce costs for all residents.

Germany is defined as Social Democracy or a Social Market Economy. It marries free-market capitalism with social welfare policies, state regulation, and collective bargaining to ensure economic growth and social security, including robust social safety nets.

The US once had stronger unions and basic worker-oriented safety nets. This has been dismantled since the 80s, while piling on the National Debt by pilfering the treasury and "returning" the money to the (rich) end of the tax base.

There was a great quote in the original Deus Ex: "In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent."

In my mind the DSA is trying to shift the Overton window towards something more reasonable, that has already existed in the US. Focusing on the extremes to dismiss the DSA entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

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Free public tenant is very common. The wealthy being massive sources of the problem is very common. The U.K., hardly a bastion of socialist views, has massive amounts of food banks and he only attempt to overturn democracy I’ve seen was on Jan 6th 2021.
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I disagree. When I moved from Finland to the US, I was surprised to find how popular actual "abolish private property" style socialism was among young Americans. I hanged out with leftist people when I was a student, and I kind of knew many of the people who eventually ended up running the Left Alliance (the main left-wing party). My impression was that they had all accepted free markets as a necessary evil, rather than advocating for the socialism of their predecessors. But it looks like Finnish students have started adopting American socialist ideas in the recent years.

Bernie is probably the most well-known democratic socialist in the US, but he is not a member of DSA. By his political positions he would be either in the left wing of Finnish Social Democratic Party or in the mainstream of the Left Alliance. He would probably choose the Left Alliance, since it is more like a coalition of like-minded activists, while the party is the primary actor for the Social Democrats.

AOC, another well-known democratic socialist, would also fit in the Left Alliance. She is part of the moderate wing of DSA. But if you start looking into the ideological wing, you find plenty of actual socialists who would make Finnish mainstream leftists uncomfortable.

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> DSA's agenda is socialism via the democratic process, and

> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.

So, getting into elected office by winning elections is wanting to abolish the democratic process?

I think I'm beginning to understand why the hardcore MAGA folks loves Trump so much.

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>The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.

You misspelled "Trump".

There is only one party making it harder for people to vote, and it is the Republican party.

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They are part of the democratic party so they are democrats.

As for their agenda, you are wrong.

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I'm going to believe what they say:

https://www.dsausa.org/

"The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters in all 50 states. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few."

"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."

"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. socialism conflicts directly with democratic values. At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side. All previous socialist "experiments" were not democracies.

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> "democratic socialism" is an oxymoron

No it's not, check out Europe, mostly northern countries, it's working just fine.

> At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side.

Again, northern europe screaming at you.

So you're wrong...

Also, you're Canadian, maybe it's not your business

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I am also a Canadian, and since midnight we are in a big economic war with the USA.

I feeel those topics are a bit of my business.

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Who exactly imposed those tarriffs?
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Scandinavian countries you are referring to are practicing Social Democracy, they are not Democratic Socialist states.

In other words, Social Democrat != Democratic Socialist

Scandinavian model relies on competitive private enterprise to create wealth, combined with strong labor union collective bargaining, universal public services, and high consumption/income taxes that apply broadly across society.

DSA seeks to move past or dismantle the capitalist economic system, advocating for social, public, or worker ownership of the means of production.[1]

[1] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism...

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No they do not and it doesn't say that anywhere in the linked website.

Why are you lieing?

From what i can read they want the same scandinavian model with strong labor unions, universal public services and so on.

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"We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation."

From the linked website. Now, that's not quite "the means of production", explicitly stated. It's just "the key economic drivers", so most of the means of production.

Maybe you ought to be a little less quick to accuse others of lying.

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So what's wrong with that phrase?

Norway collectively owns its 'key economic drivers'.

Is that a bad thing?, they're still capitalistic, just with better respect for its people.

You probably collectively own things via the stock market too.

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"Democratic Socialism" is VERY different from "Social Democracy"

In socialism with supposed democracy, where the state owns the means of production and supposedly the workers supposedly have a say about everything, they actually end up with a say about nothing (at least not without greasing the right palms in the inevitably corrupt system that arises).

In Social Democracy, capitalism is the underlying system, where corporations and workers can own means of production, but it operates under sufficient regulation that the excesses and systemic failures of captialism (e.g., failure to prevent Tragedies Of The Commons, tendency towards monopoly and excess concentration of power, consistent tendency to abuse and impoverish workers, etc.), you end up with successful systems like Northern Europe.

The two are very different, and we need to hold the DSA people to the latter and not let them sneak in the former.

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You are wrong.

The term you are looking for is communism, not socialism.

Nordic countries are practicing Democratic Socialism.

DSA is not communist.

Why are you spreading this crap when it takes 2 neurons and a few searches to find out you are wrong?

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You are mistaking Democratic Socialism (of DSA fame) for Social Democracy practiced by Nordic countries.

Different beasts as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49404166

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They themselves literally say out loud that they want to abolish our existing institutions. If you want to debate that point, go debate the DSA candidates themselves.
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You're wrong again.
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> he populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.

Leading but honest question: Are those candidates the same as Trump? I do not see how they share anything other than strategy and spin, and those things don't make policy.

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The Democrats are part of the system.
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Huh? Check out the Twitter feeds of your favorite Republican or Republican-aligned personalities. It's racial or nationalistic dog whistles all day every day.
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[flagged]
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That would be confusing considering he forced a vote to release the Epstein files.
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If that is confusing to you, you are probably not ready for politics :-) Politicians act with hypocrisy or twisted plans (where the most straightforward conclusion is not necessarily the truth) all the time. Random example from yesterday: the same person who said 19 T deficit is too much before being elected, contributed to moving the deficit to above 40 T.

However, I also highly doubt Schumer would be in Epstein files. People seem stuck on the meme that being in Epstein files is the main reason why someone acts one way or another. This degenerate over-simplification has to stop.

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I really don't want people to be left with the impresion that this is Democratic Party incompetence. It is not. They are complicit in pretty much everything the Trump administration has been doing. They know what works. Just do what Obama did in 2008 and run on a populist economic platform. They don't want to do that. It's a choice, not incompetence.

If Chuck Schumer is asked about the weather, he'll first check with Netanyahu.

Just look at what Senatorial campaigns Schumer supports and doesn't. There's a lot of suspicion that Schumer (and the DSCC) is going to leave Abdul El-Sayed out to dry because he's anti-Israel, basically. Mandela Barnes got similar treatment in 2022. And yet you have blockbuster challenges like Jaime Harrison's, which spent $130M to oust Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10. Trump won by 12 so I guess he gained 2? Well done, everybody, the system works.

Oh and what did the DNC do with Jaime Harrison after he spent $130M to lose by 10? They made him the DNC Chair. The Democratic Party loves a loser. Just like Howard Dean.

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The vast majority of sitting Democratic senators voted against funding for Israel this year.

The DSCC funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall funding in these races, and they have their own goals which may or may not be aligned with the party as a whole.

If your single issue is Israel funding (which it probably shouldn’t be but that is your choice), the Democratic Party and presidents did far more to reign in Israel’s behavior than republicans.

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I think parent's broader message was the Democratic party leadership being out of touch with potential Democratic voters.

Support for Israel's current government (elections in October 2026) being but one example.

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You need to realize just how performative most votes in Congress are. The Democrats, for example, will vote for all sorts of progressive policies when they know they won't pass. For example, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor on a Medicare for All Bill. She didn't run on that in 2024. What's the difference? Well if she won in 2024, she might have to deliver on it. In 2019, Trump was in the White House so there's zero chance it would pass.

Republicans do this too. Two of the seats they're at most risk of losing are Maine and Alaska held by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (respectively). They currently have 53 votes (well, 52 with Mitch McConnell MIA). That means they can pass things with 50 votes (and JD Vance's tie break) on anything that can get past or doesn't require cloture (eg approving judicial nominations, reconcilation). So, every time you have a controversial nomination or bill, you'll often find Collins and Murkowski vote no because their votes aren't needed. The leadership is insulating them from attack. But when their votes are needed, they're there (eg Collins's required vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh).

As for the number of Democratic senators who voted against weapons for Israel, it is significant because it never would've happened 5 years ago, but it's also mostly performative because there's no way it was going to pass.

As another example, Democrats did a rare move to invoke the filibuster last year to stop ICE funding. This resulted in a government shutdown and important programs being punitively defunded (eg there was a reserve fund for food stamps that was intentionally not tapped). What happened? The Republicans needed 60 votes to force a vote. There were 52 votes. 8 Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with Republicans. That's so weird. It's the exact number required. What a coincidence. Whatever that number was, 1, 5, 8, 12, it doesn't matter. There will most of the time be that number of exact senators requried. This, by the way, is part of the rotating villain role within the Democratic Party.

This is how calculated it was. All 8 of those who crossed the floor were either retiring or they weren't up for re-election in 2026 so the voters couldn't punish them. John Ossoff, the current liberal darling, was going to be one of the 8 but he's facing re-election this year so Chuck Schumer whipped another vote to replace him.

Another classic example was the Epstein transparency act. Trump threatened members who signed the discharge petition. Mike Johnson actually shut down the House for 7 weeks to try and get those that did to change their vote. yet when the discharge petition got 218 votes (the minimum required), suddenly the votes in the House and Senate were almost unanimous. Well, if support was almost unanimous, why not just have a vote to begin with?

Mitch McConnell can really be credited with pioneering a new era of obstruction in the Senate. He realized there was a political cost to some votes. Some things were popular and he didn't want to pass them so he'd just make sure they never made it to the floor for a vote.

So my point is that imagine the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2029 and that same Israel funding bill came up. Will all those Senators and House representatives vote for it when it might pass and become law? Nope.

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> The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.

Honestly wild opinions to have. Watch 30 seconds of fox news. A significant chunk of their coverage is about protecting women and children from migrants/pedos/trans people. They want a tough on crime executive branch almost as much as they want low taxes.

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So either they care about the safety of women and children, or they want to have some brown skinned and "weird" people to heave their hate on. I know which possibility I think is most likely...
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That's a false dichotomy.
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I recommend this short piece, "The Missing Mood"[0]. It describes the concept that the motive and behavior of someone as it relates to a proposed set of actions is important. e.g. Someone proposing war might be correct, but one hopes a war hawk laments the need to go to war, vs. celebrating it and being bloodthirsty.

Fox News ideology may at times declare opinions that, in complete isolation, might seem reasonable. "Border control", "safe streets", "responsible government" etc. But they approach it from a place of exaggeration and lies, and an outright visceral anger and hatred toward migrants, trans people, etc. They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security.

So I agree with your parent comment, that Fox News and many of its viewers pick and choose what to say they're angry about, either out of intellectual dishonesty or, in the case of the viewer, outright ignorance or deeper thought about the whole picture of the government and society right now.

[0] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.htm...

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I implore you to simply talk to a few conservatives living normal lives in the real world. I am related to many and grew up in the south. I assure you, most are not nefarious.

> They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security

Conservatives, above all else, assume everyone in government is corrupt and terrible, hence wanting smaller government. That they can't reconcile that with their love of social security is a matter of self preservation, not malice.

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> Tariffs are taxes.

Taxes are good! China, which is run by some of the smartest technocrats in the world, has a very strong system for controlling the flow of foreign products into the country. Because of the nature of their government, they have more tools at their disposal than just tariffs, e.g., requiring foreign companies to establish joint-ventures with Chinese companies. But the purpose is the same.

> a man who could not run casinos successfully

Trump didn't invent tariffs. The political thread in favor of strong tariffs started with Alexander Hamilton: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-pr.... Strong tariffs were a core plank of the Lincoln GOP: https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-....

"Tariff" didn't become a naughty word until the Cato folks took over the GOP in the 1980s.

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Tariff is a naughty word because of its proven negative side(main) effects.

Not all taxes are equal. Regressive ones suck.

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It's not "proven." At the 10,000-foot view, the magical market theory folks implemented their ideas about free trade since Reagan. And who is happy with the result? Tariffs were a core policy of the United States from Alexander Hamilton through Lincoln to the early 20th century and, empirically, they worked pretty well!
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Ok cool let's go back to then and cut the budget to match. Sounds like a decent tradeoff to me I guess. I would prefer a more incremental experiment though.

I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I also don't think we ever had a free market. Implementation details always matter. My standing policy is basically small informed perturbations around free trade, included targeted tariffs. Everything has tradeoffs. Restricting lumber from canada and fucking Americans? Not smart. Letting China openly steal from us? Asymmetric trade policies hurting the US? Also not smart.

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Nobody likes free trade. Democrats can only get away with it because they are so much better on healthcare. They can cobble together a coalition of big businesses and service workers whose jobs can’t easily be shipped to China. But healthcare is carrying to whole weight of that compromise.
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The trouble is that the US realized long ago that they could get free stuff by giving out imaginary paper (aka trade deficit) ad infinitum and, in turn, stopped doing much. China, on the other hand, doubled down on trying to do everything and now has the luxury of largely being able to ignore the rest of the world.

The US could theoretically start doing things again, but it is never clear how to make that happen. The people much prefer to get free stuff (who wouldn't!?). Even if you can convince them otherwise, a lot of the institutional knowledge required to do things is gone. As capital moves to where it is most economically useful, the 'free stuff' economic structure has shaped where the capital is found. To move to a 'do things' economy would require turning the capital allocation upside down. To have all the pieces fall into place to see all that align just right requires great upheaval.

Maybe tariffs really are trying to be the catalyst to convince the people that free stuff isn't the way to bring on the revolution, but even if that's the case, that's a different environment to how tariffs were used historically.

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Tariffs are a tax that buys you (at least) three things, all of which are difficult to quantify, and usually overlooked by economists:

1. Security. You make your own bullets. You're able to make and maintain your own military hardware. When another country cuts supply lines in their own self interest, you have options to advocate for yours, either through trade, making it yourself, or, yes, even force.

2. Economic opportunity for your children and grandchildren. And no, not just "factory jobs" as is commonly sneered, but a community of experience and expertise. An engineer that gets to interact with the products they design in that kind of environment is a better engineer. A country that gets to see and interact with the products it makes has a sense of pride and better social cohesion.

3. Social buy-in and consequences for companies. A Chinese car manufacturer doesn't give a shit if cutting costs killed your grandfather. A local company has to, because the executives and workers are all members of the community. I was in Germany during dieselgate, and the sense of disgust at the company was obvious. They felt that.

These things are, imo, important to the health of any country, but they can only really be valued in retrospect. So yeah, tariffs are a tax, but some things are worth paying for even if what's being purchased isn't necessarily obvious or easy to quantify.

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Yes those are all good things. Tariffs aren't the only and almost never are the most sustainable long-term way to get them. I'm not old enough to remember the protections against japanese cars, but I know they didn't solve the problems with US auto industry, for example.

I would guess the optimal course to those ends would include some targeted tariffs. I am damn near certain that the optimal course isn't tariff-centric. Every option in a global economy (or any economy) is coupled and never limited to the first-order obvious effect.

As a very simple example that I see ignored often on here: High paying jobs are good, but increase the cost of the ouput. Consumers are also people, they benefit from lower prices. You can never turn one dial independently. There are pretty magical dials though, like education and trade. Some dials are better than other. All dials treated coarsely are worse than dials treated as the multidimensional optionalities they are.

I generally favor increasing productivity and QoL via net-positive interactions. I default to disliking fixed-pie-slicing until convinced otherwise. With all of the caveats to this position as above.

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And the feckless executive of a lame duck administration applying them on a whim will accomplish this?
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Thing is, absolutely none of what you’re saying applies to Trump’s tariffs. Because he’ll remove them two weeks from now if the right person flatters him the right way.

So there will be no build out of manufacturing capacity. You’d be a fool to spend tens of millions on that when at literally any moment the market will revert back to the norm.

This administration’s policy making is insane. I’m surprised folks are still trying to sanewash it.

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Tariffs are only regressive on the collection side. The redistribution side can be as progressive as you want, more than offsetting regressive collection if you wish.
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I didn't say tariffs were necessarily regressive, my (poorly made) point was that renaming tariffs taxes doesn't really change the problem with them.

Edit- but I would be shocked if the net effect of Trump's tariffs weren't regressive.

Edit 2- " redistribution side can be as progressive as you want, more than offsetting regressive collection if you wish." That's an infinite money glitch if true. Tariffs increase input costs that effect many downstream things, in addition to their direct price effects.

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And how many times did Alexander Hamilton apply tariffs to islands inhabited by penguins while specifically exempting Russia and Belarus?
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> Taxes are good!

Add that to the list of things I thought I'd never hear a conservative say.

Say what you will about the man, but Trump's takeover of the mainstream conservertive movement has been thorough, and eerily cordyceps-like.

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That's like saying Clinton mind-controlled a bunch of Dukakis voters into suddenly wanting to cut the size of government. It's an underlying political realignment and reshuffling of voters.
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>> Add that to the list of things I thought I'd never hear a conservative say.

Rayiner is a bad-faith troll who thinks he is being clever by doing the whole “oh, I thought you wanted to raise taxes, liberal??” thing. He does not actually think taxes are good.

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I love taxes! I'm grateful as an immigrant to be able to give back to the country by paying high taxes. Here is my 7 years ago saying you should raise taxes on me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20412077

"In Sweden, about 15% of people pay the highest marginal tax rate. If that was the case in the U.S., the top tax bracket would kick in above $120,000 household income. That makes total sense. These people are very well off and should be subsidizing the rest of the country."

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Okay but that's not the type of tax we're talking about here. Tariffs are much more like a sales tax. And sales taxes are regressive: they take a larger percentage of income from low-income earners than from high-income earners like you. Based on what you said 7 years ago, you should be against tariffs, instead of defending them.
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"regressive religious minority" yes, Israelis and the evangelicals that worship them.
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Do people have no shame in attaching a minority group - who by the way by and away opposed Trump from a voting perspective - with ethnicity (the majority are secular) - and with a foreign government - Israel?

In any other normal sane world stuff would get called out, greyed out, and ultimately shot down. In THIS world, the responses (I bet, like this one) are the "greys."

It's a scary world we live in where the Left turns into the Right of the past.

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Why didn't you have a problem with my criticism of evangelicals?
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Not absolutely everything. You can make a very strong negative claim without hyperbole, and be a more trusted source in the process.
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As a non American, curious to know what has not been a disaster under Trump II specifically
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Nuclear stuff. btw what's more probable - every single thing that has been done under this presidency is unambiguously negative, or it's mostly negative? It's so easy to just NOT take the most extreme stance, and almost certainly to like 10 9s more accurate. Yet I'm downvoted for it.
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This is such a weird hill to die on dude. People are angry and it's been an embarrassing disaster filled with fraud on the highest scale, jumping on the fact that 1 out of 500 of his policies hasn't been bad just makes you look like you've completely missed the point
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I don't like false statements, fuck me right? Accurate models of reality matter. If you stick to the belief that 100% of trump presidency is negative, you will eliminate from your options the policies that were positive.
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