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Micah asks the question if we need to expand the boundaries of the progressive left. K Sera and Phill have cynical hearts and will hopefully be proven wrong.

Note: This episode was originally recorded in the summer of 2020. Discussions over the presidential elections, DNC primaries, the vintage last year of political discourse (from the publish date of this podcast episode) are in vogue today! Funnily enough this episode is still relevant, despite feeling like it was a time from a million news-cycles ago.

Show notes:

The progressive left

Why don’t we have more political parties in the US?

Quite possibly why we don’t have good politicians

What really happens when we recycle plastic?

K Sera’s afterthoughts:

- Me when Micah runs for office.

- I’m not sure a three party system can work with our current voting set up, but if ranked choice voting becomes part of the system, a third party can have actual viability.

- Unfortunately, as long as the current system is advantageous to the two parties running the system, nothing will change. Our democracy will remain stagnant and third party voters may as well be burning their ballots.

Phill’s afterthoughts

-We are publishing this episode in late summer, but right now (in the late summer of 2021) there is an interesting gambit occurring in US politics. A trillion dollar Infrastructure Bill might be held hostage until the more progress trillion-dollar Progressive bill is passed in the Senate. If this maneuver actually works, the small progressive left might have actually pushed the entire Democratic Party to the left (where it used to belong). If it doesn’t work, it appears we will all boil alive in an inferno of environmental injustice. So, no pressure!

- In our very first episode we talked about how we would love more viable political parties. In this latest episode we talk about how there are warring camps inside the big two political parties. Honestly, the GOP will always have the advantage since their entire motto is “we want the status quo” and if they do not pass a single bill in their entire legislative session the win by default. Meanwhile, we have people in the Democratic Party that are basically considered “moderate” when in any other country these would be solid-conservatives.

-Also, progressive people just don’t vote. If they ever wanted to have more affordable health care, college, housing, and holding corporations accountable for paying their fair share (or I don’t know, paying for their negative externalities that they push onto innocent bystanders) then a progressive candidate should have won the primary. Except they mostly stayed home, and YES I AM STILL BITTER.