democrats taking control of part or all of the legislature is merely short-term damage mitigation
having a majority or even a super majority of democrats is not enough. for our trajectory to improve, rather than simply pause, there must be enough representatives who are willing to both make a strong case to the usian people for how we fix our system for the working class and also follow through on those policies in the face of push-back from the capitalist class. the party affiliation doesn’t matter. obviously republicans aren’t proposing real solutions to the poly-crisis, but neither are centrist democrats. so long as there are enough centrist democrats that ’the party’ can play the rotating villain [1,2,3,4] game, real change will never happen via congress.
it is important to stop seeing the political spectrum as democrats vs republicans. instead there are leftists/progressives, centrists/liberals/moderates, and right-wing/n*zi representatives. the big trick of the usian political circus is to distract you with the seam between red and blue, which ultimately makes no sense as a division in ideology or policy positions. ‘centrist’ democrats and republicans alike vote nearly exclusively in the interest of capital and the status quo. they do not, and never will, support any of the reforms needed to meaningfully address the poly-crisis.
to this effect, only 40 representatives (including independents) voted to prohibit the sale of $295 million in massive caterpillar bulldozers to isr. these bulldozers are famously used by isr as part of the ongoing genocide. the outcry has been loud and consistent about the unimaginable horror of how isr uses these machines by human rights groups across more than two decades (for those who care to listen). a representative being a democrat isn’t enough. seven democrats voted in support of the us financing the perpetuation of this horror. of course these massive bulldozers are only a small part of our country’s financial support for the genocide in pse but even that small slice of the total funding, specifically for the bulldozers, would have been enough to cover the entire budget spent on services for unhoused people in new york during 2021. those seven senators, and not just them, can not be counted on to make progress towards a better world.
i hope you and i, dear reader, can agree that chuck schumer is so centrist as to be truly useless for moving the country in a positive direction. even if we draw the line between centrist and leftist at him just for the sake of amusement, 21 of the 47 democratic senators are /more/ centrist than schumer according to voteview. do we really think that swinging four or even eight more senate seats from people with an r in front of their name to people with a d in front of their name is enough to see, for example, a bill to raise the minimum wage in line with where it would be now if inflation was taking into account since the last raise? do you think that picking up even 53 in the house will result in single payer healthcare passing? no, of course not, and that is because having a d in front of your name means next to nothing when it comes to actually supporting progressive policies. a nominally blue wave won’t save us - only a wave of progressive representation that drowns out even the establishment democrats will avert ratcheting deeper into fascism.