Thread by @lxeagle17

Okay. So I've wanted to articulate this for a while, but never really knew how.

But I'm personally absolutely, completely disgusted with the Democratic Party — *my* party, in many ways — and not because of the party moving "too far left/right". Let me explain.🧵

Everything I write here is in my personal capacity. And this is not a giant thread on "why I left the Democratic Party". I'm not doing that, because I agree with Democrats significantly more than I do with the GOP, and I vote for the side I agree with more.

But I'm still angry.

I'm tired of the incessant deference to unions *at the cost of progress* (see: the Jones Act and Puerto Rico). And I'm tired of programs we forget are a means to an end, rather than the end itself (CA HSR is a great example. Give us results, don't point to "jobs created"!).

It's the "process over results" attitude that I'm just sick and tired of. So many programs are created with immense goodwill and money to be put into good things. But when the time comes to build, *we just can't*, because paperwork and process is like crack cocaine to Democrats.

And we're told "it's fine". But it's really not. Government should exist to work for people, not work for itself. If you have a program that has poured $40M into rural broadband with no results, you can rationalize it in any way you want, but it's a massive failure at the end.

Mostly, I'm tired of being promised things that the party has no intention of living up to. It goes beyond policies — we were promised that Biden was fine, and we'd see it at the debate.

Really? What the fuck was that?

"Oh, it was a bad night."

The next 3 weeks were bad too!

What about Donald Trump and January 6th? Well, Biden's own Justice Department slow-walked so much of the prosecution out of a deference to norms to a guy they say tried to overthrow the govt.

They got no help from the legal system. But their own actions did them no favors either

It's this constant prioritization of process over policy, of process over results, and of "defending our institutions" that I'm sick and tired of. If these are our institutions, can you blame voters for asking: what the fuck is the point?

I don't want our institutions to just hold, I want them to *work*.

It's not okay for CVS and Target to lock everything up in SF. It's not okay for people to be afraid of taking the BART at 11 PM. It's okay for people to want institutions to play a role in *actually fixing them*.

I continue to vote for Democrats, and I think I'll do that for the foreseeable future — at the end, I don't believe in withholding votes because one side is going to win, and I'd rather the side I agree with more win. So that's the Democrats.

But I still criticize them a lot.

Why? The Affordable Care Act, while imperfect, is massive. Social Security is a boon to seniors and helps them live decently. Medicaid/Medicare is an immensely valuable program. Trump and J6 cross a line for me. And I just don't think tearing down institutions fixes things.

But I'm also tired. I'm tired of treating institutions like some incredible holy grail that must be championed and above criticism. This isn't about a left/right axis for me — I'm just tired of being told that things are all fine when they're obviously not.

I'm not open to overtures about "why I left the Left" or whatever. I'm a Democrat.

"Sheep", "NPC", whatever — save it. The right isn't going to have me, and I don't want them (I was born here but 90% of online MAGA still wants to deport me, lol).

I just want things to work.

@the_transit_guy And look, here's the thing: highways may suck for urban planning, but highways *work* and so the average American isn't going to complain about more funding for something they use (and have to use) every day. It is what it is.

@the_transit_guy @flaminhottweets If your choice is to fund it into irrelevance, that's ok, but there are real political and policy costs associated with keeping it — costs that arguably significantly outweigh the ones associated with letting it go.

This ended up getting more attention than I imagined. This isn't really electoral advice for Democrats. It's just my own frustrations.

It's not a diagnosis of why they lost, and they don't technically *need* to change much to win 2026, but that doesn't mean I like what exists.