Sorry I've been quiet for a while. I've been thinking about leaving the Democratic Party.

I know changing my party registration to independent is just a symbolic gesture that doesn't oblige me to, or imply that I will, vote differently than I have been, but these days I honestly feel embarrassed to call myself a Democrat.

I mean I've had my disagreements with the prevailing consensus among Democrats and leftists broadly in some areas for a long time now, but I've traditionally viewed those disagreements as relatively small and felt that progressives consider them more significant and fundamental than I myself do. That's begun to change lately, especially as I've watched the governorship race in Virginia (election day being this coming Tuesday) turn into a referendum on whether one is okay or not with the rape of a girl in the girl's bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. This has become the single most defining issue of the most important American election of the year and on this issue I land squarely in agreement with the Republican candidate's position that the cover-up of this incident and at least one other related incident by the Loudoun County School Board in order to sell a new, "inclusive" gender identity policy, should be thoroughly investigated. That U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone as far as to have the parents protesting policies like these at school board meetings in Loudoun County investigated for "domestic terrorism" by the FBI has nationalized the issue in a way that's extremely forceful and feels flat-out censorious and the opposite of what should be happening. It should be the school board being investigated for covering up a rape here, not parents (including the girls' father) getting investigated for objecting!

That's just one especially visible concentration of the differences I have with the consensus in my party though. A tone in my mind was set when the Democrats abandoned their commitment to so much as raise the minimum wage earlier this year; a feat accomplished under every other Democratic president to date since Franklin Roosevelt. (And they're called "socialists" by conservative objectors, and even by some in their own ranks. ...HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!) This tone of non-concern persisted in the administration's decision to just let the Taliban overrun Afghanistan, in its open borders policy, and in its failure to enact any even semi-permanent legislation of social uplift to date since taking office. But the Virginia governorship race, and the aforementioned nationalization thereof, has begun to change my perception of administrative incompetence and lazy neglect into one of active hostility, both from the White House and from frankly the Democratic Party as an institution.

But when I saw back-to-back headlines the other day that the Biden administration had signaled support for removing paid family leave requirements from the Built Back Better Act and also came out in favor of ending cash-bail in the name of "gender equity" somehow (an experiment that has already been tried in some American cities of late, to predictably disastrous effect) on the same day, something in my brain snapped. It made me angry. So the White House is now for ending cash-bail, but against paid family leave? And somehow the purpose of all this is to make life more equitable for women at that! By making it easier for rapists to commit more rapes instead of requiring that employers continue to pay you amid childbirth. It's like...how the template Biden released shortly before jetting off to the G20 likewise includes no clean electricity program. These bills that are theoretically being negotiated and crafted in Washington was once a set of principles known as the Green New Deal. Can we just acknowledge the absurdity of that; of the Green New Deal, or what's left of it, having no clean electricity program because some coal baron from West Virginia objected? Once championed principally by progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement, progressives now are barely being consulted in the negotiations over its contents and the main climate provisions have been completely removed! And still there is no agreement!!

Taking in this whole picture I'm painting, it's almost like unisex bathrooms are a more important and uniformly agreeable principle for today's Democratic Party than is the survival of the human species. On unisex bathrooms, the Democrats are united (to the point of wanting any dissent classified as an act of terrorism). On saving the planet, not so much!

This is why I don't know if I can go on being a Democrat. I dunno, still deciding. Maybe it'll take a loss. Like maybe Terry McAuliffe needs to lose his race in Virginia for the Democrats to figure out that they need to do something useful for a change and pass the BBB Act. Maybe that will be enough to shift the current dynamic. If not though, I think I'm done.

We haven't really talked much about whats been going on in Virginia Schools, but I have a couple things to say. The first thing that strikes me is that I find it interesting that your two sources are Fox News and the NY Post (whose reporting is heavily shaped by The Daily Wire). The second thing that strikes me is that the Republican perspective seems to be shaped by the building of certain narratives. 

While there was certainly some degree of mishandling by the School, the incident was reported immediately to law enforcement (so not exactly a cover up in the way it has been described), and the trans panic angle also seems to be false. The reason the individual was in the women's bathroom was because the actor and the victim had a previously consensual sexual relationship where they were meeting to perform sexual acts in a bathroom, not because of inclusive bathroom policies. The right wing media (primarily The Daily Wire) pushed poor reporting to create a narrative and it seems people ate that up because it fit with their own personal biases. There really isn't a big national story here. A local school poorly communicated about and handled an incident that was being properly handled by police. Why should this be a national issue? Because that is how Republicans do their business. They take anecdotes and twist them to fit their narrative, and then act like that anecdote is a far more widespread issue related directly to whatever narrative they want to spin. Twisting Garland's comments about violence and threats of violence against school board members into "parents protesting are being labeled as domestic terrorists" is just another conservative spin that for some reason you seem to have bought into. 

Where would you want to go from there? Independent or any third party in mind?

Definitely independent.

When people seek to recruit me out of the Democratic Party, it seems to be mostly ideological libertarians who do so because of my anti-censorship opinions and support for people's privacy rights, the fact that I'm pro-choice and obviously in favor of family rights for gay people. These people often misread my insistence on honesty and respect for people's basic autonomy as me being a squishy, pro-market individualist. I'm not. I'm just more open-minded than some of the people who call themselves liberals in this country today is all. I'm much more of a commitarian mindset than a libertarian one in reality, and that's true in the areas both of economic policy (I count myself a democratic socialist) and also when it comes to cultural issues (I've been supportive of many Covid-era programs and restrictions, I believe in certain national values and lean more toward the melting pot culture view than the mosaic concept, and also have no problem with the concept of safe, exclusive spaces). I'm pretty much the opposite of where the Libertarian Party stands on the majority of issues. Plus the Libertarian Party is also totally irrelevant to 95% of U.S. elections anyway.

The Green Party and other left parties in this country today have an even bigger wokeness problem than the Democratic Party does and a Russian influence problem, and an even bigger irrelevance problem than the Libertarian Party has.

The political space where I feel the most at home really is in that of like centrist or center-left nationalism. I'm sympathetic to organizations like the Scottish National Party, the Bloc Quebecois, and perhaps most especially France's National Rally. There's nothing really analogous here in this country. Nationalism in the U.S. isn't even a legitimately populist project, it's a specifically right wing, bourgeois, anti-female, demagogic con built around billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump (obviously) that supports neoliberal capitalism (because its supporters are mostly wealthier people ), opposes feminism, and above all seeks to rig elections in the Republican Party's favor and restrict access to voting (because they know their positions are unpopular and cannot be made so and accordingly fear the will of the people). In contrast, if there were a party analogous to Marine Le Pen's National Rally here in this country, I'd definitely vote for them every time. There needs to be a space in the U.S. for a party that supports proportional representation and direct democracy, bringing at least most of the means of production under national ownership, is pro-choice, supports gay rights and gun control, firmly opposes open borders (especially toward migrants from Muslim-majority countries who's presence tends to increase rates of violent crime) and doesn't hate women or the police. But there isn't one. I don't have a place in the American political landscape, or at least not one that's organized. There is no party in this country I feel like I can put even half my heart into supporting anymore. Not even the one I belong to.

I'm pretty surprised by your answer, specifically the part with the National Rally.

After all, if you remove their wish for a proportional election system and support for universal health care (not being in favor of that one would be political suicide in France), you're pretty much where the Republican party is right now: A very right-wing, bourgeois (most big supporters of the National Rally are wealthy industrials) demagogic that supports neoliberal capitalism with a side of protectionism.

Well now I know that one's just not true. In fact, when I took the Pew Research Center's political typology quiz just now, out of the 8 classifications available, my results landed me in the "solid liberal" camp. Out of 16 questions in the quiz, I disagreed with the liberals' consensus answers to only 3 and disagreed with all four Republican-leaning camps substantially more often. I also can't think of any Republicans I'd ever want to vote for. I definitely know I'm not a conservative or Republican-leaning. But here was the interesting thing about that quiz to me: despite disagreeing with the consensus views of liberals on just 3 out of 16 issues, that was good enough to land me in the 10% most right-leaning of them. It goes to show you just how uniform opinion is among liberals. That you perceive me as an extreme rightist reflects that fact uniformity too, I think. Nationalism is by no means always a right wing persuasion, you know? There are lots of different kinds of nationalists. I see many obvious differences between Marine Le Pen's party and Donald Trump's:

-Where Republicans here have spent the year, and really the last decade indeed to a lesser extent, trying to find new legal ways of impeding people from voting because they know their ideas are unpopular, by contrast France's National Rally is the most pro-democracy party in France, advocating for a system of proportional representation and layers of direct democracy in the form of national referendums. That outflanks even the Democratic Party's platform positions here in the U.S.

-On the economic policy front, where the Republicans in this country are currently trying to block federal legislation to do simple, popular things like lower the Medicare eligibility age and establish universal preschool access because these programs would be funded with higher taxes on wealthy Americans, by contrast France's National Rally is a socialistic party that demands national ownership of the health care system, education, transportation, banking, and the energy industry; a stance left of what the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocate here.

-Whereas the nationalist movement (especially its more extreme, anti-Semitic fringe sections) in this country enjoys tremendous membership overlap with the men's rights activist community and often voices admiration for aspects of the ISIS program and tactics, National Rally, by contrast, has embraced feminism (including abortion rights) and (some) gay rights and supports Israel. National Rally was among the first parties to come close to meeting the sex parity requirements established by a 2002 revision to the country's constitution, fielding a 49% female slate of candidates as far back as 2002. For perspective, even our Democratic Party here has yet to field a more than 45% female slate of candidates at the federal level to this day. The party has also been helmed by a woman (the aforementioned Marine Le Pen) for the entire last decade.

If at this point you're wondering how National Rally can even get away with describing themselves as "neither left nor right" given all this, the right wing aspects of their program lie in 1) advocating a drastic, roughly 85% reduction in immigration, primarily from Muslim-majority countries, 2) in maintaining a tough law-and-order stance that demands penalizing every legal infraction (as opposed to allowing judges to exercise their own subjective, case-by-case discretion in sentencing) vaguely resembling what Republicans in this country support, with the difference that National Rally no longer supports the death penalty, and 3) overtly supporting Russia and championing increased Russian influence in global geopolitics with a lack of subtlety that might make even our former president blush. Between these three things, the last item is the one that bothers me the most. But it's saying something that the thing about them I'm most against is who some of their friends are, not who they themselves actually are.

I'm actually fairly at peace with National Rally's stance on immigration, which they vocally champion more than most other aspects of their platform, given that so much immigration to France today comes from Muslim-majority countries, and given that up to 10% of the French population today consists of Muslims, forming a significant trajectory toward social and political Islamification of whole communities in the country. The fact is that mass migration from backward places like these increases rates of violent crime, including rapes and hate crimes against Jewish, gay and lesbian people, and yields more general xenophobia. Party leader Marine Le Pen frames their position as a matter of the defense of women, gay people, and Jews against a "phallocratic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic Islam". I'm not unsympathetic to that mindset. I know that concepts like national values inevitably smack of a monoculturalist mindset, but I think secularism and the equality of women and so forth are legitimate national values to have and to defend. That to me is different from championing traditional values just because they're traditional.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a big fan of Marine Le Pen's dad though. National Rally's political ancestry is very right wing and bigoted indeed. Before Marine Le Pen became the party's leader in 2011, the ideology of the party was basically Trumpism on steroids (sort of like you still seem to think it is now). Most of the changes that have rendered them amenable to my support have been brought in by Marine Le Pen specifically, including the socialistic economic goals, as well as the party's embrace of abortion rights, (some) gay rights, stand against the death penalty, softening the party's stance on immigration from advocating the expulsion of Muslims from France to advocating a roughly 85% reduction in legal migration to France, refusal to ally with anti-Semitic parties abroad, and expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

It is interesting how easily individuals are able to accept discrimination of an other in order to protect some group that they find more valuable. 

Yep, that pretty much sums up most people.  The group I support is beyond reproach while everyone else well, not so much.

In short, you're falling for her sweet-talking. She says the party has changed, and it softened slightly, but not very much compared to the days of her dad. What really changed is just the messaging and the branding of the party, not it's stances, and she switched out anti-Zionism with islamophobia.

The party is much less overtly far-right, bigoted and demagogic than during the tenure of her father - but those are still the pillars of her party

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/16/frances-national-rally-links-to-violent-far-right-group-revealed/

Also, working with Putin and getting financed by Moscow

https://www.france24.com/en/20141123-france-far-right-turns-russian-lender-national-front-marine-le-pen

https://www.dw.com/en/is-the-kremlin-financing-europes-right-wing-populists/a-18101352

https://www.thedailybeast.com/marine-le-pens-closest-advisor-comes-out-of-the-shadows-in-donetsk

@bolded: I didn't mean to say that you're Republican, but that without those mentioned policies, the National Rally and the GOP are pretty much the same in the substance of their policies.

...Okay, except that I've just described like the vast majority of their respective programs. I mean, if we just ignore the fact that one party is pro-democracy and the other isn't, the fact one party is a neoliberal capitalist institution and the other borders on properly socialist (i.e. their entire economic platforms), the fact that one party supports women's rights and the other doesn't, the fact that one party supports gun control and the other doesn't, the fact that one party supports state executions and the other doesn't...if we just ignore 75 or 80% of their respective programs, they're exactly the same! They're exactly the same except on like 75 or 80% of issues. Those aren't small changes!

And I mean frankly even when it comes to immigration policy for example, you do realize that the sizable cuts that National Rally is calling for in that regard would only put current migration levels to France on levels proportionally comparable to levels of migration to the United States during the Obama era, right? That's not exactly tyranny, dude. It just isn't.

Yes, I hear you though on who some of their friends are, and I question that too, like I said before. I don't like EVERYTHING about the party, or any party for that matter.

Doesn't really matter anyway though, considering that I'm not French. I was just trying to illustrate the crux of where I stand ideologically.