I am sorry, but you will have to endure being a fringe for a long time, then, since a commanding majority of people have some kind of religious sentiment. Even if you triple the numbers of acknowledged atheists and agnostics, that's still about 20-30% of the population, and they aren't all left-leaning. That's no way to win. The Democratic Party as it is now is pretty secular, and people of faith have been respecting LGBTQ rights, disabled, and indigenous communities.
This just isn’t true, and ignores how hard it’s been to even achieve the partial tolerance that exists now.
I am not asking the Dems to become an atheist party. I said a two party system cannot adequately represent a large number of Americans. Positions that are standard on the Left in most first world countries can’t get a proper hearing here.
I’m not going to be told to “endure being a fringe” and then be told all the discrimination is over, at the same time - that’s absurd.
The two party system is not adequately representing a *large* number of Americans, a situation that gets worse as the hard Right keeps dragging the Overton window to the right. This is actually a way to *lose* elections by encouraging young people to believe voting is pointless, since only outdated religious perspectives get political and media legitimacy.
The Democratic Party as it is now is pretty secular, and people of faith have been respecting LGBTQ rights, disabled, and indigenous communities.
The liberal religions (the only ones that actually fit this description) are not a political or social force of any size once you get away from the coasts. They swing above their weight class in political debates because they are disproportionately the educated part of the population, but they are far outnumbered by the young “nones” and by the right wing religions in flyover states and among the old.
Telling the people who *don’t* feel represented by the current party that they now have enough and should accept their disenfranchisement for the sake of the party is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
We’re looking at the breakdown of a two party system that places large areas of perfectly valid political debate out of bounds and then tells both young people and minorities who haven’t won their legitimacy to shut up. It’s not a winning strategy.
The “fringe” isn’t small in number, it’s just been silenced, and it’s certainly enough to swing elections, and it’s tired of having to elect Republicans-lite because the alternative is frank Confederate fascists. All this does is erode democracy to the breaking point. And here we are, without a functional government.
