Months. Did you somehow miss black lives matter? The rapid growth of the prison industrial complex? This is just the explosive conclusion to a pattern that was well underway long before Trump.

Not all Democrats are in sync with party leadership though.

The President isn’t the problem. He’s certainly “a” problem, but let’s not pretend that Vance is going to be any better.

Get rid of all the corrupt Republicans (redundant phrase), and you will still have MAGA, the silicon valley tech bros, a corrupt financial system, white/Christian nationalists, and the military industrial complex.

Then we have the Democrats who have proven themselves over and over again to be incapable of standing up against any of these groups.

Whatever we protest for, any result worth the effort has to address the systemic failures that led to the Trump presidency. Anything less is performative at best.

We need an inverse lottery. The top 100 most wealthy Americans are automatically added to a pool and one is drawn at random each year. Then we confiscate everything they own, put them in the street, and see if they can get rich again.

I think my explanation to another reply explains it.

https://midwest.social/comment/18384245

For the same reason they speak in reverence of Martin Luther King Jr. and pretend that liberals didn’t hate his guts back in the day.

On a long enough time scale the left always wins, and liberals always pretend that they backed the left the whole time and claim the victory for themselves.

“A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”

I predict Mamdani and Trump will have similar arcs through the media landscape. The media hated Trump but just couldn’t stop paying attention to him, even though every time they attacked him it only made him stronger. Now they are all bending the knee to him.

The same exact thing is happening with Mamdani, but this time for all the best reasons. Mamdani’s campaign might easily become a nationwide avalanche.

rightwing forces of state repression can easily push around a left that’s been trained and groomed to function as entirely beholden to corporate sponsors and big money donors.

That’s not a “left” at all. There are traditionally three groups that vie for power, royalty, merchants, and the people. The left serves the people, Democrats serve the merchants, and Republicans are the royalists.

The Democrats may represent the left some day, but it’s not who they are right now.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a legitimate implementation of such a system. It will absolutely be intentionally flawed in ways that allow the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans citizens. That’s 100% what always happens with Republican initiatives to “protect” elections. It will be made trivial to “accidentally” remove legitimate voter registrations, and a labyrinthian bureaucratic process to correct them.

That’s kind of my point. It’s turtles all the way down.

Are you referring to the three ancient Democratic House members that died in office? It does seem a little vindictive to blame them, but I guess it wouldn’t be unreasonable. It might make more sense to blame the Democratic voters who keep renominating these decrepit fucks.

The Natives “moved” to Texas to steal it from the previous group of natives.

I can’t believe I’m playing defense for MTG but, voting for the bill in the House was a low risk action because there was absolute certainty that there would have to be back and forth with the Senate. The vote in the house was basically a vote to get the process started in the Senate.

The bill as a whole though is still absolute shit stuffed with one horror after another. I do hold everyone who voted for it responsible for that. I just don’t think it’s a big deal that she voted for some specific aspects that she later opposed. That’s just how the process of Omnibus bills works.

I don’t care what your beliefs are. If you think the progressive movement is at a point where we have worry about oppressing the neoliberals, you have a screw loose and can only hurt us.

Do you not already know what happens when after a regime change the new one decides to do all the fucked up shit the last one did, but to the opposite group of people?

And… there it is. That statement betrays exactly what you think of progressives and socialists.

What you don’t get, or don’t want to get, is that there are three political philosophies at play here, and every one of them has it’s radicals and moderates. There is conservatism, neoliberalism, and progressivism.

You think neoliberalism is defined as the “center” between conservatives and progressives, but it’s absolutely just as possible to be a radical neoliberal as a radical progressive. In fact, the people running the Democratic party are hardcore radical neoliberals. They pretend to be conservative or progressive when it suits them, but they are neoliberal to the core. They are just as capable of doing “all the fucked up shit” to their opposition, and have in fact been doing it consistently for 50 years now.

Progressives get a the tip of a toe in the door, and out you come to sound the alarm that we’re going to take over the place and, what, start deporting Republicans?

You aren’t the centrist you think you are, and you are just another enemy to progressives.

More’s the pity.

I did what again? By voting for Harris? I mean maybe I did, but I wouldn’t assume she would have been that bad.

By your own admission you have given up. You aren’t fighting for anything so, your motivations are clearly on venting. Mine aren’t.

My intent is to have the best candidate possible to defeat whatever clown the Republicans put up in 2028. I want the Harris campaign to be seen for what it was, the last gasp of failed neoliberal politics. If it’s not, then people will believe the same old story that only a “centrist” can beat a Republican. If Democratic voters buy that again, then maybe we will be done. Even then, I won’t be giving up.

It’s clear that you think this started with Trump, but it didn’t. I’ve been fighting this fight since GWB was president. Over and over Democratic voters bought the establishment’s lies. Trump and MAGA are the result, not the cause. Fuck anyone giving the establishment another excuse for their failure.

That’s not even close to being a reasonable interpretation of anything I’ve said.

Saying Biden was worse than Trump on Gaza is batshit.

Saying Biden was worse than Trump on Gaza is batshit.

I said arguably worse. Trump’s rhetoric is certainly worse. He doesn’t even pretend to give a shit about Palestinian lives. On the other hand, he doesn’t give a shit about Israeli lives either. Because of that, and his dream of a piece prize, he might actually stumble into a better outcome.

One of the very first things Trump did after being sworn in was release all the holds Biden placed on arms to Israel.

Biden put temporary holds on a few weapons, and they were mostly withdrawn before Trump even took office. At the same time, Biden was signing new arms deals to give them more weapons. Also, you never would have seen Biden negotiating behind Israel’s back with Iran.

and protest non-voting

What makes you think those votes would have all gone to Harris? Where is your evidence that the non-votes were specifically intended to protest and not just the usual result of a worn out and disengaged public? The 2020 election was high turnout and 2024 was a regression to the mean. I’m sure some people stayed home in protest, but if they were, as you say, radicalized, I think they would have gone third party.

Not voting is stupid. Voting 3rd party right now is stupid.

Did I say otherwise? But you know what else is stupid? Trying to rally voters by calling them stupid. Remember that day your mom refused to buy you the twinkies at the store and you called her stupid? Did you get the twinkies?

Destroying the far-right is more urgent than building the far-left.

The establishment has been saying exactly that forever, and look where that got us. That’s a shortcut to nowhere. You can’t beat fascism with neoliberalism. It’s failing everywhere in the world that it’s being tried.

If you want to back a leftist, have them infiltrate one of the parties so they can be part of the binary choice.

Did you see me advocate an outside strategy. I bet you didn’t. Know why you didn’t? Go ahead, guess.

The people who backed Cuomo are better than the ones who back MAGA.

It’s not about moral judgements, it’s about cause and effect. The people who backed Cuomo caused MAGA.