Maybe. Maybe not. But at least I can still say it, for now.

The precedent has now been set that you can torture the other side and target their states and communities with money withholding, police/military, and imprison subgroups, label them terrorists, and incite in-groups, and capture judges and literally ignore laws…They don’t have what it takes, and the American public won’t hold anyone accountable for any amount of time. Cooked.

they know if they set a precendents, they would actually have to do something for once, like actually act on thier “promises”, most of them tend to be Dinos though.

The 2024 Democratic primaries happened. Joe Biden won. Then his own voters made such a fucking stink about his age (despite his accomplishments) that they forced him out at the last minute and it defaulted to his VP, who Democrat voters also voted for by association of voting for Joe Biden.

You think we should have held a primary 2 months before an election? Would have been chaos.

Democrat primaries, famous for listening to the voters and propping up who they vote for. Never any fuckery in a democratic primary

It’s not even just the pardons really, it’s the fact that so much of government runs on vibes^tm and the belief that elected officials will always act in good faith. So the pardons need to be reformed but a lot more things do as well. Like the fact it’s literally impossible to do a constitutional amendment now.

Biden and his admin did some good things, for sure, but by and large he simply continued entrenching the status quo and didn’t meaningfully listen to the American populace - unless it was through the filter of the DNC/DCCC’s fuckwitted consultant class, who have been a cripplingly parasitic negative influence on the party for basically the entire span of time I’ve been politically aware. And that’s pretty much exactly why I’ve never registered “Democratic” (I live in a semi-closed primary state, so as “unaffiliated”, I tell them which party I want to primary with), though I basically always vote for Democratic candidates in the general when there is a Republican challenger for the office in question.

Remember:

nothing will fundamentally change.

I believed him when he said it, and he sure as fuck followed through.

Not to mention, his whole full-throated, carte blanche support of Israel in their genocide of Gaza (and I do mean to include the decades-long lead up to Oct 7, as well as the IDF’s retaliatory / punitive / expansionist / ethnic-cleansing actions after that point). Schumer’s one of the few politicians off the top of my head who’s more of an Israeli sycophant than Biden.

The internet loves to pretend Biden wasn’t one of the most progressive presidents we’ve ever had. The internet loves to fall for Republican and foreign disinformation and believe Biden didn’t net a ton of important wins for Americans.

It’s a combination of disinformation and people being too lazy to pay attention to current events.

Was Biden the best president in U.S. history? Nah. Was he actually a good president? Yeah, he was.

Biden delivered weapons for genocide, and there is no other reason you support him.

And then Clinton threw the doors wide open to corporate cash and allowed them to start writing tax code. He also broke down the walls against lobbying, and corporate banking.

Are you going to argue 20 years ago was the same as right now, too?

They don’t say “it’s too expensive”, they say “republicans won’t let us do it”.

But they let republicans do anything they want, including stupid petty distractions like renaming places. They are not on your side. Also they committed the majority of the genocide in Gaza. Democrats are not your friends, very few of them are decent humans.

Dude it ain’t just the renaming.

I know everyone’s got the attention span of a fucking gnat, but this dude has done whatever the fuck he wants with impunity while most Democratic administrations look like they’re asking for permission to pee.

Lets not do anything good because Trump might undo it.

See, this is where while I might nitpick on a couple of things, I’m in at least like 90% agreement, and certainly 100% agreement on the conclusion. It irks me when so many are like “I know what we need to do, but some of the progressives that could help solve this are supporting one thing I disagree with, so fuck it, I’m out”.

Because you are right - we’ve got to have progressives in charge. And it’s not because “my team win, I win”, it’s because they win for EVERYONE. Progressive policies work for everybody except fascists.

The system is built so that it is much easier to prevent action than to take it. Republicans obstruct. And where they succeed, it is largely because it’s things the oligarchs want, and yeah, centrist Dems serve the oligarchs as well.

It’s the main reason I keep shouting that we need to solve the oligarch issue first, then deal with the political party once we cut off their corrupt funding.

Yeah, busting the rail strike really tipped the hand of the establishment Democratic party to show they still are captured, and the blue-dog ranks are in office not to serve the public or to make specific changes but to get rich by peddling their political power. Given they’re negotiating with MAGA more than they’re coordinating with progressives and DSA, I’m really expecting some Democratic officials will flip so they can continue exploiting their positions for personal gain.

Heather Cox Richardson notes that this sort of thing has happened before, in which business interests dominated the government and enacted policies that wrecked the economy, but got magnates very rich, but the backlash was a revival of public serving interests. In the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, there was the threat of communist revolution, as we were also watching what was going on in the Soviet Union, and even communism had to be better than living in homeless encampments and barely surviving on flour paste.

We already have a conspicuous number of homeless encampments, and while we’re not yet living on cups of noodles, we can’t afford food and fuel at the same time, we’re skipping meds, and we’re also suffering from food poisoning while watching corruption and money getting poured into an unpopular war where our soldiers and sailors are being unnecessarily treated like shit.

Hopefully things don’t have to get much worse before the mischief begins. I suspect we’re all hoping the midterms turn out well (and we survive to the new Congress) which might save us from getting our hands dirty. But when there’s no hope at all, some of us may realize we really don’t have anything else to lose.

I, too, am pessimistic about our chances. But some folk who are more read up than me about it (e.g. Jamille Bouie, Helen Cox Richardson) express more optimism, citing trends and moments in history that rhyme.

Although, I am worried that our ultra-wealthy are exponentially richer than the robber barons ever have been at any other time in history. Once they’re done financializing the US into a wasteland (of quarries, oilfields and data centers), they’re going to move onto the rest of the developed world, and they are rich enough to buy all the elections and control all the governments.

So if we can make our stand here, and recognize our billionaire class as the existential threat that they actually are, (and as Paul Krugman suggests, tax them out of existence) we’ll be sparing the entirety of human civilization a lot of devastation.

Do you think people in the past did it from a Position of wealth…?

I’m totally game. Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption.

Otherwise, we’ll just be here again in a decade or two, and they’ll have the experience of this time to guide them.

For one thing, Citizens United only scratches the surface of money in politics. How Money Works did a video about just how entrenched it is. (Here on YouTube). And presently, politicians at the state and federal level expect to be able to enrich themselves by using the power of their office.

This is why it’s way beyond my pay grade. We need historians to remind us how systems failed in the past, so we assure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We need legal scholars to check how our terms could be misinterpreted by bad-faith judges given authority, while making sure the language is plain enough that high-school students can understand what it means.

Yeah I futzed with it to little avail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This traitor is all over this thread.