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🤣 Twenty years of this shit. Twenty years of people saying "You can't do anything in the Senate without 60 votes" back and forth at one another endlessly. Twenty. Fucking. Years. 😂
I never want to hear shit about how Clinton / Obama / Biden "tried hard" again. I never want to hear shit about "We can't pack the courts, its unprecedented" or "This obviously qualified person is too radical to survive confirmation". You liberals deserve what you fucking get. Damn shame the rest of us are getting dragged along behind your worthless asses.
Are you saying that the Republicans going nuclear is the left's fault? Wow, just wow. The Republicans are destroying our government, but somehow, somehow, that's the left's fault. That's like saying that every victim everywhere deserved it.
They're saying the dems not going nuclear under Obama and Biden is the problem.
"We should have turned authoritarian before they did", basically.
It's a valid point when the republicans were telegraphing their intentions to do so the whole time. Should have seized power, disposed of the traitors and restructured the laws to fix the loopholes that allowed it to happen in the first place. Biden would have been great for this since he was already old as shit and they could have thrown him under the bus after the fact.
Implementing fair voting laws is not authoritarianism.
Neither is playing Hard Ball, and forcing the MAGAs to follow the Constitution.
This idea that it is AUTHORITARIAN to insist that everyone abide by the Constitution, is insane.
No, they should have used their Constitutional powers to follow their oath to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC. But they didn't.
Following the Jan 6 Insurrection, Biden would have been well within his Constitutional rights and responsibilities to have Trump and his henchmen rounded up as National Security threats the moment he was Inaugurated. They should have been sent to Guantanamo Bay for extensive interrogation into their nefarious dealings with Russia, and their corruption.
Sure, the MAGA following would have gone nuts, giving the a Biden administration the excuse to crush them mercilessly, and declare them a terrorist hate group.
THEN the Stolen Document scheme would have come to light, and if the Dems were playing Hard Ball like they should have, they could have combined that with his Insurrection, and used that to create such public outrage against the MAGA Party, that it would be effectively dead forever.
But he literally did NOTHING, including pressure his REPUBLICAN AG into acting more decisively. They had managed to wrest control back from the MAGAs, but instead of making sure they never succeed again, they just created a political environment that enabled and even ENCOURAGED their comeback.
After his amazing success with the simultaneous Covid Vax program, and his post-Covid Economic Stimulation program, Biden would have been considered in the top 15 presidents, but his greatest accomplishments are overshadowed by his weakness in defending America, and avoiding crushing the treasonous MAGA movement, and allowing it to grow stronger, and rise AGAIN. For that he will be forever in the bottom 15 of presidents, the way the pre-Civil War presidents are reviled for their lack of action on preventing, or even encouraging the Civil War. Biden now joins them.
I largely agree with your sentiment, but -
This is gaslighting common Americans. This was not an amazing success in my lived experience.
Life under Biden/during COVID hit so much harder than 2008 as a person living in poverty, living around other people in poverty or homelessness in an exceptionally poor area.
People barely received any direct help and all I heard about is corporations raking in record profits. People blowing their savings - racking up credit cards. Interest rates going through the roof. House prices going insane while investors buy everything up. Rent skyrocketing. Food going absolutely nuts.
I don't know what to say besides none of this felt like enough. I know what the common responses to my expressed sentiment are and it's okay if you disagree, but this was a necessary vent.
I know what they're saying, lol. It's Obama's fault that the Republicans are pieces of shit.
Psst. See Murc's Law.
Wouldn't "holding them responsible" mean prosecuting them? Who has the power to do that?
The majority. When the dems had majority, they impeached him. The republican majority let him go.
The dems appointed an AG who chose not to prosecute Trump because that would be political.
A REPUBLICAN AG. At a time when Republicans needed to be held responsible for the most treasonous behavior since the Civil War, they actually appointed a Republican to handle it. He then dithered and slow-walked, and gave them a two year head start to run out the clock.
Just one more example of Democratic weakness.
This is why I've been an Unaffiliated Independent since I first registered to vote in 1977.
They failed to prosecute him once he was out of office, having already acknowledged he had committed crimes during the impeachment.
Republicans have been destroying our government for decades and decades and we now see the Democrats had the tools to undo the damage but never actually followed through with any of it.
Perhaps the original sin of the Obama Administration was that they never dismantled the post 9/11 surveillance state. It was almost a perfect Tolkien allegory. They had this great, terrible, and Constitutionally dubious power they inherited from the prior administration. They could choose to use it or destroy it. Unfortunately our leaders are not as noble as hobbits, so Obama chose to keep the power for himself.
Plus letting Bush and Cheney off on their war crimes so that we could "heal as a nation" certainly didnt help either. Biden, while not stating as much, did the same thing with Trump after all his illegal actions including J6, and only decided to pretend to do something a few months before the '24 election after he'd already secured the RNC nomination.
The only tool they use is Schmuck Schumer's stern statement in front of the cameras. Sometimes he'll write a strongly-worded letter.
Remember what Aldo Rain said in Inglorious Basterds, when told he'd be shot for killing Hands Landa's assistant?
"Shot? I don't think so. More like chewed out. I been chewed out before."
That's how MAGAs view Schmuck's stern statements: They don't give a rat's ass. Yet, it's about the only resistance the Dems ever offer.
Facists: Exist
DAMNED LIBRULS
???
For not taking action when they had the majorities.
Seems like a fair criticism.
And electorally, their inaction cost them. FDR's popularity rose because he did shit. There's this view democrats have that they only have limited political capital and they have to choose where to 'spend it', but it just doesn't work that way.
Yep. Republicans have the rabid following that they do because they accomplish tasks. Horrible, fucked up, stupid tasks that should never have even been tabled for discussion, but they get them done. 99% of Democrat messaging my entire lifetime has been "We're gonna do [X]! Oh, wait, no, we can't do [X] because we don't have a supermajority. Shucks. Well, we'll surely get 'em next time if you just vote for me again!" and people are, understandably, getting fucking tired of that. Especially when these same Dem voters watch every single conservative election cycle jam through abject bullshit without pushback. If they can get these things done then why can't you? Why can Trump loot my 401k and Medicaid directly into his own pockets but Obama couldn't enact universal health care? Why do we only ever ratchet toward the right?
Democrats have been chasing the mythical "centrist swing voter" for decades while voters have increasingly polarized into left vs right and the centrists have evaporated. Anyone who remains a centrist, now, isn't even going to go vote because politics clearly do not play any part in their lives.
We now have the additional problem of the rabid MAGA crowd being so vehemently anti-Democrat that not only would they never vote blue no matter what they were promised, they're statistically likely to go make attempts on the lives of Democratic officials or those running for office. So anyone who wants to run as a Democrat with an actual progressive platform are putting double the number of targets on themselves.
I think the only real way forward is a third party, one that can sidestep our red vs blue team sports mentality and say look, things are pretty bad for everyone right now. You don't have to vote for a Democrat or a Republican to make things better. You can come vote for us instead, we'll get this train back on track and you don't have to go tell the boys that you voted for a Democrat
...But then our problem becomes making this third party actually electable, which has historically been a huge problem in America.
Honestly, the democratic brand is so tainted the the left really should embrace a strategy of running independents in solid red states. They're receptive to a Bernie style message (tell them big Ag is trying to buy your farm, go big on right to repair so John Deere can't screw you on parts, tell them that Medicare for all is actually good for small businesses that can't compete on health care, etc), but after decades of right wing propaganda you can't do anything under a democratic banner in those places (especially since the democratic party would put their thumb on the scale for the centrist guy in a primary).
That is one of the best descriptions of how I've seen things since the 1970s! Ten points for a fine description of current and past events.
I mean it's 100% fair criticism, honestly. The part where it falls down for me is where the solution always seems to be "Don't vote for Democrats!" (and then leaves the room, walking proudly)
Almost everyone in Washington is a piece of shit, although the Republicans are much worse. If you want to have another FDR, you have to have another several decades of labor movement before that, fighting for change from the bottom up. And then the political class is the last to come around, and they can lock in and extend some of the changes you fought for. "Democrats are POS" is mostly true. "Let's get less engaged to politics / It doesn't matter who wins the election" is a fucking horrifying reaction and plan to cope with that and make it better.
I've heard many people on Lemmy say that they're not planning to engage with the electoral system until the Democrats get better on their own. All I can say to that strategy is, better start looking around for where to move to that'll give you the best shot at having a pretty comfortable ICE facility to call home going forward. And if you identify as any kind of anarchist / Marxist / anything like that, if you are at all engaged with any kind of counterculture or activism and you're still in the US, you should probably be making plans to leave, because for you it will probably be much much worse.
They expect Democrats to cater to people who don't bother to vote because nothing is ever good enough.
"Bold strategy Cotton. We'll see how it works out for them."
Considering the Democrats are a minority in every single branch of government, I'd say its a bold strategy on their part to continually ignore their own base in favor of the Republican base.
There's that whole thing about everything in the US taking this horrifying downwards turn right around 1970, by all these different metrics, and there's not really an obvious reason for it. I actually have one speculative theory on that: I think that in the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops beat the fuck out of a lot of the most passionate and engaged leftist activists the country had out in the street, and the lesson they took away from that (sorta reasonably, even though the Chicago cops certainly were not Democrats) was "fuck the whole political system then, I don't care, I'm out and fuck you." McGovern suffered his absolutely heartbreaking shutout in 1972, and the Democrats just stopped winning elections completely for the next 20 years, and eventually they learned their lesson and became Republicans. We went from JFK and LBJ to Clinton, and the new era of 1990s / 2000s horrors was born with no left representation anywhere in Washington.
So yeah, I agree with you. There's not really any reason to think that anyone in Washington would react to the electoral disengagement of the left by moving any direction other than right, and I think there is a good argument for a strong precedent of them moving far right and the whole country getting fucked over a barrel up to and including the present day because of it.
Clinton only won in 92 because Ross Perot split the vote. Obama (and biden) won because people thought they were going to help them, and were further disaffected when they turned out to be republican-lite. You can't pretend dems moving right does anything but further disaffect their base. You have to really really loath your base to lose against a party as malicious and incompetent as the republicans.
Never change guys
Never change
I mean, I don’t think you will have to ever hear it again to be honest. We’re headed into truly uncharted waters. By spring next year it’s hard to say what of our political system will even be recognizable.
The senate structurally favors republicans. It’s to the left’s advantage for it to be slow and inefficient. Now that that’s no longer the case it just means more than ever we need a movement with autonomous power that isn’t subjugated to a system that is designed to disenfranchise us.
It’s true, we really should just start gunning down anyone we see. All we need to start, is to behead some big government people on television. THEN we’ll get universal health care, infrastructure backing to fix the climate, and more money for schools and social programs.
Goddam, how did Clinton / Obama / Biden not see that?
It doesn't really matter now. There won't be any more elections, and the laws dont matter.
We've got two gubernatorial races and a whole mess of municipal races coming in November. So that remains to be seen.
But when see front-runners for primaries coddling up to fascism all up and down the Dem slate, it does not fill me with optimism for the future.
It makes me sick. I don't want to leave the country, but I might be leaving the country.
Did that almost a year ago, only thing I miss is Waffle House (I never actually liked waffle house, but having it available at 2AM was comforting) and some friends who are still working on getting out.