TanyaJLaird

Enough doomposting. Fatalism is fatal. Even if you're right, would you rather go down fighting or wait for the knock on the door to come to you? Here are some tangible things Dem reps can actually do right now, even as a minority party. These are the things voters should be demanding of them, other than just vague calls to "do something":

1. Grind the Senate to a halt. Not one Dem vote for any confirmation. Filibuster everything. Put holds on everything.
2. Not one Democratic vote for a continuing resolution or debt ceiling increase without major concessions. The federal government is better shut down than run by Trump/Musk.
3. Participate directly in street protests. Sitting reps can participate in these with little risk for arrest or assault by cops, and they have the resources and clout to not be destroyed by being arrested.
4. Purge anyone who dares utter the word "bipartisanship" from the party. Anyone who votes on a single Republican bill should be ineligible for a penny of Dem campaign funds come the next cycle and should lose any committee seats they have.

These are the things we should be demanding of Democratic representatives right now. Give up on the doomerism. If you want to crawl into a hole and die, fine. Go do it and quit bitching.

Oh, and quit trying to relitigate the prior election. Yes, there were errors on both sides of the left. The centrists should have stopped the genocide, and the Palestine supporters should have voted for Kamala anyway. It's a moot point now. We have bigger problems to worry about, and picking at these old wounds does nothing but divide the left further.

I don't think many people actually thought Trump would be an improvement, aside from the Christian nationalists.

When your life is misery, a chance, any chance, no matter how small, can often be or at least seem worth it. Rents are through the roof, pay is stagnant, health insurance is complete scam, and people have lost any hope of improving their lives. For tens of millions of people, the probability of them ever actually improving their lot in life is next to zero.

Someone comes along and says, "I'll smash the current order to pieces and reshuffle the entire deck."

Imagine you're a person in desperate straits. You think that overall, that potential leader will be a net negative society. But in the current system, the probability of anything improving in your life is zero. With a complete shuffling of the societal deck, well your odds aren't great, but they are non-zero. You're not going to end up an oligarch, but maybe you'll be one of the minority that ends up slightly better off. After all, some ordinary German citizens did actually materially benefit from the Nazis. Most didn't, but some got lucky.

This is why many people aside from Christian nationalists voted for Trump. The saw him as someone would would come along and knock over the Jenga tower of the existing sociopolitical order. They knew that the odds of their life being directly improved by this were slim. But they thought a slim chance was still there. And if nothing else, it would punish the bastards who have been keeping them down for years.

This is the fatal flaw with milquetoast Democratic centrism. It ignores that if you go long enough without actually helping millions of people who really need help, eventually those desperate people will vote to burn it all down out of sheer spite.

Is such a vote rational? No. But human beings are not rational. Human beings are not perfect utilitarian optimization engines. They vote with their hearts and souls, with both hope and rage. And that is what Democrats have repeatedly failed to realize.

Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?

We live in a world of specialization of labor. That is how civilizations are built. I don't have to be a blacksmith to know that a crooked nail is a poorly made one. I don't have to be a doctor to know that a witch doctor is not a real physician. I don't have to be a politician to know when a politician is utterly failing at their job.

I think you fail to understand that 2024 was not the anomaly. 2020 was the anomaly. The Democratic Party, as it exists now, is fundamentally incapable of winning a presidential election. They are as incapable of it as the Libertarian or the Green Parties are. We currently have only a single viable party for the US presidential election.

DNC milquetoast centrism has been electorally dead since at least 2012. It failed in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Biden only managed to win in 2020 not because of his platform or message, but simply because of covid. Make no mistake, if not for covid, Trump would have easily won in 2020. They've been selling the same slop since Clinton ran in 1992. And the brand is old and tired.

There weren't actually that many people who wanted to stop the Palestinian genocide but then voted for Trump. The vast, vast majority of the people you saw pleading online for Biden to do something ended up voting for Kamala. I certainly did.

Did Trump make inroads among the Muslim community? Sure. But he also made inroads among the Hispanic community. The anti-trans ads got way more Muslim votes for Trump than Biden's Gaza policy ever did. The truth is just as plenty of Hispanic voters will vote for an anti-immigrant candidate, plenty of Muslim voters will vote for an anti-Palestine candidate. Palestine is just one of many nations in the Middle East. It's supremely racist to lump all Muslims together as a single monolith and think all they care about is Palestine.

People were pleading with Kamala to make a change because it was one of the few opportunities she had to actually win the race. The DNC centrism is a politically dead philosophy. A radical departure from past policies was needed to give her any chance of victory. Making a hard break from Israel was just such a chance. It was one of the few slim chances she had to actually pull off this win. People were pleading with her to change policy on Gaza because they were trying to help her win. But she ignored them, and she also failed to make any meaningful change on any other substantial issue. Because of that she lost.

Kamala didn't lose because of Gaza. She was already destined to lose before Gaza. But changing policy on Gaza was a squandered opportunity that could have saved her otherwise doomed campaign. It was an opportunity to make a clear sign saying, "I'm something new, let's strike a new course." But she decided to campaign with Liz Cheney instead. And she secured her place in Hell because of it.

"No, this pair of shoes must be better, it's from that brand I like! I know it's made of cardboard and duct tape, but I swear, it's from that brand I like, so it has to be better!"

How well did that work for them? They had a billion dollar campaign, most of which was utterly wasted on advertising in already-saturated TV markets and pointless celebrity endorsements. Maybe they could have accepted less corporate money, been content with a mere $500 million campaign, and not driven their base away.

Pardons don't help you when you're being removed by the military.

There is a big difference between someone like Trump potentially carrying out a coup and actively carrying out a coup. He is now "an enemy, foreign and domestic." If members of the military have any intention of upholding their oath, he and his regime need to be removed by force.

Realistically, if they does face justice, it will likely be mob justice. Trump and Musk are setting themselves up to be in an incredibly physically vulnerable position. What do you think is going to happen in the DC metro area after they fire half of the federal government? The vast majority of the DC population will want to literally see their heads on pikes. And the military? They may uphold their oath to the Constitution not by removing Trump by force themselves, but simply by standing aside and letting the mob storm the gates.

The problem with running a blatantly and undeniably unconstitutional regime is that mobs of angry people will have zero moral compulsion about removing you from this world in justice outside the law.

When this is over, Musk is going to end up hanging from the end of a rope. He will be charged, tried, and convicted, and hanged for treason against the republic. What he has done is literally a capital offense. And those kids who've helped him enact this coup by hacking government systems? They have signed their own death warrants. They will join him on the gallows after they also are convicted for their treason and acts of terrorism against the nation.

It reminds me one of Asimov's robots trying to reason a way around the Three Laws.

Replace Tienanmen with discussions of Palestine, and you get the same censorship in US models.

Our governments aren't as different as they would like to pretend. The media in both countries is controlled by a government-integrated media oligarchy. The US is just a little more gentle with its censorship. China will lock you up for expressing certain views online. The US makes sure all prominent social media sites will either ban you or severely throttle the spread of your posts if you post any political wrongthink.

The US is ultimately just better at hiding its censorship.