If you take away one thing from this post, it is that Trump set a precedent.
In other words, Trump opened a door to Christian mythology through which larger evils may walk onto the same stage and be much worse than he is.
Americans are primed, so start those engines and make choices to smother Nazism.
Make art.
Self-actualize.
Be savagely hedonistic. My favorite.
Both parties are still utterly captured by Israel and kleptocrats too. Some deck chairs on the titanic got rearranged but the captains of the boat are the same, and didnt care what the vote was. Thats what owning both parties is all about. This blue wave was simply a change in middle mangement, and an opportunity to placate the masses for a bit with new deceptions.
The main thing I’ve been hearing from leftists and progressives (basically the whole political left other than establishment democrats) is that the midterms were just the first step and that we have a lot more work to do. I feel like people arrive at the sentiment in the post by watching Democrat-favorable mainstream media, which loudly ignores (or outright condemns) anyone doing anything more left than the neo liberals.
The oligarchs are still around, so no, we didn’t solve anything. We got a small FU to someone who has been skirting Congress, and it remains to be seen if Congress has any power to reign in the executive branch.
In other words, Trump opened a door to Christian mythology through which larger evils may walk onto the same stage and be much worse than he is.
Naw, that’s normal US Christianity, and authoritarianism is the larger evil. Christian Nationalism runs deep in the US; it arrived here with the Puritans.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy opened the door to all of this, and has formed the Republican base of power for ~50 years. Reagan solidified the bond, and gave legitimacy to the likes of Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham.
Trump set the bar for corruption and disregard for the rule of law. Those are the new and scary parts.
POTUS has been accumulating power and trending towards more of an autocratic positions for years thanks to congress shirking their responsibilities, but this has mainly been held in check by the people who have held the office. They’ve respected the office and US gov customs.
The US needs to seriously clean house. Get rid of the oligarchs. Get rid of the mega-corporations. Get rid of 250 years of history because quite a bit of it is seriously rotten. Restructure the gov to put reigns on the executive branch and make it so the people hold the power.
Is that going to happen? Probably not, so the best advice is to get out and let it crater.
To make the world a better place, people outside the US should help the left-leaning folks migrate over. It could be a swap. Send the right-wing assholes to the US in exchange for more enlightened people. This fixes 2 problems at once. 😃
Pretty sure the “micro” in “microblog memes” refers to the number of characters, not the font size
Authoritarianism in America is not dead - https://aussie.zone/post/38216333
I think we need to discard this whole “blue tsunami” nonsense. This wasn’t the American public in its totality rejecting the Republican Party. This was a few tens of millions of people changing their vote this time around.
On average, Republicans still took around 40% of votes. These people never went away. And the few million that switched their vote to blue? What’s keeping them from voting red in the next election?
Very little has changed, apart from a few people getting really really mad about gas prices.
It’s true. It was the politically-unengaged (“I hate politics, I think it’s stupid and nobody ever does anything, anyway”) getting squeezed enough financially to spite vote for the Dems and the MAGA faithful being dispirited enough to not want to vote that brought us these results. We need to continue working to stomp out the creep of fascism and re-establish the separation of powers from the executive branch. It would also be really great if we could stop the same handful of billionaires from continuing to pull every nice thing out of the reach of the poors by saying things like, “They don’t need to go to resorts and theme parks for their PTO,” “nobody needs a to-go cup of coffee,” or “there are plenty of other proteins to choose from that aren’t beef” and raising prices.
Still, this is a victory, and no one’s as capable at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as the Democrats.
Theocratic pedophile nazis or good, average people? Those are the choices we have right now.
You are who you hang out with.
This is the apologia which handed 2024 to Trump. It should be discarded with all who repeat it.
Noted.
Very little has changed, apart from a few people getting really really mad about gas prices.
The electorate hasn’t fundamentally changed, but as usual incompetent Republican governance has pushed it leftward on certain issues. It’s not just the gas prices; Americans are more pro-immigration now than a few years ago, and abolishing ICE isn’t a fringe position anymore.
What’s keeping them from voting red in the next election?
For now nothing, but if the Democrats can make good on even some of their promises (or at least convince people they’re trying) there’s no reason they can’t maintain this momentum into 2028 and pull an FDR. Of course I don’t trust them to do any of that, but history tells us that this is far from an impossible problem.
Knowing dems in control they’ll just refuse to impeach Trump, pretend they tried to do something without actually improving anything for anyone, and try again to use “Trump bad so you have to vote for us” to run fucking milquetoast ass newsom in 2028.
But, Democrats did impeach Trump… twice. They couldn’t remove him from office because that requires a supermajority in the senate.
The fact of the matter is, the federal government is structured so that very little change is possible unless one party holds the majority of the House and Senate and has the Presidency.
That only happened for two years under Biden. And the Senate “majority” was a 50-50 split, so they were vulnerable to Republican filibuster and so even a single senator defecting (Manchin and Sinema) could derail a bill. Even so, we got some good things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest investment the US has ever made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, codifying same-sex marriage into law, and more.
The last time Democrats had a filibuster-proof supermajority was under Obama, and it only lasted for 72 working days. In less than three months, Democrats passed the ACA. While US healthcare is still abhorent, it cannot be understated how utterly massive of a step forward the ACA was and continues to be. Lifetime maximums and pre-existing conditions gone. Kids keeping their parents insurance until they turn 26. Full coverage of preventative care. Prenatal care. Contraceptives. Seriously, read your insurance policy and just about everything on it is only covered because it is legally mandated by the ACA. Sometimes, it gets lazy and will even say “does not cover xyz, except where legally required by the ACA”.
Democrats are not going to magically fix everything when voters don’t give them the power to do so, and giving Republicans power every other election does not help.
Democrats are not going to magically fix everything when voters don’t give them the power to do so, and giving Republicans power every other election does not help.
You’re mixing up cause and effect here. Democrats aren’t going to get the power to fix things until they credibly run on fixing things. The kind of supermajority you want historically comes when people have something to turn out for (thinking of FDR here, but Obama also works, the difference here being that Obama betrayed his voters and FDR didn’t). Also I’m really not sure why I should be impressed that it took the Democrats 72 days to pass Romneycare and nothing else. In any case though there are things we know they have the power to do: Kick Chuck and Jeffries out of Congress leadership, end the war in Iran, impeach Trump and as many of his cronies as possible (the investigations would be worth it even without a conviction), defund ICE, etc. Any actual legislation they pass would be a bonus on top.
To add to this, in the next congress Democrats will hold a majority in the House and Senate, but not a veto-proof majority. Federally, do not expect Democrats to improve much in the next 2 years, they simply do not have the power to enact major change without the Presidency. They will, however, grind the open corruption and ransacking of the country to a snails pace for the rest of Trumps term, which is a massive boon. Republicans will play this up during the next campaign cycle saying Democrats did nothing, but “nothing” is a whole lot better than the nosedive we are currently in.
In the next 2 years, improvements driven from the Democrats will come from the state level. States with new Democrat governors and local politicians will see great things.
Thank you.
People here are acting like the DSA speaks for 99.9% of the population.
They see that Mamdani won as Mayor of New York, and ignore that the Congresswoman from Staten Island is still GOP.
Weʻre in a moment where the boss is down to 10% HP. There is an oppurtunity to step on the windpipe of the Republican party right now, and crush it, and actually end them as a party permanently. It depends on Democrats in the House and Senate stepping up and leading. On letting slip ALLL the dogs of war, all the powder, and all the canons at once in this period. This means inside power, outside power, media power, and if need be, labor power in the form of a general strike.
Any one apologizing for weakness on behalf is our enemy right now. We can accept no weakness, and no excuses. We need to be dynamic in our concept of what power is and how to apply it. We need to take the lessons that BLM and Occupy taught us about how inside and outside power works.
The outside power game needs to be prepared to work hand-in-glove with the inside power game. We can-not be above any strategy right now, however insane.
Edit after reading the other comments:
What in the fuck is the shit-libbary in this thread? Did bluesky start leaking?
Occupy was co-opted and neutralized, neutered even.
BLM was basically abandoned when Biden got into office. shit was baffling.
I think because black conservative Democrats thought Biden would have their backs. He didn’t.
We’ve still got two years with fascists in control of the executive (including and especially DoJ) and SCOTUS. If there’s one thing that history teaches, it’s that fascists don’t just get voted out.
First, the Dems don’t have a big enough majority to overcome Trump’s vetoes.
Second, more incumbent Dems were re-elected than new Dems voted in.
The Dems are going to have to overcome a lot of die hard GOPs whose strategy is to block up everything and then blame the Left for not being capable leaders.
I think yall need to play up shame more. Its a fantastic biological mechanism for regulating behaviour. Make MAGA a shameful thing to be connected with.
I only go on Facebook to bully MAGAs, and I can say in my experience shame and disgust are the most effective weapons I’ve found. Call them stupid, call them racist, call them cultists, and they just double down. Call them disgusting, pathetic, revolting, and their tone changes, if they respond at all.
They have canned responses for substantive criticism. Their brains short circuit when you call them filthy degenerates. Bonus points if you hit them in the religion or patriotism. Jesus was a leftist and you can quote Scripture for days. The founding fathers wrote quite a lot against authoritarianism.
Shame and disgust are the winning play. It’s the only language their tribalistic lizard brains understand.
If that worked, we would never had had the TeaParty let alone MAGA.
The irony of Europeans lecturing Americans about fascism is not post on me
Australia isn’t in Europe.
I agree but Lemmy isn’t a microblog.
Yeah, confused why this isn’t a a crosspost?
This will surely be unpopular, but I think the best thing to do would be to break up the country. The US is a huge country and has become basically ungovernable within our two party system. The federal government is hopelessly corrupt. The electorate is bitterly divided and misinformation is all over the place with no real way to stop it. I think it would be wise to break up into smaller groups (I’m thinking the states could become sovereign nations), which would make real change more achievable. Some states would be lost causes, but at least they wouldn’t be tanking all of us. Food for thought…
Breaking up the country means dooming tons of people in states that rely on federal assistance (ie, southern states where marginalized people already suffer more). If we want to rethink/reorganize/retool the federal government, I’m on board. But dissolving it completely would be disastrous
That may be true, but I think you are assuming that there is an easy way out. What if there isn’t? What if the interests of the ultra wealthy have infested our government to the point where it serves only them and will defend their positions of power at all cost? We would be talking violent revolt if we wanted to better our situation anyway. In order to prevent the same situation from quickly redeveloping, we might want to break up the country into more manageable territories. The larger the group, the more difficult it is to reach consensus. You are right that some would be better off than others. That is true now though.
No, it’s not just that some would be better off than others. There would be entire states that would be destitute without the federal government. Multiple states receive more in federal aid/grants/etc. than what their people pay in taxes. Removing the federal government would instantly throw them into bankruptcy. There would be famines.
I’m not assuming there’s an easy way out. Fixing the federal government will be one of the hardest projects in the country’s history. But dissolving it won’t fix anything, and it surely won’t make revolution any easier. Kinda hard to revolt when you’re dying of hunger.
That would be a very ugly process… It’s not like we’d come out on the other side as a close collection of states like the EU. It would be brutal and extremely chaotic
I think the federal government has been critically damaged over the last 2 years, so I think a lot of power is going to return to the states naturally. I think we have an opportunity to redefine what happens federally starting in January, and I think the answer to that can’t be “nothing”
I don’t want to test the might of individual states against megacorps. And we are going to be up against megacorps either way
Megacorps already own the federal government. The break up of the US could be relatively peaceful. Well, at least it could be similar to the break up of the Soviet Union; there would be some clashes and violence, but it would be better than a full scale civil war or a revolution. I know that a lot of people are hopeful right now. I am too, but very reserved about it. At least we know our votes still count… But the corruption remains. At best, it’s just a little more diluted. Right now is probably not the right time to bring up dissolution of the United States, but wait two years when people are moaning about nothing changing and things still being too expensive. Watch the Nazis get a real chance to gain back power. It was never possible to change things. The government is corrupt and powerless. Now what?
I think we need to put our complete trust and faith in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. I also don’t understand why people are upset with Haley Stevens. She could have been the next Chuck Schumer. Also, how can people say that Israel isn’t our greatest ally in the whole world. With Schumer and Jeffries at the helm Democrats can make supporting Israel their number one cause. That is how they can show America that they’ve learned the lessons from the past and prevent people from losing faith in institutions.
Is this sarcasm? I really can’t tell.
The sarcasm on display is earth shaking.
I agree 100%. It’s a shame that so many people don’t understand who really has our best interests st heart.
You betcha.
