One reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”.
The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future.
But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle.
So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
> But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
The party has been hijacked by capital. And has been since Clinton at least. As an ancient anarchist, I remember when the Dems held policy positions, but just barely. The party these days is just wealthy folks hoping they can hold norms stable long enough to cash out.
I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins…
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
I earnestly believe the midterm elections will happen far too late to have any impact. Look at how much has already been dismantled in the first six months:
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
> An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend.
A certain German clergyman write a poem about this.
The Constitution applies to everyone on US soil, ceding any ground undermines the next norm to be broken. It's a deliberate scope creep from Criminal illegal immigrants -> illegal immigrants -> immigrant-looking and criminals in general -> enemies of the state and criminal/enemy sympathizers. Having to "defend" American-born citizens means you've ceded a lot of ground, and are nearing your last stand.
What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
I suspect the person you're responding to was suggesting your energy could be better channeled to more productive pursuits, rather than aping bluesky-level analysis on an internet forum.
As a citizen of the world, this option absolutely remains available to you. As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
> As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Eh, it depends. To put it succinctly, a leading investor from the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic Gulf state once told me that while the Republican govt., especially under Trump, is super friendly to letting them get away with shit, a Democrat government is better for returns. From an investment standpoint, everyone craves stability and is happy to double down and reinvest, but given cases like Trump, we're happy to move out our American extractions.
That high rent Americans pay to their landlords? Yeah, we're LPs of Blackstone, who brag about bleeding renters dry annually. That new war Mr President wants to start? Carlyle is very happy about its strong showing. All those farm running out of water in California, Arizona, etc.? They're happily eating local mutton and dairy derived from cows, goats and sheep fed on American alfalfa. Oh, and my mom absolutely loves those water-hungry almonds you grow there, especially when they come for a nice hefty discount.
The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
I think you've identified the symptom, but not the root cause. Democrats are inept. The party lost my vote recently. But it has nothing to do with trans support or gender support, and everything to do with they have calcified into "at least we're not the other guy." There is no platform except, "look at how bad the other party is!"
My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people.
Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people.
And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
I don't believe either that they focused too much on trans rights. But they don't have a clear focus on anything so they are easy to attack on minor issues like trans rights (yes, it's a minor issue only a very small part of the population cares about). And they constantly fall for the bait. They should run on something like Medicare For All and stick to it. Seems whenever they face some resistance they drop the issue.
Democrats and progressives believe that factual arguments are what wins elections, so they are tripping over themselves to present the lectorate with proof. this would be a winning strategy if the whole electorate were like Dems and progressives, but it's not.
They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Abstract, abstract, abstract,
my hat is red,
your hat is blue
that is why -
I hate you.
Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system.
I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future.
But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle.
So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.