2028 ELECTION THREAD

well stated

These statements are mutually exclusive.

I agree with the latter ..... that Democrats are not genuinely interested in attaining power. Their priority has been ensuring that a progressive like Sanders did not win and avoiding any intra party competition about policy which included a progressive perspective.

So .... from the perspective of a party which doesn't seek to be popular and win, choosing Harris without a competitive was extremely intelligent.

Dumb is the term I would use for the voters who believe the Democratic leadership is committed to a competitive democratic process. As George Carlin admonished us .... there's a club of people who own the country and you are I are not in it. It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

By way of background .... I have nothing complimentary to say about Republicans and I've never voted for one. But at least they give their voters something of what they want. They want theocracy. They want AR-15's. They want someone to hate. They want an authoritarian. They want an end to abortion rights.

I am disgusted by what the Democratic Party has become. There is no intra-party competition which involves a debate about what the voters want. The voters were completely excluded from the process by which a nominee was selected.

Political qualifications involve the ability to win a competitive popularity contest. Hillary Clinton winning a Senate seat in a deep blue state of NY or Kamala Harris doing the same in California is not a reflection of ability to win a competitive national election. I don't mean to be sexist, but these are two who only arrived at these places as a result of their relationship with men (Bill Clinton and Willie Brown) who had the charisma and political chops to win competitive elections. They were just ambitious opportunists who got where they were as a result of their subservience to power.

The Democratic Party doesn't give a **** about popularity. It's all a transparent farce.

Frankly, the only person remotely affiliated with Democrats that the public trusts who is younger than Bernie is Jon Stewart.

If you belong to a party where no one debates or disagrees with each other .... then there is no reason to think one candidate would do better than another.

I'll say one for the GOP. They had a competition in 2016 and Trump insulted all of his competitors. Ted Cruz became "Lying Ted". Marco Rubio became "Little Marco". He expressed the contempt that voters feel for the establishment. He channeled their contempt.

Democrats needs an alpha character who is willing to go toe to toe with other Democrats.

Bernie was willing to disagree on policy, but he was kinda wimpy.

We need a character like FDR who said at the 1936 convention that he welcomed the hate of those who opposed his candidacy. We need a candidate who is willing to insult Barack Obama's empty legacy and tell billionaire capitalist Nancy Pelosi to go to hell. We need a leftist bully.

The situation is because of corruption. In order for Democrats to appear to genuinely server their constituents, they would have to actually care about what they think. They don't. The votes come with money. Money is what wins elections and it comes from donors. Many of the same entities donate to both parties. The solution is reform. Democrats play the good cop. They don't need to do anything except not be the bad guy.

We are longer a society which has the capacity to combat the gravitational force of money.

We are in a death spiral of wealth concentration. The working class "herd" grasps that they are in a system which is inhumane and indifferent to their well being. That's why they voted for Trump. He holds the potential to destroy the entire paradigm.

It's really no different than Germans in the 1920's who understand that the terms at Versailles were indifferent to their starvation. The Nazis were the horrific transition from Versailles to the Marshall Plan.

The donors as individuals are looking to maximize their ROI. They are purchasing government outcomes with their donations.

The donors as a whole are practicing something insane. They are enjoying life in the penthouse while the foundation of the building is rotting away and the whole structure is crumbling. This is a recurring cycle in human history. The Romans had a word for it called Saeculum. It refers to a period of time roughly equivalent to a human lifespan.

It basically goes like this.

Hard Times ==> Strong People ==> Good Times ==> Weak People ==> Hard Time (repeat ad nauseum)

WW2 was hard time. Boomers are the people who grew without hard times and hence are weak people who squandered the legacy they inherited. Hard times are incoming.

I agree about the wealth inequality the our time seems a lot like era leading up to the great depression. There's not really a solution as people are ignorant, lazy and cowardly. I don't blame them and am mostly the same. In the US most people are stuck because of debt, family, and mostly health care. The lack of public health care stifles the economy more than we can quantify, but it serves to keep everyone in line because otherwise their families will die.
MAGAs are going to be really angry when social security, medicare, USPS, schools, jobs, the stock market are destroyed. I have a feeling they won't turn their anger to the robber barons in charge.

this +1million

Nut Nut, I like your posts and largely agree with the points contained therein, but I've always hated this cliche:

Hard times are more likely to create BROKEN people than strong people. Wars, depression, famine, these things spark trauma in people which can last decades. On a more micro level, check out the biographies of serial killers; seriously like 98% of them come from horrible childhood situations, rife with physical and sexual abuse, drugs and poverty.

There's really nothing good about austerity. It doesn't create Strong People. This is a myth perpetrated by the capitalist class. And the rest of the formula is on shaky ground as well. Hitler, Mussolini, Cheney, they were/are all strong people who definitely didn't create good times!

there's ample historical example of this

historically speaking - until the advent of gunpowder as the great equalizer, farmers made terrible soldiers (a small professional army > large army of farmers) and they were historically dominated by those who scraped by on a lot more hardship, usually nomads or pastoral people - ie the sheep herders of the mountains would dominate the byzantine army

ie the arab tribes were these nomadic people who swept across the world conquering everything, they then settle down and farm and enjoy the good life and a new tribe of nomads in the turks move in and take over - look at most of the arab kingdoms and the later ones are often dominated by the turks once the arabs got wealthy and fat

you see this repeat itself throughout history - the latter stages of rome their army and ruling class were largely from the nomadic hordes which had early been raiding rome and were now the army and generals defending it - same with manchu who swept up and ruled china as the qing, early qing were a force so powerful nobody dared confront them and they defeated all european incursions - they were so powerful it led to a period of peace in asia called the pax manjurica and then they get wealthy, settled and fat and a few hundred years later and easily brushed aside by foreign armies and their former vassal states like japan