5 ms·

This is a general cultural problem with liberalism at present. My social media timelines are absolutely full of Serious People analyzing how we got here and sit

This is a general cultural problem with liberalism at present. My social media timelines are absolutely full of Serious People analyzing how we got here and situating our present condition in historical and theoretical context. And they're mostly right! but what's lacking is any discussion of what to do about it. Even advocacy for legislative remedies or mass strikes are mostly dismissed in favor of throwing up hands and waiting for the midterm elections, as if the outcome were assured and a repeat of January 6 2021 were unthinkable. I can only conclude that a large part of the populace either can't believe what's happening or can't comprehend the implications.

braiamp 2y ago
Yeah, people would prefer to "coast it up" rather than doing something substantial. The weekend protests are literally self own, because you are protesting in the only "free time" that you can have.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  There have been such a comical amount of protests over the last decade for every trite issue that it's hard not to feel like most of those people would defs not be there if they had any sort of other obligation or otherwise incurred a cost. Not to say that's the case with every issue, but there's a world of difference between the person showing up on a weekend for a bit to protest for climate action, hoping to end up in a photo, and the person protesting the actions of their home country's regime knowing that their government could abduct your family that's still there.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    I see people saying this a lot, and I guarantee during civil rights marches people were saying the same thing. It's a cynical and jaded and not very useful viewpoint, IMO. We shouldn't be gatekeeping the ability of the average person to publicly petition their government for a redress of grievances. That's kind of a core function of an engaged populace.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      Ya, in retrospect it does read as overly cynical and yelling at clouds in a way, I agree with that point. My comment captured more than I intended, but the civil rights example pretty much seems like a defining use of the term. Specific, tangible outcome, targeted, not trite at all, connected to a real oppressive issue of the time, but I can imagine people trivializing them at the time. While I can think of examples that I personally think are a bit silly, I'd agree it's not really a useful contribution.
  - Cipater 2y ago
    >for every trite issue This speaks volumes
- cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
  There's only one possible route for removal but it requires simultaneous impeachment and removal of POTUS and all 18 in the USPLOS too. That would require immense pressure on a handful of Republicans to break from party such that 218 House and 68 Senate votes could be achieved. Furthermore, the Senate would need to agree upon a non-MAGA interim POTUS or not appoint one, and then extraordinary POTUS elections would need to be held and the electorate not make the same mistakes again. Odds of occurring: snowball's chance. Not gonna happen. The action alternative to that is massive numbers of calls to representatives, attendance of town halls, and large-scale protests to attempt to limit political maneuvering. People in America aren't rich and can't afford to take time off work to protest, so protesting off hours is more convenient... seems kind of insulting and elitist for you to dismiss civic participation. And then there's the people who shout "impeach" or other absurdities, or criticize others taking actions while doing nothing themselves.
  - giardini 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - rayiner 2y ago
    The Senate wouldn’t even vote to end Trump’s tariffs.
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      Which is absurd too because tariffs and taxes are supposed to come from the Senate per the Constitution. The Senate should be protecting the Constitution here, if nothing else.
      - otterley 2y ago
        Unfortunately Congress, in its infinite wisdom, delegated tariff-making authority to the President in cases of emergency. You'll never guess what happened next.
    - otterley 2y ago
lovich 2y ago
A large part of the populace has proven they’ll pick this option repeatedly. A lot of people are tired of fighting to keep toddlers from touching the hot stove and just want to let them learn their lesson for once.
- cpncrunch 2y ago
  Yes, this is what people voted for. Either they will get fed up with the outcome, or Trump will reverse course (I suspect the latter). Either way, time to grab the popcorn.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Walmart back rooms are emptying out nationwide. Shelves will do so next. Let's see what tune folks sing when their guy turns their everything store into a scene out of Solzhenitsyn. Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage with their usual grating condescension and smug incompetence, and then blame everyone else for their own myriad failings, again as always.
    - bigyabai 2y ago
      > Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage It's up to business owners to capitalize on that advantage. Neither liberals nor conservatives are beholden to stabilizing prices at Costco or Adam&Eve. These are privately owned businesses that are fundamentally allowed to plan their businesses apart from (or even against the wishes of) the federal government. This is how we ended up importing our cars from Japan and Mexico, and why our iPhones and Nike won't get made without slave wages. It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders.
      - throwanem 2y ago
        Business owners and so on as you enumerated have names, addresses, and assets susceptible to seizure. And the law does not often anticipate novel crimes, nor need.
roenxi 2y ago
The last time January 6 happened it had no implications except Trump's polling dropped slightly. If there is a repeat it is irrelevant except for optics - you will need to theorise something that is substantially worse.
harimau777 2y ago
I think that most people don't believe that there's anything that they can do that will make a difference. Realistically things aren't getting better in the short term no matter what we do and, as the saying goes, in the long term we're all dead. So why risk it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- giardini 2y ago
  [flagged]
freen 2y ago
If you know how to convince Trump to stop, or the GOP controlled congress to stop him, or the GOP packed supreme court to stop him… By all means, share the wisdom!
sandworm101 2y ago
Or a large percentage of the populace is afraid. Nobody wants to draw the attention of the far right, both the parts in and out of office. Everyone in the US knows someone who is illegal, a green car holder, a student/work visa holder or who otherwise may be vulnerable. Piss off the wrong people and the powers that be may cast their eye on you and your friends. Even if deportation is remote for any of my immediate friends, I dont want my name on one of those lists, such as the lists of enemy attornies/firms that have recently had to make "donations" and pledges. This is why ballots are secret. At least for now.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Apathy and cowardice is how we got here. My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it. For many years after she was thoroughly audited by the IRS. If that's the price of free expression, put my name on the list. I won't go quietly.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    When I was a teenager after 9/11, me and my family had donated to the Holy Land foundation. For the next two years, my literal firewood delivery business I ran with my dad that grossed under 10K was audited by the IRS.
  - giardini 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    >My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it. What? Tell us more. Who stopped her? Why was she actually stopped and searched? They aren’t going to just see or know you have “commie pamphlets” in your suitcase.
    - steebo 2y ago
      Checked luggage gets opened legally without the owner present all the time.
jshen 2y ago
Republicans just voted against legislation to stop this nonsense. The only remedy is to convince people to vote against this party. the problem is that people identify as Republican and see Democrats as something that goes against the core of their identity. Most people don't follow politics closely and it will take a LOT to get them to wake up. My ray of hope is that the full effect of these dumb policies have not really hit yet outside of the stock market. Once they do hit, hopefully it wakes up enough of them. The argument for pessimism is that many people convinced themselves that covid was fake and that the vaccines were some kind of conspiracy, so even when their own life was on the line, they chose ignorance tot he point that many people lay dying in the hospital in denial that covid was killing them. Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug.
- bigbadfeline 2y ago
  > "Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug." If you think the Dems didn't know that, think again. The Democrats put Trump into office with their insane choice of identity hills to die on. Then Biden woke up in mid summer: "Gosh am I still a presidential candidate? How come? Let's do Kamala now" ... with her disastrous electability record. Yeah right, "an honest mistake". > "many people convinced themselves that covid was fake" Covid has nothing to do with it... Trump was the first and most vocal vaccine salesman and he got elected anyway because in the eyes of the public there was no difference between Dem and Rep, the election was decided on a different set of issues.
  - x3ro 2y ago
    I really don’t understand how this is being downvoted. Whatever your interpretation of the reasons is, it’s objectively correct to say that democrats lost [1] instead of saying Trump won, even though the outcome is the same. Democrats alienated 19 million voters on a variety of issues, whereas republican turnout was almost the same. [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnout-2024-analysis/tnamp/ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnou...
  - jshen 2y ago
    You misunderstood the points I made.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
There's plenty of discussion of what to do about it, including a legislative remedy which went up for a vote just today. The thing is, Trump's poll numbers are declining rapidly, with his support being driven by people who just don't believe the consequences of his policies will happen. So the conclusion most people reach is that protesting and talking are the most effective things to do right now. If we're 7 weeks out from empty store shelves, then we're 7 weeks out from a huge surge of discontent, and we want to be ready to tell those people that Donald Trump is clearly responsible and they can help stop him if they'd like. A mass strike in particular definitely doesn't make sense today. You can't run a mass strike if the Teamsters aren't on your side, and they support the tariffs.
giardini 2y ago
Lack of imagination.
6502nerdface 2y ago
All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
syllogism 2y ago
Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Let Trump implode so that he owns the inevitable failure. His base will desperately want to blame the left for not letting the policies work as intended. The less the Democrats do, the harder that is. I think a lot of Democrat politicians are going this way, and it's why Schumer rolled over on the budget. Part of the logic here is that Trump is indeed different from other authoritarians. He's even less competent. He's blowing all his political capital on imploding the economy. He also can't understand the legal battles, so when Stephen Miller tells him they won the Supreme Court case 9-0, he believes him. This seems to have been a big wake-up call to Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh. The administration has shown its hand much too quickly, before it fully consolidated its power. What the Democrats should be doing already is campaigning more. Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes. Show people Trump calling January the "Trump economy" before inauguration, then calling April the "Biden economy" now that he's crashed it. If Trump polls low enough, more senators will jump ship, and impeachment could be possible.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  Not just campaigning. Resourcing. By now (by 8 years ago, to be !@#$ing honest) there should be a very clean, crisp website that's a searchable list of topics/talking points, with immediately available videos, audios, screenshots of Trump contradicting himself, along with links to easily digestible facts. This alone will never convince anyone of anything who isn't already convinced. But as an absolute minimum, it should be effortless for anyone to demonstrate his lack of ideology every single time he speaks about how he's always/never supported something. Maybe we could even educate "journalists" and the media on its existence so they can do more than "agree to disagree" whenever they talk about things.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  > Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Our tax money hard at work. What a fucking joke.
  - verzali 2y ago
    Do American parties get tax money to spend on strategists?
sph 2y ago
> what's lacking is any discussion of what to do about it If you subscribe to the views of documentarist Adam Curtis, that is because no one has any clue whatsoever.
- satanfirst 2y ago
  I get his PoV, but I think most people who have thought about it know which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. The difficulty is precedent and the preference to the power two factions over structure. Doing something to fix the US' executive branch problem with the proper Amendments would be likely to fail because it would be too neutral to collect from lobyists or sell on emotion.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    The amendments already exist! More than that, the core articles already exist! The Constitutional powers delegate taxation and tariffs solely to Congress. Doing it through Executive Order is Constitutionally absurd and if Congress wasn't asleep at the wheel and criminally "Do Nothing" (especially, nothing without a Lobbyist lining your tailored suit's insides with cash like filthy lingerie) and the Judicial Branch wasn't suborned into party politics mentalities and a lot of people in both Congress and Justice weren't being hugely negligent on their sworn oaths to Protect the Constitution, there should be a lot more Checks and Balances happening right now. This isn't about which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. This is about which tools should have been used before the Great Depression in a country under a political party that has spent decades dismantling the tools that helped it end the Great Depression.
0xEF 2y ago
This is the Liberal Way; complain about the state of things, but when it comes time to do the work and change it, they are suddenly nowhere to be found unless you go to the various social media enclaves where they sure do talk up a big storm of moral outrage, mostly well-reasoned and justified. The problem is they wait for someone else to roll up their sleeves and get to work. The Fascist Right does not, which is why they are winning this War of Ideology.
- zamalek 2y ago
  I call it pseudo-liberalism: people who don't understand that protecting rights actually damned hard work. They also can't see the mountains for the molehills. It is also when liberalism is used as a fashion accessory: they wear their sweat shop handbags to an anti-fascist rally.
rayiner 2y ago
> And they're mostly right They’re clearly not! Around the developed world, people—especially younger people—are angry that their economies have been exported to the third world while their countries have been filled with cheap third world labor. Acela-class liberals and highly educated Reagan conservatives teamed up to bring about that state of affairs. Maybe they should do some introspection instead of crowing about how they’re right and half the country is just too stupid to realize how great they have it. If (neo-)liberalism worked, people wouldn’t be so unhappy about the current state of affairs.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  What economies are exported? US GDP growth been huge and unemployment is low. The economy is doing great, just not for everyone. = Making socks for $10,000/yr is not what these people want, nor will it help them. Instead, they will see housing and cost of living slip further from normal salaries as a result of tariffs.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    But does GDP growth reflect quality of life? The inequality you’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect from policies that reduce labor market bargaining power through the dual-pronged approach of outsourcing production and facilitating mass immigration. Germans and Japanese don’t make socks for $10,000/year. Our former au pair lives in a small town in Germany. She was tracked into an apprenticeship program at 16 (off the college track), but now in her early 30s has a solid white collar job doing logistics for a baby formula manufacturer. Her boyfriend works in logistics as well—a big industry in a country that makes things. By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real? As a corporate attorney, I make probably double what I would in Germany. Pay differentials seem to be similar for other knowledge-economy jobs like software development, marketing, etc. Our laptop class makes tons of money compared to their counterparts in Germany or Japan. But is that a good thing?
    - JamesBarney 2y ago
      It's so weird to see conservatives talk about how great the European economy is. I used to have to argue with my liberal friends about how Europe is a sclerotic economy and now I'm arguing with conservatives about it. Weird world. > By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real? Yes it's real, we live in larger homes, have more cars, have more stuff. Maybe that doesn't drive a huge change in quality of life, but making us poorer isn't going to do that either. And when you talk to Europeans about why they like Europe they don't list how poor everyone is there, or how many factory jobs there are. They list a bunch of stuff that is anathema to conservatives like the socialized medicine (some love it, other's hate it), a carless culture, a social safety net, a slower speed of life, lots of vacation. (Which is a big reason why they are poorer) And it's not just the laptop class, almost everyone who is full time is richer in the US. The exception is people who are marginally employed who would probably benefit from Europe's larger social safety net.

braiamp 2y ago

Yeah, people would prefer to "coast it up" rather than doing something substantial. The weekend protests are literally self own, because you are protesting in the only "free time" that you can have.

brailsafe 2y ago
There have been such a comical amount of protests over the last decade for every trite issue that it's hard not to feel like most of those people would defs not be there if they had any sort of other obligation or otherwise incurred a cost. Not to say that's the case with every issue, but there's a world of difference between the person showing up on a weekend for a bit to protest for climate action, hoping to end up in a photo, and the person protesting the actions of their home country's regime knowing that their government could abduct your family that's still there.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  I see people saying this a lot, and I guarantee during civil rights marches people were saying the same thing. It's a cynical and jaded and not very useful viewpoint, IMO. We shouldn't be gatekeeping the ability of the average person to publicly petition their government for a redress of grievances. That's kind of a core function of an engaged populace.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Ya, in retrospect it does read as overly cynical and yelling at clouds in a way, I agree with that point. My comment captured more than I intended, but the civil rights example pretty much seems like a defining use of the term. Specific, tangible outcome, targeted, not trite at all, connected to a real oppressive issue of the time, but I can imagine people trivializing them at the time. While I can think of examples that I personally think are a bit silly, I'd agree it's not really a useful contribution.
- Cipater 2y ago
  >for every trite issue This speaks volumes
cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
There's only one possible route for removal but it requires simultaneous impeachment and removal of POTUS and all 18 in the USPLOS too. That would require immense pressure on a handful of Republicans to break from party such that 218 House and 68 Senate votes could be achieved. Furthermore, the Senate would need to agree upon a non-MAGA interim POTUS or not appoint one, and then extraordinary POTUS elections would need to be held and the electorate not make the same mistakes again. Odds of occurring: snowball's chance. Not gonna happen. The action alternative to that is massive numbers of calls to representatives, attendance of town halls, and large-scale protests to attempt to limit political maneuvering. People in America aren't rich and can't afford to take time off work to protest, so protesting off hours is more convenient... seems kind of insulting and elitist for you to dismiss civic participation. And then there's the people who shout "impeach" or other absurdities, or criticize others taking actions while doing nothing themselves.
- giardini 2y ago
  [flagged]
- rayiner 2y ago
  The Senate wouldn’t even vote to end Trump’s tariffs.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    Which is absurd too because tariffs and taxes are supposed to come from the Senate per the Constitution. The Senate should be protecting the Constitution here, if nothing else.
    - otterley 2y ago
      Unfortunately Congress, in its infinite wisdom, delegated tariff-making authority to the President in cases of emergency. You'll never guess what happened next.
  - otterley 2y ago

lovich 2y ago

A large part of the populace has proven they’ll pick this option repeatedly. A lot of people are tired of fighting to keep toddlers from touching the hot stove and just want to let them learn their lesson for once.

cpncrunch 2y ago
Yes, this is what people voted for. Either they will get fed up with the outcome, or Trump will reverse course (I suspect the latter). Either way, time to grab the popcorn.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Walmart back rooms are emptying out nationwide. Shelves will do so next. Let's see what tune folks sing when their guy turns their everything store into a scene out of Solzhenitsyn. Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage with their usual grating condescension and smug incompetence, and then blame everyone else for their own myriad failings, again as always.
  - bigyabai 2y ago
    > Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage It's up to business owners to capitalize on that advantage. Neither liberals nor conservatives are beholden to stabilizing prices at Costco or Adam&Eve. These are privately owned businesses that are fundamentally allowed to plan their businesses apart from (or even against the wishes of) the federal government. This is how we ended up importing our cars from Japan and Mexico, and why our iPhones and Nike won't get made without slave wages. It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Business owners and so on as you enumerated have names, addresses, and assets susceptible to seizure. And the law does not often anticipate novel crimes, nor need.

roenxi 2y ago

The last time January 6 happened it had no implications except Trump's polling dropped slightly. If there is a repeat it is irrelevant except for optics - you will need to theorise something that is substantially worse.

harimau777 2y ago

I think that most people don't believe that there's anything that they can do that will make a difference. Realistically things aren't getting better in the short term no matter what we do and, as the saying goes, in the long term we're all dead. So why risk it?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
giardini 2y ago
[flagged]

freen 2y ago

If you know how to convince Trump to stop, or the GOP controlled congress to stop him, or the GOP packed supreme court to stop him… By all means, share the wisdom!

sandworm101 2y ago

Or a large percentage of the populace is afraid. Nobody wants to draw the attention of the far right, both the parts in and out of office. Everyone in the US knows someone who is illegal, a green car holder, a student/work visa holder or who otherwise may be vulnerable. Piss off the wrong people and the powers that be may cast their eye on you and your friends. Even if deportation is remote for any of my immediate friends, I dont want my name on one of those lists, such as the lists of enemy attornies/firms that have recently had to make "donations" and pledges. This is why ballots are secret. At least for now.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Apathy and cowardice is how we got here. My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it. For many years after she was thoroughly audited by the IRS. If that's the price of free expression, put my name on the list. I won't go quietly.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  When I was a teenager after 9/11, me and my family had donated to the Holy Land foundation. For the next two years, my literal firewood delivery business I ran with my dad that grossed under 10K was audited by the IRS.
- giardini 2y ago
  [flagged]
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  >My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it. What? Tell us more. Who stopped her? Why was she actually stopped and searched? They aren’t going to just see or know you have “commie pamphlets” in your suitcase.
  - steebo 2y ago
    Checked luggage gets opened legally without the owner present all the time.

jshen 2y ago

Republicans just voted against legislation to stop this nonsense. The only remedy is to convince people to vote against this party. the problem is that people identify as Republican and see Democrats as something that goes against the core of their identity. Most people don't follow politics closely and it will take a LOT to get them to wake up. My ray of hope is that the full effect of these dumb policies have not really hit yet outside of the stock market. Once they do hit, hopefully it wakes up enough of them. The argument for pessimism is that many people convinced themselves that covid was fake and that the vaccines were some kind of conspiracy, so even when their own life was on the line, they chose ignorance tot he point that many people lay dying in the hospital in denial that covid was killing them. Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug.

bigbadfeline 2y ago
> "Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug." If you think the Dems didn't know that, think again. The Democrats put Trump into office with their insane choice of identity hills to die on. Then Biden woke up in mid summer: "Gosh am I still a presidential candidate? How come? Let's do Kamala now" ... with her disastrous electability record. Yeah right, "an honest mistake". > "many people convinced themselves that covid was fake" Covid has nothing to do with it... Trump was the first and most vocal vaccine salesman and he got elected anyway because in the eyes of the public there was no difference between Dem and Rep, the election was decided on a different set of issues.
- x3ro 2y ago
  I really don’t understand how this is being downvoted. Whatever your interpretation of the reasons is, it’s objectively correct to say that democrats lost [1] instead of saying Trump won, even though the outcome is the same. Democrats alienated 19 million voters on a variety of issues, whereas republican turnout was almost the same. [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnout-2024-analysis/tnamp/ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnou...
- jshen 2y ago
  You misunderstood the points I made.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

There's plenty of discussion of what to do about it, including a legislative remedy which went up for a vote just today. The thing is, Trump's poll numbers are declining rapidly, with his support being driven by people who just don't believe the consequences of his policies will happen. So the conclusion most people reach is that protesting and talking are the most effective things to do right now. If we're 7 weeks out from empty store shelves, then we're 7 weeks out from a huge surge of discontent, and we want to be ready to tell those people that Donald Trump is clearly responsible and they can help stop him if they'd like. A mass strike in particular definitely doesn't make sense today. You can't run a mass strike if the Teamsters aren't on your side, and they support the tariffs.

giardini 2y ago

Lack of imagination.

6502nerdface 2y ago

All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

syllogism 2y ago

Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Let Trump implode so that he owns the inevitable failure. His base will desperately want to blame the left for not letting the policies work as intended. The less the Democrats do, the harder that is. I think a lot of Democrat politicians are going this way, and it's why Schumer rolled over on the budget. Part of the logic here is that Trump is indeed different from other authoritarians. He's even less competent. He's blowing all his political capital on imploding the economy. He also can't understand the legal battles, so when Stephen Miller tells him they won the Supreme Court case 9-0, he believes him. This seems to have been a big wake-up call to Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh. The administration has shown its hand much too quickly, before it fully consolidated its power. What the Democrats should be doing already is campaigning more. Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes. Show people Trump calling January the "Trump economy" before inauguration, then calling April the "Biden economy" now that he's crashed it. If Trump polls low enough, more senators will jump ship, and impeachment could be possible.

Waterluvian 2y ago
Not just campaigning. Resourcing. By now (by 8 years ago, to be !@#$ing honest) there should be a very clean, crisp website that's a searchable list of topics/talking points, with immediately available videos, audios, screenshots of Trump contradicting himself, along with links to easily digestible facts. This alone will never convince anyone of anything who isn't already convinced. But as an absolute minimum, it should be effortless for anyone to demonstrate his lack of ideology every single time he speaks about how he's always/never supported something. Maybe we could even educate "journalists" and the media on its existence so they can do more than "agree to disagree" whenever they talk about things.
dgfitz 2y ago
> Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Our tax money hard at work. What a fucking joke.
- verzali 2y ago
  Do American parties get tax money to spend on strategists?

sph 2y ago

> what's lacking is any discussion of what to do about it If you subscribe to the views of documentarist Adam Curtis, that is because no one has any clue whatsoever.

satanfirst 2y ago
I get his PoV, but I think most people who have thought about it know which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. The difficulty is precedent and the preference to the power two factions over structure. Doing something to fix the US' executive branch problem with the proper Amendments would be likely to fail because it would be too neutral to collect from lobyists or sell on emotion.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  The amendments already exist! More than that, the core articles already exist! The Constitutional powers delegate taxation and tariffs solely to Congress. Doing it through Executive Order is Constitutionally absurd and if Congress wasn't asleep at the wheel and criminally "Do Nothing" (especially, nothing without a Lobbyist lining your tailored suit's insides with cash like filthy lingerie) and the Judicial Branch wasn't suborned into party politics mentalities and a lot of people in both Congress and Justice weren't being hugely negligent on their sworn oaths to Protect the Constitution, there should be a lot more Checks and Balances happening right now. This isn't about which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. This is about which tools should have been used before the Great Depression in a country under a political party that has spent decades dismantling the tools that helped it end the Great Depression.

0xEF 2y ago

This is the Liberal Way; complain about the state of things, but when it comes time to do the work and change it, they are suddenly nowhere to be found unless you go to the various social media enclaves where they sure do talk up a big storm of moral outrage, mostly well-reasoned and justified. The problem is they wait for someone else to roll up their sleeves and get to work. The Fascist Right does not, which is why they are winning this War of Ideology.

zamalek 2y ago
I call it pseudo-liberalism: people who don't understand that protecting rights actually damned hard work. They also can't see the mountains for the molehills. It is also when liberalism is used as a fashion accessory: they wear their sweat shop handbags to an anti-fascist rally.

rayiner 2y ago

> And they're mostly right They’re clearly not! Around the developed world, people—especially younger people—are angry that their economies have been exported to the third world while their countries have been filled with cheap third world labor. Acela-class liberals and highly educated Reagan conservatives teamed up to bring about that state of affairs. Maybe they should do some introspection instead of crowing about how they’re right and half the country is just too stupid to realize how great they have it. If (neo-)liberalism worked, people wouldn’t be so unhappy about the current state of affairs.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
What economies are exported? US GDP growth been huge and unemployment is low. The economy is doing great, just not for everyone. = Making socks for $10,000/yr is not what these people want, nor will it help them. Instead, they will see housing and cost of living slip further from normal salaries as a result of tariffs.
- rayiner 2y ago
  But does GDP growth reflect quality of life? The inequality you’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect from policies that reduce labor market bargaining power through the dual-pronged approach of outsourcing production and facilitating mass immigration. Germans and Japanese don’t make socks for $10,000/year. Our former au pair lives in a small town in Germany. She was tracked into an apprenticeship program at 16 (off the college track), but now in her early 30s has a solid white collar job doing logistics for a baby formula manufacturer. Her boyfriend works in logistics as well—a big industry in a country that makes things. By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real? As a corporate attorney, I make probably double what I would in Germany. Pay differentials seem to be similar for other knowledge-economy jobs like software development, marketing, etc. Our laptop class makes tons of money compared to their counterparts in Germany or Japan. But is that a good thing?
  - JamesBarney 2y ago
    It's so weird to see conservatives talk about how great the European economy is. I used to have to argue with my liberal friends about how Europe is a sclerotic economy and now I'm arguing with conservatives about it. Weird world. > By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real? Yes it's real, we live in larger homes, have more cars, have more stuff. Maybe that doesn't drive a huge change in quality of life, but making us poorer isn't going to do that either. And when you talk to Europeans about why they like Europe they don't list how poor everyone is there, or how many factory jobs there are. They list a bunch of stuff that is anathema to conservatives like the socialized medicine (some love it, other's hate it), a carless culture, a social safety net, a slower speed of life, lots of vacation. (Which is a big reason why they are poorer) And it's not just the laptop class, almost everyone who is full time is richer in the US. The exception is people who are marginally employed who would probably benefit from Europe's larger social safety net.