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The United States is Falling Apart and the World is Taking Notice
(www.counterpunch.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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good old lefty progressivism reduced to: "look at what trump is doing!"
if you're truly progressive or left, you have as much ire for the democratic party-- if not more.
You're getting downvoted by the same people who got upset by calling out that Kamala and Biden were not good candidates.
If they were, they would have beat this idiot.
The DNC has no idea, nor does it care, what people really need or want. They don't represent our reality. The only Dems who do are... You guessed it: Progressive.
AOC, Bernie, Ro Khana, Cori Bush, Nina Turner... None of them are supported by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. All of them have people in mind over reelection.
It's time for a sea change.
I think Kamala was an embarrassment that deserved to be called out, Biden is evil, and the establishment often cares more about suppressing progressives than beating Republicans, but I absolutely downvoted that dumb as shit comment.
The Democrats can be responsible for failing to defeat fascism, complicit in genocide and the backsliding of civil rights, and a problem in need of active and forceful change without saying stupid things like they're just as bad as the guy empowering Nazis, destroying the civil service, and persecuting trans people with deadly results.
That's fucking stupid online edgelord politics.
They're the same picture
The people you're arguing with and you always seem to want the same progressive candidate, but it ain't reflecting in the vote counts. I'm not even gonna argue from my viewpoint anymore, cause it doesn't matter when we want the same thing. What can we do together to make sure that changes? Especially in local and state elections, that seems to be where we can make the most impact.
You're going out and voting for every primary for progressive candidates, right? Cause we both gotta do it, cause there's just that many Nazis out there. And we need our friends and families to do so too, and I imagine you are just the same as I am and talking with them.
So if everyone is doing their best in their small world, what's the next step, or what are we missing in your opinion? And I'm asking this with sincerity, whether you believe it or not.
And since it's a while to the next voting time, do you see any worthwhile plan of resistance? There's a couple of general strike/don't work days planned coming up, but pessimism seems strong there. How are you feeling about them or other options?
They don't even want the same candidate. Whenever those candidates come up they complain that they sold out or they're not radical enough. Whatever the deeper motivation is, their only perceivable act seems to be to complain.
As to action, I do agree with the general sentiment that it needs to be sustained. The protests need to have a cost and disrupt regular life beyond just people taking a day off. But I think things are tense enough that something like BLM could kick off again. People just need to believe it's time. A protest day after day, or a multiweek protest on a specific day, could convince people it's real. A one and done protest following the prescribed route isn't useless (it reminds people that basically half the country hates the guy), but it's something people see and think they did their resistance and now it's back to regular life.
I have a very real fear that even if a truly progressive democratic candidate runs for president, they still won't win.
Don't get me wrong, they still should actually give it a shot. There's literally no other winning alternative for the Dems.
Instead, I think you're very right about the DNC not knowing what people want. There is a huge, mildly surprising amount of support in this country for bigotry. There is a surprising amount of people locked into the Nazi vote, and you know I'm not exaggerating. This is what people actually want. As it turns out, they chose fascism over treating specific people as people, same as last time, and times before.
This is America. And it has allies with other bigots and land grabbing warmongers.
May we both survive, and here's to hoping we can get a progressive candidate next time, if we get a next time. It's always worth it to fight for someone's right to just exist.
I get what you mean, but remember that many people voted for Trump because they wanted change, not because they were exceptionally thrilled about his bigotry. The Bernie-Trump pipeline is a very real phenomenon (see also AOC-Trump voters) and makes the GOP seem like they have more popular support than they really do.
I don't see it that way, where are these supposed trump regretting folk? I haven't seen them. I thought I saw one in a friend I miss, and then he spews the qanon bullshit that passes for doge talking points.
By overwhelming majority, they're cool with this. This is America, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
~~So, what then. Continue this mindless pendulous torture? You think what we've done until now has been effective?~~
I think I was being a bit reactive because I'm so used to the knee-jerk negative. You make good points, in your third paragraph especially. That said, I don't think you're entirely wrong about the Nazi vote there, even though it's tongue-in-cheek. There are Dems reaching across the aisle to vote for Trump's nominees. They need to be blockading the same way the GOP did for legitimate good-faith votes proffered by Dems. Merrick Garland for SCOTUS under Obama comes to mind. (I feel like Garland as a Justice would have done less harm than his milquetoast performance as the Attorney General.)
You seem to think I'm arguing with you. Fight the good fight. Progressive or bust, encourage everyone to vote in primaries. There's literally no other alternative for a future. We either resist from here at every point, or we're done. Let's see how the lawyers do over the next few days, reevaluate, and let's see how far we get until we get enough public outcry to actually do something.
What else do you think we could do?
My apologies. I think I was just flying off the cuff. Amending my initial reply to you, as I see you were indeed being constructive.
see above.
Valid points on Merrick Garland too. He was disappointing in many respects, but yeah, they fucked him hard on the supreme court nomination didn't they.
Fuck them back, let's be entirely clear, if the pendulum does swing... This is how it's supposed to go, right? Living wage is gonna get a whole lot easier when you can just throw executive orders at private business, and launch lawsuits for not listening good enough. No takes backsies for the fucking pigs this time.
Well, you're getting your wish. The only problem is we're chained to the rock on the beach and your requested tide is rising. We're not going to survive your sea change.
is the democratic party currently destroying every american institution at record pace?
No. They're the ones who could not beat the most deplorable piece of shit to run and win the US presidential elections.
We all need to recognize this if we ever get a chance to vote fairly again.
I mean I'm no fan of Biden or Harris and the Democratic establishment deserves some blame. But with a decades long concerted effort by the billionaire class which owns pretty much all relevant media to undermine democracy and gaslight uninformed citizens (and outright bribe them in some cases) it wasn't exactly a fair fight.
I mean that advantage should have been counteracted by the very existence of Trump. The fact that the DNC failed to capitalize on that is unequivocally their fault.
Sounds like something for the democratic party to have considered when they had the power to do something about it
Absolutely. Which I why I haven't been a supporter since Obama, it's clear they didn't have a plan of attack nor took the threat seriously. But still if one person commits a murder and another person saw it coming but didn't act in time, you can be critical of the second, but it's still the murderer that's to blame.
So, just stay the course? We're good?
I think the comment above hits on some important truths:
She kind of did, kind of didn't. A trend that could be observed during her campaign (I saw this quantified somewhere but for the life of me can't find it again) was that while she started with economic populism, as the campaign progressed she watered down, took back or outright ignored her early promises and tried to fill the gap with "orange man bad". This wasn't a coincidence; corporate representatives would systematically ask for "clarifications" and "explanations" about her policies and have her walk them back one by one into something acceptable to them. So anyway, the result of this was that the Kamala of election day was not running on an economic populist platform.
It seems to be from her brother-in-law, an Uber executive, who asked her to cozy up to big business more.
And instead of standing up their still holding on to the decorum. Almost like they're complicit and getting rich being complicit.
did the democratic party lose twice to trump?
I used to think that the Democrats were the lesser evil, now I know they are a more insidious evil with polite rhetoric.
100% where I am.
were you saying this throughout the election or only after it?
A few months after I voted for Biden and having realized I was fooled. But the realization came into full force after the insulting response I got from my Democratic representative in November 2023.
so you helped get trump elected
No, I helped get Gaza flattened. I never voted Republican and never will. I think the DNC helped get Trump reelected.
so you think criticizing the DNC and not voting for them is the best way to keep trump out of the whitehouse?
The best way to keep trump out of the Whitehouse was Bernie. Dems refused that and joined a genocide, Trump is the consequence that Americans have to sadly suffer.
so you chose Gaza
but you didn't, you just chose trump
I chose nothing as I'm not a US citizen, I'm just explaining you the consequences of the democrat administration's actions, they're very obvious from outside
you're still to blame for campaigning against Harris
I didn't campaign against Harris, I campaigned against genocide. Too bad the dems couldn't compromise and, you know, not genocide people. If campaigning against genocide implies a certain party losing votes, I fail to see how that's my fault and not the party's
i'm sure you would like to blame everything on them seeing as how it monumentally backfired on you
but you did your part and got trump elected
It didn't backfire on me, Gaza actually has a ceasefire, which while imperfect is better than the overt genocide we saw over the recent past. International policy of the USA is the same regardless of which wing of the oligarchy is in government at any particular time, I do feel bad for women and minorities in the US, but again the fault is the system's, not the voters'.
Jesus... BlueMAGA is at the point where any criticism of the Democrats is forbidden.
I only agree with half your statement. I can be appalled by the majority government and still think the Dems are dumb as stumps. What do you suggest “lefty progressivism” talk about?
it is the framing of the article that set me off because it is so typically one-sided. "The United States is imploding. The reign of Donald Trump is...."
as though the democrats weren't funding genocide in gaza and spending hundreds of billions on nato expansion and the predictable (essentially promised) war that ensued.
I hope the people who refrained from voting over the genocide stance feel proud of what they accomplished.
spoken like a true democrat.. you lot love to blame the voters for the party's bad policy. (unless i am misreading you-- you're criticizing people who hold genocide to be a red-line?)
I haven't been a democrat since 2017. I registered with the DSA. I vote progressive left when possible or against the gop when it's a toss up. Don't presuppose my affiliation based on a couple of posts and your own sour grapes.
If Gaza didn't exist the Democrats would still have lost.
Agreed.
How many human rights campaigns are you a member of?