But America brings so much to the table! There’s all the goods manufactured in America, there is all the creativity coming out of the American TV and movie industries, there is all the scientific research and knowledge that is totally not leaving. What about innovative software (licenses) and enshitified streaming services. America is on the cutting edge of defense and it’s partners totally trust that America would never yank away support for those weapons at the whim of a mad king or anything.

Most importantly, how will the world ever get by without the American financial system that contributes nothing to the world and demands all the wealth in return? I think the world will find America hard to shake.

(Massive /s, just in case it’s not obvious.)

Meh. We’ll see what happens when it threatens their office. A lot of them have already started changing their rhetoric.

This time the Democrats have an actual flesh and blood candidate who actually stands for something. If he wins, will that alter your perspective at all?

American voters suck, just like they have always sucked, just like voters suck everyplace else. That’s the field in which the game is played.

Being the lesser of two evils is not a good strategy. The greater evil gets all the attention and therefore enthusiasm. Good vs evil is a whole different dynamic.

Now it’s time for the “vote blue no matter who” crowd to put up or shut up. So far, party loyalty doesn’t seem very important to a lot of the establishment.

I imagine it would feel a bit like punching a pile of dried leaves.

As a hopelessly straight American, I second the motion.

It wasn’t rigged. Even if it were rigged, it should never have been close enough to be rigged, but it wasn’t rigged. If the DNC waited to say it was rigged, they are still waiting because they haven’t said they think it’s rigged, but their not waiting, because it wasn’t rigged.

They really thought she’d be worse?

For the love of God, please stop spreading this mode of thinking. Elections are won by enthusiasm, not an intellectual weighing of the pros and cons of each. This is the model Democrats have used for decades that got us here. Being the lesser evil is not a solid campaign strategy. The greater evil will always get more attention, and therefore enthusiasm.

I don’t think this is an exclusively American thing. Did Brits really think brexit was a good idea?

Months. Did you somehow miss black lives matter? The rapid growth of the prison industrial complex? This is just the explosive conclusion to a pattern that was well underway long before Trump.

Not all Democrats are in sync with party leadership though.

The President isn’t the problem. He’s certainly “a” problem, but let’s not pretend that Vance is going to be any better.

Get rid of all the corrupt Republicans (redundant phrase), and you will still have MAGA, the silicon valley tech bros, a corrupt financial system, white/Christian nationalists, and the military industrial complex.

Then we have the Democrats who have proven themselves over and over again to be incapable of standing up against any of these groups.

Whatever we protest for, any result worth the effort has to address the systemic failures that led to the Trump presidency. Anything less is performative at best.

We need an inverse lottery. The top 100 most wealthy Americans are automatically added to a pool and one is drawn at random each year. Then we confiscate everything they own, put them in the street, and see if they can get rich again.

I think my explanation to another reply explains it.

https://midwest.social/comment/18384245

For the same reason they speak in reverence of Martin Luther King Jr. and pretend that liberals didn’t hate his guts back in the day.

On a long enough time scale the left always wins, and liberals always pretend that they backed the left the whole time and claim the victory for themselves.

“A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”

I predict Mamdani and Trump will have similar arcs through the media landscape. The media hated Trump but just couldn’t stop paying attention to him, even though every time they attacked him it only made him stronger. Now they are all bending the knee to him.

The same exact thing is happening with Mamdani, but this time for all the best reasons. Mamdani’s campaign might easily become a nationwide avalanche.

rightwing forces of state repression can easily push around a left that’s been trained and groomed to function as entirely beholden to corporate sponsors and big money donors.

That’s not a “left” at all. There are traditionally three groups that vie for power, royalty, merchants, and the people. The left serves the people, Democrats serve the merchants, and Republicans are the royalists.

The Democrats may represent the left some day, but it’s not who they are right now.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a legitimate implementation of such a system. It will absolutely be intentionally flawed in ways that allow the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans citizens. That’s 100% what always happens with Republican initiatives to “protect” elections. It will be made trivial to “accidentally” remove legitimate voter registrations, and a labyrinthian bureaucratic process to correct them.

That’s kind of my point. It’s turtles all the way down.

Are you referring to the three ancient Democratic House members that died in office? It does seem a little vindictive to blame them, but I guess it wouldn’t be unreasonable. It might make more sense to blame the Democratic voters who keep renominating these decrepit fucks.

The Natives “moved” to Texas to steal it from the previous group of natives.