The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. It seems that may be where the US is headed.
Many of the founders saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government. Unfortunately, America hasn’t achieved that yet.
As it stands, the two parties tend to exacerbate conflict rather than work together to solve America’s problems. That opened the way for charlatan con-man Trump to exploit the division and make false promises to get elected twice. How do you think he’s doing as President so far this time?
I have never really cared for any presidents after the assassination of Kennedy, and much like republican interpretations of the constitution I don’t like the democrats interpretations of it either. If you’re asking me if the U.S. will collapse in our lifetime my answer would be yes, but I would argue both political parties are involved in that equally.
If you read my posts on this thread you’ll see it’s not about partisan politics. I support democracy, the rule of law and equal justice under the law. Following the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling big money interests can anonymously influence elections. Both parties gerrymander election districts unfairly. Voter suppression disenfranchises people with a legal right to vote under the Constitution. Corporate lobbyists have disproportional influence on elected officials in Washington DC. Rather than clean up the swamp as was his campaign slogan in 2016, Donald Trump has done everything in his power to further his own interests at the expense of most Americans. The system is broken, with the wealthy enriching themselves while most people scraping by. Since Trump was reelected he has been taking the country in the wrong direction and making matters worse.
Both parties have a major flaw in common: they both favor the rich over the poor. But a Democratic administration would not be destroying the economy. The current administration is wrecking a global order that actually produced significant value through cooperation, peace, and trade. And while most of that value was captured by the wealthy, the current administration isn’t solving that problem: the benefits of the global order will still flow to the wealthy, the difference is that with a decreasing net wealth that will look like the poor getting poorer while the rich stagnate – an unequal distribution of increased suffering.
Democrats would have kept the status quo: deeply imperfect, but much better than what’s happening now.
Well, as a Pliskin accelerationist I’m delighted by what the Don is doing because a breakdown of world order to such a degree that not even local law enforcement can be effective (or bothered with) hunting down and imprisoning for a third time a wrongfully convicted lifetime sex offender attempting to take his freedom back and move freely where he may.
If I’m a bad guy for saying that, I can’t be sorry. My situation is so absurd the whole world falling to shambles around me would be justified if it meant i was getting my freedom back.
What’s so strange… so alien to me bacause it is still only human… is how the whole world hasn’t already rallied around me. This is just bananas.
Everybody should be like "wait, hold up. Stop all the wars and pause all the episodes of your favorite series. There’s a guy in America right now who… and I’m am not making this up… you can’t make this up… has experienced X…
(let X be the autobiographical sum total of facts stated in my manifesto)
… and this is so cringe worthy that i am demanding we all come together and stop this from happening to this guy before we continue with all the other nonsense that pales in comparison to his epic story.
Instead, the people of the world would rather let the Don destroy everything for me to get my (their kind of) freedom back.
Anybody who opens the floodgates to water a parched land is an idiot who wrecks everything to supposedly solve a single problem.
You are unconcerned about the damage and harm caused by such measures, and I can only hope that you are one of the people who are affected first. But probably, you think you are out of harm’s way.
The Idiocracy now in place in the Whitehouse can only lead to war..
I think most of the world hopes that the war that results from this hostile takeover of democracy is solved, not by a foreign war by by the Second American Civil War.
If anyone has the attention span on this Forum capable of stting down for a few minutes Watch this video to help you understand what is going on.
Somehow I doubt the MAGAchuds are capable..
Conservative columnist David Brooks is not a guy I would expect to call for a large scale national uprising and yet here he does exactly that:
Trump is not a conservative. Many Republican conservative intellectuals have broken with him and what he stands for. A growing number of thinking liberals and conservatives are uniting against Trump and his minions.
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration early Saturday from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases.
In saner times this would be a no brainer decision that people would take for granted since America has not declared war. Right wing Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. They basically seem to believe Trump is an emperor with absolute authority.
By the way there is a rumor floating around that Trump will declare martial law tomorrow? If true, that could change the equation. Have you heard the rumor? What do you think?
Thousands of demonstrators rallied at hundreds of events on Saturday to speak out against the president’s handling of immigration, civil liberties, job cuts and many other issues. I expect protest to increase as long as Trump is president. As things get worse for them, the MAGA folks will join the protest in large numbers.
“The best thing about Trump is that he will destroy the ability to effectively monitor convicted sex offenders” is a hilarious take, but I think this is actually the selling point for a non-trivial portion of Trump voters: people who have irredeemably fucked up their lives and whose only hope of escaping their choices is burning the ledger.
That seems to be what motivated Trump himself to run again (he is a convicted felon, but was sentences to zero punishment explicitly because he won). It also seems to motivate a number of his closest advisors (e.g. Musk had a number of regulatory actions pending against him and his companies).
But I think it also motivates a lot of the old white guys who form his base. In a stable world order, they would never escape the life they’d made for themselves. And that’s not just the the sex offender registry vote: it’s no coincidence that Trump did disproportionately well among divorced men too.
It would of been the same with Kamala Harris though. Both parties and the entire system is compromised by Wallstreet, until that dynamic changes nothing will.
They’re both destroying the financial economy, republicans favoring tariffs in order to not address domestic rising wage inequality instead choosing to tax foreign nations in terms of monetary levies, and the democrats selling the nation out in terms of international conglomerates or NGO’s all the while debasing and devaluing the dollar. It’s basically a different means to the same very end while destroying the American working class. Also, democrats support open borders and foreign imported workers in order to erode domestic wages, that’s just a fact.
There is a ruling Uniparty. That splits itself into two ‘sides’ in order to play each side the other and against the middle. To manipulate the politically-interested masses into thinking there is really a choice.
It is genuinely sad how many people fall into the trap of the fake two-party system. They actually go vote, thinking they are doing something productive and meaningful. When all they are doing is continuing to give false legitimacy to the illegitimate system by supporting it.
This is just not true. The economy during the Biden administration was strong, and there’s every reason to believe that the Harris administration would have basically continued the Biden-era policies responsible for it.
Republicans aren’t just shifting taxes, they’re declaring trade wars, they’re shredding international alliances. The value of the dollar is plummeting, because its position as the international reserve currency has been called into question.
There is nothing at all comparable in any Democratic economic policy. You can criticize them for favoring capital over labor, but it is just factually incorrect to claim that the Biden administration was engaged in anything like the economic destruction we’re seeing under Trump, and it’s implausible that a Harris administration would have either.
You can both-sides a lot of things, but what’s happening under Trump is uniquely shitty economic policy.
The only way to peacefully stop the illegitimate Uniparty is to STOP VOTING. Stop supporting it. Imagine if 90% of people stopped supporting it by refusing to vote, or by writing “Mickey Mouse” or whatever into the ballot. The illegitimate Uniparty would collapse overnight. Then what comes next? Maybe room for authentic, normal and real human beings to actually become politicians again. Plus a return to far more localism in politics as was intended by the Constitution to begin with.
Two political parties pretending to be at the opposite spectrum of each other serving the same monetary masters dividing and conquering everybody to the middle of them. In western postmodern nations and societies this is how politics work, the pretense of freedom and democracy all the while committing egregious crimes in the backdrop that is ignored or denied in all terms publicly.
This strikes me as naive. We’re going to stop voting, and the people with the guns are going to feel so ashamed that they just walk away while we convene campfire sessions to plan for the next epidemic?
Government is big and messy, it’s always going to be big and messy, checking out is not going to fix that. If you want to reform government, you would be better off running for something.
They don’t pretend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. If you’re expecting two radical parties, you are going to be disappointed. The median voter theorem predicts that both parties will be centrists.
The parties aren’t static in their bundle of policies, as is quite apparent now that Trump is gutting the free trade policies championed by Republicans for decades. The Democrats used to be the anti-establishment party. But the coalitions have realigned: Many good-government conservatives have left the Republicans, and many pro-labor/anti-trade Democrats have switched to Trump. But as long as the winner is chosen by a fair election, each coalition will offer something to roughly half of the voters.
