President Donald Trump called for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be imprisoned Wednesday morning amid his administration’s deployment of National Guard members to Illinois’ largest city.“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” Trump wrote on his social media platform ...
Unfortunately, the violence directed at them is what many on the right and even Trump himself want, because it will be used as a pretext to interfere in the mid-term elections coming in 2026.
I mean, they’re going to try anyhow, and stirring up shit will just give them that much more leverage to do so.
As rage-inducing as Trump is, just biding ones time and voting and getting everyone you know to vote in the mid-terms for the Democrats - even if the candidate is an absolute stinker - is what is needed to put the brakes onto this administration.
We did that for Biden already. The Dems had 4 years to do something, anything, of significance to protect democracy and what did we get? The most feeble attempt at legal charades that I’ve ever seen. They ran out the clock and let Trump cancel the only real investigations into his own behavior.
Yes, Democrats are clearly better than Republicans but those limp-dicked cowards are not going to save us. Many of them can barely muster the courage to condemn what’s happening now, much less convince anyone that they actually want to stop it.
Who said they were going to save us? We have to save ourselves. The reason we vote for stinker Dems is to get more time to establish our own salvation.
Maybe that’s what you mean but I don’t get the impression that’s what most people mean when they say that voting for Dems is the answer. They want some external force to do the work for them. They don’t want to be directly involved any more than checking a box every couple of years.
If we’re just talking general population, then yeah most people just wanna check a box and not think about it. If you’re talking about the people actually advocating voting Dem, I think my perspective is much more representative.
Who is out there saying that the Dems are great and we need to vote for them because they’re actively good? The vast majority of people I see advocating Dems are very candid about it being a harm reduction strategy. It seems weird to assume that “most people” mean the opposite of what I see them actually saying.
I’m much more worried about the people finding idealistic reasons to criticize harm reduction strategies.
Almost all mainstream media that isn’t intended for right wing audiences. Every person who has knocked on my door, sent me an email, or called my phone to talk to me about Democratic candidates for the last 25 years. 80% of the people I have had political conversations with in the real world who aren’t Republicans. Calling it millions of people would be a conservative estimate as best as I can tell. The only people I hear saying what you’re saying, which by the way isn’t too dissimilar to what I have been saying for the last decade, are people in niche online communities like Lemmy and the occasional outlier politician like Bernie Sanders.
I’m all about harm reduction. I think it’s a great strategy that most people can get behind. However, when I say harm reduction I don’t just mean slowing the rate at which shitty things happen. I mean reducing the amount of harm in the world. So the question is, do Democrats reduce the amount of harm in the world or do they simply slow the progress of shitty people?
Now, I understand that a lot of people think slowing the progress of shitty people is it’s own reward, and in a vacuum I think that’s true. That being said, are we actually slowing it down indefinitely or are we simply delaying it while at the same time making it inevitable? There is a difference. Biden slowed MAGA down for sure. While he was President they could not actively pursue their goals to the same degree that they could with Trump in the White House. However, I think Bidens policies in general but especially his refusal to go after Trump in a serious manner have made our current situation more likely, not less. The only way to prevent what we have now was to clamp down hard on Trump’s lawlessness and executive overreach when we had the chance or to improve the lives of the average American significantly enough that they would not fall for Trump’s lies about the economy or immigrants or whatever else. Biden could have done at least the first pretty easily. Instead, he decided to mostly maintain the status quo and hope Americans made the right decision in the end. Well, given that Trump’s 2016 win was, in my opinion, largely a rebellion against the status quo, that seems like a bad move. Further, giving Trump four years to strategize and consolidate power within the Republican party led to worse outcomes in 2025 than would have been possible in 2021.
There’s a lot more to say here and I feel like I’ve been going on too long already so let me sum it all up like this; I believe that putting Biden in the White House in 2020 on the basis of harm reduction was worse than a Trump win would have been. Biden didn’t do anything significant to either disqualify Trump himself or materially change the conditions that led to his election, which made Trump’s eventual reelection both more likely and more dangerous because Trump and his cronies had four years to plot out their strategies. In the end, aiming for harm reduction actually increased harm.
I mean, I wasn’t counting people whose job it is to promote the Democratic Party.
Weird, most of the non-Republicans I know think the Dems suck but they’re better than the Cons. At best they think the Dems can be pressured into some civil rights here and there. I can’t say I’ve encountered many fans of the Dems outside explicitly political events.
It’s not like he wasn’t on trial for lots of the lawlessness, he’s just actually really good at dragging out trials. Mishandling that could’ve sparked civil war, it had to be ironclad. Clamping down beyond the proper channels wasn’t a better option.
They actually did get a surprising amount of decent stuff through, but no improvement is going to make people stop falling for lies about the economy and immigrants. That’s just how people are, I’m sorry.
I doubt it, the Heritage Foundation had this shit drawn up decades ago. They didn’t need the extra years to plot, if anything it threw off their timing.
They already consolidated power by 2021, the Republican party was MAGA . They already had their people in their stations, they would’ve been more effective if the cabinet didn’t have to transition out and back in.
Oh and COVID definitely would’ve been way worse overall too. That could’ve been a much bigger disaster.
So no, I don’t think Biden was worse than Trump would have been in 2020. It’s on us for not doing anything with those 4 years.
There’s no salvation. The US isn’t functional anymore.
It WILL be a Democrat or a Republican group holding power in Washington. You can pretend it won’t be but it will be. It has been that way for untold decades. You cannot and will not change that.
So you either don’t accept this reliable truth. Or you want Republicans in charge. Which is it?
I never said it would be anyone else in power. I said Democrats are not going to fix this problem. Those two things are not equivalent in any way.
Still, if you want to take this conversation in a totally different direction I’ll play along. if you base future decisions on past outcomes you’re only guaranteeing that change cannot occur. People said exactly what you just did about the divine right of kings for centuries. It was true until it wasn’t just like what you’re saying now.
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No the summary is that you’re clearly incapable of keeping your assumptions and biases from changing the meaning of what you read.
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I haven’t answered you directly because:
Its a stupid question. I already said that Democrats are better than Republicans before you ever responded to me. Out of all the things you have incorrectly inferred from my responses, the answer to this dumb “gotcha” question is the one thing you could have successfully deduced with ease but for some reason you’re categorically unwilling to do so. Probably because you’re not actually processing what I’m saying. Which leads me to:
You aren’t having a discussion. You’re arguing with a caricature of what you think I’m saying. People that do this usually have such an inflated ego that conversation is pointless because they’re not interested in the exchange of ideas but rather word vomiting on someone in a childish attempt at self soothing. This is further evidenced by the fact that you’re downvoting everything I say despite the fact that I still have not downvoted your repeatedly and unnecessarily hostile demeanor.
Since you appear fond of the TLDR summary I’ll give one for this comment. You’re a shit conversational partner that I have no interest in speaking with further.
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I mean, not really. We keep waffling between 45/55% of our government being controlled by fascists.
If 45% of the governing body is still fascist, that makes it kinda hard to actually do anything when most of our government requires more than a simple majority to get things done.
Just look at Trumps approval rating right now. It’s still not below 40%.
Merrick Garland didn’t need Congress to do his job. Biden didn’t need Congress to pressure Garland to do his job. Stop making excuses for their inaction.
I agree that Biden is going to go down in history as a bad president for not doing more to prevent the current state of things, but when half the country keeps voting for facisim the problem isn’t just the politicians.
Stop making excuses to once again hand Republicans future victories.
According to the Lemmy left, this is . . . *checks notes* . . com . . complissit . . librul . . bou . . bourg . . I can’t say that one - uh, compitulation.
Look at the demographic of any “left” and you generally find kids that don’t understand how societal power works.
Taking a few classes on sociology and reading Marx is fine and all that, but they need to understand the framework of conformist, consumerist America and leverage that… and as it’s anathema to what Marx says… they’ll forever be smacking their heads against the walls.
Then they grow up and become Wall Street brokers.
Sause: Am 60, and have seen this same shit happening over and over - for decades.