I was really surprised to discover that even Harris is polled as out performing Biden, especially among black voters, independents and suburban women. And she's distanced herself from Biden on Israel in the past, so she really fixes a lot of the problems with the Biden admin. Plus she's probably less squeamish on abortion.
I think the main wild card here would be whether or not her nomination galvanized racists and bigots to come out to oppose her, but my gut says the energy created within the Democratic party by Biden leaving would still overwhelm bigoted backlash.
She would be a disappointing first woman president, but I suppose we can't really be precious about that.
It's less than ideal, but is still preferable to many places, if for no other reason than its potential for reform. We still have some insight into things like campaign finance for now, which makes it possible to fight from an informed position.
I'm actually not that committed to the Democratic party itself, but you're right that they're abusive. Acting politically based on the division between conservative and progressive, regardless of any label a politician might self-apply, helps clarify the way forward for me. As far as my mental model of the political landscape goes, conservative/neoliberal democrats are quarantined off with the GOP, they're the same in terms of their potential to produce lasting change. I'm not going to support an AIPAC democrat the same way I'm not going to ever support a MAGA conservative.
But yeah, our democracy is functioning incredibly poorly at the moment.
Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There's no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it's a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they're not. They're either able to admit when something doesn't work or they're not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they'll work. It's an ideology that's constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can't have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would've never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking "We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing."
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it's not a counter balance.
Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum
Yes, there are degrees of commitment, but the normie conservatives are still enabling the extremists and play a key part in the progression from democracy to fascism, you can't just flip from democracy to a fascist state, you need "respectable" conservatives to start to ease people towards the notion. There's still no value in their conservative leanings, even if it's watered down.
I don't want any lead in my water ideally, even if slight amounts aren't immediately harmful, the lead traces in the water has no benefit regardless of the degree.
It's still the end result, and while your grandfather might've been an engineer and accepted some science as an individual, his political ideology is what has contributed to the slow creep of increasing ignorance because his conservative views are what prompt him to vote for conservative politicians who obstruct attempts to improve society for all of us. Conservativism degrades a society's ability to access the truth.
There actually is no reasonable form of conservativism. You're either looking for ways to improve and integrate new understanding about the world based on the best information available to you at the time, or you're trying to preserve ideas simply because they existed beforehand.
It would be like if someone brought a newer, safer design to your grandfather and he rejected it simply in the interest of preserving the old design because its old. He couldn't function as an engineer if he applied his conservative thinking to his work, so I don't see how people expect that philosophy to work in politics either. There is no effective scientist who, upon recieving new information, rejects it because it doesn't fit with what they already believe, they try to adapt their model to fit the new facts.
We accept conservativism as some kind of immutable facet of politics, but we don't actually need to. Making itself seem intrinsic is how the ideology survives, but really all it is is the remnant ideology leftover ftom the death of monarchy, it was injected into our politics early on in order to protect an aristocratic class, allowing it to continue on in a new form (corporate oligarchy).
The best we can hope for is that his small inner circle of people he actually listens to can be convinced to convince him to step down. Which looks to be happening maybe.
I've seen it suggested that probably the best way of doing that would be flattering his ego about his accomplishments and giving him a narrative he can follow that makes him feel like a victor as he leaves. "Good job, you defeated Trump like you said you would and carried the party through a difficult time!" That kind of bullshit. He's a racist mass murderer and needs to go obviously, but I think his belief about his legacy is maybe one of his weak points that should be leveraged.
This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy. You can't have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people's political ideology boils down to "We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past."
This is why when the Democratic party talk about the need for "balance" between the two parties it's so toxic.
The pompous condescension completely undercuts any point you were attempting to make. I hope I end up the opposite of whatever you are as I get older. Have a great life.
To be honest I'm pretty energized. Not for Biden obviously, but just glad to see Democrats actually shifting their asses and just for people to finally be piecing together the predicament that the Democratic establishment has put us all in. There's potential for actual change here, even if it requires going through some chaos and pain.
The pressure of the non-vote threat is actually being felt by party leadership and they appear to be delicately trying to create an environment that will allow Biden to accept that he needs to step down. It would actually be huge for the party's health if they pulled it off.
Biden's speech was infuriating. Just came out and basically said "This is bad. I'm not going to do anything about it. This is just the way it is now so I hope we always have good presidents from here unto eternity. Good bye." and then doddered off stage.
Biden hasn't changed though. He's still the same old pro-austerity, pro-corporate, "respectably racist" Republican-at-heart conservative he's always been. You just can't see it because Trump is so much more extreme.
I support the policies he took from the Sanders campaign to appear more progressive than he is, but he dropped most of those as soon as he got elected.
Almost like we should've elected someone who actually had an established history of fighting for those policies, and not someone who adapted them in a stunted form to win an election.
Corporations love his pork barrel spending though, yeah.
It's not out of context, it's exactly what he said and meant. And he's repeated that sentiment on multiple occassions.
If you need a more recent example to ignore, in 2022 he attempted to make some kind of distinction between MAGA and non-MAGA republicans because he still is dumb enough to believe there's some contingent within the GOP that's not fully onboard with fascism. Even after the decades of lies and double-dealing, of Republicans pushing to capture the courts and voting consistently to strip Americans of their rights, it hasn't sunk in. Not even after January 6, after the whole party united behind Trump.
He actually thinks there needs to be a balance between "good" Republicans and Democrats, which is a deeply idiotic notion at this point and betrays the fact that he doesn't actually want to achieve any of the progressive policy he cribbed off Sanders to win in 2020.
"In my view, we need a strong Republican Party. We need a Republican Party that’s united."
-Joe Biden (~2011)
The man is just incompetent and nostalgic for the "good old days" when Dems and Republicans would play grab ass together and hoodwink the public together to protect the status quo and grow the wealth divide. This whole fascism thing, though clearly signaled decades ago, has him scratching his head. He simply doesn't get it and is too mentally calcified to keep up with the paradigm shift in politics.
They fucking canceled the primary across multiple states, what are you talking about "no one put up a fight"? The DNC and their media arm didn't allow a fight, and now it's biting them in the ass as they realize what everyone else has known for the last 4 years; 81 year olds shouldn't be president.
He's the commander in chief, ordering a seal team or the CIA to assassinate someone is an official act and legal now. What you fail to mention in your haste to try to downplay this is that they also made it impossible to present evidence of crimes by the president, so any non-public action by the president is de facto legal. It would be impossible to prosecute because even if you gathered evidence he ordered the hit, you couldn't use it in court.
Yes, it's that bad. No, it's not that people are over reacting.
Read Sotomayor's dissent, she says explicitly that this gives the president legal immunity against assassinations.
Even if Democrats were to support impeachment, it would likely face hurdles due to Republicans’ narrow control of the House of Representatives.
What I don't understand is why wouldn't every single democrat support this? What better case for impeachment is there than a court that flagrantly ignores the constitution and tries to turn the president into a king? It's beyond the pale.
"That's the problem with old men. You can kick 'em down the stairs and say it's a accident but you can't just shoot 'em."
-John Ruth