But it's too soon to tell if that effort will accomplish anything, because the effort has to be sustained through 2026 and 2028.
And the people showing up waving signs have to become politically active - not just showing up and going home, but writing their congresspeople and boycotting companies and knocking on doors to get out the vote and so on and so forth. Bernie and AOC can stump all they want. If they don't inspire people to act it means nothing.
The Democrats need a grassroots movement - as angry and passionate and hopeful as the Tea Party was - not just speeches by celebrity pols. It's too early to tell if liberal citizen voters will accept their responsibility to build that movement.
Save your praise until they actually win some victories. Marches and rallies are a good start, but they don't necessarily translate into political action. Remember the women's marches in 2017? The largest single day protest in American history and it did exactly two things: jack and shit. People went out, waved signs, went home, and Trump flipped three court seats and ended Roe.
Bernie in particular has always been great at turning out a crowd, but he's never been able to turn that into political or legislative victories.
The US government has always treated politically motivated vandalism as domestic terrorism.
The FBI defined Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, and similar radical environmental groups as terrorist organizations decades ago, because they spiked trees and burnt subdivisions and SUV dealerships.
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act makes it an act of terrorism to vandalize a factory farm or animal research lab - even nonviolent protest that "intimidates" employees is illegal.
Some of y'all are acting like burning car dealerships was protected speech before Trump. Come on.
The nonprofit industrial complex is a leech. At least government agencies have some level of accountability, because if they fail to solve a problem, the voters blame the politicians, and the politicians shit downhill on the agencies. Nonprofits don't even have that minimal level of accountability. They just spend all the government money they get, write grants saying "we spent all the money you gave us doing stuff, please give us more", and get more money.
But this is what you get when both the left and right have bought into libertarian free market ideology and agree that privatizing government services is more efficient than letting the government do its goddamn job.
Capitalism is decentralized tyranny. If a dictator said "if you refuse to work where I send you I will starve you to death on the streets" most Americans would recoil. But capitalism says "if you do not provide enough value for the upper class, they will not give you enough tokens to exchange for food and housing, and you will starve to death on the streets". And we just shrug and say it's the workers' fault for not working hard enough - because "no one is forcing you" - there's no specific individual we can blame for starving the unwanted population to death, it's the insensate grinding of the gears of a machine, and don't be silly, we can't turn off the machine, what are you, traitor?
And even with the open dictator model, many Americans would say "that just makes sense, if you don't work you don't eat" and cheer the dictator for putting lazy useless people to work. Just look how many people support slave labor in private, for profit prisons, and how many people want unhoused people to be enslaved in those exact same prisons. Hell, at the height of the Qanon craze something like 20% of Americans believed that Donald Trump would enact martial law and put millions of liberals in concentration camps and wanted it to happen. We're addicted to the taste of boot.
I agree, everyone who loves liberty should oppose this law.
Unfortunately, if you are conservative and you oppose this law, in my experience you are damn near a unicorn. I'm in California and these kind of brutal crackdowns are wildly popular among conservatives - and moderates, and even wealthy white liberals. Like the article says, blaming the victims of homelessness for the homeless crisis has been incredibly effective. And most people don't understand how corrupt the homeless industrial complex is, how little government funding actually gets to the homeless to help them, and how incompetent, abusive, and poorly run those aid programs actually are, so it's easy to look at all the money and programs that exist on paper and blame homeless people for "refusing help".
Unhoused people refuse help because past "help" failed them or people they know, or "help" comes with conditions that are unacceptable to them, or "help" will not solve the actual problems they have. The solution is not to force people into institutions that abuse them, neglect them, and then kick them out for failing to follow arbitrary rules.
I mean, if you have a dog, and the shelters don't allow dogs, what do you do? What sane person would risk their dog being put down at the pound in exchange for a few weeks of housing - housing, moreover, that is demonstratively less safe than living on the street?
The solution is to improve the services available without conditions so that unhoused people feel safe in asking for those services.
There are a small number of people who genuinely cannot make decisions because they cannot comprehend reality. And those people need help, possibly involuntary help. But even then, that doesn't mean taking them away from the people and places they know and locking them up. People blame Reagan's deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people in the '80s for the current homeless crisis - people forget Reagan's deinstitutionalization policy was popular because insane asylums were horrifically incompetent and abusive.
And if you see a homeless person experiencing a mental health crisis or acting irrational in public, please remember, they have no private place to go - how would you come off to the public if your worst moments had to be displayed in public? - and then ask yourself whether their actions are making you feel unsafe, or merely uncomfortable.
Funny how so many old punks do it, then 😆