Description: A picture titled “Russian plants” in a 3 x 3 grid with one of the grid items being Jill Stein, the rest are flora.
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There is a fundamental difference between Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans with regard to domestic policy and social issues. That's why you've got folks like Obama and Hilary and Biden bending on gay marriage, throwing kickbacks to the domestic EV market, playing ref between Big Business and Unions, and occasionally kicking some money back for student debt relief. This, while Republicans seem to prefer anti-Trans witch hunts, bailouts to failing coal companies, a court packed full of Pinkertons, and full privatization of the education sector.
I'm sympathetic to folks who see the choice between Trump and Harris as a question of whether we're going to do full scale Final Solution shit to the LGBTQ community, because looking at Florida and Texas you can see legitimacy to that fear.
But when it comes to foreign policy? The MIC has both parties by the balls. This "Trump will be worse on Gaza" is pure cope. This is a campaign of extermination that Biden has actively facilitated. There's nothing left for Trump to do. Similarly, with Ukraine, the fear is that Trump's going to step in and deprive Zelensky of our latest arms shipment. He won't. Trump loves his arms deals almost as much as he loves his trade deals.
Domestically, liberals are perfectly happy to push Women's Rights and LGBTQ Rights amendments at the state level. The biggest hurdle for Dem state reforms have been shitty governors like Hochul and Newsome. When you have a Beshear at the helm, he's happy to rubber stamp progressive reforms even from a state as red as Kentucky.
Nationally, Biden fucking sucks. Harris sucks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. But Dems do have people on their roster that don't suck. Dem populism does still exist, particularly in the smaller states.
But the Dems are trending towards a very scary nationalist reflection of the GOP. The Eric Adams style candidate is a fucking sociopath and they're as common to the party as any milquetoast Beto or SucDem AOC. The quality progressives - your Jamal Bowmans and Cori Bushs - are being drummed out of the party by big money. The Silicon Valley hucksters - your Gilibrands and Newsoms - are continuing to climb the ladder.
Its fucking crazy when you've got Dems clapping like seals over the Dick Cheney endorsement. Grim tidings for the future of the party.
Most dems are not clapping like seals from Cheney’s endorsement. Most of us want him to fuck off. But we can also look to instances like that of how far the Republican Party has fallen when a literal war criminal is like “this is too much even for me”.
The Cheneys have fallen. The GOP is doing the exact same shit its been on since the Eisenhower Administration. This revanchist "I remember when Republicans were kinda good aktuly" is playing right into Trump MAGA rhetoric.
No, they are far more extreme than they were before. I literally called Cheney a war criminal. They have never been good, but it’s absolutely true that they are worse than before (republicans). You seem to think in very binary terms which helps makes sense of your simplistic world views.
The extremist rhetoric you're hearing today was echoed during the Bush Unitary Executive era and was arguably even worse during the Reagan and Nixon eras, when the then-President was significantly more popular.
They're less popular than before, so the fascist policies Americans used to nod and smile at during the War on Drugs or the War on Terror are no longer going down so smoothly. And we've had nearly half a century of ramp up. So police brutality was more remarkable during Rodney King, when a few city cops could bludgeon a guy on camera, than in the modern day when the NYPD can merc a guy and two other civilians in the subway over bus fare.
But the policies? The rhetoric? The machismo attitude? The bigotries? Its the same shit. In many cases, its the same people. John Bolton was literally a Reagan guy who had served in every GOP administration up to Trump. Elliott Abrams was directly implicated in Iran-Contra. Rumsfeld and Cheney were cronies under Gerald Ford, ffs. They were doing all the same bloody-fisted international brutality and signing off on all the domestic immigrant hunting and domestic fear-mongering that we've seen under Trump.
Trump's judicial appoints are the same Federalist Society hacks that crawled up through the bowls of the prior administrations. His cabinet is stacked with Reagan and Bush Era state level officials. Pence was a Reagan Republican and a Rush-style reactionary talk radio host who worked at the same "Alliance Defending Freedom" right-wing legal lawsuit mills as House Speaker Mike Johnson and SCOTUS judge Amy Comey Barret and Trump AGs William Barr and Jeff Sessions and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. A 31 year old institution founded by James Dobson, an arch-conservative Christian Fundamentalist.
This is who they have always been.