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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Things have gotten bitter, but you can’t have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don’t engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it’s a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don’t have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can’t deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.

    Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they’re kind of self-sabotaging here. All they’re accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?



  • I’m rather curious how you relativise a lot of the US’ recent history. Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t pillars of stability, but I think the balance comes down pretty hard against the US with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations as well. Our continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia isn’t looking so hot either.

    Then we’ve got military intervention in the Dominican Republic and support of Trujillo until he stopped being useful, installing the Pinochet regime after helping topple the government of Salvador Allende, support for the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as backing dictatorships in Argentina.

    Our colonization of the Philippines was pretty awful, as is our continued treatment of Puerto Rico as essentially a vacation spot and Caribbean ghetto.

    You get the idea. Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of an instance in the last century where the US has intervened on the international stage and actually has a credible claim to having done good with the exception of World War II.

    The government has created and fought for stability for a small subset of monied interests and has largely left the rest of us to jump for whatever table scraps they deign to let fall to us plebs. As @Nokinori mentions, even domestically, things are increasingly coming undone at the seams and looking ready to get worse.


  • He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now.

    Stabilizing the world is just flat out wrong. At best, the US has stabilized itself and a select few allies. Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, along with a whole bunch of countries in Central and South America over the last 100 years would probably feel quite strongly that the US has been a disruptive force for them.