The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.
This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
The DEA has been jerking off about how they've been doing this stuff on the east coast corridor for over a decade.
The current CBP situation is basically a Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V of what DEA was doing under Bush and Obama.
who was president in 2017?
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
(Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
Normal earnings increased just 55% in that time and tracking inflation would have meant increasing 49.5%
>Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen
They literally got ACA passed by a hair, and were just shy of 2 Senate votes needed to enact all those policies I discussed in Biden's original BBB.
That’s what American conservatism used to look like. Modern Dems talk a lot like that.
Hell, the right-wing ran on giving more money to the National Health Service as one of their Brexit arguments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus (Including Farage, at times! https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-r...)
The US has very little actual big-L Left (ahem) left in it.
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
Healthcare, for instance, is not more expensive for the average low-income person because of the ACA. You’re utterly incorrect, completely misinformed, and repeating bullshit. “Progressives”. Lol.
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
All the Democrat led states have passed a law to change presidential votes to popular vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
And there isn't much Dems can do about the disproportionate power of a few states due to the Senate, except for start a Civil War.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
Companies do not have to do a conscious effort to determine the lowest amount they can go. "Everyone else pays that rate too"
But absent the rule, they would - and did - reliably go lower.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.
While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice.
They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects.
The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young.
Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
The Taliban can hate the west all they want, it's not politically tenable for them to engage in any serious effort to sponsor terrorism abroad. Likewise going full jackboot during reconstruction after the US civil war wasn't politically possible.
I’m sure it was. You’ll see after whoever wins the next one.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
There is suffering either way. Which has more area under the curve, fighting about it now, or boiling the frog 100yr and fighting later?
In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
And you won't convince any of that party's voters to care about location privacy enough to make it a vote-changing issue if you open your argument by criticizing their party (which, yes, almost universally sucks) instead of talking about the actual issue, which is location privacy.
Look, no, that's just wrong. Immigration enforcement overreach (and law enforcement overreach more generally) is an almost purely republican issue. Period. Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
You are misinterpreting me in bad faith here.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
edit: in reality the times have changed and so has the country and the parties. All of these pre-2008 stereotypes are stupid and not useful anymore.
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
It's a silly claim made by unserious folks.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
In the US electoral system, voting third party doesn't send a signal. It throws away your vote. Let's take a look at what voting third party has done.
1. Voting for Nader led to Bush Jr. winning the presidency in 2000. 2. Voting for Jill Stein led to the first Trump presidency in 2016.
So you got that going for you.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
Sorry, but that is how it is.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
There is an interesting philosophical issue around these accusations of "distributed hypocrisy". It would be one thing if you were pointing to a particular individual who took an inconsistent position. But if two loosely affiliated individuals disagree, that's not necessarily hypocritical. Even a single individual may change their mind on an issue over time.
They've not been "small government" since forever.
They are patrolling the border. The border between desired and undesired citizens.
Nobody lifted a finger when “the privacy violations are only used against the bad guys”. Now it looks like it’s your turn to be declared the bad guy.
The people who voted for them and are still cheering them on are insisting that they voted for and are getting small government!
They are divorced from what words mean
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
But also your political adversary.
And even then it was smoldering for a long time before that. A good "start" point is probably the creation of the FBI.
Is that a win for the oligarchs?
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
Again, you'll find few democrats that have a stance on the border that contradicts the Republican stance. There are a few, but most are just staying silent. The only reason they vote against these sorts of bills is because of pure partisanship, not out of some ideology alignment.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-hold-election-year-sh...
GOP is the party of capitalism (free-market, laissez-faire). Capitalism is the pursuit of self-interest and the profit motive.
And when the opportunity permits, this creates an ethical incentive structure for lying to be deployed for tactical gain.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
It's going to be one party, or the other, in my opinion .. a party that is more overtly favoring the business- / owner-class. And today it happens to be GOP.
The fascinating / interesting part to me is how Lying, a socially-unfavorable trait, is overtly deployed more and more often by a specific political party.
And so it reinforces, in my mind, the "Post-Truth Era" labeling by some political scientists, for today. Where society itself is complicit in accepting the GOP, I assume because it feels good to "win", while the GOP gratuitously lies.
Their leader, Trump, is re-explained by his supporters, "what he meant when he called for the execution of other Government leaders was ..." and similar such intentional misdirection / lying.
As a tactic, it's remarkable to me how Lying is successful. I expect to see more of it, from popular and even unpopular business leaders, going forward, perhaps enabled by increasingly capable automated information generation technology like AI & (mis)info-spreaders like social-networks.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
edit: Why am I being downvoted?
Article starts with: "The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide"
Within illegal entry you have:
Terror watchlist
Recycling deportees (commuting to/from construction job sites in Phoenix or coming from Tijuana to do sex work in US)
Ultralight pilots dropping meth in fields
Smuggled minors (custody disputes)
Chinese nationals on the run from China
Mexican wildlife/hunting violators
Archaeological and horticultural looters stealing from Sonora Desert
Dryback US citizens pretending to be aliens to get a free ride on ICE flights to Houston
US citizen gotawaysTo me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
The ?
You mean to say you're supporting a checkpoint in Indiana to catch drugs that came from Mexico?
Fix the checkpoint in Texas then if it's leaking drugs to Indiana ...
Presumably CBP is not stupid and that surveillance is providing value they can not otherwise get only in Texas.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Eventually you realize your enemy isn't the system. The system is like a misbehaving toddler that's never been disciplined. It acts as badly as it can get away with. Your enemy is your fellow countryman, you coworkers, your own family. And from that realization comes nothing actionable nor good conclusions, only despair...
Translated to "Even though I know that most republicans said they didn't want to go against someone who had a very good chance winning in 2024 for the fear that they would get their political career destroyed, because that is what Trump explicitly said to them, I will vaguely allude to some fringe statements about things that haven never been proven true in regards to other aspects of the bill as the reason Republicans didn't vote for it, because in no way shape or form will I ever admit that I was wrong.
I don't get why people on your side still think that saying shit like this makes you sound smart. That ship has long sailed.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans. Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.
> This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans.
There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
> Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
Conjecture. Trump was not in office in 2024. That bill may or may not have addressed some issues, while also creating new issues or making things worse.
"Why?" he asked. "A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it's bad for him politically."
Mr Biden said the former president had spent the past 24 hours lobbying Republicans in the House and Senate in an effort to torpedo the proposal.
He said Mr Trump had tried to intimidate Republican lawmakers, "and it looks like they're caving".
Mr Biden urged the lawmakers to "show some spine".
The Trump campaign blasted the Biden speech, calling it "an embarrassment to our Nation and a slap in the face to the American people".
Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called Mr Biden's criticism of Mr Trump "a brazen, pathetic lie and the American people know the truth".
Her statement also said Mr Trump's policies had "created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them".
On Monday, Mr Trump posted on social media that "only a fool, or a radical left Democrat" would vote for the bill. ”
That Biden is trying to blame Trump for the border disaster that he caused?
Give me a break.
Here are some Republican Senators talking about their criticisms of the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It sure doesn't sound like a "really good bill" that only failed because Trump said so. That is a Democrat-spun narrative.
Thats why minimum wage laws specifically exist. Everybody wins.
>There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
The border bill that Trump killed would have increased funding to CBP to speed up the process of determining who is fit to stay and who isn't because so many people were entering that there wasn't enough staff to process cases quicker.
>Conjecture.
Nice try lol. I know yall LOVE to rewrite history, but that doesn't fly anymore. Everything is on record on why Republicans voted against it.
Yes that is one of the things that bill would have done, along with hundreds of other things which may or may not have been beneficial or detrimental.
And again, Trump didn't kill anything. He was not in office. There were many criticisms of that bill on its merits. The criticisms are on record as you said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
> In this video, several Republican Senators express their blunt dismissal of the so-called "bipartisan" border security bill, highlighting their reasons for opposition and their dissatisfaction with the negotiation process and their leadership.
Hopefully, once US economy tanks, and you lose years of your life due to stress and a good portion of your retirement funds, you will understand this because its impossible for you to learn this any other way.
WTF? So your arguments is that stealing American jobs and not paying taxes “it’s good for the economy”?
Even if that were true, slavery is also “good for the economy”, but that doesn’t make it a good thing
Undocumented Tyson Chicken employees handed over paperwork _from Tyson_ that was given to over 900 of them where the company told them how to fill out government/tax/payroll forms when undocumented so as to stay under the radar... and CBP said that wasn't part of the scope of their investigation into Tyson, and did precisely nothing about that.
Hormel, much the same.
The bitching and moaning about "the economy" by Republicans is so amazingly selective - it's funny how they focus on that, while ignoring how _awfully convenient_ it is to farm, livestock, food production and other employers and businesses it is to have access to that same labor pool.
Do keep in mind that 50 years ago all these jobs were done by “Americans”.
Either way, prices will increase - that's just the immediate corollary of having a higher production cost due to higher salaries. Hopefully the Maga distortion field still acknolwges that basic fact. Guess what happens when prices increase. People won't buy more out of patriotic feelings.
The problem you (and others) raise with this point is that Americans don’t want to do those jobs. But if they paid a lot more, they would want to. Okay now the problem on your end shifts. Ohhh but the prices would go up. Okay, and? Yes, the prices go up, and we can discuss whether that is a problem, but it isn’t your original problem, you have performed a squirm maneuver (probably unknowingly since you are probably just repeating essentially a propaganda script you have unknowingly ingested).
You take it as a foregone conclusion that the price increases would be prohibitive. You have provided no basis for this assumption, and nobody ever does because it isn’t obviously true. It depends on a) what percent of the consumer price can be attributed to the artificially low wages and b) the second and third etc order effects of increasing wages on affordability across society, including the domestic workers in these areas. When you dig into it (a) isn’t generally above a few years worth of target inflation, on very specific product categories, and you simultaneously increase wages for low skill domestic workers, which sounds like a win for the left but somehow it isn’t? Pay slightly higher prices to support American workers is a pretty easy slogan.
So the proposal is basically that we knowingly abandon the rule of law in the area of immigration in exchange for 6% cheaper vegetables. Uh, no thank you, I’ll pass on that one.
The comparison to slavery is quite funny, because you're actually right. But probably not in the way you think - or even, the way most American politics talks about. For example, whenever a state gets a bug up their butt about illegal immigration and tries to actually enforce eVerify[0], the local agricultural sector collapses. Because American agriculture has always been addicted to slave labor, and always will be absent specific interventions to give agricultural workers negotiating power.
Of course, that's not the kind of intervention you're going to see out of Congress anytime soon. The arguments had in Congress, and with Trump, boil down to "how many indentured servants do we bring in, and for how long do they have to work before they get their rights back?" Illegal immigration is solely understood as a fault of the immigrant, not the companies who rely on them. Even the mass deportations are being carried out with the understanding that the slaves are the problem - not their masters.
And to be clear, the slave-like nature of immigration (illegal or otherwise) comes down to the fact that immigrants don't use the same job market Americans use. If I want to poach an H1-B, I have to go through hoops and pay an exorbitant sum to sponsor them. This means they can't demand equivalent salaries - even though the condition of their visa was that they'd be getting paid the same or better. It just doesn't pencil unless the immigrant works for peanuts and you're a huge organization that can swallow the compliance costs.
You can't get rid of slavery by whipping the slave harder. If you want to actually get rid of immigration-as-slavery, you need to hand out visas like candy, green cards to anyone who tells on their employer / trafficker / etc. for violating labor laws, and amnesty to people who have been here for a long time without a rap sheet.
[0] This is the US government service that actually tells you if you're hiring someone who has a legal right to work in the country or not.