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Comment by kubafu | Hacker News Reader

USA is such a weird place these days. Is there a way back to sanity once this administration ends?

The way back to sanity would've required the opposition party to be worth anything. Right now they're busy writing up their own project 2029 plan which involves cracking down on the internet and whining about the old guard getting voted out of office for being feckless.

IMO the DNC needs to grow a spine and perform hard correction and repair. Which is to say, I don't think that will happen, and some form of collapse is inevitable.

But I'm far from a political scientist. Just an engineer with a history hobby, pattern matching.

There is a persistent narrative that the DNC is incompetent. That they're just trying to be nice and to compromise. And it's simply not true and needs to be disposed of.

The DNC have known what works in elections since 2008 when Obama swept and won states like Iowa. They might argue that Obama was generationally charismatic (which is true) but it was the message that won, a message of progressive populism. Here's a 2016 quote from Chuck Schumer [1]:

> For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

Here's another [2]:

> For as long as I live, for as long as I have the privilege of serving in the Senate from New York, I will unflinchingly, unstintingly, and with all my strength, be a Guardian of Israel

Substitute "Israel" for any other country and you'll be charged with something between treason and acting as an unregistered foreign agent (eg [3]).

Also remember that the contentious Epstein files, which implicate a bunch of powerful people including the current president and will likely all but prove that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli agent, sat in a dark room doing nothing for 4 years of Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. And no, "ongoing cases" isn't an excuse, particularly after Maxwell was convicted in 2022.

Look at the disastrous Iran war. What was the response from Democrats? How many, particularly in leadership positions, actually opposed the war? Not many. Most of the objections were process objections, namely that Congress wasn't consulted. That's not opposition to a war because most of them don't oppose the war.

I really hope people begin to understand that none of what the DNC and establishment Democrats is doing is incompetence. It isn't.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Schumer

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh8rpFTVBuM

[3]: https://www.bipc.com/arcadia-mayor-charged-by-doj-as-chinese...

Thanks for the info. It makes sense to me.

No country has ever recovered from this sort of thing. At best the empire collapses and the country survives as a country and becomes a vassal of a different empire (likely China, or BRICS). If recovery was possible, we wouldn't have gotten this far already.

Can you name a single relevant historical example for this claim?

Why don't you just name a country that voted its way out of fascism.

That's not what you said. However, Italy is a country that did recover from fascism.

It seems like you are more interested in being a doomer than engaging in good faith discussion. I'll pass on the defeatist doom porn.

Did they? Who is Italy's PM right now?

As to this doomer nonsense I only said you can't vote your way out of fascism, there are other ways to escape fascism.

I don't think I need to quote your own post back to you where the word "vote" is not present. You are not here for a good faith discussion.

I am not them. I understand the confusion, 'someonebaggy' and 'undersuit' are very similar names.

Here's the thing: The traditional / establishment democrats have blindly believed that you can negotiate with people like Trump, because of decorum. Establishment candidates have been more occupied with taking the moral high-road, even if that resulted in loss after loss.

There's this ingrained belief that if you just play nice with republicans, they'll play nice back. And that was valid for a long, long time. The problem is that Trump completely upended that, though he was not the start of it - he's just the natural consequence of populism and the ground that had been fertilized for years.

The reason why Trump has been allowed to hijack the republican party, is because of how the two-party system in the US works. Trump has an iron grip on a sizable number of voters, and thus the GOP had to kowtow to Trump.

Luckily Trump is MAGA, and MAGA is Trump. I fully expect that the current MAGA movement will fracture and splinter into smaller factions once Trump is out. And from the looks of it, they do not have any plan B. No front runner in sight.

No, it's worse than that. Establishment Democrats are complicit in what Trump is doing. This went so far as to intentionally lose the presidential election in 2024 rather than oppose genocide. How can Trump both be a fascist and an existential threat and a preferable outcome to stopping genocide?

For years, the Democrats have sold this "electability" lie, that the only electable Democrats are "moderates" or "centrists". This was never true and it was just an excuse for the same people funding both parties to make the Democrats the controlled opposition.

What we've seen in the last year is the right democratic socialists ousting incumbents in primaries and defeating establishment candidates. This movement is undeniably popular and what do establishment Democrats do? They side with Republicans in saying that socialism is an existential threat to the US.

As for your last point, I think we're going to find out what happens sooner than many think. MAGA is a cult and cults never survive intact when their leader dies. There's nobody to take his place so the jmost likely outcome is a descent into factionalism and the party splinters for a time until Trump 2.0 can once again unite the factions.

But we should never forget that establishment Democrats are siding and will side with Republicans to defend the current system.

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