I can't understand the logic behind party A did something, and then blame party B for not undoing it.
Not everything is a simple ctrl-z, and the blame lays squarely on who implemented it.
Not everything is a simple ctrl-z, and the blame lays squarely on who implemented it.
There are a lot of people that do not know what to do.
There are also wounds that you can't really do anything about without hospital. (internal bleeding?!)
The funny thing is, as analogies go, here the friend tells you to bugger off because of israel and tells the mugger to come back and help him... mugger stabs him some more
"stuck in the past" vibes vs making progress
I've voted democrat in every election since I was 18.
As an example, take the current Iran war. There's very little opposition in establishment politics to the actual war. What you get instead are process objections, such as the president not consulting Congress. Objecting to the process is a way of appearing to be in opposition without being in opposition.
This was ultimately why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. "Trump bad" isn't a platform that people get excited for. People are asking "what are you going to do about it?" and her answer was... nothing. It was the culmination of years of what's been called "lesser evil voting" or "harm reduction voting". Democrats have adopted a platform of just not being quite as bad as the Republicans, probably because they have the exact same donors. And millions of voters stayed home in 2024 rather than vote for the status quo.
So back to the JCPOA, Biden should've done something but did nothing. Because he likes what Trump did. He agrees with it. And so do most Democrats. That's the point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
[2]: https://ia800503.us.archive.org/5/items/mirage-of-dissent-th...
I think it depends on how you characterize “reformist”. I’m almost certainly being too loose with this term. I mean people who actually push hard for substantial reform, including deep technical reforms, not the common colloquial meaning of incremental, superficial reform from groups like the New Democrat Coalition. Frankly I probably should have used a different word, as I think my usage here is atypical.
What I mean is the somewhat awkward “non-mainstream liberals who advocate for substantial policy changes.” Maybe I should just say progressives? But the people I’m thinking of don’t quite fit in with most of the progressives, even if they do sometimes align with them. We don’t have Lib Dems like the UK does, but that would probably be the segment I’m talking about if we had that here.
Biden did a pretty good job cleaning up after Trump. Was he perfect? Not even close. But Dem primary voters had the option of more progressive candidates and instead they circled around Biden. Did donors try and engineer a Biden win? Sure. Were voters obligated to go along with their scheme? Also no.
The blame for our situations rests squarely on the shoulders of the American people, who have been living so insulated from the consequences of their votes that they entertained a guy like Trump, twice.
Republicans like the filibuster because they can force through most of what they want under reconciliation, which only requires a simply majority, and they can block Democrats with a minority. Democrats like the filibuster because it gives them an excuse to do nothing. Because a lot of what Democrats want to do isn't filibuster-proof.
Also, the filibuster once meant that you had to stand up and hold the floor to block a vote. Now we have a silent hold since the 1970s. If you for some reason believe in needing 60 votes to end debate, why not at least adopt the earlier interpretation that requires someone to stand at a podium? Because Democrats don't want to do anything. That's why.
Biden had four terrible decisions in his presidency:
1. Appointing Merrick Garland as AG. He's another establishment Democrat that didn't want to do anything, really, particularly not prosecute the insurrection that took place. He was embarrassed into doing so by the January 6 Committee. He basically lost 2 years of potentially prosecuting the administration;
2. His Israel policy, particularly the bear hug strategy and especially not ending the genocide;
3. Not raking MBS over the coals for not ending the Trump 2020 OPEC deal, wich exacerbated the inflation price shock; and
4. Running for re-election.
It's worth adding that the only reason Biden was the candidate was because the DNC was scared Bernie Sanders would be the candidate so they fixed the race in South Carolina thanks to Jim Clyburn in particular. Everyone dropped out of the primary and got rewarded with Cabinet posts, etc (eg Pete Buttigief as DoT Secretary). Except one. Elizabeth Warren stayed in to split Bernie's vote.
As for blaming the voters, I 100% disagree. The party leadership has repeatedly engineered situations to give the voters terrible choices and rely on lesser evil voting. After the 2017 election, the DNC got sued and argued in court that they had no obligation to stay neutral. That was a political promise not a binding promise. Basically, they argued that they were free to overrule the will of primary voters with superdelegates and manipualting of funds by then DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who when exposed and was forced out, just went and joined the Hilary campaign.
Voters stayed home in the millions in 2024 (vs 2020) because they were given no choice. They're not responsible for that. The candidate is. And if you end up being angry about Kamala losing, blame her for having a terrible platform, not the voters who decided a slightly better candidate was the only available choice.
Anyway we will have to agree to disagree. IMO almost everything you’ve said is true but still doesn’t absolve the voters who haven’t been voting in a vacuum starting in 2016.