this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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While I'm mostly sure it parody, its gotten really hard to tell lately.
I think they just got stuck in a rut. They have been dealing with an all-obstructionist Republican party for nearly 16 years now, ever since Obama was elected, if not before.
They stopped promising the moon because they became policy wonks and focused on what was realistically achievable, only making promises they thought they could turn into reality with an obstructionist party blocking them.
Hillary Clinton not-so-famously did a bunch of number crunching on a Basic Income and then said it wouldn't work, so that's why she didn't campaign on anything like that.
They stopped being dreamers, started being policy wonks, and were unwilling to make promises they didn't think they could keep. Think about the amount of messaging in the last few elections about how progressives were asking too much because we have to be realistic about what we can pass with only a sliver of a majority. People rightly view that as starting from a point of compromise and thus as weak.
Trump promised to smash norms and ignore laws to get his promises done, which people wrongly view as strong. When Republicans like Trump make promises, they are completely unburdened by whether they can accomplish them or not: make the promise, follow through be damned.
Nobody wants a policy wonk telling them they need to wait until their kids are middle aged for things to get better for their family, and the Democrats somehow failed to realize this in 16 years.
Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system. Everyone else has been Bush-era-style "Stay the course" status-quo enabling.
And, even then, he enacted a shockingly small amount of actual change.
He had the majority long enough that he could have codified Roe V. Wade, and increased the minimum wage, and done UHC and all sorts of shit, but he wanted to policy wonk both-sides across the aisle cooperation shit, and well, ended up passing the Republican version of UHC and bailing out billionaires, which really doesn't exactly reflect hope and/or change.
I'm not saying he didn't have problems, or that he had an endless mandate, or that he did nothing, but mostly that the "best" democratic president in damn near 30 years who had the biggest mandate you're probably going to find in modern politics still did a shockingly little amount of anything to improve or harden the government against clear nutters - the Tea Party was showing up, so it was or should have been blindingly obvious where that was going to end up eventually going.
I don't buy the (R) "do nothing democrats" line, but boy, they certainly make it hard to refute that claim in any form that's not a 1000 word essay which is why it plays so very well on TV/news/Twitter.