You are describing a global phenomena. Something like 75% of the population believe civil war is possible in the UK. There have been warnings from France too. Germany and Poland are heavily polarized as are Argentina and Brazil. Demographic decline and loss of trust in institutions are everywhere. And then there are the wars.
The Democratic Party has done absolutely zero to stem the vicious antisemitic discrimination, hate speech and support for violence coming from their progressive wing. Would the Democrats pressure their precious universities to stop violating the Civl Rights Act Title VI rights of Jewish students? How about speaking out against the antisemitic pro Hamas indoctrination their teacher union buddies are trying to expose public school students to? Of course not, and you didn't even think to mention that in your article. Jewish Americans don't count, unless they're the token Jew clowns of the Free Palestine cult.
Will the Democratic Party do the simplest thing to block the Long March tactics of the far left, like requiring candidates to be registered Democrats for at least one elections cycle ahead of running in primaries and forcing them to not be members of other political parties like the DSA? They can't even do something that simple.
As long as the tiny number of progressives out there are allowed to control the staff of Congressional Democrats and Democratic presidential administrations, the party will keep being loathsome to most Americans. Understand this reality - Americans on a whole loathe modern progressive politics.
The writer of this article is somewhat dishonest when he doesn't admit that the Democrats ALLOWED OPEN BORDERS which has caused destabilization in our cities, like mine, across the country. The majority of Democrats don't experience the consequences of their open border policy because most live in suburbs, have security details, and walls around their homes. And about the use of Marines, the Marines were there to assist the National Guard in protecting federal agents and property, not do arrests, no matter the perception. And the US Senator Padilla barged into the Noem press conference and was NOT wearing his senator's id that might have calmed the situation. But like a lot of Democrats, this writer is not telling the whole story. I am an unaffiliated voter who is having difficulty finding any Democrat I can trust. So far, President Trump is the only person I can find to trust because he does what he says he will do. I realize he has changed his mind several times about some issues, but I believe our country is going in the right direction. All Democrats do is attack Trump and give us nothing to trust.
It is possible with a Democratic leader who can combine an understanding of the new media landscape with a less volatile and authoritarian temperament and policy program than MAGA.
The role of the new media technologies is the underappreciated factor in a lot of analyses of the situation. The whole business model of social media, and the associated algorithms of their platforms, are optimized around addicting people to paranoia and anger, and the fragmentation of informational sources means the average person is subjected to a constant barrage of conflicting signals that make it hard to figure out what is going on. In a prior era, things like the fake electors scheme--to take just one politically-oriented, American example--would have become part of the public's consensus reality, and the bad actors duly punished. Now, one media feed says it happened, another media feed says it's 'fake news', and both feeds throw a million other stories--many of equal importance, many of far less importance--at news consumers, so the average person goes "Well, this source said this, the other source said that, so...maybe it happened? Maybe it didn't? I dunno." As a result, the public's consensus reality is fractured, and the crimes of the bad actors often go unpunished--or worse, are hardly known about.
Combine this with the fact that people's understanding of the new nature of labor in an economy based on digital rather than industrial machines--its transformation into 'money = amount of useful data a person produces' rather than 'money = amount of time a person operates an industrial devices'--and you get economic dislocation and inequality that can't be fixed via conventional redistributional schemes.
Infoanarchy + economic inequality = unsettled people in an unsettled world.
That's why it's crucial the next leader of the Democrats grasp the new media landscape, in addition to providing a more stable authority figure and policy regime than Trump. Fortunately, the Democratic party has a lot of these types amongst it ranks. (the Republicans have Trump, but their bench is very weak beyond him in terms of media savvy) Unfortunately, only a few of these Democrats are highly visible right now. One of them needs to grasp the mantle of leadership--and whether that happens is *the* question.
"Fake electors" were first deployed by the JFK campaign in 1960. It was a legal strategy designed to allow court challenges if necessary. The motivation in 2020 was the same.
Not according to Trump's team; the aim in their case was to reverse the election result, which we can see from the Eastman memo. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos)
The 1960 alternate electors were a precaution, commissioned because a lengthy recount in Hawaii was going on and it wasn't clear whether it would be finished--and thus whether the election outcome would be clear--by the deadline for having electors cast their vote. The Republican governor approved them for this reason--i.e., to have the Republican slate vote if the recount showed Nixon had won, and the Democratic slate if the recount showed Kennedy had won. The Eastman memo makes clear that the 2020 alternate electors were not precautionary, but instead part of a stratagem meant to unilaterally reverse the outcome of state elections that had been certified by recounts, after Trump's court challenges failed owing to a lack of evidence of fraud. (and in many cases a lack of standing, as well) They were never approved by the governors of those states, either. Notably, part of the plan was not to leverage the passing of the deadline for having the electors cast their votes due to ongoing recounts, but to *actively disrupt* Mike Pence's counting of the votes to meet the theoretical 'technical' requirement necessary to prevent the certification of the electors' votes and the substitution of them with the fake electors' votes.
This is why January 6th can be correctly characterized as an insurrectionary event--not due merely to the rioters, but due to the way Trump and his team planned to overturn the result of the vote in order to keep him in office, and the way they tried to *use* the riot to do so.
Riots are never ok—nevertheless not all of them are backed by a coordinated attempt to overturn the electoral machinery that acts as the ultimate arbiter of state authority in a democratic nation. If the Biden administration had incited a violent cell of radical left-wing anarchists to ransack the capital in the hopes of stopping the counting of the electoral votes in 2024 so it could swap in a bunch of fake electors and overturn Trump’s reelection they’d be guilty of the same thing. But that thankfully didn’t happen.
I am sure that if you asked any one of the rioters on January 6, "Are you backed by a coordinated attempt to overturn the electoral machinery that acts as the ultimate arbiter of state authority in a democratic nation?" the response would be, "Whut? Hell, no. I'm here because I'm mad at the election result." The wicked see conspiracy when none exists.
You can be backed by something you don't understand the full extent of. Many of the Nazi soldiers who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were just following orders and had been told the Jews were being sent to "resettlement" camps to minimize disruptions to public order; they discounted tales of gas chambers as exaggerations by enemies of the government. Does that mean the Nazis weren't guilty of genocide? Regarding January 6th, several rioters knew about the plan, several rioters were literally there to overthrow the government for their own reasons, (such as the Proud Boys members that were eventually charged with seditious conspiracy) and there are probably a decent amount who were just there to make trouble, or were protesters who got a little carried away. As a whole, however, the riot was part of a coordinated plot to reverse the election result, and therefore, as I said above, an insurrectionary event, of which they were (some knowing, some unknowing) participants.
The flip side of the former media landscape is that elite corruption and deception tended to go largely unchalenged back then, with relatively few exceptions. That's just how party leadership wanted it of course, and this was probably one of the less well haralded reasons why things wern't so partisan and a lot more serious bipartisan policy work could get done. Noting like secrete pay to play and a general since of impunity to grease the wheels of una-party dealmaking...
Republicans have to a very small extent come to understand changes needed to be made. Trump kicked butt in the 2016 primaries and all of a sudden Republicans had a candidate who could say Iraq was one of the most stupid foreign policy moves in history, and that he wouldn't touch Social Security.
Democrats need someone to say they are going to deport almost everyone who is here illegally and they'll make no sweetheat amnesty deals. We don't care that you get things done cheap, it's coming out of our income, we are the ones paying. Someone needs to admit we blew it just as Trump did about Iraq.
Our health care still sucks. Half the bankruptcies in America are of people with medical insurance. Half. They have insurance and they go BK because they got sick. The ACA still sucks. We thought we were going to all get health care, remember all that BS about health care being a right?
Josh Hawley a Republican just introduced a bill to make $15 the min wage. Maybe Dems can go for $20 and get my vote, and until starting wages for most all jobs are at $30 keep deporting.
Every election, to varying degrees, is predicated on the previous one. Trump was a "reaction" to the Obama (and scandalous Biden) Administration; Obama was the same after eight years of Bush. The recent Canadian elections may provide a clue: voters ultimately didn't want "change" (except among younger voters), they wanted a "return to normalcy" (hat tip to Warren G. Harding), a functional and competent center-left government led by a calm technocrat. After Trump's tumultuous era, with a big assist from the progressive left that's been marching through our institutions, what "normal" will look like in November 2028, and who will carry that banner?
God willing, the banner-bearer, whoever he is, won't be another member of the political gerontocracy -- and this is coming from an octogenarian. My generation has run out of ideas and is operating solely on the fumes of doctrine.
Based on the recent behavior and voting patterns of our generation (boomers, although you might be just ahead of it), I agree. We've screwed things up enough.
There are still some very smart and experienced Americans who have long advocated alternatives to the most radical policies of various politicians of both major parties, and so I regard it as over-generalization to accuse an entire generation of anything.
However, I think that there should be maximum age limits for certain highly critical positions such as U.S. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, military officers, and airline pilots, based on the inevitable decline in energy and cognitive ability that comes with aging — particularly after 80. And as we should have learned from the experience with Biden, that decline can set in well within a few years.
This the era of frequent Black Swan events. Next will be the impact of AI on all aspects of politics and society. Read your McLuhan for a perspective of all encompassing change from major new technologies.
is this REALLY what the dems think is good???????????
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist and former rapper, is surging in the polls in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary following endorsements by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In The Free Press, Olivia Reingold examined Mamdani’s chances against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: “As Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old candidate for mayor of New York City, took selfies with adoring fans on a recent Sunday in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a heckler in a MAGA hat began shouting with a megaphone only a few feet away. ‘You’re a socialist,’ the man cried out to the crowd. ‘If you hate America, you should leave.’ Normally, that label—the s-word—might be considered a slur, or at least a political liability. But not to this crowd. ‘Yeah, dude,’ a Mamdani supporter in wire-rimmed glasses scoffed. ‘We are socialists.’ Laughs peeled in from across the park. A terrier with a keffiyeh around its neck began barking with excitement. Volunteers handing out Spanish-language pamphlets craned their necks to catch the commotion. Suddenly, a chant caught on. ‘We are socialists! We are socialists! We are socialists!’”
While I agree, the alternatives of Cuomo as well as the current mayor, are truly horid. While I and many voters might want more of some version of "moderate" in politics, moderate declined in part precisely becouse of it's association with a deeply corrupt and elitist status quo.
And to be clear, we really should be able to (and I would strongly support) legalizing a great many migrants if we actually had a lasting secure border and steadally decreasing unauthorized US population. Most voters would as well according to polls. But that support is very conditional, and any widespread belief that Dems might meet or even support such conditions has been largely lost in recent years. We should also have greater and more diverse refugee admissions. It is absurd that we have not given refugee status to many Venazualans or other Latin Americans fleeing persecution but we seem to have a defacto rule against doing so at scale.
At this point, such policy changes could probably only be seriously discussed with a substancial Dem majority in congress and if they don't keep insisting on vastly increased immigration or on changes that weaken enforcement of immigration law. And that is if Democrats even remained interested in doing so once in power. However, what (didn't) happen under Obama on immigration when Dems actually had a super majority in the Senate for a time is not a good imdication... Nor is the fact that Biden allowed such a vast number to enter the US with no path to permanant status.
Trump has actually (mostly) acheived a secure border recently proving how wrong Dems who falsely claimed he couldn't were. Yet Dems are still suing trying to start up asylum claims at the border and for unauthorized migrants within the US again. The truth is that we just cannot have that policy and also have a secure border! Those pushing such ideas should be the ones ostrecised from the party for undermining public support for a resonable immigration policy, but instead it is currently the opposite...
Democrats have really and truly blown it on this issue in particular, yet so far show almost no signs of coming to a new understanding on it. The sooner this changes, the more hope there is for much needed legalization and other policy changes (But not all the ones most elite Democrats curently want!) and for a more sane and successful Democratic party future! Again, I'm not holding my breath. End rant.
The question is, has our system to handle the Jan 6 riot or any other challenge worked? Like we said in the union, anyone can grieve anything. It doesn't matter what individuals do, it is how the system responds. When the systems start failing, that will be the beginning of the end of our country.
On immigration, what more Democratic leaders and influancers must not only get through there thick sculls but act apon (even if they are shunned or attacked by current leaders, pushed or kept off ballots, etc which they would be!) is that there is currently no longer any real shared belief at this point that we should "continue the US's long tradition of welcoming and assimilating newcomers", at least not at the high levals of immigration that we have seen in recent decades, much less at the absurdly elevated levels that most core Democrats now seem to want and take as some sort of given.
Futhermore, focussing on deporting unauthorized immigrants/migrants in general, and not only those with criminal records (even as the latter are first priority) as Trump has been doing is not incohesive policy, no matter how much most Democrats dislike it!!! The more limmited shock and awe stuff and campus or other supposed "antisemitism" cases are a very differant matter, but they are the exception. But what have now become routine ice raids is well in keeping what Trump had promised durring his campaign.
At present many Republicans want an outright moretoreum on immigration. But even if they welcome existing legal immigrants for the most part, most are all in favor of deporting as many (ideally all, though that would be unrealistic) unauthorized immigrants as possible while NOT increasing legal immigration further. In short, they want much LESS overall immigration and yes fewer immigrants then we now have.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders and influancers (save for gadflies like John Fetterman or Bill Maher) on the other hand seem to increasingly think that the entire US should become like California in terms of both policy and diversity, and refuse to even consider otherwise, as if this is some sort of given. Newsflash, -it isn't! But many millions more of mostly working class (especially working class white) Americans have left California for other US states (The same is also true of certian other expensive and immigrant rich blue states), then have moved in to California in recent decades. They are voting with their feet, something that only very recently have leading Democrats began to widely aknowledge even though it has been a major trend beginning in the late 1980's.
Many working class Americans feel they have been displaced geographically as well as in other ways by excessive immigration. It is very much a soceoeconomic issue and not just a cultural or social ome. In short, the support is just not there for what most Democrats have increasingly pretended (or actually falsely believed) is some sort of consensus for far more immigration then wht the majority of Americans, and certianly most Republicans, actually want. Refusing to reconsider this stance has become a hill many and perhaps most progressives seem willing to die on. This sooner this changes the better. But let's just say I'm not holding my breath!
The cycle repeats. US patriots saved the world and then kept it peaceful by funding the global order for nearly 80 years. The collectivist authoritatians have risen yet again to threaten freedom and liberty. We make the mistake thinking they ever go away.
Sometimes it takes a lot of words to say so little. In all due respect to Michael Baharaeen, he has layed out what to me reads like an eloquent case for Democrats failure to read the tea leaves and learn from a history that the party says is important to be on the "rights side" of.
Their actions speak otherwise, and Americans have every reason to feel unsettled by that.
You are describing a global phenomena. Something like 75% of the population believe civil war is possible in the UK. There have been warnings from France too. Germany and Poland are heavily polarized as are Argentina and Brazil. Demographic decline and loss of trust in institutions are everywhere. And then there are the wars.
The Democratic Party has done absolutely zero to stem the vicious antisemitic discrimination, hate speech and support for violence coming from their progressive wing. Would the Democrats pressure their precious universities to stop violating the Civl Rights Act Title VI rights of Jewish students? How about speaking out against the antisemitic pro Hamas indoctrination their teacher union buddies are trying to expose public school students to? Of course not, and you didn't even think to mention that in your article. Jewish Americans don't count, unless they're the token Jew clowns of the Free Palestine cult.
Will the Democratic Party do the simplest thing to block the Long March tactics of the far left, like requiring candidates to be registered Democrats for at least one elections cycle ahead of running in primaries and forcing them to not be members of other political parties like the DSA? They can't even do something that simple.
As long as the tiny number of progressives out there are allowed to control the staff of Congressional Democrats and Democratic presidential administrations, the party will keep being loathsome to most Americans. Understand this reality - Americans on a whole loathe modern progressive politics.
The writer of this article is somewhat dishonest when he doesn't admit that the Democrats ALLOWED OPEN BORDERS which has caused destabilization in our cities, like mine, across the country. The majority of Democrats don't experience the consequences of their open border policy because most live in suburbs, have security details, and walls around their homes. And about the use of Marines, the Marines were there to assist the National Guard in protecting federal agents and property, not do arrests, no matter the perception. And the US Senator Padilla barged into the Noem press conference and was NOT wearing his senator's id that might have calmed the situation. But like a lot of Democrats, this writer is not telling the whole story. I am an unaffiliated voter who is having difficulty finding any Democrat I can trust. So far, President Trump is the only person I can find to trust because he does what he says he will do. I realize he has changed his mind several times about some issues, but I believe our country is going in the right direction. All Democrats do is attack Trump and give us nothing to trust.
It is possible with a Democratic leader who can combine an understanding of the new media landscape with a less volatile and authoritarian temperament and policy program than MAGA.
The role of the new media technologies is the underappreciated factor in a lot of analyses of the situation. The whole business model of social media, and the associated algorithms of their platforms, are optimized around addicting people to paranoia and anger, and the fragmentation of informational sources means the average person is subjected to a constant barrage of conflicting signals that make it hard to figure out what is going on. In a prior era, things like the fake electors scheme--to take just one politically-oriented, American example--would have become part of the public's consensus reality, and the bad actors duly punished. Now, one media feed says it happened, another media feed says it's 'fake news', and both feeds throw a million other stories--many of equal importance, many of far less importance--at news consumers, so the average person goes "Well, this source said this, the other source said that, so...maybe it happened? Maybe it didn't? I dunno." As a result, the public's consensus reality is fractured, and the crimes of the bad actors often go unpunished--or worse, are hardly known about.
Combine this with the fact that people's understanding of the new nature of labor in an economy based on digital rather than industrial machines--its transformation into 'money = amount of useful data a person produces' rather than 'money = amount of time a person operates an industrial devices'--and you get economic dislocation and inequality that can't be fixed via conventional redistributional schemes.
Infoanarchy + economic inequality = unsettled people in an unsettled world.
That's why it's crucial the next leader of the Democrats grasp the new media landscape, in addition to providing a more stable authority figure and policy regime than Trump. Fortunately, the Democratic party has a lot of these types amongst it ranks. (the Republicans have Trump, but their bench is very weak beyond him in terms of media savvy) Unfortunately, only a few of these Democrats are highly visible right now. One of them needs to grasp the mantle of leadership--and whether that happens is *the* question.
"Fake electors" were first deployed by the JFK campaign in 1960. It was a legal strategy designed to allow court challenges if necessary. The motivation in 2020 was the same.
Not according to Trump's team; the aim in their case was to reverse the election result, which we can see from the Eastman memo. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos)
The 1960 alternate electors were a precaution, commissioned because a lengthy recount in Hawaii was going on and it wasn't clear whether it would be finished--and thus whether the election outcome would be clear--by the deadline for having electors cast their vote. The Republican governor approved them for this reason--i.e., to have the Republican slate vote if the recount showed Nixon had won, and the Democratic slate if the recount showed Kennedy had won. The Eastman memo makes clear that the 2020 alternate electors were not precautionary, but instead part of a stratagem meant to unilaterally reverse the outcome of state elections that had been certified by recounts, after Trump's court challenges failed owing to a lack of evidence of fraud. (and in many cases a lack of standing, as well) They were never approved by the governors of those states, either. Notably, part of the plan was not to leverage the passing of the deadline for having the electors cast their votes due to ongoing recounts, but to *actively disrupt* Mike Pence's counting of the votes to meet the theoretical 'technical' requirement necessary to prevent the certification of the electors' votes and the substitution of them with the fake electors' votes.
This is why January 6th can be correctly characterized as an insurrectionary event--not due merely to the rioters, but due to the way Trump and his team planned to overturn the result of the vote in order to keep him in office, and the way they tried to *use* the riot to do so.
Yeah, right. When Democrats do it, it's a riot and it's OK. When Republicans do it, it's an insurrection and it's not OK.
Riots are never ok—nevertheless not all of them are backed by a coordinated attempt to overturn the electoral machinery that acts as the ultimate arbiter of state authority in a democratic nation. If the Biden administration had incited a violent cell of radical left-wing anarchists to ransack the capital in the hopes of stopping the counting of the electoral votes in 2024 so it could swap in a bunch of fake electors and overturn Trump’s reelection they’d be guilty of the same thing. But that thankfully didn’t happen.
I am sure that if you asked any one of the rioters on January 6, "Are you backed by a coordinated attempt to overturn the electoral machinery that acts as the ultimate arbiter of state authority in a democratic nation?" the response would be, "Whut? Hell, no. I'm here because I'm mad at the election result." The wicked see conspiracy when none exists.
You can be backed by something you don't understand the full extent of. Many of the Nazi soldiers who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were just following orders and had been told the Jews were being sent to "resettlement" camps to minimize disruptions to public order; they discounted tales of gas chambers as exaggerations by enemies of the government. Does that mean the Nazis weren't guilty of genocide? Regarding January 6th, several rioters knew about the plan, several rioters were literally there to overthrow the government for their own reasons, (such as the Proud Boys members that were eventually charged with seditious conspiracy) and there are probably a decent amount who were just there to make trouble, or were protesters who got a little carried away. As a whole, however, the riot was part of a coordinated plot to reverse the election result, and therefore, as I said above, an insurrectionary event, of which they were (some knowing, some unknowing) participants.
The flip side of the former media landscape is that elite corruption and deception tended to go largely unchalenged back then, with relatively few exceptions. That's just how party leadership wanted it of course, and this was probably one of the less well haralded reasons why things wern't so partisan and a lot more serious bipartisan policy work could get done. Noting like secrete pay to play and a general since of impunity to grease the wheels of una-party dealmaking...
Republicans have to a very small extent come to understand changes needed to be made. Trump kicked butt in the 2016 primaries and all of a sudden Republicans had a candidate who could say Iraq was one of the most stupid foreign policy moves in history, and that he wouldn't touch Social Security.
Democrats need someone to say they are going to deport almost everyone who is here illegally and they'll make no sweetheat amnesty deals. We don't care that you get things done cheap, it's coming out of our income, we are the ones paying. Someone needs to admit we blew it just as Trump did about Iraq.
Our health care still sucks. Half the bankruptcies in America are of people with medical insurance. Half. They have insurance and they go BK because they got sick. The ACA still sucks. We thought we were going to all get health care, remember all that BS about health care being a right?
Josh Hawley a Republican just introduced a bill to make $15 the min wage. Maybe Dems can go for $20 and get my vote, and until starting wages for most all jobs are at $30 keep deporting.
Can anyone explain the rationale behind people answering that we are less stable now than we were during the Civil War?
Every election, to varying degrees, is predicated on the previous one. Trump was a "reaction" to the Obama (and scandalous Biden) Administration; Obama was the same after eight years of Bush. The recent Canadian elections may provide a clue: voters ultimately didn't want "change" (except among younger voters), they wanted a "return to normalcy" (hat tip to Warren G. Harding), a functional and competent center-left government led by a calm technocrat. After Trump's tumultuous era, with a big assist from the progressive left that's been marching through our institutions, what "normal" will look like in November 2028, and who will carry that banner?
God willing, the banner-bearer, whoever he is, won't be another member of the political gerontocracy -- and this is coming from an octogenarian. My generation has run out of ideas and is operating solely on the fumes of doctrine.
Based on the recent behavior and voting patterns of our generation (boomers, although you might be just ahead of it), I agree. We've screwed things up enough.
There are still some very smart and experienced Americans who have long advocated alternatives to the most radical policies of various politicians of both major parties, and so I regard it as over-generalization to accuse an entire generation of anything.
However, I think that there should be maximum age limits for certain highly critical positions such as U.S. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, military officers, and airline pilots, based on the inevitable decline in energy and cognitive ability that comes with aging — particularly after 80. And as we should have learned from the experience with Biden, that decline can set in well within a few years.
This the era of frequent Black Swan events. Next will be the impact of AI on all aspects of politics and society. Read your McLuhan for a perspective of all encompassing change from major new technologies.
is this REALLY what the dems think is good???????????
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist and former rapper, is surging in the polls in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary following endorsements by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In The Free Press, Olivia Reingold examined Mamdani’s chances against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: “As Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old candidate for mayor of New York City, took selfies with adoring fans on a recent Sunday in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a heckler in a MAGA hat began shouting with a megaphone only a few feet away. ‘You’re a socialist,’ the man cried out to the crowd. ‘If you hate America, you should leave.’ Normally, that label—the s-word—might be considered a slur, or at least a political liability. But not to this crowd. ‘Yeah, dude,’ a Mamdani supporter in wire-rimmed glasses scoffed. ‘We are socialists.’ Laughs peeled in from across the park. A terrier with a keffiyeh around its neck began barking with excitement. Volunteers handing out Spanish-language pamphlets craned their necks to catch the commotion. Suddenly, a chant caught on. ‘We are socialists! We are socialists! We are socialists!’”
While I agree, the alternatives of Cuomo as well as the current mayor, are truly horid. While I and many voters might want more of some version of "moderate" in politics, moderate declined in part precisely becouse of it's association with a deeply corrupt and elitist status quo.
And to be clear, we really should be able to (and I would strongly support) legalizing a great many migrants if we actually had a lasting secure border and steadally decreasing unauthorized US population. Most voters would as well according to polls. But that support is very conditional, and any widespread belief that Dems might meet or even support such conditions has been largely lost in recent years. We should also have greater and more diverse refugee admissions. It is absurd that we have not given refugee status to many Venazualans or other Latin Americans fleeing persecution but we seem to have a defacto rule against doing so at scale.
At this point, such policy changes could probably only be seriously discussed with a substancial Dem majority in congress and if they don't keep insisting on vastly increased immigration or on changes that weaken enforcement of immigration law. And that is if Democrats even remained interested in doing so once in power. However, what (didn't) happen under Obama on immigration when Dems actually had a super majority in the Senate for a time is not a good imdication... Nor is the fact that Biden allowed such a vast number to enter the US with no path to permanant status.
Trump has actually (mostly) acheived a secure border recently proving how wrong Dems who falsely claimed he couldn't were. Yet Dems are still suing trying to start up asylum claims at the border and for unauthorized migrants within the US again. The truth is that we just cannot have that policy and also have a secure border! Those pushing such ideas should be the ones ostrecised from the party for undermining public support for a resonable immigration policy, but instead it is currently the opposite...
Democrats have really and truly blown it on this issue in particular, yet so far show almost no signs of coming to a new understanding on it. The sooner this changes, the more hope there is for much needed legalization and other policy changes (But not all the ones most elite Democrats curently want!) and for a more sane and successful Democratic party future! Again, I'm not holding my breath. End rant.
As bad as political divisions are now, at least there is not civil warfare as there was during both the Revolutionary War and THE Civil War.
I agree with the “No Kings” position, but also oppose commissars, particularly of the DEI variety that progressive Democrats gave us.
The question is, has our system to handle the Jan 6 riot or any other challenge worked? Like we said in the union, anyone can grieve anything. It doesn't matter what individuals do, it is how the system responds. When the systems start failing, that will be the beginning of the end of our country.
On immigration, what more Democratic leaders and influancers must not only get through there thick sculls but act apon (even if they are shunned or attacked by current leaders, pushed or kept off ballots, etc which they would be!) is that there is currently no longer any real shared belief at this point that we should "continue the US's long tradition of welcoming and assimilating newcomers", at least not at the high levals of immigration that we have seen in recent decades, much less at the absurdly elevated levels that most core Democrats now seem to want and take as some sort of given.
Futhermore, focussing on deporting unauthorized immigrants/migrants in general, and not only those with criminal records (even as the latter are first priority) as Trump has been doing is not incohesive policy, no matter how much most Democrats dislike it!!! The more limmited shock and awe stuff and campus or other supposed "antisemitism" cases are a very differant matter, but they are the exception. But what have now become routine ice raids is well in keeping what Trump had promised durring his campaign.
At present many Republicans want an outright moretoreum on immigration. But even if they welcome existing legal immigrants for the most part, most are all in favor of deporting as many (ideally all, though that would be unrealistic) unauthorized immigrants as possible while NOT increasing legal immigration further. In short, they want much LESS overall immigration and yes fewer immigrants then we now have.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders and influancers (save for gadflies like John Fetterman or Bill Maher) on the other hand seem to increasingly think that the entire US should become like California in terms of both policy and diversity, and refuse to even consider otherwise, as if this is some sort of given. Newsflash, -it isn't! But many millions more of mostly working class (especially working class white) Americans have left California for other US states (The same is also true of certian other expensive and immigrant rich blue states), then have moved in to California in recent decades. They are voting with their feet, something that only very recently have leading Democrats began to widely aknowledge even though it has been a major trend beginning in the late 1980's.
Many working class Americans feel they have been displaced geographically as well as in other ways by excessive immigration. It is very much a soceoeconomic issue and not just a cultural or social ome. In short, the support is just not there for what most Democrats have increasingly pretended (or actually falsely believed) is some sort of consensus for far more immigration then wht the majority of Americans, and certianly most Republicans, actually want. Refusing to reconsider this stance has become a hill many and perhaps most progressives seem willing to die on. This sooner this changes the better. But let's just say I'm not holding my breath!
The cycle repeats. US patriots saved the world and then kept it peaceful by funding the global order for nearly 80 years. The collectivist authoritatians have risen yet again to threaten freedom and liberty. We make the mistake thinking they ever go away.
Sometimes it takes a lot of words to say so little. In all due respect to Michael Baharaeen, he has layed out what to me reads like an eloquent case for Democrats failure to read the tea leaves and learn from a history that the party says is important to be on the "rights side" of.
Their actions speak otherwise, and Americans have every reason to feel unsettled by that.