If we can get a progressive executive in and a progressive Congress where we can, we can potentially correct the course everything is going.
Strong disagree.
Getting a progressive executive and Congress would be great, but there is no way in hell they’re going to correct course before the next midterm election, or the next presidential election, or the ones a decade after that.
Remember that it took Evangelicals fifty years of strident work to get Roe overturned. That is the level of effort that will be required to change course on just one issue.
Stop putting hope in people’s minds that we can unfuck ourselves faster than we fucked ourselves. This needs to happen every single election for the rest of my life before I would agree that the course has been corrected, and this sort of attitude makes people give up on voting because things won’t change very much in the short term.
The difference between Roe and progressive policies is that said policies are broadly popular with the electorate. Making durable, unpopular changes under minority rule is virtually impossible with our federal legislature, and the right had to finally luck out and enact them by installing enough Supreme Court justices willing to upend the system. From a long-term view, Roe wasn’t a sustained effort, or at least not a successful one until very recently. The evangelicals had been losing support on the issue every year and exploited a crack in the system that McConnell exposed in 2016.
The GOP and the conservative coalition within the Democratic Party can’t afford to allow significant progressive policy through even once because it becomes political suicide to repeal without years of propaganda and budgetary ratfucking. Obamacare is the latest example. It’s not even close to the same effort level.
A second New Deal Congress is coming within our lifetimes. The demographics say it’s inevitable (as long as we have elections, anyway). Yes, it will take work, and it starts in the primaries.
A second New Deal Congress is coming within our lifetimes.
That entirely depends on how old you think I am.
I’ve been hearing this sort of thing for decades already, and I don’t see it happening.
I’ll keep voting, but I’m done holding my breath. The American People have let me down too many times.
I agree with you completely that need more than 2-4 years to correct the course. But we could get decades of actual progress if we just fix one glaring issue now.
We need to abolish the electoral college.
That alone would decimate any chances that the republican party has of winning a presidential election anytime soon, at least with thier current platform. It wouldn’t be everything, but it would be a damn good start.
We need to abolish the electoral college
Which will require a Constitutional amendment. Which most of the states won’t go for because most of them will lose power.
So we’d need a supermajority in both the House and Senate to do it.
Which will take decades of elections to get to, if it ever happens. And even if it does there will be other, more urgent things to do before then, and then we’ll lose the supermajorities and have to start from scratch again.
Telling people we just need a couple good elections is creating false hope.
It’s not false hope. It’s just a long journey ahead.
You obviously understand more about the details of US politics than I do, and perhaps getting rid of the electoral college isn’t realistic right now.
I get where you are coming from, this doesn’t mean we can just sit back and enjoy. But this kind of turnout is a good thing. Harris is going to win, and that’s the first step in the right direction.
