19 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
Instead we get the guy who insists on working with them.
From our perspective - I agree.
But behind closed doors...I dunno.
See, I think a lot of Republicans are mostly for show - to keep their idiot base voting for them.
I think - I hope - Biden is being discrete and making deals behind closed doors. The infrastructure law isn't the best for progressives, but it's something. And that can be built upon. If Biden were an asshole like Trump, there wouldn't have been anything - or much less.
Or .... I am living in Fairy Tale land and we all got fucked.
Comment by harpsm at 17/11/2021 at 13:49 UTC
12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
As I see it, the main thing that could preserve democracy is voting/election reform, but unless Manchin gets on board with eliminating the filibuster, that's a nonstarter.
Comment by [deleted] at 17/11/2021 at 16:18 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Oh, "Biden's playing 3D chess"?
That's a refreshing take on an old classic.
Comment by ThisIsMySimulacrum at 17/11/2021 at 19:08 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The infrastructure law isn't the best for progressives, but it's something.
It's a lot more than just something.
Consider:
Similar to the fall of Weimer Germany, what led us to this moment took years of policy neglect that allowed for hard infrastructure as well as human infrastructure to degrade and decay - from roads and bridges that are in disrepair or became toll roads due to lack of funding, to hundreds of thousands of people dying from a decades-long opioid epidemic.
Looking at the overall demographic of the people who showed up for Jan 6th, we see a group that likely saw a lot of degradation and decay during this period of negligent and malpractice policy decisions. This is a group that has been primed to reject democratic principles in favor of fascism (ie, a strongman) because they believe it's the only way to improve their lives, or to enact revenge on those they believe are responsible for the aforementioned degradation and decay.
The fascist leaders (ie, Steve's Bannon and Miller) know this, and for the last 4yrs they've been getting Trump to ratchet up the fascist rhetoric. It started with "I alone can fix it"[1] and not even a full 5yrs later we've got Trump supporters openly asking when they can start shooting liberals;[2] the fact they're still in the asking for permission phase tells us we can still turn this around.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality?wprov=sfla1
The way to directly combat this slowly simmering, yet could boil over into a full blown violent fascist takeover, is to remove the fascist's 'ammunition' - that ammo being the very real degradation and decay of our hard and human infrastructure. The reason for passing the hard infrastructure bill first as opposed to the human infrastructure bill goes back to the demographics of the people who showed up for Jan. 6th.
Those people were likely out-of-work construction contractors, security guards, factory workers, etc who because of losing their jobs due to covid shuttering the global economy for a year+ had the time to participate in an insurrection. The way to temper these people's collective anger is to make them so busy with work that they're literally too tired to go to the insurrection. Too tired, but also because they're working to rebuild bridges/roads or lay fiberoptic they have a job that puts a roof over their heads, feeds their families, and gives them a sense of investment in their communities that they've seen degrade and decay.
What makes this situation even more precarious is we have a blossoming network of autocratic regimes around the world who are invested in seeing the US cease to be a democratic republic, and they have the technology to make it happen through social media.