And Democrats were complicit the whole time, ignoring the explicit warning signs in their blind greed for more corporate money.

You’ve made the mistake thinking that this is about democracy and the American people, in reality it’s about his ego and more than a dash of creeping dementia.

The man is living decades in the past. He thinks the GOP and Dems are still working together for the same corporate goals, he thinks hes dealing with Golda Meir’s Israel, he thinks he has 50 years to deal with climate change.

Biden is just out of touch with reality and is too stubborn to listen to anyone telling him he’s about to drive the family van into a crowd of pedestrians because “I’ve been driving for 60 years! I know what I’m doing, stop trying to influence me!”

No, the rest of us know, you don’t know because you haven’t been paying attention. Polling shows Biden losing by almost 10 points. Even Kamala Harris has better numbers.

So if you actually wanted the best chance, you’d be wanting him to step down. But I’m guessing you don’t.

If he was trying to save American democracy he’d step down, this is about his bloated sense of self importance.

He’s going to lose if he runs. He’s the single worst option for Democrats.

It’s not good. Biden stands the worst chance against Trump, which is why concern trolls are so desperate to shut down and dismiss any discussion of replacing him.

Well, that’s on him, and so is his loss and all the consequences that come from it. All to try and satisfy his ego. Insanity.

Removed by mod

“Temporarily” has a pretty consistent habit of becoming permanent. It’s either malicious or extremely naive on Lenin’s part to believe that ypu can concentrate power into the hands of a few people and then they’ll just voluntarily give it up.

Which term is Xi on now at this point again? Oh right, he made himself dictator for life…

Yes, Lenin also prescribed dictatorship. His mindset was inextricable from the imperialist context he lived in, it limited his ability to imagine further. Which is part if why communism has always failed or collapsed into a fascist state capitalism (like China).

Uh, China doesn’t forgive the loans, they seize the assets, that’s the whole point of debt colonialism. They can’t colonize by force and no one trusts them to host their military bases, so they use debt to build a port or whatever and then when the host country can’t keep up on exhorbitant payments they take the port and ta-da, they’ve expanded their geopolitical reach.

China is in a hyper-imperialist push right now.

Yes, what I’m saying is if you can keep the GOP out of power you hobble the supreme court. Like I said, it’s a source of hope and a goal to aim your political effort towards, not a permanent solution.

People downvoting this seem confused. I made the assumption people were able to understand I was talking longer term fight.

Yes, it depends up getting people out to vote, especially in mid-terms.

Precedent is literally just a tradition that’s agreed upon, there’s nothing binding judges to adhere to it, which is why the supreme court was so easily able to ignore it.

So in that sense it’s a double-edged sword, it’s just as easy for judges to rule by precedent as it is for them to not, it’s always been this way.

A court with more judges would water down the influence of any extremists.

But yes, packing the court alone doesn’t guaruntee the court can’t be captured again. What Elie Mystal suggested way back when the court majority had flipped was basically two things that should happen:

1. expand the court by alot, maybe somewhere within 20-30, similar to the 9th circuit that’s just below the Supreme Court. This helps dilute the power of individual crazies like Alito and then

2. Rotate judges out routinely to other federal positions. This allows for their life-time appointment still, but ensures also that, due to the high number of justices, every administration is getting an opportunity to appoint a few judges every time. That revolving door means it wpuld require multiple far-right administrations to pin the court down like it is now.

There’s no reason the court needs to be nine justices, we’ve had more and less throughout our history as a nation, and there’s no reason that the courts power needs to be concentrated into the hands of so few individuals, since the purpose of the court is suppose to be a moderating force of legal scholars, not an explicitly partisan body.

The silver lining here is they have no power of enforcement themselves, and their decisions can be reversed if a sane court is built around them by leaders with enough spine to do so.

Democrats just need to get Biden out of the race so Trump can be kept out of office. And the house majority is very slim, so that can potentially be flipped too if the base can actually be energized instead of suppressed the way they have been. Democrats win when there is high turn out, so the name of the game needs to be showing people that Democrats are capable of listening.

Even Harris is polling better, and doesn’t have the pro-genocide baggage. If polls are to be believed she has a better chance of beating out Trump, especially among key demographics of black voters and suburban women, and if she has a better chance then I feel like basically anyone does.

“That’s the problem with old men. You can kick 'em down the stairs and say it’s a accident but you can’t just shoot 'em.”

-John Ruth

I was really surprised to discover that even Harris is polled as out performing Biden, especially among black voters, independents and suburban women. And she’s distanced herself from Biden on Israel in the past, so she really fixes a lot of the problems with the Biden admin. Plus she’s probably less squeamish on abortion.

I think the main wild card here would be whether or not her nomination galvanized racists and bigots to come out to oppose her, but my gut says the energy created within the Democratic party by Biden leaving would still overwhelm bigoted backlash.

She would be a disappointing first woman president, but I suppose we can’t really be precious about that.

It’s less than ideal, but is still preferable to many places, if for no other reason than its potential for reform. We still have some insight into things like campaign finance for now, which makes it possible to fight from an informed position.

I’m actually not that committed to the Democratic party itself, but you’re right that they’re abusive. Acting politically based on the division between conservative and progressive, regardless of any label a politician might self-apply, helps clarify the way forward for me. As far as my mental model of the political landscape goes, conservative/neoliberal democrats are quarantined off with the GOP, they’re the same in terms of their potential to produce lasting change. I’m not going to support an AIPAC democrat the same way I’m not going to ever support a MAGA conservative.

But yeah, our democracy is functioning incredibly poorly at the moment.

Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.

Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.

You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”

Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.

Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum

Yes, there are degrees of commitment, but the normie conservatives are still enabling the extremists and play a key part in the progression from democracy to fascism, you can’t just flip from democracy to a fascist state, you need “respectable” conservatives to start to ease people towards the notion. There’s still no value in their conservative leanings, even if it’s watered down.

I don’t want any lead in my water ideally, even if slight amounts aren’t immediately harmful, the lead traces in the water has no benefit regardless of the degree.