For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win and figured they must be just weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with the Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more or less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a Center position and bargaining to the Right, and eventually after enough of that it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that actually fits the facts: The Democrats are not over matched, they aren’t weak, they aren’t cowards…they’re complicit.
Most people wouldn’t, which is why this argument is a non-starter for me. When people say Dems should’ve played dirty to stop the Republicans, I just roll my eyes. It would never work, because the majority of people who vote Dem would never support that kind of politicking under normal circumstances. But now we’re at the precipice, and we are slowly finding out that even the most milquetoast Dem voters are willing to support the dirtiest tricks just to get out from under the grip of this techno-fascist bullshit.
I just hope we can find our way back to some kind of sanity once the dust settles.
Supporting dirty tricks won’t get us back to sanity though. Either our system runs following its own laws which desperately need to be modified to shore up civil liberties and restrict corporations and money in politics or people lay down their lives. We can’t get out of this pit by digging deeper.
I don’t see any legal or legislative way out of the mess we’re in when the current government (and about a third of the country) doesn’t believe in the law or the rules of legislation, and the so-called “opposition” party is weak and feckless at best, and complicit at worst. We either either get our hands dirty or have a civil war. I’m open to ideas that don’t involve wither one. but I can’t think of any.