It's not just Trump that needs to be voted out.
If Biden wins the Presidency and Mitch McConnell is still Majority Leader, then nothing changes. It'll be a repeat of Obama's two terms with the Senate blocking all judicial appointments and threatening to shut down the government every other week (because of the deficit you see, which suddenly matters again). No meaningful legislation gets passed. No work gets done. FOX News plays all your favorite propaganda hits, and in 2024 they get Trump Jr. elected and we're done as a functioning democracy.
But at least the libs got owned, so it was worth it.
McConnell, Graham, Cornyn, frankly everyone but Mitt needs to lose their offices, their influence, and their fortunes. They need to suddenly find themselves retired with nothing to do but yardwork because nobody wants to touch them with a barge pole. And I know that's fantasy because of the wingnut welfare circuit, but that's what should happen.
There needs to be a housecleaning at all levels of government, federal, state, and local. Meaningful police reform has to happen at the city level.
The only way to purge the Republican party of the racist and fascist dipshits is for them to lose, massively, across the board.
I tend to agree with the sentiments, but the way things are at the moment it's not going to happen because not enough people are actively engaging in grassroots political work.
Changing the political landscape of a country as big as the USA is going to take engagement by a significant portion of the population for a significant period of time, with the likelihood of no apparent change for a while too. In that sort of environment it's easy for people to give up and say nothing will change, and that it's better to exploit the system as it is than to change it. That will especially be the case when they get mocked and dismissed by Republican supporters, who seem to have mastered the art of the adolescent put-down.
The other things about this sort of work are that it takes a lot of time when so many people seem so much more busy than ever before, and that it involves working closely with people of different political views. The danger is that being seen as a compromiser can attract the ire of the ideologically pure who are theoretically on your side. (About ten years ago the Australian Greens sided with the conservative side of Australian politics to vote down a carbon pollution reduction scheme because it didn't go as far as the Greens wanted; and thanks to that decision by the Greens we've pretty much since then had a far
less effective alternative in place. The better is the enemy of the good...)
Yes, Biden isn't an ideal candidate, and he has questions he needs to answer about his past behaviour. But if Democrats insist on not voting unless they have the perfect candidate they're handing the White House to the Republicans for the next generation at least. Politics is the art of the compromise, and Sanders supporters in 2016 have something to answer for in this regard.
So what I'd suggest needs to happen in the next few months is a commitment from ordinary Americans to involve themselves in politics as much as they can at the local level, focused on the election rather than getting sidetracked (President
and House
and Senate). It would probably also help Democrat candidates to hear more from the people they're expecting to vote for them, rather than having everything filtered through the bubble of the party.
To that extent, that's one reason why I keep visiting the UM forum. The political discussions can get overheated at times, but at least it's a place where people of different political views engage with each other. Unfortunately a lot of the time it involves little more than repeating old slogans at each other, but at least it's an opportunity to see what people on the Other Side think and why they think it. I think of engaging with these people in much the same way as I'd engage with an Apollo HB - not to tackle their beliefs head on, but to stay calm and to plant a seed in their minds and those of the silent onlookers, to make them realise that the sort of changes being sought aren't as frightening as their politicians and commentators have been telling them.
Also, for all the appearance of hyper-partisanship in American politics I suspect there's still a decent-sized pool of people in the USA whose political beliefs sit somewhere between the two parties and so who are amenable to the sort of arguments from either side.
But once the election is done, there's obviously a lot more work to do at the state level too - that would allow the worse gerrymanders to be dealt with, for example. Otherwise, if ordinary people sit back and leave it to the party, not much is going to change.
