Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
*Looks at Biden. Feels the lost dreams of a living wage being the minimum wage, Medicare for All, serious attempts to provide people with real food and housing, prison reform, status quo immigration policy reform, back to war foreign policy, no serious new green deal, same ole gun bs, and shrugs*
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Of course I'm an outsider to US politics and my knowledge of past administrations is pretty scant, though I do remember Obama making a bitter speech about how his gun control bill had been defeated in the Senate. The Obama/Biden admin had its hands tied by GOP control of House and Senate, didn't it?
The path of progress is awash with lost dreams, but I don't see the situation in the US as hopeless. What I see are the Dems, believing in science, racial inclusiveness and climate change as a real threat.
What I see from the GOP is a very real slide towards autocracy. They have already declared that their only policy plank is to support Trump in whatever he chooses to do, and what he chooses to do is:-
i) declare in advance that his victory is the only election result he will accept as valid.
ii) turn government departments like the DOJ, CDC etc into tools that promote his agenda rather than fulfill the trust of the American people.
iii) appoint a guy intent on hobbling the USPS so that, again, it serves his agenda of voter repression rather than serving the American people
It's hardly an exaggeration to say that American democracy is being dismantled before our eyes. The institutions that tax dollars pay for are less and less serving as checks and balances; one by one they are being co-opted to keep one man in power.
Four years ago, Trump lost the popular vote and maybe that's why, on the streets, there have been environmental protests hoping for a party that, at a minimum, ackowledges that there is a rising problem of extreme weather events. Those BLM protesters were also hoping to see some kind of change and would presumably welcome a bit of black representation in the person of Kamala Harris as vice pres - surely an improvement on the odious Mike Pence.
Even if we can't believe in the full-on dreams of the environmentalists and BLMers, for their sakes, isn't it worth voting to help those dreams survive, to make a Dem victory "to big to rig" ? If I was an American, I think I'd vote Dem, if only for the satisfaction of sticking it to Mike Pence and seeing the last of his sanctimonious, hypocritical, fawning face leering behind Trump at every news briefing.