By many metrics, the US economy is humming along. The jobs market is robust; consumers are spending again; and inflation has eased to a three-year low.
If there were a magic wand that could reward the pure and punish the guilty, I would wave it. But there isn’t.
As a direct result of previous elections, it is currently impossible to accomplish most of your goals. At a federal level, prison reform is not on the table. Nor are wide-ranging trade bans. Nor is a lobbying ban. Even small attempts to punish bad behavior, like tightening EPA standards, are generally reversed in the courts. All of this because according to roughly 50% of American voters, it’s actually the status quo that is “non-negotiable”.
The system does provide one useful lever, however, which is to incentivize steps towards a solution. So that’s the lever that should be pulled. It’s not about “being okay” with the status quo, it’s about making a positive change using the most effective means at our disposal. You can celebrate incremental progress or not, but it’s the only way forward.
Trump is an effect of this system, not an anomaly. Thinking that we can vote our way into a healthier system when this one works perfectly and increasingly well for billionaires and corporations who control how and what congress votes on is naive. If the system of law is so flawed that a person who tried to foment an insurrection ACTUALLY has a shot at being president again, it’s clear to me that we’re just living in some clown world where nothing we actually need to happen will actually happen without direct action.
Positive change is relative dependent on your status in society. Trans people are still afraid of their lives under Biden. Marginalized communities are still seeing their towns become polluted under Biden. Women’s rights are still being taken away under Biden. People are still electively dying because they can’t afford medical care without ruining their family. We have an issue in this country where a large number people are hurting so bad that they’d rather make someone else hurt than fix anything because they feel defeated. I assume a lot of them see trump as a sort of “well, my life isn’t going to get too much better regardless, but it’s fun making those people in that gated community squirm for a bit”. Do you think this issue goes away if trump can’t run for president? Do you think this problem goes away if Biden wins? We need more of a sense of community and we can’t get that if everyone is competing for table scraps and playing team sports with politics.
If half of the voters in this country are seen as enemies to the survival of democracy, what’s the end goal in solving it? Mass de-programming? If the shoe was on the other foot and they wanted to do a mass-deprogramming of you (or worse considering gun ownership) and everyone who thought like you, what sort of impact would that have on your opinion of them? They’re our neighbors who are hurting and unfortunately they’re getting all their outside perspective from propagandists on Fox News and OANN instead of actual people. And it’s not like liberals are without their propaganda either. No one is faultless. Instead of acting with kindness and understanding when the working class are having difficulties, there’s so much of “well, those stupid rednecks should’ve tried not being so stupid by getting into a coal career if they didn’t want their jobs and livelihoods to be ruined. Sucks for them. The world will breathe better without them in it”. And we wonder why they’re angry enough to vote for trump. Presenting Biden as the knight in shining armor so much that all the responsibility is removed from ourselves and any blowback from our political negligence can be waved away in a sort of plausible deniability is not the right way to incrementally fix things. It’s just a way to distance ourselves from the problems we have created.
Again, you’ve listed a lot of problems without proposing any solutions apart from vaguely hinting at “direct action”. And if you think voting is unlikely to have an effect, then whatever direct action you have in mind is absolutely doomed.
We’ve already seen various “direct” efforts from both sides over the years from the Million Man March to the Ammon Bundy standoff to Occupy Wall Street, and none made the slightest difference. So I’ll stick with voting, which at least has a track record of producing incremental improvement.
If there were a magic wand that could reward the pure and punish the guilty, I would wave it. But there isn’t.
As a direct result of previous elections, it is currently impossible to accomplish most of your goals. At a federal level, prison reform is not on the table. Nor are wide-ranging trade bans. Nor is a lobbying ban. Even small attempts to punish bad behavior, like tightening EPA standards, are generally reversed in the courts. All of this because according to roughly 50% of American voters, it’s actually the status quo that is “non-negotiable”.
The system does provide one useful lever, however, which is to incentivize steps towards a solution. So that’s the lever that should be pulled. It’s not about “being okay” with the status quo, it’s about making a positive change using the most effective means at our disposal. You can celebrate incremental progress or not, but it’s the only way forward.
Trump is an effect of this system, not an anomaly. Thinking that we can vote our way into a healthier system when this one works perfectly and increasingly well for billionaires and corporations who control how and what congress votes on is naive. If the system of law is so flawed that a person who tried to foment an insurrection ACTUALLY has a shot at being president again, it’s clear to me that we’re just living in some clown world where nothing we actually need to happen will actually happen without direct action.
Positive change is relative dependent on your status in society. Trans people are still afraid of their lives under Biden. Marginalized communities are still seeing their towns become polluted under Biden. Women’s rights are still being taken away under Biden. People are still electively dying because they can’t afford medical care without ruining their family. We have an issue in this country where a large number people are hurting so bad that they’d rather make someone else hurt than fix anything because they feel defeated. I assume a lot of them see trump as a sort of “well, my life isn’t going to get too much better regardless, but it’s fun making those people in that gated community squirm for a bit”. Do you think this issue goes away if trump can’t run for president? Do you think this problem goes away if Biden wins? We need more of a sense of community and we can’t get that if everyone is competing for table scraps and playing team sports with politics.
If half of the voters in this country are seen as enemies to the survival of democracy, what’s the end goal in solving it? Mass de-programming? If the shoe was on the other foot and they wanted to do a mass-deprogramming of you (or worse considering gun ownership) and everyone who thought like you, what sort of impact would that have on your opinion of them? They’re our neighbors who are hurting and unfortunately they’re getting all their outside perspective from propagandists on Fox News and OANN instead of actual people. And it’s not like liberals are without their propaganda either. No one is faultless. Instead of acting with kindness and understanding when the working class are having difficulties, there’s so much of “well, those stupid rednecks should’ve tried not being so stupid by getting into a coal career if they didn’t want their jobs and livelihoods to be ruined. Sucks for them. The world will breathe better without them in it”. And we wonder why they’re angry enough to vote for trump. Presenting Biden as the knight in shining armor so much that all the responsibility is removed from ourselves and any blowback from our political negligence can be waved away in a sort of plausible deniability is not the right way to incrementally fix things. It’s just a way to distance ourselves from the problems we have created.
Again, you’ve listed a lot of problems without proposing any solutions apart from vaguely hinting at “direct action”. And if you think voting is unlikely to have an effect, then whatever direct action you have in mind is absolutely doomed.
We’ve already seen various “direct” efforts from both sides over the years from the Million Man March to the Ammon Bundy standoff to Occupy Wall Street, and none made the slightest difference. So I’ll stick with voting, which at least has a track record of producing incremental improvement.