Political Memes

When did they say "the economy is good?" I remember Harris talking during her campaign about how they did a lot of work and made a lot of progress, but there was still a long way to go. True, they didn't make a huge deal out of it like Mamdani did, but I can't find any evidence of them saying "nah man, everything is ok."

The Democrats act lazy, but in reality, they want the same thing that the GOP wants: Their donors to be happy. They only pretend to fight, until they can get the votes to keep their seats.

Let's be clear: every employee is responsible for doing what their employer wants. Elected representatives made it into office through a convoluted hiring process, and so the people who got them into office are their employers. I'm not oblivious to that at all. When I say "the Democrats are lazy," it's reductive in the same way that "the people elect the president" is reductive. Actually, the people vote for electors and the electoral college elects the president. And so no, the Democrats aren't actually lazy; a less-reductive way to say it would be "the people that the Democrats see as their employers aren't telling them to fix the affordability crisis."

That may seem cynical, but the reason that this is notable is that, up until fairly recently in historical terms, the Democrats and Republicans alike treated their constituents as their employers, in at least some capacity. In some cases they weren't their only employers, maybe some particularly corrupt ones in safe districts didn't need to worry about the voters' opinions at all, but for most of them the "other employers" (that is, the donors) also wanted them to keep the voters happy because they wanted us to keep buying their stuff, and a happy population is a consumptive population.

Now, though, almost none of the elected officials in Congress consider their constituents to be their employers.

The Republicans consider Trump to be the one signing their paycheck; even though their money is still coming from their donors, Trump has (or at least had) such an outsized impact on their electoral chances, and therefore their lobbyist money, that he commanded essentially all of their obedience.

And the Democrats have decided that just not being MAGA is good enough for their constituents to keep electing them (and in fairness, if they were up against the opposition they had in 1998, it would've been), so they don't actually need to work that hard at following through as long as they just stay not-MAGA; so they've decided to put more effort into making their donors happy, and since their donors also supported Trump, their marching orders are just to not kick up too much of a fuss.

In the meantime, all of the donors have decided they're okay with all of us being too poor to buy their stuff now for some reason (my personal theory is that it's a really stupid game of chicken or some twisted prisoner's dilemma thing), so that part of the historical backpressure is gone too.

The way that ends up working itself out is the Republicans saying whatever Trump says, even if it's a lie, because he's their employer; and the Democrats being lazy, because their employers say to be.

So no, I don't think that Democrats are actually lying. They've just decided that they don't work for us anymore. Which means we need to fire them (primary each and every one of them who isn't doing what we want) to show them that, actually, they do; because if we hire the other guys, we already know who they're going to be working for.