Late Stage Capitalism

It expanded the grift. I was uninsured and negotiating care for cash payments before Obamacare passed. Since then I have been paying monthly premiums for insurance but no money left for care, I have had exactly one checkup since Obamacare passed.

The problem is that doing nothing causes the electorate to vote in fascists.

I think the argument I often see between Dems and those further to the left is so difficult because both things are simultaneously true.

• If people voted in the Dems it would keep the republicans out of power.
• The Dems failure to deliver causes people to not vote for them.

I think this is where my frustration lies with the party. The job of the party is to win elections and if they can’t articulate and then deliver on policies that cause people to vote for them, they aren’t doing their job. And people can be angry at those that don’t vote for the democrats because it gives the republicans power, but anger in one hand and not much else in the other isn’t going to make those people vote.

So I think the cycle in the meme is largely correct, except I’d probably replace “vibes” with “the consequences of the republicans awful governing finally fuck things up enough that voters kick them out and the Dems are the only other game in town”

If the Dems want to stop being the ticket of last resort after a failed pandemic response leaves a mountain of corpses and a broken society in its wake or literal world war 3 happens, they need to get in power and then use that power to make people’s lives better. Not just a little better around the edges, not just “oh you can stay on your parents insurance until you are 25, still participating in a fundamentally broken system but you get a slightly longer grace period,” not with benefits that phase in over a decade and can be undone by an opposition party before they take effect.

I don’t hold out much hope though, because the Democratic Party has shown me that when push comes to shove their donors win. And their donors make a lot of money from the systems being broken. Hard to cut out the insurance companies from healthcare when they are cutting you big fat election checks. Curtailing predatory loans would be easier if the fees they extract from the working poor didnt in part end up in politicians pockets.

Both parties are owned by the donor class. The republicans figured out they could say they are pro business and they could lie and say they are pro worker, their voters aren’t carefully double checking. The democrats try to do the same thing with a neoliberal twist, they want to keep business in check but are for common sense public private partnerships, proud capitalists who believe in the power of the free market with regulations. It sounds all well and good but the donors would rather not have regulations and those public private partnerships would be a lot more appealing if the donors made a bigger profit and they’ll have even more to donate next election cycle.

The grift grinds on and the democratic base gets outraged that “those stupid voters let the republicans have power again” but if the Dems aren’t doing anything to improve their lives, why do we expect those mercurial voters that swing around untethered with some vague sense that “this is all fucked up” would stick around. It is all fucked up, so many things in this nation are a fucking scam so some small handful of wealthy fucks can have just a little bit more. Sure their idea of “let the republicans have a turn” isnt going to make things better and in many ways will make things worse, but shits fucked up, Dems allow the shit to stay fucked up, those people are just reacting to the fact that things aren’t getting better.

The problem is in the normalization of the policies the last Republican left, paving the way for Republicans to expand on those terrible policies once back in charge