All this fundamentally forgets that the idea of ‘burning it all down’, which has a huge amount of advocates on this forum means that we will entrench GOP power in this country for the rest of my lifetime. After that moment we won’t be able to rise up something through the ashes to save us via the will of the people or whatever. Not because they’re better or have more people to oppress us, but because we’re eating each other alive and making it happen (like a zombie apocalypse TV show or movie). It’s profoundly disturbing that most people here just seem to forget that.
Everyone sees what the Trump administration is doing, and the conventional wisdom here is the Dems are effing up their primaries/caucuses as if who you get as your candidate matters even one bit in the scenario that’s coming. That’s the disconnect here. You can’t say it’s all over, and then turn around and say ‘we gotta elect Bernie or die’. I mean I just don’t get that at all. Somewhere deep down or right on top is the idea that something can change without burning everything down or people wouldn’t be so excited about the prospects of Bernie being president. How can he ever be president if all really is lost?
I don’t agree with your assessment, related to this site, that groundswell to change is what’s going on. Bernie ain’t ever getting 70 percent of the vote in this country. This site is mostly firmly in the ‘nothing matters, WAAF’ camp, and I find it odd there is such a disconnect related to that. If we lose in 2020, that’s the correct take. In 2016, after that election, I said we now live in a post fact world. The lies you tell don’t matter anymore. After 2020, if there isn’t a good result if you’re not a Republican or hold whatever ideals they have related to the monstrous policies they push, nothing will matter anymore. I’ll tell you the real cheat code that could change things. F*** with people’s money (take away Social Security or anything else they count on). S*** will get real quick.
This site also loves to look at what’s going on as a ‘timeline’ like in a badly written movie or TV script. Well, guess what, under that formula the Impeachment Trial acquittal was the ‘all is lost’ moment. What we don’t know in the forum’s talk of a ‘timeline’ is whether we’re the living protagonists or the zombies. Whether the script is written from our perspective or whether it’s written from the GOP’s perspective. Whether there’s a Hollywood ending or a French one, or if it’s some bold new writer who might shock us all by subverting our expectations based on how ridiculous the story’s been to this point.
I most certainly am not a nihilist, but this site is filled with them. If nothing truly matters, as is suggested in your post, why are people fighting so hard to get Bernie (many who are firmly in the WAAF camp). I mean we are literally 4 seats away from being able to pass meaningful legislation, and only one seat away from being able to make that meaningful agenda Constitutional. If we lose the Senate and Presidency, meaningful agenda is over in my lifetime. If we somehow lose the House, the GOP will gerrymander us out of existence with the district redrawing coming after the Census.
This isn’t about how ‘rigged’ or not the system is. Everyone knows that, the point is to say we can actually do something about it at this particular point in our country’s history because it’s that close to our reach (we just have to overcome probably an 11 point handicap in cheating). If people didn’t think that was true they wouldn’t be supporting Bernie to the death, and tearing everyone else down. I think they rightly see this is possibly the only time they can get Bernie without a revolution in the perfect storm of Trump. That’s what the people who willed Trump in thought in 2016, as 2016 was their existential crisis (which they slowed or stopped with court packing). They see how important 2020 is to them, and it’s why they picked Trump over the Constitution. I stand by the idea that Mitch is a horrible player, who’s a stone cold bluffer. He’s depended on the weakness of his opponents, that no one’s paying attention to what he’s doing, and ‘luck’ like what happened in 2016 to bail him out. He exposed how bad of a player he is much earlier than this, but the idea of him being a good player came crashing down with how he chose to conduct the Impeachment Trial. He’s really depending on luck right now. That form of luck is him depending on the Democratic Party to tear itself apart during this election.
As I said, I have a bar of where I’ll stop talking about any of this, and it’s losing the 2020 election in a way that entrenches GOP power for the rest of my lifetime (unless maybe there’s a revolution, which would probably still mean the end of my life). Surely it can’t be hard to see why 2020 is such an important dividing line on this point. That’s what this ‘ballot’ is all about, and I want people to treat it that way. I don’t really give a damn how that plays, but I’m gonna play it.
