General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Grant immunity? Obama's making Bush criminals into heroes! [View all]JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)And the voting clienteles of the Democrats are not just the tiny fraction of formal liberals and Third Way wonks and party hacks, but workers, women, blacks, immigrants, Latinos, the poor, LGBT, the subaltern classes, also genuine progressives, unions, teachers, most academics and scientists, people who understand the seriousness of the ecological crisis, people who want spending on health and education not military, and generally those who oppose war and profit-making and corporate control. This is the coalition who should be making the revolution, but they're not.
Are our conditions of life less oppressive under Democratic governments? Yes. More or less. Generally. Is this enough? No, and not just because the few reforms won are not enough. And not just because the wars and the plunder and the rule of Wall Street continue, and the planet itself continues to be burned, so that we will all lose our future. But because a scam cycle has been established. Status-quo Democrats disappoint, then are replaced by Genghis Khan Republicans who are revolutionary in pushing the country further right and making new breakthroughs in atrocity, causing everyone reasonable to run back to the status-quo Democrats and celebrate their return.
This game requires the two parties to be genuinely different from one another on many issues that matter, if not on the consensus of how the political economy and imperialism are supposed to work. Democrats make some real reforms on things that matter (like gay rights and Lily Ledbetter and the ridiculously byzantine inadequate reform of the health system which indisputably added coverage for 10 or 20 million people who didn't have it).
The general pattern is that Republican outrages in extending the power of the repressive and warmaking state and of capital are ambitious, and in your face, and often trampling the law. Later a Democratic admin effects a legalistic consolidation and expansion of the same outrages - even as the right-wing screams about socialism and the planned inadequacy of the Democrats sets up the next Republican government. Both end up making mincemeat of constitutional rule, but one with more the appearance of legality.
It's a real conundrum. But the fatal global crises are not being addressed!