The End of Politics
We are not fighting over political ideology — we're fighting for an ethical humanity and a core of basic human decency.
It was once an ideological battle, but the sad truth is that leftists like me lost that battle immediately after the Reagan election.1 And by leftist, I don’t mean sign-waving hard-core socialists who want to destroy capitalism.
By leftist, I simply mean someone who wants to preserve and expand on FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s civil rights legislation.
That’s it, really. Add in an important dose of respect for our oppressed LGBTQ+ friends, but that, along with women’s rights, is part of the civil rights expansion process that we are fighting for and losing.
These are and have been the only goals of most leftists since World War Two.
Many Democrats these days are willing to toss aside LGBTQ+ rights as part of the “lessons learned” over the Kamala election squeaker because people like Marc Andreessen say we should not fret over things like identity politics.
This is typical.
Democrats have been giving in and contributing to the right-wing Republican pendulum swing for more than 40 years. Every few years, the giant right-wing rat gnaws further away at the social contract created by Democrats in the 20th century.
Today, there is almost nothing left of it. Republicans are determined to destroy what little is left. They’re trying to privatize Social Security. Food Stamps and Medicaid are almost impossible to qualify for. The end of gay marriage is on the table. Abortion and other women’s rights are shells of their former selves.
The idea of a more extreme Left in American politics is a joke referring to a day that never truly arrived.
Whatever there was of a socialist movement in the United States died when FDR gathered together corporate titans to run the World War Two death machine.
I do happen to think that late-stage capitalism is now so far gone that it needs to be replaced, mostly because there is almost no way to sustain a small business nowadays without Scrooging your employees. However, that’s an argument that only a tiny group of ears is willing to hear, even after all that we have seen during the last decade.
It doesn’t matter. We are not even within earshot of that discussion.
For now, we’re all on our heels: liberals, moderate conservatives, socialist renegades, and everyone else with a conscience. We’ve all gathered together to mourn under an oversized tent managed by an incompetent Democratic Party itself beholden to corporate interests.
But it’s where we are. It’s how these front lines are now drawn.
The best we can do is fight for a return to a level of normalcy that allows political and economic arguments to be renewed. Leftists were eliminated from this conversation during those Reagan days I mentioned. But the rest of you, hopefully, can have at it in a few more years if we survive that long.
Part of the reason we are in this mess, aside from the fact that the media world is one big clusterfuck of right-wing nationalism and corporate propaganda, is that Kamala would have probably won the election if not for a concerted voter suppression effort as described by
2 and others:
Previous political divides involving conservatives and liberals, although sometimes serious, rarely expanded much beyond an argument between friends over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer.
Today’s current divide, however, is no longer about politics. It’s not left vs. right, unless you bundle the far right with conservatism in general. It’s not about socialism vs. capitalism or even capitalism vs. communism (please do note that communism is completely non-existent on the planet we call Earth, but feel free to check other worlds).
Today’s current divide is strictly between two sets of morality. Ironically, far-right manifestos say the same thing, which seems to confuse a few people who aren’t capable of deciphering such basics as right vs. wrong.
But despite emoji-laced social media comments from right-wing trolls, there’s no way to put a pretty face of righteousness on fascism. The far-right goons who have infected the U.S. government seem to slowly be giving up on this argument. They are beginning to abandon the notion that they are fighting the good fight. They simply want to win the fight at all costs. They’ll take out as many people as necessary.
Witness this recent post on Heil Twitter3 from Eric Trump:
I don’t know about you, but I liked the SNL version of Eric Trump better.
Harmlessly stupid:
The coward deleted his tweet after about 40 minutes, which is exactly what the SNL version of him would have done while staring at the camera on Weekend Update with a stupid look on his face.
If you’d like more evidence that the current divide is between people who believe in common decency and those who don’t, it doesn’t take a lot of work to find it.
But I’ll add this conversation from the Predator in Chief with the subservient American press on his way to somewhere on Air Force One:4, 5
Trump: I said to him, I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.
Q: You’d like Jordan to house people from Gaza?
Trump: I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people. I’m meeting with, I’m talking to General [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi tomorrow, some time, I believe, and I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people. I can—I mean, you’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. It’s, you know, it’s, over the centuries, that’s had many, many conflicts, that site. And, I don’t know, it’s, something has to happen, but, it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished. And people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.
Q: Temporarily? Or would they—
Trump: It could be either. It could be temporarily, could be long term.
Moving all of Gaza’s citizens out of the “demolition site” so that Jared Kushner can build luxury hotels on some prime, freshly demolished beachfront property is not a Republican vs. Democrat thing. There is no way a normal person can support that.
I’m not going to list all the other shit Trump has done during his first week in office. Others have done this, and you’re probably getting sick of it all.
I only wanted to quickly point out that none of this is an ideological battle. It’s not liberals vs. conservatives. It’s not even Democrats vs. Republicans, mostly because there are no more Republicans left. About the only one left in the Senate is Mitch McConnell, FFS. And he’s a Gingrich Republican, the likes of whom acted as the genesis to all this madness.
So, no. I don’t need to list the endless mendacity. You’re already seeing that every day.
But this one was worth a special callout to drive home the point.
Hey, at least Trump didn’t offer to settle oppressed Gazans and their broken families in Oklahoma. Progress?
You can make an easy argument for other times before Reagan, even FDR’s embrace of oligarchs to help the American War effort and create the military-industrial complex that his general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us of, but Reagan was the final death blow.
Note: Hartmann’s post is not about the BlueAnon stuff regarding conspiracies regarding voting machines or Musk.
This is a well-researched article about the way many states enacted voter suppression laws that, as predicted by many, directly impacted the election.
Note the similarity between the real Heil Twitter logo and this one created by Gary Taxali : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garytaxali_i-did-this-picture-2-years-ago-elons-support-activity-7287536881901228032-59U6/
https://www.instagram.com/meidastouch/reel/DFRug0yxmqG/
Transcript quoted from The Fucking News. You can listen to it yourself on the Meidas Touch Instagram post from Meidas Touch.
And its happened pretty fast...the end of politics. The divide is indeed between common decency and, well, not common decency. It is and always has been about power and control for the Republicans. The Democrats have disappointed me to no end. The lack of push back, strong messaging, and being direct in dealing with all this is not very promising. Add this to the fact that people just cant leave each other alone. Who are you, MAGA, to tell other people what to do and how to live their lives? Maybe the Democrats need their own campaign that says "it's ok to be kind, decent, and generous. It's ok to accept people who aren't like you."
I'm disappointed in people and how shitty they have become. People seem to have found justification for their behavior in politics, when politicians couldn't care less about us.
Well said