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By now you have surely heard at least one Democratic party representative say that Donald Trump is a threat to Democracy, and it might have crossed your mind that many leftists, including me, are constantly saying that the US is not a democracy, but rather a plutocracy (or a plutocratic anocracy). At the same time, though, many people on the left will tell you that the Democratic party is a better option than the Republicans.

Realistically, the threat Donald Trump represents is not a threat to our democracy but rather the threat of regime change within a plutocracy. Right now, the plutocrats are the very wealthy, with each of those plutocrats having more or less power based on their wealth. A second Trump presidency, which would be accompanied by a systemic replacement of leadership in the entire executive branch, would mean that the new plutocrats would be relatively wealthy white evangelical racists. Under a new Trump regime, the portion of today’s plutocrats that stand on the Democratic party side of things would no longer have significant political power; they would no longer be significantly powerful and might very well lose their wealth. While it is true that there are current plutocrats who are not evangelicals but who support Trump (because they think Trump’s extremism is necessary to maintain their power), those people are idiots (e.g., Musk).

A lot of people (including me) are extremely frustrated at this situation. Essentially, there’s no way to vote against fascism. Both the Democrats and Republicans have made it very clear that they represent unyielding domination from their respective plutocrat groups, including ill treatment of immigrants, violent maintenance of the US empire, and genocide. Neither political group has any intention of doing anything about extreme inequality and the economic problems associated with it (like housing and food becoming less and less affordable); sure, they will pretend they will do something (mostly to disparage the competition) but we should all understand by now that they are insincere.

The difference between these two visions of fascist plutocracy is in the details, but they are details that matter, so potentially worth your time in terms of voting.

Immigration

While both parties are against immigration and are currently engaging in a contest over which of them can offer the most dystopian view of how the southern US border should be managed, the Republicans are more likely to engage in cruelty for the sake of cruelty rather than the simple pragmatic cruelty of the Democrats. The Republicans would likely treat many people of color who are legally living in the US (including actual US citizens) as illegal immigrants and deport them.

LGTBQ+ Rights

While the Democrats are willing to allow LGBTQ+ people to have significant civil rights (i.e., to allow them to fully participate in the capitalist hellscape), Republicans have been clear that they intend to commit genocide against LGBTQ+ people in the US. This policy would not only affect the interior of the US, but would undoubtedly be exported to the rest of the US empire, replacing the liberal policy of attempting to coerce foreign governments into supporting LGBTQ+ people. The genocide would include legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, illegalizing pro-LGBTQ+ information and symbols, systematic institutionalization of LGBTQ+ people, and (especially) intentionally looking the other way when LGBTQ+ people are brutalized or killed (moreso than is currently the case).

Homeless People

While Democrats pretend to support homeless people, in practice, they do not. The most accurate way to represent the Democratic party perspective (in total) on homeless people is that they tolerate them slightly and oppose murdering them. That’s not good, but under a Trump regime, homeless people would be more actively harmed and killed (i.e., law enforcement would actively look the other way when someone decided to kill them and might even participate). Importantly, the percentage of LGBTQ+ people that would become homeless under a Trump regime would be much greater than the current situation. We would expect to see most programs to assist the homeless become illegal, or effectively illegal, under Trump.

Israel/Palestine

Both the Democrats and Republicans strongly support the genocide of the Palestinian people, including sending huge amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel. Democrats favor a slow genocide that pauses for significant periods of time so that people tend to forget about it. Trump favors finishing off the Palestinians as quickly as possible. While it is true that both sides support genocide, it is also true that the Trump plan is worse. The Trump plan is also much more likely to start World War 3 as it is likely to cause Israel’s Muslim neighbors to lose their patience and feel that they have a duty to attack Israel.

Empire

Both the Democrats and Republicans support the continued existence of the American empire, including hostility toward leftist states like North Korea, Cuba, China, and Venezuela as well as Iran (and potentially other Muslim states). A second Trump presidency would shift support for Ukraine to Russia, as well increasing hostility toward other Islamic states. It would also shift a significant portion of US military activity from maintaining the US empire to instead occupying the US itself.

Muslims, Leftists, and People of Color

Democrats are willing to tolerate a diversity of viewpoints as long as the individuals holding those viewpoints do not pose a direct threat to capitalism. In contrast, a second Trump regime would engage in a war domestically against any group that they perceive as a threat, including Muslims, Leftists, and people of color (especially Black Lives Matter and any other group asking for equal protection under the law for people of color). This would consist primarily of selective enforcement of the law as well as new laws specifically criminalizing dissent. Such a war would not usually look like open warfare, but rather just an escalation of the kinds of shenanigans the police already participate in and a more aggressive brushing under the rug (by both cops and the media) of assaults and murders against hated groups.

Climate Change

None of this matters if we are all dead. The Democrats are not taking climate change seriously; it’s as if they either don’t understand the extent of the problem or simply do not care. Their support of environmentalism is much like their support of the left — almost entirely performative and even a bit patronizing. For example, US oil production hit an all-time record under Biden. However, the Republicans intend to destroy existing infrastructure that is working well (e.g., solar power farms, electric vehicle charging stations, windmills) and then double or even triple-down on fossil fuels. They will literally burn shit and waste energy just to “own the libs”. While there’s a possibility that a new Trump presidency would damage the US economy enough that US carbon emissions would decline, there’s a better chance of eventually achieving rational environmental policy with the Democrats.

Conclusion

Do what you want with all this. I’m sure you’re aware of all of it, but I thought it might be helpful to make a short summary. I feel like it helped me. I do want to correct myself, though: In the past, I’ve referred to the Democrats as “center-right” many, many times. I was wrong about that. It is clear that they are fully right wing — just not far right. The Republicans are both further to the right and on a different ideological plane from the Democrats.

On July 28, Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

Meanwhile, I’ve been struggling to figure out why she thought this was a “sudden revolution in our politics” and why she would struggle to understand what it means. She goes on to describe what happened with Biden dropping out and so forth, but doesn’t really address why she’s struggling to understand any of it.

The shock and demoralization caused by the DNC’s selection of Joe Biden as their nominee in 2020 was widespread. I say the DNC selected him because they used a pretty clear strategy to make him the winner of the primary: They had all the other clearly neoliberal candidates drop out while keeping Elizabeth Warren, thus successfully splitting the “progressive” (centrist) vote between Warren and Sanders, and guaranteeing a victory for Biden. Only Michael Bloomberg was a worse candidate than Biden.

As much as I would like voters to be well informed and vote based on their deep understanding of the issues and the candidates, as well as a strong background in political theory and a healthy dose of empathy, the fact of the matter is that most voters are not well-informed — most are misinformed — and they end up basing their votes on intuition. Intuition is a blurry representation of salient facts, so it isn’t complete trash, but it also tends to result in candidates winning due to fairly superficial traits. For example, that’s why taller candidates tend to win elections.

That being said, there are some things that most Americans who are not baby boomers understand:

• Politics are controlled by people with more money and that is harmful to the country as a whole and to people with less money in particular. Who those people are specifically, and how to stop them is a subject of much debate, but suggesting that nothing should fundamentally change is a completely out-of-touch sentiment.
• There’s a point where a person is too old to drive, much less run a country. Most voting-age people have experienced extremely elderly people trying to drive; many of us have been privy to conversations within our families about how to stop grandpa from driving because he is clearly no longer safe, and then how to help him get around town without a car. It’s a real problem rather than an expression of ageism, and we’re all familiar with it. It’s not because of a lack of respect, but rather practical concern.
• Older Americans (e.g., boomers) are not really in touch with modern realities and have a lot of bad ideas. Making fun of boomers is practically a national pastime at this point. Biden is older than that!

And for people who were slightly more well-informed:

• Joe Biden has a long history of conservative political choices (i.e., he’s very old fashioned). While people do certainly change over time, it’s also true that older people tend to revert to earlier ways of thinking. I’m aware of Biden’s record as President; it doesn’t strike me as being particularly “progressive”, but then again, what does that even mean? What does a neoliberal DNC think we should be progressing toward?

Like I said, Joe Biden was the worst candidate the DNC presented to voters at that time, with the exception of Michael Bloomberg. While Biden’s old-fashioned ways may have been very appealing to the donor class and boomers, who are old and relatively rich, it was repulsive to pretty much everyone else. The 2020 election was a contest about which old man you disliked the least. There’s literally a popular song about how much it sucked to have to vote for Joe Biden.

So, given all this, Biden’s presidency has left normal voters (i.e., non-MAGA, moderately informed) in a constant state of anxiety waiting for him to say some weird old-man shit, or forget an important name/word, or fall down….AGAIN. That Democratic party voters (i.e., not “Democrats” but people who typically vote for a Democrat) rebelled after his terrible debate against Trump should not be surprising at all. We were tired of his shit even before he got put on the ballot in 2020.

The idea that Joe Biden was the “most progressive President ever” (per Warmbo and people like him) was based on a combination of pure fantasy and the fact that Biden’s administration was mostly being run by much younger people who at least understood what Democratic party voters wanted Biden to be. It was not based on the reality of Biden or even his personal potential. As I’ve said before, the DNC is not capable (in its post-Reagan incarnation) of producing a candidate for President that progressives, centrists and leftists can get genuinely excited about. This is specifically because the donor class has had absolute control of the decision-making process within the DNC, but the average age of DNC leadership was certainly a secondary factor.

That Democratic party donors saw the writing on the wall in terms of Biden’s lack of ability to beat Trump or serve as the nation’s chief executive should not have been surprising, either. Replacing Biden with Harris, specifically, should not have been surprising. Harris is just another neoliberal. It wasn’t the political upheaval that HCR seems to think it was.

Today, however, they announced that Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidential candidate will be Tim Walz, the progressive governor of Minnesota and that is very surprising. I had assumed that she/they would choose Shapiro or someone similarly neoliberal. The only way I can make sense of the DNC doing the right thing with the VP pick is to blame it on the fact that they are terrified of Trump, and they’ve finally realized that leaning to the right doesn’t pay off, so they have decided to make an attempt to appeal to younger and further left voters. From the perspective of wealthy people, Walz is a particularly bad candidate; for example, he once said, “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” He’s right, but you aren’t supposed to say that where the rich people might hear you.

Usually, the Vice President candidate is chosen to placate powerful people; I say “placate” because the VP is not expected to actually do anything. The choice of Walz (ostensibly by Harris, but surely as part of a long discussion with DNC leadership) suggests either that the DNC is now considering younger and more left voters as a legitimate political force that must be addressed more seriously, or that Harris, in particular, has hidden depths of ethical rationality. I’m not ready to get optimistic about this — Harris and Walz are both technically boomers after all and they are DNC approved — but there’s reason to suggest the country could get back on track after the fiasco that started in 2016.

That note of slight optimism should not be interpreted to suggest that we will avoid political violence after the election. The odds of political violence from the far-right are extremely high, and we’re likely to see a lot of it regardless of how the election turns out. A Trump win will embolden them, but a Harris win will enrage and terrify them. There is no way out of political violence at this point. The important questions are: “How much violence will there be?”, “Who will be the targets of violence?” and “Will municipal, state and federal law enforcement counter that violence, or facilitate it?”

Related: How Bad Will Political Violence in the U.S. Get? (Bruce Hoffman, ForeignPolicy.com)

I’m also not suggesting that the DNC is going to become leftist or even centrist in a timely fashion. The DNC should not be trusted with our money. As I mentioned previously, creating a separation between the DNC and political donations from working class people would be extremely beneficial toward democratizing the DNC and moving US politics closer to the center.

Joe Biden has declined the Democratic Party nomination, and Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee. That’s a good thing, but if voters are hoping for a Democrat who is willing to address the Zionist genocide happening in Gaza, Harris is not it. In fact, there’s no such thing as a potential Democratic Party nominee for President that would oppose the genocide in Gaza because the party is controlled by neoliberals, and neoliberals hate Islam.

I should be a little bit more precise, though. Neoliberalism doesn’t have an opinion on any religion, but it does insist that every religion be subservient to the neoliberal (i.e., capitalist) order, and it hates any kind of organizing that opposes that order, including religious organizing. That’s part of why there are now some conservatives and fascists who are questioning the dominance of capital in society. It’s not that they want liberty in the same way the left does, but rather because they want a form of neofeudalism that has a far-right version of Christianity at its center. People call them “the American Taliban” for that very reason. Neoliberalism is inherently opposed to any order that puts capitalism in service to another ideology because that would end the dominance of the capitalist class over society.

Neoliberalism — like all right-wing ideologies — needs an outside threat that it can use as an excuse for its bad behavior. That threat is always exaggerated and fictionalized to the point of being a cartoonish version of the real threat, even though it is based on a kernel of truth. Once the soviet block had been effectively defeated, neoliberalism looked around for a new threat to focus on, and that threat was Islamic theocracy. It’s not like they’d been ignoring Islamic theocracy before that — it just wasn’t the focal point. In fact, they were willing to use Islamic theocracy to organize people against the Soviet Union and they called militant Muslims “freedom fighters” in that context. They gave them money and weapons to help defeat the soviets. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were both supported by the US.

In addition to neoliberalism’s need for an enemy to use as an excuse for bad behavior, there is also a more directly practical need for anti-Islamic propaganda — that is, to provide an excuse for Israel. Israel is more than just a cog in the right-wing Christian narrative that prevents them from having to deal with the inevitability of death. It is also, essentially, a huge western military base within striking distance of more than 67% of the world’s oil. That oil is the reason why neoliberalism’s bad behavior is seen as necessary by neoliberals. Joe Biden famously said that if Israel didn’t exist, the US would have to invent it; this is why.

Dominance of oil-producing nations isn’t just important for the direct reason of access to the oil. Secondarily, oil companies, which control US politics to the extent that they have veto power over essentially any legislation, are the ones who actually get access to the oil, and they need that access for their very existence. Third, but no less important, is the problem of the petrodollar. The Nixon administration decoupled the value of the US dollar from the value of gold and instead negotiated with OPEC (and the Saudis in particular) to make the US dollar the standard currency for buying and selling oil, which forces non-US nations to hold US dollars, and that props up the value of the US dollar and, in turn, the US economy. In short, Americans get a dramatic economic benefit from all those children and other innocent people the Zionists have been murdering since the Nakba (1948).

Neoliberals would frame their demand that all religions be subservient to the capitalist order quite differently. They would probably say that they want religious groups to embrace freedom, and what they offer certainly does include religious freedom. However, under capitalism, only the capitalist really has a true opportunity for a reasonable level of freedom. Everyone else is free to either provide a benefit to the capitalist class or die. If Islam is not willing to provide a benefit to the capitalist class, it must die — or, more precisely, that version of Islam must die and be replaced with an Islam that is subservient to capital.

The left’s support for Islam is complicated, but is based on the fact that Islam is being victimized by capitalism; i.e., it is more about the left being anti-capitalist than pro-Islam. However, the left also appreciates that there is a wide range of belief and action within Islam, and that all people should be free to retain their culture, practice their religion, own personal property, and exist. Genocide is wrong and should be opposed regardless of who the two sides of the genocide are. To truly respect freedom of the individual, you must respect the right of individuals to make choices that you think are wrong as long as they don’t hurt anyone. In fact, the left has a hard time registering a choice as “wrong” if it doesn’t harm other people; the right hates that and calls it “moral relativism”. The right wing spends a lot of time manufacturing harms that might hypothetically be caused by behaviors that they don’t like, but that both seem harmless on first glance and prove to be harmless upon closer inspection.

One day, I will stop criticizing the Democrats. That day will be when they stop disappointing me.

Let’s get this assassination attempt in perspective.

There are very good reasons why Trump’s popularity relative to Biden hasn’t really changed since the shooting.

First off, people are trying to kill Trump all the time.

• June 18, 2016: A British man at a Trump rally attempted to take a cop’s gun for the purpose of shooting Trump.
• September 6, 2017: A guy tried to kill Trump with a forklift.
• October 1, 2018: A US Navy veteran sent Trump ricin on a letter.
• September 20, 2020: A Canadian had a ricin-laced letter intended for Trump.
• October 2020: The people who wanted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer also wanted to hang Trump.
• July 13, 2024: A young Republican tried to shoot Trump with an AR-15.

For some reason, the rest of these assassination attempts were fine, but this latest one has Democrats cowering in a posture of surrender. Why?

Second, who created this hazardous conditions that led to the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life?

According to both Republicans and Democrats, the issue is the “heated rhetoric” on both sides. To be clear, what this means is that Democrats have decided that they can no longer state the facts about Trump and Trumpism. I was going to list those facts out, but the essence of it is that Trump would create a fascist dystopia. To be fair, if you’re a fascist, it might be exactly what you want, so a fascist utopia in that case. If a factual recounting of your intentions and behaviors makes people want to kill you, is that the fault of the facts? Wasn’t it the Republicans who said, “Facts don’t care about your feelings”?

Third, when shootings happen, what is it that Republicans say?

After a school shooting in January of this year, Trump told supporters, “We have to get over it.” That’s been a common refrain among Republicans for a very long time regarding gun violence. Their other favorite thing to say is that no amount of bloodshed would justify doing anything about the regulation of firearms — in particular, the AR-15. You see, from time to time, the Tree of Liberty must be fed with the blood of elementary school children.

Fourth, Republicans — and Trump in particular — are constantly encouraging political violence.

Here is a handy list of times Trump called for violence from 2022.

Fifth: When political violence happens, what is it that Republicans say?

When one of their people attacks a Democrat (e.g., when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked by crazed Trumper with a hammer), they simultaneously laugh about it and claim they did nothing wrong. They point to the attacker and say he was crazy. Their violent rhetoric could not have possibly contributed to the attack, they say.

Sixth: Republicans are always talking about killing pedophiles.

Why should we be shocked if a Republican actually tried to kill a well-known pedophile? Now, I do realize that most Republicans don’t actually care about pedophiles and that “killing pedophiles” is a dog whistle for killing LGTBQ people, but should we be surprised that a Republican didn’t get the dog whistle and instead took it literally?

Seventh: Republicans are in favor of bullying.

The entire Republican ethos is a toxic fixation on achieving dominance, and the essence of fascism is just bullying writ large. According to people interviewed by the press, the shooter was an outcast who was bullied all the time, and we know that bullying contributes to mental illness and can contribute to an individual choosing violent action. Because the Republicans contribute to a culture of bullying, they are also contributing to the blow-back from bullying. They like to talk about how violence is the result of a toxic culture, and they’re right — they just don’t understand that they’re talking about their own culture.

Eighth: People clearly do not appreciate the scale of the horrific violence perpetuated by the US political system.

On the same day Trump’s ear was tragically pierced by a 22 caliber bullet, hundreds of Palestinians living in Gaza were massacred by the Zionist genocide machine using US munitions provided by the Biden administration. Within the USA, roughly 120 people are shot every day; nearly all of those shootings would have been prevented by more rational policies that valued the well-being of human beings above increasing the wealth of a few people who are already stinking rich. Similarly, about 135 Americans commit suicide every day, and the same kinds of policies that would reduce shootings would reduce suicides as well because fewer people would wish to be dead.

Ninth: Ear piercing is very common in the US.

83% of American women have their ears pierced, and many American men do as well. Yes, it is always a good idea to have a professional piercer provide this service rather than going to a novice with a piercing gun or a maniac wielding an AR-15, but, come on, it was just an ear. Trump himself described the feeling of the injury as “the world’s largest mosquito“. If we start obsessing over every time someone almost got killed in this country, that would take up all our time.

Tenth: What do you call 9 people sitting with a Nazi?

Well, that’s 10 Nazis. They are not “innocent people”. If something happens to those Nazis who are all sitting together, is that really a tragedy, or is it just something that happened? We are now 8 years into this bullshit. Everyone knows what Trump represents. There are no longer any excuses for supporting him in any way. Yes, I realize they are (willfully) ignorant and might have brain damage from lead exposure, COVID-19, and other things, but those excuses only go so far — and at some point, you have to accept that an individual’s brain damage is an inseparable part of them.

Eleventh: It’s looking more and more like the shooter was a Republican.

How can anyone on the left or center-right be held responsible for an act committed by a conservative? Instead of cowering and essentially surrendering, the Biden campaign should be preparing a statement indicating that Trump is so unpopular with conservatives that one tried to kill him. What a loser. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if he just quit?

What are the Democrats up to?

A few days before the latest assassination attempt, someone on Twitter wrote this:

The Democratic Party is willing to lose to avoid confrontation. They are tragically deferential to institutional power/norms, despite their base pleading with them to do more and to understand these are unprecedented times. They prefer a permanent defensive cowering posture. Their base is begging them to Do Something about abortion, they do nothing. People are begging them to Do Something about Supreme Court overreach, they do nothing. They don’t offer offense of any kind, they hold, then dangle the idea of fixing the problem after the next election. The way they’ve handled the sinking of their presidential nominee in realtime is no different—instead of bold, decisive action, instead of courage, they’ve simply told voters, its out of their hands, there’s nothing they can do, all they can do is leak their dissenting opinions. If Democrats refuse to fight for their own political survival, why should we trust that they’d ever fight for ours.

Lindsay Ballant

When Lindsay says, “their base,” she means loyal voters, not the people who the party considers their base — loyal donors — but her point still stands. Then here is what the Biden campaign says about how their strategy will change after the assassination attempt:

Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president’s history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the “disorder” created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict, campaign officials said on condition of anonymity.

Reuters (as quoted here)

Yes, the response of the Democrats is to “both sides” it and attempt to equate protests against a genocide to the attempted assassination. According to The Nation, this is an act of clever marketing rather than a psychotic, immoral betrayal. It could potentially make some sense if they were equating the genocide to the attempted assassination, but no, this is the protests against the genocide that they don’t like.

Some of Biden’s political allies were so demoralized they seem to have preemptively surrendered. On Sunday, Axios quoted a “senior House Democrat” as saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

“Biden Condemns Political Violence Without Whitewashing Trump” The Nation (July 14, 2024)

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — one of the few voices from the Democratic party that usually makes sense — demanded the resignation of any senior Democrats that have resigned themselves to a second Trump presidency. I doubt any of them will comply.

If you’re a ‘senior Democrat’ that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism. This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

It’s time to end the Democratic party.

While it isn’t clear whether the Democratic party is sincerely incompetent and pathetic or whether they just keep intentionally losing over and over again, it is extremely clear that no one should support them anymore. The only reason you might support the Democratic party is if you are somehow OK with their failures and are fine with the US slipping into authoritarianism as long as it happens slowly.

There’s a lot to complain about, but here are 3 big ones:

• The Democratic party consistently chooses terrible candidates in an effort to appeal to conservatives. Ultimately, this does not work because the Republicans are always one step to the right of the Democrats and will always accuse the Democrat of being a communist no matter how right wing the Democrat is. The higher the office, the worse the candidates they choose.
• The Democratic party will not fight for you. When things get rough, the Democrats curl up in a ball on the floor.
• The Democrats consistently choose to take conservative actions — even when they have control of all three branches of government. For example, the fiasco of the Affordable Care Act was based on a Heritage Foundation proposal — yes, the same Heritage Foundation that hatched Project 2025.

Essentially, the Democrats are always on the verge of surrendering. If the Republicans can be characterized by Narcissistic Personality Disorder (and I think they can), Democrats seem to be co-dependent people-pleasers that are desperate for conservative voters to like them. Another explanation would be that the Democrats are always putting the wishes of the donor class (who are much more wealthy and elderly than the average American) above those of their common constituents — and the donor class is always more afraid of the left than it is of the far right. Maybe the Democrats are just cowards — but it is important to recognize that human death and suffering isn’t what they are afraid of. Rather, they are afraid of disorder, and especially disorder that might affect their standard of living. They don’t mind people suffering and dying as long as that death and suffering benefits them (typically, because it enforces stability).

Perhaps all three of these factors are at play.

How to end the anti-democratic Democrats

The dominance over electoral politics of the Democratic party comes down to 2 things: 1) cultural inertia, and 2) funding. We can address the first by addressing the second.

Instead of donating to the Democratic party, we need to be donating to left-leaning organizations that can distribute funds directly to political campaigns or even sidestep those campaigns and directly provide marketing for those left-leaning candidates. (Sidestepping might be necessary to keep the DNC from getting a cut.) At the very least, a single, clearly leftist donation source would force candidates to treat popular positions as valid. In contrast, an individual making a $5 per month donation does not have enough financial significance to the Democratic party or any individual candidate to warrant serious consideration of their political desires. If there were enough people going along with this strategy, multiple left-wing orgs would be able to successfully participate.

While it seems like Democratic Socialists of America might be the correct organization to take on that role, it’s a complicated situation; there’s also Our Revolution, PSL, and probably many others to consider. The correct org would usually (but not always) be donating to Democratic party candidates, but would never donate to a right-wing Democrat (e.g., Manchin).

The combination of the two-party system and the legality of buying off politicians makes it impossible to democratize the electoral system, but we can get a little closer by starving the Democratic party of direct access to revenue from individuals who are not wealthy. The overall purpose of this strategy is to take party direction away from the people who run the DNC; they’ll say this causes “chaotic messaging” but they really should have thought about that before they decided to work against democracy. The left’s rejection of electoral politics is based on the fact that electoral politics are controlled by the very wealthy; that’s a valid criticism, but it also means that the left has not explored workarounds that might reduce the influence of the wealthy on the electoral system. Such intervention is certainly a lot more important than merely voting.

I didn’t think being an American could become more embarrassing, but here we are. How can anyone take the USA seriously when those two buffoons are our candidates for President?

On the brighter side, though: Apparently, it is now OK to say out loud that Joe Biden should be replaced as the Democratic Party nominee:

The Guardian: Who could replace Joe Biden? Here are six possibilities
BBC: Can Biden be replaced? And who could replace him?
New York Times: President Biden, I’ve seen enough
CNN: What would happen if Biden decided to leave the race?
The Hill: Axelrod to GOP strategists: If Biden is replaced, ‘you guys are in trouble’
The Economist: How could Democrats replace Joe Biden as their candidate for president?
The Atlantic: Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option
Bloomberg: Democrats Hit Panic Button in Wake of Biden Debate Debacle

Being a leftist means being correct too soon. It’s a corollary to the strange phenomenon where Democrats are always opposed to a genocide after it is over, and, now, to the fact that Joe Biden should not have been the nominee in 2020.

Look, I am old, and I’m getting older every day. That’s how it works. At some point, I am going to stop working and that point should come when I can still do the job. This is how my dignity would be maintained despite what aging does to a person. If I’m 78 fucking years old and they’re still propping me up to do this job, it will end up being an embarrassment to me and a stain on my reputation. Biden is 82 now — we should be helping him with small jobs around the house, and getting him a blanket and a hot chocolate. We should be adjusting the recliner when he falls asleep in it. We should be giving him rides to the store and to church. We should not be making him run the most powerful nation on the planet. And yes, the Democrats should be keeping him around to provide them with his wisdom (it does give me pause to imagine what that might entail), but there’s no way he should be President of the United States.

From the perspective of the left, every candidate the DNC seriously considered in 2020 was completely unacceptable. (They even included a literal billionaire in their lineup!) In addition to being unacceptable, Biden was also absurd. So absurd that I didn’t believe that that Democrats would vote for him, but they disappointed me yet again. I was shocked that he was their nominee. But here we are. Luckily, there are lots of other people available to take the job, and there’s still time to switch.

This just in: He’s not dropping out. He’s even committing to another debate.

This video from 2019 features Meredith Whittaker who is now the president of the Signal Foundation talking about AI, which is one of her areas of expertise. She spent about a year as an advisor on AI to the Federal Trade Commission, and has a background with AI at Google.

Before January 6, 2020, Thom Hartman published a piece about how Republicans planned to steal the election. Democrats mostly responded to it with denial — essentially saying that the scenario he described was not possible because of the strength of our democratic institutions. Even a week after January 6, Democrats were still saying that there was no way that plan could ever work. Well, then people looked at it seriously, and it turns out that if the mob had been more organized and if Mike Pence had gone along with it, their plot to hand the election to Donald Trump would have worked well enough. A system designed to thwart democracy will sometimes thwart it in a way you don’t like.

For details on the 2020 plot, I will refer you to Wikipedia.

There’s a new plan now — designed to fit a new set of circumstances and compensate for past failures — and Democrats are again denying that there’s a danger. In short:

1. Mike Johnson refuses to swear a few new Democrats into Congress on January 3rd, claiming there are “irregularities” in their elections that must be first investigated. This allows the Republicans to still be in control of the House on January 6. They’ve delayed swearing in representatives before, so it is an established practice and appears to be legal.
2. Mike Johnson delays acceptance of the Electoral College certificates of election from a handful of states where Republicans claim there are “problems.” Republicans have repeatedly stated that they believe the House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from each state, and there’s no precedent regarding whether that is true. If Democrats fought this point in a legal sense, it would go to the Supreme Court, which is controlled by the Republicans; it would likely conclude that Congress should decide the question with legislation.
3. Regardless of how many votes Biden won by, electoral or popular, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives simply refuses to certify the electoral college votes of enough states; as a result, the minimum of 270 isn’t reached. Under the 12th Amendment, like with the election of 1876, that throws the election to the House, where each state gets one vote. While a majority of Americans live in a state run by Democrats, a majority of the states themselves are run by Republicans. Even if Biden has the majority of 269 electoral votes, the Constitution still says the election goes to the House, and the House may choose literally anyone as President.

(Much of the text of the above 3 points is copy-pasted from Thom Hartman’s article.)

The way we would all experience this is that Biden wins on election night, but Republicans immediately start claiming the election was stolen. Over the next few weeks, they claim specific states have a problem. Legal maneuvering begins and continues all the way into January; Republicans successfully stall — they’re good at it. Before January 3rd, Republicans make claims about specific new Democratic party members of the House, and Mike Johnson refuses to seat them on January 3rd pending an investigation. On January 6, Mike Johnson claims that Biden doesn’t actually have 270 electoral votes and announces that the House will choose the President.

This new plan does not depend on a mob of crazed MAGA minions, nor does it depend on Mike Pence. It also avoids the need to send sets of fake electors from some states — a strategy that didn’t work out last time. Rather, it depends on a crew of Republican politicians who sometimes speak out against Trump and his authoritarian aspirations, but always end up doing the wrong thing in the end. If the Democrats want to fight any of this, the best course of action would be to get a time machine, go back to 1977 (for example), and eliminate the electoral college and the other procedural tricks that allow this strategy to work. Since that’s not an option, the Democratic party really needs to think outside the box.

I mean, really outside the box. Outside the box of always trying to get conservatives to like them. Outside the box of standard procedure. Outside the box of civility. Outside the box of preventing conflict by throwing vulnerable people under the bus. I predict that the Democrats will not think outside of the box. My understanding is that the Democrats would rather let the Republicans win than step outside the box. Since the Democratic party isn’t going to be saving the day, we will all just have to cross our fingers and hope that the MAGA’s are too disorganized even within the House of Representatives to make this plan happen.

Hopes and prayers!

PS: This post is in no way meant to dissuade you from voting. Please vote.

There’s an article in the New Yorker from June 10 entitled “Are We Doomed? Here’s how to think about it“. It’s really cute when academics tell people how to think because academics are — let’s say — a little odd. Of the highest relevance in this context is their absolute conviction that academics can solve any problem. It’s a specific and self-serving kind of intense optimism that we also see among liberals/Democrats — the experts will inevitably solve every problem.

The article revolves around a course at the University of Chicago co-taught by an astrophysicist and a “computational scientist and sociologist”. They bring in an expert for each putative source of doom, and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on coming up with a more informed weighing of these different sources of doom.

Importantly, they seem to see the means of doom (e.g., nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid strike, AI) as things that exist independently of human society. In some cases, like asteroid strike, that’s mostly true. In most cases, though, the real source of doom is either a caustic culture or two caustic cultures rubbing up against each other and thing the liberal mind is focused on is really the tool rather than the cause. (They do this with guns, too.) In all cases, the source of caustic culture is a group of elites who are floating so high above the rest of society that they believe they are independent of that society and no longer really care if it is destroyed. See, for example: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jeffrey Bezos, Joe Biden.

The whole reason we have states engaging in “nuclear deterrence” with one another is because they are controlled by out-of-touch elites who believe that either A) civilization will be destroyed, but my money/power will protect me (perhaps via my various luxury vaults), or B) I would rather destroy the entire world than sacrifice my elite status. It’s the same for many of these other means of destruction. Should we do something about climate change? No, because doing something substantive would sacrifice the status of the elites and they’d rather die than lose their status. Should we prepare for a potential asteroid strike in a meaningful way? No, too expensive — that kind of expenditure would have to be borne by the elites, thus threatening their elite status.

Wherever there are elites, there is intense anxiety that the working class will rise up and take away their status. When the working class does manage to rise up, the elites never get over it; they will obsess about it forever, and in the cases where the revolution was kind, they will lie about it incessantly. See, for example, the Soviet Revolution, the New Deal, Cuba.

In 1860, white people still outnumbered enslaved Black people by a wide margin, even in the south. However, in the context of a plantation, the opposite was true, and it was all too easy to imagine those enslaved people rebelling. Southern whites developed complex systems to protect those plantation owners from the people they were enslaving. In every pro-communist revolution that has occurred, capitalists have sent troops to fight against the revolution; this is not typically because the capitalists care about the country in question, but rather because they fear a trend that will culminate in the revolution arriving at their own doorstep. In the modern-day corporation, the anxiety of the elites comes from a sneaking suspicion that they really don’t know anything about running the corporation. They are always worried that people are not giving 110% effort, and they are extremely concerned that the experts they employ are not working entirely for the benefit of the capitalist.

Traditionally, capitalists have dealt with this anxiety in the context of a corporation via complex procedures and bean counting — i.e., bureaucracy. Fans of capitalism love to rail against “central planning” and “bureaucracy”, and say that public institutions “should be run like a business” but there’s no more centrally planned, bureaucratic and outright authoritarian system than the modern American business. There’s a way out of this inefficient, labyrinthine bureaucracy, though — a solution that also completely solves the anxiety of the capitalist.

Artificial intelligence.

Yes, just replace everyone, from the guy who tightens the nuts on the thing, to the bookkeeper tracking all the beans with machines running artificial intelligence. You can tell it is intelligent because “intelligence” is right in the name. The word “artificial” means not human — so you don’t have to pay it. The important thing, though, from the capitalist perspective is that AI offers the possibility of direct control — no human intermediaries. At some point, the artificial intelligence will be so smart that it will be able to replicate itself, so you won’t even have to hire programmers. (A lot of corporations have already fired programmers and are trying to have AI do their jobs.) This is why “artificial intelligence” is so exciting for everyone right now.

In order to quash their anxiety, capitalists are willing to spend billions of dollars on AI. Just one corporation, Meta, expects to spend $10 billion this year. Google plans to spend $12 billion. The claimed motivations are fuzzy things like “increased revenue” and “cashing in on the boom” but it all comes down to getting rid of workers who have to be paid and, more importantly, have a will of their own. The elites are quite literally always trying to figure out how to re-implement slavery, and this implementation is superficially perfect since no humans are involved.

The obvious problem — the one my dad keeps bringing up — is that if corporations are no longer paying workers, then 99% of people would no longer have money with which to buy the things offered by those corporations. We talk about the “service economy” but even fast food companies are working toward a day when the restaurant will be run by robots. How can this work out?

Well, it cannot, but the real problem is that people don’t understand the true purpose of capitalism. In short, the purpose of capitalism — or the goal of the capitalist — is to not work. The goal of not working may be achieved through any means necessary, certainly this includes “hard work”, but it also includes sacrificing the lives of any other person, or every other person. Put another way, the purpose of capitalism is to elevate the capitalist class above human society; once this has been achieved, there is no need to continue capitalism — or human society. If capitalism ends humanity (with the exception of the capitalist class, which is above humanity) that is good; it is the intended climax of the story of capitalism. If capitalism did not end humanity, it would be like a bomb that never manifests its destiny (by exploding).

We are living in an unfortunate (or perhaps inevitable) intersection of amazingly dangerous technology and outlandishly elevated elites. Those elites are happy to use that amazing technology to further elevate themselves and also wipe out the rest of humanity. Which type of technology the elites use to wipe out the rest of humanity is a bit beside the point, but here are some examples (see if you can match each scenario to a media franchise):

• They can choose to drag their feet on climate change, and then hide in their luxury vaults while the rest of the world starves and burns.
• They can develop AI/robotic soldiers that give the elites direct control of the means of violence from the safety of their luxury vaults.
• They can use nuclear war to wipe out the rest of the world, while they hide in their luxury vaults.
• They can hide in their luxury vaults while the rest of the world is wiped out by some new plague.

(Incidentally, the robot-controlled warfare is already happening; e.g., in South Korea and Israel, they’re using automated machine gun turrets right now.)

The interesting thing is that they are planning to do all this. They just don’t know which of these events will the “The Event” — and they don’t care. They don’t feel like they’re part of humanity anymore and they are more than ready to sacrifice us all to whatever cosmic horror happens to pop up. They are more than willing to be that cosmic horror. In a society this advanced, there is but one doom, and it is the rich.

I strongly recommend that you read Douglas Rushkoff’s essay, “Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind” (unfortunately, it is now behind a paywall, but it is worth it to find an archive of it or even create an account on Medium). And then, Rushkoff also has a book by the same name that is worth your time.

It’s Pride month! Hooray!

For some reason, Columbia doesn’t do Pride until September. OK, we actually know the reason. It’s because the University of Missouri is not in session in June, and most of the students aren’t here. They’re spending the summer with their parents, typically, and will attend Pride events in that area, so it isn’t like they are missing Pride, exactly. And that gets down to the real reason Columbia’s Pride is in September — because that gives Boone County area vendors a chance to make a lot more money than they would have in June.

Rainbow capitalism. You can tell a lot about a person’s politics from their relationship to it:

Liberals love rainbow capitalism because they think including everyone in an orgy of consumerism is the pinnacle of human civilization. It’s the same thinking that leads them to conclude that the prison-industrial complex is OK, so long as the prison guards are diverse or at least reflect the same demographics as the prisoners. If only we had more trans drone pilots, right?

Conservatives love the capitalism but hate the rainbow, or rather, are very, very angry that the rainbow was stolen from Christianity, even though the actual story was originally Jewish and the phenomenon itself naturally precedes the formulation of either religious tradition (it would have been created at “Let there be light!” rather than at the end of the Flood). All rainbows should be Christian, you see, but now people with pronouns are displaying the rainbow and that’s wrong.

Leftists love the rainbow but hate the capitalism.

The first Pride was a riot. Rather than buying rainbow-themed merch, the authentic way to celebrate it would be to throw a brick at someone who is either violating your right to assemble or imposing their religious belief on your behavior (both are part of the First Amendment in the US). That would include anyone saying, “Oh, you can assemble, just not here, on public property,” or, “You can be gay as long as no one knows.”

Despite all that, me and my family will definitely be going in September (and we’re trying to figure out if we can attend Pride in KC or St. Louis this year). It’s great to see so many people who normally live in fear of some right-winger attacking them for their sexuality or gender expression having fun and being themselves. While the rainbow capitalism itself is gross, it is also reassuring because in the context of capitalism, support of the capitalist class for your particular marginalized group is the most important thing there is. When they decide they can’t suck any more value out of you, that’s when you’re in trouble.

Yesterday’s Heather Cox Richardson email contains what I believe to be her worst take ever. Here’s a quote:

The roots of today’s protests lie in an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The committee announced the investigation on December 7, two days after its members spent more than five hours grilling then-president of Harvard University Claudine Gay, then-president of University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth on how their universities were handling student protests against Israel over its military response to Hamas’s attack of October 7.

The actual roots of today’s protests are the fact that the United States of America, under the Biden administration, has sent billions of dollars worth of military hardware to the Israeli government since October 7 and the Israeli government is using that hardware to conduct a genocide against the Palestinian people, making US citizens complicit in a genocide that we would be intervening in if we were the heroic nation we pretend to be. Biden, specifically, has declared himself a Zionist and says he will back Israel no matter what they do. The students are typically asking for no more than that their universities divest of any connection to the nation of Israel.

The Democratic Party establishment and its minions (including Heather Cox Richardson) are trying to pretend that Joe Biden’s Zionism is not a direct threat to his election chances and are trying to convince us that Biden is good because of all the emergency supplies he is now sending to the people whose lives he helped to destroy. Not only are they blaming the Republicans, apparently, but they’re also blaming Russia, et al. Again, from Heather Cox Richardson:

Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times reported today that Russia, China, and Iran are amplifying the protests “to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States,” as well as to “undermine President Biden’s reelection prospects.” 

The fun thing about this ongoing trend of blaming Russia is that most of what Russia is pointing out or amplifying is true. The same thing happened during the 2016 election, with Russian propagandists merely posting videos of Hillary Clinton simply expressing herself (e.g., the famous “super predators” speech, or her talking about being a “Goldwater Girl”, or how much she loves Henry Kissinger). Somehow, just showing the world what the Democratic Party stands for is “misinformation”. Certainly, it is true that Russia is villainous, but if your position is so tenuous that simply repeating the truth undermines you, then perhaps you should choose a better position.